Category: Sermons
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Ideals and Non-Attachment
Self-mastery, you say, is the highest mastery. You are attached to this ideal and you live for the most part in accordance with it. But on occasion you stumble and fall. You lose your temper, overeat, or succumb to lust. And then you feel disgust with yourself. The failure hurts your ego. It diminishes your…
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Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy
Today is the Feast of St. Augustine. At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their…
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Socializing and Idle Talk
Some good comes from socializing if only as a concession to our ineluctable social nature. Only a beast or a god could live without it. But even I do too much of it. In society one is apt to talk too much about too little. Review the previous day's unnecessary conversations. On balance, did they…
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Institutional Corruption
Without institutions, where would we be? But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance. You should be skeptical of all institutions. Like the houses out here, they…
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Struggle
We must struggle against our moral and other limitations, but we must also accept that we cannot make much headway with them on our own. Fail we will, and often. We shouldn't let this fact bother us too much. Prosecute the moral struggle with equanimity and detachment from the outcome. Learn humility from moral failure.
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Like a Moth to the Flame
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.…
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Soul Food
People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise, and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has…
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Failure
We fall back again and again into our old bad habits because of our weakness on all levels: the flesh, the heart, the will, and the intellect. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul. How do we know this? By honest self-examination and a refusal to evade the truth. The…
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A Philosopher’s Prayer
We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that…
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Continence
The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker. Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit. Remind people of the importance of…
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Don’t Spoil Your Success
You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's. Beware of comparison. Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there. Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.' An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense…
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Journeys and Preparations
We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return? "Because it is a journey into sheer…
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Why Do We Remember the Dead?
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But…
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Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are…
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Awareness of Death as Cure for Existential Drift
Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is…