Short video reflection of The Wisdom of Fulton Sheen
Happiness must be our bridesmaid, not our bride.
Our enjoyment of life is vastly increased if we follow the spiritual injunction to bring some mortification and self-denial into our lives.
The fact is: you want to be perfectly happy, but you are not. Your life has been a series of disappointments, shocks, and disillusionment. How have you reacted to your disappointments? Either your became cynical or else you became religious.
If a ship is sailing on a polluted canal and wishes to transfer itself to clear waters on a higher level, it must pass through a device which locks out the polluted waters and raises the ship to the higher position. Mary’s Immaculate Conception was like that lock..[[T]hrough her, humanity passed from the lower level of the sons of Adam to the higher level of the sons of God.
The world is in a state of mortal sin, and it needs absolution. Vain platitudes and ‘regeneration,’ ‘the Constitution,’ and ‘progress’ are not going to save us, even though we go on shouting them louder and louder. We need a new word in our vocabulary and that word is God.
The better we become, the less conscious we are of our goodness. If anyone admits to being a saint, he is close to being a devil…The more saintly we become, the less conscious we are of begin holy. A child is cute as long as he does not know he is cute. As soon as he thinks he is, he is a brat. True goodness is unconscious.
Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals
Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace without soul peace.
We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue, a time to pull up weeds or to plant good seeds. Which is better is clear, for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative.
If we wish to have the light, we must keep the sun; if we wish to keep our forests we must keep our trees; if we wish to keep our perfumes, we must keep our flowers–and if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God.