Explaining the Communion of Saints, in preparation for All Saint's Day!

"We should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, and do, and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better or for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death."
Pope Benedict XVI

It's a Sign

SO, my son dropped his binder outside on the way to the bus today.  That's only significant because it means that I made an unexpected trip into town to deliver it to him at school.  On my way there, from out of the LITERAL GUTTER next to the road... a gigantic bald eagle came out of nowhere and attempted to fly into my car.  I was going around 50 miles per hour at the time, and I stared at the thing eye to eye through the windshield on the passenger side.  A BALD EAGLE. 

I swerved into the other lane, and missed the thing by inches.  No exaggeration.  INCHES.  And then I swerved back into my lane, and the car wobbled and took a second to right itself.  It all happened so fast.  My heart was pounding, it was so surreal.  I almost killed a BALD EAGLE, our national bird.  He was almost road kill. 

It took only a nanosecond after that to find the significance of that encounter.  Our nation is currently in the gutter with this election.  We have stooped to such lows as have never been seen before.  If we stay on our current path - what with the election only a few weeks away - WHAMMO.  America as we know it is a gonner.  But if we do the unexpected, if we swerve suddenly at the last minute instead of staying the course... we can avert disaster.  It may cause things to go a bit crazy in the short term, but we will right ourselves again.  America, like that huge bald eagle, will soar once again.  Out of the dang gutter.

I'm going to swerve.  I don't know if anyone will swerve with me, but I hope so, as I kind of feel like it's our only hope.  I'm going to vote my conscience, and I hope every one else does, too.  I'm not going to feel obligated by the miserable choices I've been given. 

I mean - what IF, for the first time in decades - people on both sides of the aisle cooperated on this ONE THING to save our country.  What if the people who are voting for Hillary because they don't want Trump, and the people who are voting for Trump because they don't want Hillary... what if those people didn't vote for them, and instead voted their consciences?  What if they really voted for who they really wanted to vote for?  And America could start anew???

On Free Will

We have nothing of our own but our will. It is the only thing that God has so placed in our own power that we can make an offering of it to him.

St. John Vianney

Words To Live By....

"Our first duty, therefore, precisely in order to heal this world, is to be holy, configured to God; in this way we emanate a healing and transforming power that also acts on others, on history. . . In this regard, it us useful to reflect that the Twelve Apostles were not perfect men, chosen for their moral and religious irreproachability. They were indeed believers, full of enthusiasm and zeal but at the same time marked by their human limitations, which were sometimes even serious. Therefore Jesus did not call them because they were already holy, complete, perfect, but so that they might become so, so that they might thereby also transform history, as it is for us, as it is for all Christians."

Pope Benedict XVI