Journeying With The Saints

Welcome back, Catholic Pilgrims. Only 15 more readings to go, can you believe it?   Today, we are asked more questions. This time with regards to ourselves. Last time, St. Francis asked a lot of questions that probed deeper into our relationship with God. Today, he's going to probe into our how we think about ourselves. Just like last time, these are excellent questions to really and truly answer....

Welcome to another reading, Catholic Pilgrims. Today, we are going to get asked lots of questions.   St. Francis is going to ask us questions in order to examine the state of our souls. They are different than most questions from, say, like an examination of conscience. These are questions that don't need a lot of reflection from me but that we do need to seriously ask ourselves. So, I would encou...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims. How's life treating you out there in the big wide world? I hope well, but if you are struggling right now, I pray that God blesses you with many graces to hang in there.   When I was a young teen, after I was baptized, I pretty much thought that was the pinnacle of my spiritual life. Now, I hadn't read the Bible yet and I didn't pray too much, but I believed in Jesus an...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, welcome back to another great day of learning from St. Francis.   Last time, we heard about how we need to renew our devotions to God, at least once a year. We need to look thing over to determine how we are doing. Have we neglected things in our spiritual life? Have we given up on things that we pledged to do? If so, why? What's kept us from our pledged devotion to God?...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims. Welcome to the fifth and final part of the book. We only have 19 more readings left together in the season. The whole Fifth Part is about renewing our souls in devotion, which makes sense as the the book is called, "Introduction to the Devout Life."   So, let's go ahead and open our books to Chapter One of the Fifth Part.  

Welcome back, Catholic Pilgrims, to the last reading from the Fourth Part.  If you remember, the Fourth Part has been all about temptations. Last time, we talked about dryness and barrenness in the spiritual life. There is a real temptation when we feel dryness to think that God has utterly abandoned us and that nothing we do makes any difference. We think this because we don't feel anything. We l...

Welcome back, Catholic Pilgrims. Today, our topic is on spiritual dryness, something that most of us feel at one time or another. It's also something many of the saints dealt with in their lives.   I belong to a book club and we recently had our October meeting to discuss the book "All That Remains." It's a book by a forensic anthropologist. Our group had a great discussion, but towards the end, o...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims, to our 100th episode of Season Four! It's really amazing if you think about it. So, since it's our 100th episode and that's quite a milestone, I thought I'd share with you who I am reading for Season Five.   But, you'll have to hear about that after our reading. I know, I know, I'm terrible, aren't I? Today's reading is the longest one we've had. Because it is so long,...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims. Thank you for joining along today.   There are five people in my family and I am the only one with a melancholic personality that manifests itself sometimes.   My oldest daughter barely lets anything get her down, my middle finds a way to keep smiling through adversity, my son can turn a frown into a smile pretty quickly, and my husband rarely, if ever, lets sadness overt...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims. Today we are going to read about an issue that we hear all over the place—anxiety.   Even though we are the most counseled, self-helped, medicated people in all of history, rates of anxiety are not going down, they are increasing at alarming rates. My daughters' generation—Gen Z—is the most depressed and anxious generation that has ever been recorded.   Could it have so...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims. Including today's reading, we only have 25 readings left from this book. Isn't that crazy? We will be done before we know it, but it's been wonderful having this time to get to know St. Francis and learn from him.   So, with 25 readings left, we still have much to learn. Today is the last day where St. Francis will focus on temptations and it's another short reading. Le...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, welcome to another day.   We have another short reading today on temptations and, if you remember, that's what this whole fourth part is about—temptations. So, it's clearly a topic that St. Francis sees as important to discuss from many different angles. Temptations are the path that sin starts on. If we resist the temptations, we've committed no sin. But, if we give into...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims, to another day where we are learning about resisting temptations. Today, though, St. Francis is talking about resisting small ones.   It's another short reading today. Lately, we've had a few quick and concise readings, so let's go ahead and jump on in and open our books to Chapter Eight of the Fourth Part.

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, thank you for joining me today.   When I was growing up, most people tried to be pretty quiet about their sins or their temptations. There was a real push to seem perfect or as if you didn't really struggle with anything.   We all know that we struggle, but we just didn't want to appear like we did. Today, we have almost swung clear over to the other side, where people op...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, welcome back to another great day to learn from St. Francis.   When my girls were little, Taylor Swift broke onto the scene. Taylor's first cd played almost non-stop in our house and my car for months and months. Some songs were fun, some were sad, but all-in-all they were harmless. They were just a teenage girl singing about the ups and downs of teenage life.   The next...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, and welcome back to another great day.   When I was Protestant, growing in holiness was never really something that was talked about. Just being a believer made you righteous in the eyes of God, so that was really all there was to it.   I didn't grow up learning about how suffering can be redemptive or how we can sacrifice to show love. Jesus' sacrifice was all that was f...

  Welcome back, Catholic Pilgrims. I'm very glad that you have joined me today.   Last time, we heard St. Francis talk about how feeling tempted is not the same as yielding to temptation.   Today, we are going to get an example of what that looks like through the experiences of St. Catherine of Siena.   So, let's open our books to Chapter Four of the Fourth Part.  

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims. Welcome back.   Just to refresh our memory, this Fourth Part of the book is all about remedies to temptations. The first thing we heard about in dealing with temptations is to not really care what the world thinks about us when we try to live a more devout spiritual life. The second thing we have to have is courage—courage to say no to temptations.   Today, St. Francis is...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims. Thank you for pressing play and joining me.   When we start out on the path to become more devoted to Christ and our Faith, we usually have to leave a lot of things behind. We realize that we need to shed certain sins that have become habitual and in our new fervor, we initially find that very easy to do. Then, however, those old temptations may start to creep back up int...

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims, to the Fourth Part of our book. I don't know if you've looked at our progress in the book lately, but we've definitely covered a lot of ground.   The Fourth Part is about "needful remedies against ordinary temptations," which is an area where we can all use some guidance.   To kick us off in this area, St. Francis is going to talk to us about not giving heed to what the...

Hello, my fellow Pilgrims, welcome back. Today, is our last reading in the Third Part and it's a short one. We've had some pretty long readings lately and, today, you get a bit of a break. St. Francis is going to be giving a word to the unmarried, so let's open to Chapter Forty-One of the Third Part.

Welcome back, Catholic Pilgrims, to our second to last reading in the third part.   This is a hard one for me, I'm going to admit it. Mostly, because I feel I have an opinion about this topic that nobody else on planet earth has. I'm not saying my opinion or feelings on the matter are right or anything like that, but it is the way I feel.   Mostly, I keep my opinion on this topic to myself, becaus...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims, welcome to another great day. Today, St. Francis is going to continue on with his talk for married couples, but he's going to be speaking about the intimate side of marriage and, so, if you have little ones around, you may want to chose to listen later.   He doesn't get graphic or anything like that, in fact, he uses eating food as a metaphor for the marital act, which mi...

Hello, Catholic Pilgrims and welcome to our reading on advice to married couples. This is a long reading, but, it's really, really good and what I have to say afterwards is important. So, let's jump right in by turning to Chapter Thirty-Eight of the Third Part.  

Welcome, Catholic Pilgrims. It's a great day to be together with St. Francis.   Today, we are going to be talking about desires. Some desires are good and some are definitely not. Sadly, we live in a world that says, "Whatever you desire is fine." This isn't true and it gets us into a lot of trouble with temptations and sins.   I think this reading today points very closely to the last two of the...