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I found the following sermon from St. John Vianney very interesting. Being sort of miserable myself because I work with an administration of creeps and character disordered types.
I live a simple life and take pleasure in good conversation and admiring the change in the colors of the leaves, among other things.
I'd like a house, I'd like a sailboat, but don't need these to be happy and know these won't fulfill me. The sermon seems meant for folks attached to the material things in the world, which I'm not to any great extent, but I'll give him that life is full of disappointments.
Have a read:
Sermon on Happiness, By St. John-Marie Vianney
"Why, my dear brethren, are our lives full of so many miseries?
If we consider the life of man carefully, it is nothing other than a succession of evils.
The illnesses, the disappointments, the persecutions, and indeed the losses of goods fall unceasingly upon us so that whatever side the worldly man turns to or examines, he finds only crosses and afflictions….
Indeed, my dear brethren, man on earth, unless he turns to the side of God, cannot be other than unhappy.
Do you know why, my friends?…Well, here is the real reason.
It is that God, having put us into this world as into a place of exile and of banishment, wishes to force us, by so many evils, not to attach our hearts to it but to aspire to greater, purer, and more lasting joys than those we can find in this life.
To make us appreciate more keenly the necessity to turn our eyes to eternal blessings, God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them.
Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted.
We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things.
If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us.
Do you want to be happy, my friends?
Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.
All the evils which you experience are the real means of leading you there.
[...] Jesus Christ, by His sufferings and His death, has made all our actions meritorious, so that for the good Christian there is no motion of our hearts or of our bodies which will not be rewarded if we perform them for Him.
[...] All you have to do is to have in view the object of pleasing God in everything you do…. In the morning, when you awake, think at once of God and quickly make the Sign of the Cross, saying to Him:
“My God, I give you my heart, and since You are so good as to give me another day, give me the grace that everything I do will be for Your honour and for the salvation of my soul.”
I found the following sermon from St. John Vianney very interesting. Being sort of miserable myself because I work with an administration of creeps and character disordered types.
I live a simple life and take pleasure in good conversation and admiring the change in the colors of the leaves, among other things.
I'd like a house, I'd like a sailboat, but don't need these to be happy and know these won't fulfill me. The sermon seems meant for folks attached to the material things in the world, which I'm not to any great extent, but I'll give him that life is full of disappointments.
Have a read:
Sermon on Happiness, By St. John-Marie Vianney
"Why, my dear brethren, are our lives full of so many miseries?
If we consider the life of man carefully, it is nothing other than a succession of evils.
The illnesses, the disappointments, the persecutions, and indeed the losses of goods fall unceasingly upon us so that whatever side the worldly man turns to or examines, he finds only crosses and afflictions….
Indeed, my dear brethren, man on earth, unless he turns to the side of God, cannot be other than unhappy.
Do you know why, my friends?…Well, here is the real reason.
It is that God, having put us into this world as into a place of exile and of banishment, wishes to force us, by so many evils, not to attach our hearts to it but to aspire to greater, purer, and more lasting joys than those we can find in this life.
To make us appreciate more keenly the necessity to turn our eyes to eternal blessings, God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them.
Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted.
We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things.
If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us.
Do you want to be happy, my friends?
Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.
All the evils which you experience are the real means of leading you there.
[...] Jesus Christ, by His sufferings and His death, has made all our actions meritorious, so that for the good Christian there is no motion of our hearts or of our bodies which will not be rewarded if we perform them for Him.
[...] All you have to do is to have in view the object of pleasing God in everything you do…. In the morning, when you awake, think at once of God and quickly make the Sign of the Cross, saying to Him:
“My God, I give you my heart, and since You are so good as to give me another day, give me the grace that everything I do will be for Your honour and for the salvation of my soul.”
I like this perspective on suffering. I agree that the evil and suffering does indeed have a purpose, even though we can't understand it all right now. But God must've had a plan when He put everything in motion, and by giving us Jesus Christ before it all started.
Suffering is a unique experience. It's one thing to talk about it, but another thing when we find ourselves within it. Corrie Ten Boom once wrote, "you'll never know that Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have." Very deep words, imo.
Fixing our spiritual eyes on heaven, and dwelling on His mercy, goodness, kindness, grace... these are things that give me much peace within me.
Thanks for posting this. In our most difficult times, God carries us. Trusting in His Mercy is all we can do.
Amen. Our circumstances do not define who we are in Christ.
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