February 28 – Simple Pleasures

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the most well-known and well-beloved monastics of all time. The secret of her enduring message and model? Sr. Thérèse determined to live her life for the simple pleasure of turning every trial and every joy into an offering of love to God.

If that sounds TOO monastic for the marketplace, let us consider this: trials and joys will come to all of us. We can no more refuse every trial than we can hold on to every joy.

We can no more obtain guarantees on each happiness than we can guarantee our hearts that they will never break.

What we may do, if we will, is make an offering of all, of joy and peace, heartbreak and trial, to the God Who loves us. What else is there? As neither death nor life can separate us from Him (Romans 8:38,39,) we may volunteer that in neither pain nor celebration will we separate ourselves. Neither magnificent joys nor crushing failures will lure us away from the privilege of waking in His love and sleeping in His care. Like Thérèse, we can only make a beginning and protect that beginning from lesser things.


For those in Cor Unum who have not yet made their next “conversion of life” selection, it might prove interesting (at the very least) to keep a little tablet and make a tic mark each time a door or phone was answered for the sake of the love of Jesus Christ . . . each time the table was set, as for Him . . . each time we answered a call or question as if He were beckoning or inquiring. If, at the end of March, there were only four little marks
. . . / / / / . . . they might represent four inroads to His pleasure that, otherwise, would never have been traveled.


"Bent, But Not Broken"
photo by Kerry