Tag: Catechism of the Catholic Church

A plan of sheer goodness

I am not a Roman Catholic; reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not something that would have ever occurred to me to do. But I kept running into Catholic writers, one after another, who wrote about faith and life with a richness I hadn’t seen before: Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, James Martin, and Jean Vanier to name a few. So I spent several years looking into Roman Catholicism in depth, which included reading through the Catechism…twice.

Tags Catechism of the Catholic Church, division, goodness, heart, Jesus, love

Other Writings

The place of decision

The heart is the dwelling–place where I am, where I live…the place “to which I withdraw.” The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others…The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death.

“…only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully.”

— Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2563

Tags Catechism of the Catholic Church, center, death, decision, heart, life, mind, truth

Review-recap

What did we do?

woman looking at what she has written in her notebook

What happened in February?

scripture

We continued to look at scriptures that talk about light and its incompatibility with darkness in our lives.

prayers

We considered prayers begging for the very basics of eternal life and for divine mercy.

other writings

We looked at writings from the Catholic Catechism, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver, and Frederick Buechner that considered how we can know what is true about the world around us and about our own identities, what the final purpose of life is, and the nature of prayer.

comments

Online community is a tricky thing. I don’t think it takes the place of physical, in-your-face community, but I do think it can be valuable, maybe even a lifeline at times. I welcome any thoughts you’d like to share.