Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Growth in Virtuous Love To undergo real transformation in holy love, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux asserts that three commitments are required of any person, three essential conditions that should sound awfully familiar to us in...
Read Part 1 of this series. 2nd Observation: God Is the Very Source of Our Love Saint Bernard’s second observation for why we should love God is that God, who is Love itself, is the absolute origin of our own individual yearning to love and be loved, and as such He is...
“Then one of the scribes…asked Jesus, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,...
The phone rang. I was 23 years old and hadn’t heard from my friend Sara in five years. We grew up together. “What have you been up to?” Sara asked. “Well, I’ve had a life-changing experience and I’ve become a born-again Christian!” I exclaimed, waiting for the usual...
Saint John Henry Newman’s distinction between notional and real knowledge offers profound insights for the journey of recovery as an adult child of a dysfunctional home. Recovery, much like Newman’s view of the Christian life, involves moving from a theoretical...
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. We come to the second to last stage of humility, discretion. According to Saint Benedict, “The eleventh step of humility is that a monk speaks...
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. The fruit of the fear of God, self-denial, obedience, perseverance, and repentance is the gift of serenity, where we truly begin to live in detachment...
Read Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. Humility, like recovery, begins with a healthy fear of God—the awareness, as Saint Benedict puts it, that we are “always seen by God in heaven” (Rule). There is...
Read Part 1 or Part 2 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. In recovery, we seek freedom from addiction by following the Twelve Steps. But the true effectiveness of 12-step recovery is found in the fact that, at its heart, it is...
Read Part 1 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. We turn to what I believe to be the most important and common denominator present at the origin, escalation, and outright enslavement of any addiction, and that which certainly...