Blessed Pentecost my friends!!1 This season comes to an end with Evening prayer. I pray it has been a beautiful season of gratitude and joy. If you want more joy in your life, practice gratitude for all things. A few words below.

Happy Saturday my friends!   Good morning and good day to all my digital neighbors! We are in the final days of Easter, and it has been a wonderful season. I hope most of them have been days of joy. If you have been checking in on these little musings, you hopefully have found some food for thought or fuel for prayer.  More Thee, and less me leads to days of joy. More love of God, then neighbor and finally myself puts life in the right order. Until that realization and then the commitment to it, life is disordered and a mess. While God can work wonders in the mess, He really likes it when we make straight His way, when we lower the mountains of pride and fill in the valleys of self-preoccupation.  That straight path is the superhighway of holiness and joy. We will always be tempted to wander off the path, to stop when we should have kept going or hurriedly pass by when we were invited to linger. No one listens to the Holy Spirit flawlessly. We all have to constantly overcome the ever-present SELF and its demands.  Only constant discipline will keep us on the path of Discipleship.  There is no discipleship without discipline, the two are inseparable.  I wish I were better at it with a higher degree of constancy. Each day offers that opportunity. It is never too late to begin if you have a day in front of you.   A good prayer for a Saturday and the summer months in front of us.  Have a great day my friends!

Slow me down, Lord!

Ease the pounding of my heart by the quietening of my mind.

Steady my hurried pace with a vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me the calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles with the soothing music of the singing streams.

Help me to know the magical, restoring power of sleep.

Teach me the art of taking minute vacations…of slowing down to look at a flower, to chat with a friend, to pat the dog, to read a few lines from a good book.

Remind me each day of the fable of the hare and the tortoise, that I may know that the race is not always to the swift; that there is more to life than measuring its speed.

Let me look upwards into the branches of the towering oak and know that it grew great and strong because it grew slowly and well.

Slow me down, Lord, and inspire me to send my roots deep into the soil of life’s enduring values that I may grow towards the star of my greater destiny. Amen.

Good morning, Digital Neighbors!   Happy Friday!  Some 4^th century wisdom and an attitude tune up from Roy Bennett.  Have a great Friday my friends.

Second reading
From the treatise On the Trinity by Saint Hilary, bishop
The Father’s gift in Christ

Our Lord commanded us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In baptism, then, we profess faith in the Creator, in the only-begotten Son and in the gift which is the Spirit. There is one Creator of all things, for in God there is one Father from whom all things have their being. And there is one only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist. And there is one Spirit, the gift who is in all. So all follow their due order, according to the proper operation of each: one power, which brings all things into being, one Son, through whom all things come to be, and one gift of perfect hope. Nothing is wanting to this flawless union: in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is infinity of endless being, perfect reflection of the divine image, and mutual enjoyment of the gift.

Our Lord has described the purpose of the Spirit’s presence in us. Let us listen to his words: I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. It is to your advantage that I go away; if I go, I will send you the Advocate. And also: I will ask the Father and he will give you another Counselor to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth. He will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine.

From among many of our Lord’s sayings, these have been chosen to guide our understanding, for they reveal to us the intention of the giver, the nature of the gift and the condition for its reception. Since our weak minds cannot comprehend the Father or the Son, we have been given the Holy Spirit as our intermediary and advocate, to shed light on that hard doctrine of our faith, the incarnation of God.

We receive the Spirit of truth so that we can know the things of God. In order to grasp this, consider how useless the faculties of the human body would become if they were denied their exercise. Our eyes cannot fulfill their task without light, either natural or artificial; our ears cannot react without sound vibrations, and in the absence of any odor our nostrils are ignorant of their function. Not that these senses would lose their own nature if they were not used; rather, they demand objects of experience in order to function. It is the same with the human soul. Unless it absorbs the gift of the Spirit through faith, the mind has the ability to know God but lacks the light necessary for that knowledge.

This unique gift which is in Christ is offered in its fullness to everyone. It is everywhere available, but it is given to each man in proportion to his readiness to receive it. Its presence is the fuller, the greater a man’s desire to be worthy of it. This gift will remain with us until the end of the world and will be our comfort in the time of waiting. By the favors it bestows, it is the pledge of our hope for the future, the light of our minds, and the splendor that irradiates our understanding.

It’s important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts, and you have negative ones too. Nurture your mind with positive thoughts: kindness, empathy, compassion, peace, love, joy, humility, generosity, etc. The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.

                                                – Roy Bennett. The Light in the Heart.