Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy… Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. – Thomas Merton
Our hatred for evil is different from our hatred for something good.
Our hatred for all evil things stem from our natural desire for goodness. It is supported by our conscience and our sense of justice. It is remedied by compassion and mercy for our fellowmen who fall.
But our hatred for goodness is warped and unnatural. It is a form of envy and makes us lie to ourselves, to who we are supposed to be. What remedy is there to satisfy those who hate good men when the only desire of that will is to see good men fall?
Some good men may indeed fall. But by God’s grace they can rise again. Goodness always has a way to triumph in the end.
Let us therefore examine our hearts and pray that God may purify our thoughts and our desires. We are weak and sinful. But with God’s mercy, we can be healed. We can be whole. We can rise again!
The heart is deceitful above all things
and it is exceedingly corrupt.
Who can know it?
“I, the LORD, search the mind.
I try the heart,
even to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his doings.”
-Jeremiah 17, WEBBE
“The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.” – Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Check Jocelyn's books:
"Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief", "Mend My Broken Heart", "Questions to God", "To Love an Invisible God", "Defending My Catholic Faith", and more - click here.
(You may freely quote excerpts from this website as long as due credit is given to author Jocelyn Soriano and the website itakeoffthemask.com)