Author: Facing Our Immortality

Please Join Us for Our Next Spiritual Exercise: Christian Resistance to Evil

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Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Sr.AnneMarie Walsh’s Zoom MeetingTime: Oct 14, 2024 06:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://zoom.us/j/95305999268?pwd=UQmUdWuZbdGwDCCnCu2d5T188lvShb.1 Meeting ID: 953 0599 9268Passcode: 241317 One tap mobile+16469313860,,95305999268# US+19292056099,,95305999268# US (New York) Dial by your location CHRISTIAN RESISTANCE TO EVIL – Session 66 The ordinary Christian knows something the unbeliever does not.  When Christians, especially Catholics, look at the state of the world, they know the primary source of evil is not cultural, political, or sociological.  It’s spiritual.  “For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground.”  Eph 6:12-13 As Catholics, we do not believe that anyone is born evil.  God creates us good.  We are, however, born wounded in the integrity of our nature because of the first sin.  The …

Becoming A True Prepper

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Becoming a True Prepper There is a whole industry today built around people’s anxiety to be prepared in the event of a catastrophic disaster, both natural and man-made.  How would you survive if there was a nuclear war, if there was an asteroid hit, or if the grid was completely knocked out? It’s the dilemma of Lazarus.  Jesus raised him from the dead at his sisters’ pleading.  But his reprieve from death was temporary.  He eventually had to be prepared to die again.  You can bet, though, that the time between his first death and second death served to detach him even more from this present life so that he was fully ready when it came time to die again.   You start thinking about these things when you assess the real-time threats we face.  It is true that we are called to read the signs of the time and be responsibly prepared.  But our goal has to be more than saving ourselves and our life here.  Jesus warns us that seeking to save ourselves …

The Leaders We Deserve

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 It’s often been said that God gives us the leaders we deserve. If that’s true, we should then do everything in our power to become worthy of good leaders. Everyone who grows anything knows that the stock you start out with is very important. If the stock is not healthy, it will not produce good fruit. Simply saying this, in a political season, can bring about the pressing temptation to pivot to our leaders and complain about our options. But the point is that reform begins with ourselves. If we want good leaders, we have to become good ourselves. It’s as simple as that. As a people, we produce our own leaders. But if we are trying to produce leadership without any connection to or real reference to God, and if the criteria for a good leader have become completely secularized, we are going to run right up against the impossibility of bringing anything good out of it.  God the Father is the source of every good gift, and if we are honest, we soon …

Join Us for Our Next Spiritual Exercise

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Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Monday, July 15, 2024, 6:30 pm mountain time; 7:30pm central Topic: Sr.AnneMarie Walsh’s Personal Meeting Room Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/6516969698?pwd=WWQ4dndGQnVyTGx6SW1Hc0RrMjM3UT09 Meeting ID: 651 696 9698 Passcode: 246122 — One tap mobile +16469313860,,6516969698# US +19292056099,,6516969698# US (New York) — Meeting ID: 651 696 9698 Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/ace2MfJLLg

A Phrase for Life

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Living life by a particular motto can have untold benefits.  Many of the saints had mottoes to which they oriented their entire lives.  “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?”  That motto spoke to St. Anthony of the desert as the conversion or turning point of his entire life.   We may be familiar with other mottoes, such as Padre Pio’s “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” Or, Pope St. John Paul II, who entrusted his life to the care and protection of Our Blessed Moth and encapsulated this in his papal motto: “Totus Tuus,””,  meaning “Totally Yours.”  St. Junipero  Serra’s motto was “Always forward, never back.” Padre Miguel Pro, who was martyred for the faith in Mexico during the Cristero uprising against the government and who died by firing squad, proclaimed the motto he lived his life by:  “Viva Christo Re!” or, “Long live Christ the King.” Each of us lives our lives according to our beliefs and the way we understand life in general.  At the …

Tragedy and the Power of Prayer

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Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Tragedy and the Power of Prayer Monday, May 13, 2024 7:30pm central time/6:30 pm mountain time Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/6516969698 pwd=WWQ4dndGQnVyTGx6SW1Hc0RrMjM3UT09 Meeting ID: 651 696 9698 Passcode: 246122 Meeting ID: 651 696 9698 Tragedy and the Power of Prayer A dear friend of mine recently lost a grown daughter to suicide.  The daughter was a wife and a mother of two teenagers.  My friend, who is a devout Catholic, has been almost inconsolable so much has this death shocked the whole family. None of them saw any signs that this was coming.  There was no explanation for this sudden happening, only unfiltered speculations on what brought the daughter to this point, none of which could touch the acute pain they have been in since her death. One expression (which is roundly rebuffed by those suffering this tragedy) is the oft-repeated, almost trite observation that suicide “is a permanent answer to a temporary problem.”  It may be ok to make this remark to someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation.  But …

Session 61: Finding Our True Selves

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FACING OUR IMMORTALITY Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Finding Our True Selves Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/6516969698?pwd=WWQ4dndGQnVyTGx6SW1Hc0RrMjM3UT09 Meeting ID: 651 696 9698/Passcode: 246122 FINDING OUR TRUE SELVES Blessed Carlo Acutis, the young Catholic, Italian website designer who died of Leukemia at 15 years of age while living a holy life in the modern world, observed that “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.” This is a problem if we understand that God has a master plan for our happiness but that many people do not, knowingly or unknowingly, choose to follow it.   Blessed Carlo understood this.  His plan for life was to stay close to Jesus and allow Jesus to unfold his life and its unique purpose.  It wasn’t a long life, but it was one in which he could say:  “…in eternal life, something extraordinary awaits us.”  “I am happy to die because I have lived my life without wasting a minute on those things which do not please God.”  He also understood that …

Facing Our Immortality

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Please join us! We meet Monday, March 11 at 6:30 pm Mountain time; 7:30 pm Central time Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: I Can Love Myself Better Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/6516969698?pwd=WWQ4dndGQnVyTGx6SW1Hc0RrMjM3UT09Meeting ID: 651 696 9698 Passcode: 246122 “I Can Love Myself Better?” Certain things are just obviously ridiculous. It’s hard to fathom how anyone could believe them.  Yet today, there are so many examples of people believing patently false ideas that you wonder how they have become so estranged from the truth. If someone showed up seriously promoting the idea that The Encyclopedia Britannica was created by the random explosion of a typewriter, most people would laugh.   Yet people readily accept things much more ludicrous than that.  Many people believe that there is nothing greater than ourselves, that the universe in all its infinite, delicate, micro and macro details just happened, and that one day we (or “Science”) will figure it out, but that basically, there is a human explanation for it.  God is not necessary.  Man is the …

Definitive Questions

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Sr. Anne Marie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting for Facing Our Immortality online support group. Join Zoom Meeting: Please use the link below. Included are the meeting ID and password. Our meeting begins at 6:30 pm MT. Topic: Definitive Questions Time: Feb 12, 2024 07:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada); (NB) 6:30 pm Mountain Time https://zoom.us/j/95448669169?pwd=eUZ0MzNTczZTcG1jVFZUSUNNOGM3Zz09 Meeting ID: 954 4866 9169 Passcode: 325195 Prayer: Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary… Definitive Questions The saints often cast our meeting with God at the end of our time on earth in terms of a life review in which certain questions are implicit.  How have you loved?  Have you kept my commandments?  What do you have to show for the gifts you’ve been given? There is another plausible question that the Lord might ask us and which we may not be expecting: How many disciples have you made?  Currently, there are about 1.3 billion Catholics in the world (which boasts an 8.1 billion population). If every Catholic devoted time to making at least one disciple, one …