I’m often asked by parishioners to recommend books for spiritual reading. It’s sometimes tricky to nail down what someone means by spiritual reading, so I offer a number of suggestions in what I consider different categories of that genre.

I'm desperate to figure out how God wants to love the world through us in every practical detail.

Our days can pass by in a blur, but our lives need not be unexamined. This is the genius of the nightly examen prayer, which is an important practice for a serious plan of life.

You will know that you have truly prayed when you grow in peace, and when you find eagerness to get back to your day.

What I remember most fondly about Pope Benedict is how his theological work bore the mark of humility, which was reflected so well in his life of service.

Get that: Jesus wants to transform our world by transforming the lives of those who follow him from the inside out. And he does it chiefly by loving us into his new world.

And this love comes to meet me today, 2,000 years on from its Incarnation. Just like he got his hands dirty that first Christmas, so he comes to me today, unafraid of the messiness of my heart and undeterred by the chaos of my life.

The central claim of Christianity is that God became human. The world was half ready (at best) for him, and God the Son still “became flesh and lived among us.”

If God alone is our satisfaction, then we won’t hold too tightly to anything else: we will give what we have (time, talent, treasure) away.

When we open our hearts and share our lives with God in prayer, he shares his life with us. His life at work in us brings about growth in love and joy and peace!

This Sunday, the Church enters the Season of Advent. If we use these few short weeks wisely, we will find the time and space we need to prepare for Christ’s coming at Christmas.

That's the primary way Christ's kingship works: in and through his faithful followers. When we abandon ourselves to God - giving our total, undying, allegiance to Christ the King - we are made to bring God's love to life for everyone we encounter.

I know it’s hard to know your neighbors these days, but what a difference it would make to know these kinds of things, and to extend ourselves in love to meet people’s genuine needs.

If we can entrust ourselves to Jesus and rise to meet the demands of love today, then we can figure the rest of it out as we go - we can figure out how to overcome tomorrow’s obstacles tomorrow.

It’s especially important, given that we celebrate All Saints the day prior, to keep in mind the souls in purgatory - the people who are not yet saints who have gone before us in faith, and who we support by our prayers as they undergo their final purification.

God, in his great mercy and glory, made you in his image. He made you out of love: he made you by love, and he made you for love.

Jesus encourages us in this weekend’s Gospel passage to pray always without becoming weary. This is a strong reminder to us that the strength of all our efforts at OLMC is God’s own life of love, which is given to us whenever we turn to God in faith-filled prayer.

Made whole by God’s healing love, we identify with Jesus more deeply the more we seek to make God’s mercy known to everyone we encounter.

I’ve been witness to the Spirit’s healing work these past few months in nothing short of miraculous ways, and this has me more and more committed to fostering healthy hearts and minds at OLMC.