It Is Jan. 18 Already?

The monthly Magnificat magazine (subscribe here) includes a reflection from a French Carthusian monk who died in 1945, Dom Augustin Guillerand. If you’re back into old habits and want to start again before January’s end, with prayer, it might help get us back on track:

Life has an inner source, namely God. And God cannot remain inactive. It is he who gives life to all our acts. Thus our inner life is not something to be sought up in the skies, but within ourselves; not in the abstract, but in little daily happenings and acts. God is at work there, within us, with us, correcting, polishing; until — and in order that — everything in us, our faculties and their acts, are under the sway of this inner principle. We should try to reduce everything in us to this inner principle.
Hence the necessity for self-correction, the control of ourselves from within, with God’s help. The virtues keep all our acts “ordered” –- towards God, our neighbor, and ourselves. This is the Christian life. The “gifts” of the Holy Spirit guide us directly…we have only to follow the Holy Spirit.

What a blessing Sundays are! Dude, take the day off.