Flame of the Holy Spirit, purify my thoughts, words and actions...

James 3:13-18 & Mark 9:14-29  
 
We live in treacherous times. Laws, leaders, and legislatures, not to mention the Church, are being distorted and stretched beyond recognition, while human life becomes more susceptible to super-bugs and systemic collapse.  Despair seems to be our inevitable future – or is it? In times like these, the appropriate response is not despair but repentance, that is mourning the distance beween us and God, and collectively and individually turning back to our deeply spiritual roots. Through repentance, we turn back to God and allow him to purify our hearts, minds, souls and strength so that we, like the disciples, can cast out this kind by prayer and fasting, and by doing so, allow the fire of the Holy Spirit of God to burn away all that is impure, and all that is not holy truth and holy love.  As the season of Lent approaches, let us (let me) examine [my] very being  and repent so that I am free to fully live into the purposes and plans of the Holy Spirit of God, despite the failures and foibles of human kind.  This year will I participate fully in the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting and charitable giving and so enter into the purifying (if unnerving) designs of God? Flame of the Holy Spirit, purify my thoughts, words and actions.   
                                                                              
The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are True, and righteous altogether. (Psalm 19:9)
 
Act as if every day were the last of your life, adn each action the last you perform.  
St. Alphonsus Liguori
 
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Soli ad gloriam Dei