The Stained Glass Buffalo: a la Avila

28 April 2008

a la Avila

St. Theresa of Avila was full of life, with a quick tongue, mischievous spirit, and ready wit. One story night she found herself in an old cart, holding the reigns of two oxen, as she bumped over a muddy road in Spain.

Lightning flashed and thunder roared; in a panic, the startled oxen sped up, and the wheel of the wagon caught in a deep hole, throwing Theresa off the cart, where she landed face first into the mud.

Theresa knew that she was supposed to thank God for everything, but this wasn't going to be easy. Just then she heard the voice of her beloved Jesus say, "Theresa, be not dismayed, but only strengthened - I offer this only to my most faithful friends."

Theresa - her face and clothing covered with mud - though for a moment and then said "Perhaps that's why you have so few"

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It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.