Time goes definitively fast and we are now already in February, a few weeks after the beginning of the new year 2009. Many of you are busy with a professional life and the care of a family: many of you are too busy with temporal business, sometimes to the detriment of spiritual life. As usually you may have made good resolutions, and you now observe that you have not been able to keep them. Maybe they were not the right resolutions that you need. Maybe they were, but you lack of fortitude in order to keep them. Whatever is the reason, the fact is that you need more constancy in your spiritual life and to order your life. And because you are dependent on many affections and tendencies that are disordered, you miss many occasions to increase the love of God and to become more holy.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, inspired by Our Blessed Mother gives you a wonderful remedy that allows you to follow Our Lord and to serve Him better. It is his famous Spiritual exercises that help you to conquer yourself and regulate your life, in other words, to become a saint by accepting and doing God’s will.
Father Gordon and I will give you an opportunity to follow the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius in a 4-days retreat. A retreat for ladies will be given from March 23rd to 26th and another one for men from April 13th to 16th, both at Subiaco retreat center in Arkansas. Will you consider this opportunity as an occasion to be renewed in the Spirit, as Saint Paul says, and to learn how to love and serve Him better?
It happens many times that Our Lord calls us, but we find many excuses for not answering his calls: "I have bought a farm and I must needs go out and see it. I pray thee, hold me excused. Or: I have bought five yoke of oxen and I go to try them. I pray thee, hold me excused. Or again: I have married a wife; and therefore I cannot come."
Be sure that your excuses are not a pretext to neglect the care of your soul. Remember what the Lord says: "But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."
With the assurance of my prayers for you and your families,
Father Laurent Demets, FSSP40 Matecumbe StreetCherokee Village, AR 72529870 - 257 - 5588
