Emotional Maturity

This is from an interesting short article about emotional versus spiritual maturity:

Emotional Maturity: First let’s discuss emotional maturity. Eminent Catholic psychiatrists Dr. Anna Terruwe and Dr. Conrad Baars, who based their work on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote extensively about the emotional life. They defined emotions as “psychological motors, designed to move us toward all that’s good, beautiful and true and away from what’s not.” They further taught that by nature our emotions want to and need to be guided by reason, but that reason serves the heart, or the emotional life–not the other way around.

Read more: http://spiritualdirection.com/2014/10/22/emotional-and-spiritual-maturity-whats-difference-part-i-of-ii#ixzz3H0IO9uba

I had never seen this expressed so clearly before.  So much for the primacy of reason...

On the Feast of St. John Paul II

Duc in altum -- John Paul II prepared the faithful from the beginning of his papacy to prepare for the Third Millennium. After we reached the Great Jubilee year celebrating 2000 years since Christ's birth, he issued the encyclical Novo Millennio Ineunte, in which he meditated on Christ's words, Duc in altum (Put out in the deep), pointing out that this is the time of the New Evangelization. We follow these words daily when we live and spread the Gospel daily.

God's Kingdom

“If we desire to live in the dwelling-place of his kingdom there is no means of reaching it except by the way of good deeds.” -St. Benedict

Read more: http://spiritualdirection.com/2014/10/22/the-answer-matthew-22-34-46#ixzz3GtwWDv1u

Some autumn thoughts:

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays a while like an old friend that you have missed.  It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November.  Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are clam white strips with gray keels.  The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still.  It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts.  The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones.  It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die--migrate or die.

                                                                               -Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot