Feast of the Guardian Angels

I went to the Abbey this weekend with Jon and little Michael because Father Abbot was giving a conference on the document Christifideles Laici called "Salt, Light and Leaven". It was a great conference! One of the things that struck me most about the day though, was the homily given at Mass in the morning by Fr. Peter.

Saturday was the feast of the Guardian Angels and so Fr. Peter preached on this topic.
He began by saying that the reason we have a guardian is because we need to be guarded against something. "Against what?" you may ask. He said there are 2 types of enemies you fight against and that your guardian guards you from. 1. yourself. 2. demons. He said they often work together.
It was so refreshing to hear Father speak about this so plainly and without reservation. We don't often hear about the spiritual battle spoken about with such a sense of reality devoid of an almost "Hollywood horror" type of exaggeration. Again, so refreshing!

Fr. Peter mentioned the seven deadly sins and the demons that tempt you to those sins and said that the one sin that attacks you most is sloth. He explained sloth in a different way than most people tend to think about it. He said that the demon of sloth doesn't so much tempt you to laziness as he does to busy-ness. He said it can tempt you to be busy doing bad things and even good things. But the goal of this demons temptations are for you to be so busy that you are inattentive to your relationship with Christ. So basically, you're so distracted that you've neglected your one end. You are tempted to be lazy about your life in Christ while being so busy.

This was so important to hear. While it is important for us as lay persons to get things done in the world, even while praying and offering everything up, it is more important that we remember our reason for being, our reason for working, our reason for life. Our beginning and our end is Christ and we must not be allowed to be tempted to be lazy about our relationship with Him. I often find so much difficulty making time for this relationship with Christ amid daily activities and the routine. So this for me was a wonderful wake up call. One that I've been receiving a lot lately, "Make time for Jesus! He's the most important part of your life! You can't give what you don't have!"
These messages have been said to me recently a lot in homilies and Masses and those words have been popping out like crazy.

I don't blog very often, but I felt such a push to blog about this. I think it's a message I need to hear often and I thought it'd be worthwhile to share.

So to sum up:
We have guardians for a reason.
We need to guard against sloth, which can be different than the sloth we normally think about.
Our relationship with Christ is our primary obligation.


Otherwise, I'd highly recommend checking out the Apostolic Exhortation written by JPII on the laity. It's very important that we recognize our vocation as lay persons and how we are an integral part of the life of the Church. We literally make up 99.9% of the Catholic Church today. If we depend on the .01% alone to sustain her, then we're not really fulfilling our role as "priest, prophet, and king". Good stuff!
The Church is so amazing. Being Catholic rocks!