February 2024: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day February 2024
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
4 February 2024
- When things are against you remember that aircraft take off into the wind.
- Other’s love for you is God’s gentle helping hand on your shoulder.
- Genuine listening requires a courageous open mind that is ready to change.
- Before you sleep name one thing for which you are grateful each day.
- No matter how you feel, wake up, get up, dress up, show up and try not to give up.
- To be without some of the things we want is indispensable to happiness.
- Every great event happened when someone decided not to give up.
- Children may wreck a house, but they can hold a home together.
Des O’Donnell OMI, Random Reflections
(Messenger Publications)
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Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
11 February 2024
World Day of the Sick • Day of Prayer for Temperance
The word temperance, like the word fortitude, is perhaps another of those words that are not used much in ordinary conversation. But the idea of temperance is suggested in some words that are used in everyday speech. Balance is one of those words, I think. We speak of wanting to lead ‘balanced’ lives, of wanting our judgments to be ‘balanced,’ our big decisions in life to be the result of ‘balanced reflections.’ We speak of a person being unbalanced. We speak of balanced diets. We try to balance our professional lives with our personal lives. We know what people mean when we hear these phrases. Balance is something like the virtue of temperance.
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First Sunday of Lent
18 February 2024
We need to rethink among other things the question of human power, its meaning and its limits. For our power has increased frenetically in a few decades. We have made impressive and awesome technological advances, and we have not realised that at the same time we have turned into highly dangerous beings, capable of threatening the lives of many beings and our own survival. Today it is worth repeating the ironic comment of Solovyov about an ‘age which was so advanced as to be actually the last one.’ We need lucidity and honesty in order to recognise in time that our power and the progress we are producing are turning against us.
Laudate Deum 28, Pope Francis
(Veritas Publications)
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Second Sunday of Lent
25 February 2024
Jesus was ‘able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attraction full of fondness and wonder. As he made his way throughout the land, he often stopped to contemplate the beauty sown by his Father and invited his disciples to perceive a divine message in things.’ The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.’ If ‘the universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely… there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.’ The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?
Laudate Deum 64-65, Pope Francis
(Veritas Publications)