Need of a Guide for Beginning Devotion and Making Progress in It


23 August, 2019

“Need of a Guide for Beginning Devotion and Making Progress in It” pp 33-35

"The Word of Life Mural" at the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame (photo:P. Smith)


                 The first thing I think of is how we, as Catholic school teachers, need to be guides for our students. We need be those people who encourage and challenge and inspire and, most of all, Love our students. If what St. Francis De Sales has to say is real, and we are all called to follow the road to devotion, then we are guiding our students to much more than just middle school, or high school, or college, or a profession, or even to being a good person. Our students are all called to much more than that… they are called to Devotion…to a relationship with Jesus Christ and the Holiness that comes with it. But we cannot be the guide they need if we, ourselves, do not possess that “great desire to imitate” the Love of Jesus. We must be “full of charity, knowledge, and prudence”, and we can come to have these virtues if we become those “humble souls who sincerely desire to make spiritual progress.” Our students deserve guides who, themselves, are led by Holiness.

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