Love In the Present Tense

/ J. Thorp / 6 Comments

Already last night’s timeline is incomplete: today I was reminded that my first real, in-depth exposure to St. Faustina and Divine Mercy came in February 2016, five months before we left for Poland. Fr. Chris Allar of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, keepers of the Shrine of Divine Mercy here in the United States, came to St. Michael to lead our annual parish retreat, and despite having a full agenda, managed to infuse the occasion with enough about St. Faustina, the Divine Mercy image, and the revelations of God’s boundless love and mercy that my curiosity was sparked.

His message seemed almost to good to be true: God loves us and wants us all to be saved. To do so, we must A) ask for His mercy, B) be merciful to others, and C) completely trust in Him.

That’s it, in a nutshell. Hope swells in the heart at the thought it might be that simple, doesn’t it? (Too simple, some would argue–where’s the judgement and justice in that?) Of course, trust in God is not always easy, nor is humbling ourselves to ask for mercy or extend it to others. Continue reading →

Journey to the Heart: A Timeline

/ J. Thorp / 5 Comments

One of the obstacles to sharing this roundabout path to the Sacred Heart with you is that in many cases it is only visible in retrospect. The sequence is hazy at this point, even to me. So I’m going to start with a timeline, which will hopefully serve as an outline for the sequence of posts to come. Though I may not write them chronologically, we ought to be able to plug them into the timeline in the end.

Part of the reason for doing this exercise at all is that every so often someone hears me say something like, “God has me here for a reason,”  “God told me such-and such,” or “God is leading me toward X,” and asks me what that means. God doesn’t speak to me audibly, but He opens some doors—in my heart, in others, and in the world—and closes others. This timeline and sequence will hopefully show what I mean.

We begin nearly two years ago… Continue reading →

Journey to the Heart of Love

/ J. Thorp / 16 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post, then putting it off time and again because I don’t know how I can possibly do it. For more than year now God has been moving in me, pulling me in what seems like a hundred different directions, softening and shaping my stony heart in various ways and encouraging, pushing, even forcing me to surrender, little by little, to Him.

In some sense, it has all come to a head, in this month of the Sacred Heart, as that seems to be the destination toward which He is calling me, the burning, bleeding, beating heart of Love Himself, the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I don’t know how explain the connections in one coherent post, so I’ve decided to attempt something I’ve not done in a long while: short daily posts to explain how God has lured me toward the Heart of Love. Continue reading →

Urgent Conversion

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Sometimes when Jodi and I rise early in the morning to reflect on the daily Scripture readings and pray together, I fail to check the calendar for special feasts. Instead I go straight for the daily missal and read the regular readings for the day, only to open our emailed gospel reflection to learn that it’s the Feast of Such-and-such, with a special gospel reading.

That is what happened on Thursday morning, with the happy result that it caused me to focus on the call to urgency and action in our conversion.

Continue reading →