Dominicast is part of the Sisters' apostolic outreach to "Preach the word...in season and out of season" and to keep alive the search for Truth in a world that keeps looking for lies.
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Happiness is what we are all seeking after, but never completely find. This is because we were made for a greater happiness than this world can give – the happiness of heaven.
We are creatures that spend their lives making choices – some minor and some very crucial. It is our soul that does this choosing and the choices it makes bring us in the end to an eternal destiny in heaven or hell.
You are more than a body animated by some vague life-principle. Unlike animals and plants our human life-principle is a spiritual soul which can never be destroyed by anyone and never die.
We don’t bring ourselves into existence – obviously. All the various theories of a where a person comes from can’t explain the origin of a spiritual human soul. And as for where everything else came from, we find ourselves having to trace back through all the multiple causes in the universe to one original cause that had no cause. God!
Many people ignore God’s existence altogether. Many have negative concepts of Him. However unwelcome this thought may be to some, God is not a blind force but a person – Three Persons – who knows everything and love without limit. He is the one who gives existence to everything and keeps it there.
God loved me into existence. What He wants for me is happiness. And we all know the recipe for human happiness is love - given and received. So you could say God has created me in love and for love. Sounds like a very loving thing to do.
If we operate out of the idea that our conscience is simply our emotions guiding us to where we want to go or what we want to do or be, we have no real chance of living a full and happy human life. That spiritual navigation system planted in us by God which allows us to know good from evil is in shut-down. A dangerous situation to be in.
Freedom - Truth Byte 8 We differ from animals in having a spiritual soul that can reason, choose freely and take responsibility for those choices. People can put pressure on us – sometimes terrible pressure - in an attempt to limit our free will, but no-one can ultimately deprive us of our God-given freedom – unless we choose to let them.
The word ‘love’ is almost too commonplace for us to give it much thought. But love is the whole purpose of our lives; the “make or break” factor that we must get right if we want to find the happiness we were created for. It’s really worth our while to give it some deeper thought.
We humans tend to think we are the great inventors and creators of love. Love is what we spend our most precious energies on: loving is the most important and rewarding thing we ever do. But love is actually a gift to us from the One who created us – God, Who not only loves more than anyone, but IS LOVE.
With all the different ways we use the word ‘love’ (and in fact do love), we could save ourselves a lot of grief by taking a look at some of the important categories of human love. This may help us to get our relationships in perspective and allow them to be what they are meant to be.
We all have our personal identity . You could say we all have our own reality; our own truth. But these personal truths can be a real problem when it comes to our interaction with others. There has to be some kind of unchanging, bottom line truth that all our so called truths are measured by. What is it?
We all have a right to our rights. But somehow we have to balance our rights against the rights of others. And no-one has rights without responsibilities. These are ideas which are not always thought through in our 'me first' society.
Everyone is bothered by the existence of evil. But is it an 'existence' or an absence? And who should wear the blame for it?
Except for Christ and His Mother, we're all sinners. But being cheerful about our sin is just a cop-out. So is treating it light-heartedly like a minor social slip-up. Something that messes up our humanity the way sin does is no joking matter.
Sure, we’re all free to dehumanise ourselves by sin. But we are just as free to repent and get our lives back on track again. God won’t force the issue but He stands ready to forgive, if and when we’re ready.
The Ten Commandments are relevant to you - if you are a human being. Most of us don't realise that they are the Maker's instructions for human nature. No wonder human nature finds itself so often in such a mess when most people dodge around them or ignore them altogether.
Our personality is not the superficial thing we often imagine it to be. This podcast explains why we are all, as persons, more complex than our external "style'' suggests.
Virtue: A Pathway to Freedom - Truth Byte 19 Virtues are not strictly for the 'Holy Joe'. They are good habits that contribute to building that quality personality we all dream of having.
Prudent people are often the steady "succeeders" of this world, but we often think of them as boring and unadventurous. A good hard look at the moral virtue of prudence may change our minds on that.
Justice is that 'fair go' we all want. It's doing to others what we want them to do to us. It's the social virtue that makes living with others possible, peaceful and productive. It's also something we owe to God. And something He measures out to us!
The word "temperance" has often been associated with people joining a temperance league - making an oath never to drink alcohol. The virtue of temperance is a much more wide-ranging and attractive thing. It's all about managing our bodies and our emotions in healthy ways that make us more what we are made to be. Like the other moral virtues, then, temperance is a humanising habit that brings its own happiness both here and in the afterlife.
Most of us appreciate being supported by firm, loyal friends and have an admiration (sometimes secret) for people with moral fortitude. The virtue of fortitude is a highly attractive one – nothing like the aggressive, dominating, showy strength we associate with the heavyweights of the world but more like the faithful, self-sacrificing and committed strength of the big-hearted.
None of us is going to argue with the fact that our human nature is not perfect. None of us, however, want to really degrade our human nature by sin, especially by those big ones that can turn us into monsters. What are these big sins we sometimes call capital sins? What do they look like in action? How do we deal with them?
Personal pride - a healthy sense of our own self-worth – is a virtue. But thanks to all the defects of our fallen human nature, we often manage to turn pride into something very ugly, one of the capital sins in fact. It’s the ultimate sin of self-idolatry which leads us into all kinds of dangerous delusions and generally makes us impossible to live with.
Anger: The Second Capital Sin - Truth Byte 26 Anger - we all have it. We all need it to survive. But we need to keep the lid on it. This means controlling it by our reason and giving it direction by our will, so that it becomes a power for good in the world not the destructive force it so often is.
We all battle against materialism - that degrading tendency to put more value on things than on people. The vice of avarice grows out of this and makes us slaves to our wants, never satisfied with what we have and much more keen on getting than on giving.
The sin of envy is one of the ugliest sins. Envy makes us resent the success, gifts, good fortune of others just because we haven't got them ourselves. It is the ultimate kill-joy. It spoils life for others and doesn't improve our own.
Long ago, a wise man said that one sure sign of those preoccupied with low things was overeating - “their god is their stomach”. This form of false worship - the vice of gluttony - is unfortunately ever with us, as are its negative consequences – but thankfully, so are its solutions.
Lust: the Sixth Capital Sin Truth Byte 30
Lust is a vice so prevalent that many people have come to see it as a kind of virtue. Is it? In a world that is obsessed with sex as pleasure, we may need to stop and reflect on God's plan for humanity and our true happiness.
The general trend today is to work as little as possible for the greatest possible rewards. But do we realise that this culture of sloth is undermining our integrity and shrinking our personalities... and maybe even worse?
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