Maureen on personal devotions:
When we Catholics say people have a devotion to some aspect of God, or some saint, or some useful practice, it basically means that they love it and they persevere in working with it. They’re devoted to it. They have a devotion.
Or… maybe I need an example. Okay, say you meet some people in a Precious Blood order, and shortly afterward, you come across that verse from Peter about the Precious Blood. You start thinking about that verse a lot, and its implications. You start running into other mentions of the Precious Blood, maybe find a book about it or a holy card. It starts to be one of the primary ways you meditate about salvation, and the more you get into it, the more you seem to understand what’s going on, and the more depths open up to you. Then maybe you learn a prayer about it, or find out what other people in the past were interested in this. Maybe you get some prayers granted, or maybe you just learn to carry your own cross a bit better. Probably you talk to people about Jesus’ Precious Blood whenever it comes up — and probably it comes up more often than you’d expect. After a while, you realize you’ve got a devotion to the Precious Blood...
As Adoro points out, there is a certain element of personal devotion that seems to be part of Providence and the mysterious unity of the Body of Christ. Sure, sometimes people just like something, for conscious or even frivolous reasons. Sometimes, though, a saint or an aspect of the faith seems to find you and haunt you, until you finally start paying attention to God’s obvious will in the matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment