From: richarra@gmail.com   
      
   On Self-Examination, and the Purpose of Amendment:  [III]   
      
   When you have confessed and grieved over these and your other faults   
   with deep sorrow and contrition at your own weakness, make a firm   
   resolve to amend your life and to advance in holiness. Then surrender   
   yourself and your will entirely to Me, and offer yourself on the altar   
   of your heart as a perpetual sacrifice to the honour of My Name.   
   Faithfully commit yourself to Me, body and soul, that you may worthily   
   approach and offer this Sacrifice to God, and receive the Sacrament of   
   My Body to the health of your soul.   
   --Thomas à Kempis--Imitation of Christ Book 4 Ch.7   
      
      
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   December 31st - St. Melania The Younger, Widow   
   (368-439 A.D.)   
      
   “It is easier,” said Our Lord, “for a camel to pass through a needle’s   
   eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” His disciples   
   asked him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus replied, “For God all things   
   are possible.”   
      
   St. Melania the Younger illustrates what He meant. She was a   
   fabulously wealthy person, but under divine guidance she lived in   
   poverty and devoted all her riches to good causes.   
      
   Melania belonged to a patrician Roman family. While most of the early   
   Christians were not well-to-do, she fell heir to vast properties all   
   over Italy and North Africa. As she grew up, her disposition was to   
   live the life of an ascetic. However, her father, Valerius Publicola,   
   a Roman senator and socialite, insisted that she marry his cousin,   
   Valerius Pinianus. The two children she bore to him died. Pinianus,   
   seeing in this that God favored his wife’s desire for the ascetical   
   life, agreed to live with her henceforth as brother with sister.   
      
   Now she got permission from Emperor Honorius to dispose of her great   
   real estate holdings. Her house on the Appian Way she converted into a   
   hostel for pilgrims. Adopting the simplest type of clothing (and   
   eventually persuading the “stylish” Pinianus to do the same), Melania   
   fled with him to Sicily when the Goths invaded Italy. Later on, they   
   crossed over to North Africa.   
      
   In both places she promoted the current movement towards Christian   
   austerity and devotional practices.   
      
   She established monasteries, one for men; and one for women populated   
   by her former slaves. (Part of her wealth had been a huge number of   
   slaves, but in Christian spirit she had freed at least 8,000 of them.   
   The present day market value of each slave could have been $200; so by   
   liberating all of them she gave up the equivalent of a $1.6 million   
   investment.) She herself lived in this women’s monastery, and being a   
   literate woman spent her working hours copying Greek and Latin books.   
   It is said that these copies were still in circulation five centuries   
   later.   
      
   Finally, in 417, St. Melania and her family went to Jerusalem. She and   
   Pinian then took off for Egypt to visit the great desert monasteries   
   of the Nile Valley. Inspired by the devotion of the Egyptian monks,   
   she returned to Jerusalem intent upon a life of still profounder   
   solitude and prayer. At Bethlehem she met St. Jerome, the great hermit   
   and scriptural scholar. He was the spiritual director of a group of   
   devout Roman women who had come east to seek his guidance. When her   
   husband died, St. Melania buried him outside the walls of Jerusalem   
   and established nearby a large convent of nuns over which she presided   
   for the rest of her days.   
      
   On Christmas Eve, 439, Melania went to Bethlehem to celebrate the   
   birth of Jesus. After Mass she told her cousin St. Paula that she was   
   about to die. On the feast of St. Stephen, December 26, she read to   
   her nuns the scripture story of the death of this first Christian   
   martyr. Afterwards she said, “You will never again hear me read these   
   lessons.” She died on December 31 at the age of 56 – a Christmastide   
   saint.   
      
   Melania the Younger had shown how a person of great wealth could still   
   be saved. God made it possible by giving her an extraordinary gift of   
   detachment from the things of earth. She considered herself not the   
   owner, but the distributor of the property entrusted to her.   
      
   Melania was so detached and humble, in fact, that she never allowed   
   herself the luxury of bearing a grudge against anybody. In her last   
   conversation she said to her nuns, “The Lord knows that I am unworthy,   
   and I would not dare compare myself with any good woman, even those   
   living in the world. Yet I trust that Satan himself will not at the   
   last judgment accuse me of ever having gone to sleep with bitterness   
   in my heart.”   
      
   Had she chosen a motto, it might well have been: “Give and forgive.”   
   That’s a sentiment especially appropriate in the Christmas season.   
      
   Quote:   
   "For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the   
   principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the   
   love of God?"   
   --Thomas á Kempis   
      
   Bible Quote:   
   O Lord, in thy favour, thou gavest strength to my beauty. Thou   
   turnedst away thy face from me, and I became troubled.   (Psalms 29:8)   
      
      
   <><><><>   
   Joseph, the father of Jesus   
      
       A saint who had loved so deeply during his life could not but die   
   of love. Unable to love his dear Jesus as he wished amid the   
   distractions of this life, and having completed the service required   
   by our Lord's tender years, it only remained for him to say to the   
   Father: "I have finished the work which you gave me to do"; and to the   
   Son: "My child, to my hands your heavenly Father entrusted your body   
   on the day when you came into this world; now to your hands I entrust   
   my spirit on the day I leave this world."   
       Such, I believe, was the death of this great patriarch, the man   
   chosen to perform for the Son of God the tenderest and most loving   
   offices possible, apart from those fulfilled by his heaven-sent wife,   
   the true mother of that same Son.   
   --Francis de Sales   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)