From: richarra@gmail.com   
      
   Faith is the messenger   
      
    Faith is the messenger that bears your prayers to God. Prayer can be   
   like incense, rising ever higher and higher. The prayer of faith is   
   the prayer of trust that feels the presence of God, which it rises to   
   meet. It can be sure of some response from God. We can say a prayer of   
   thanks to God every day for His grace, which has kept us on the right   
   way and allowed us to start living the good life. So we should pray to   
   God with faith and trust and gratitude.   
      
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   December 1st - Bl. Gerard Cagnoli   
   d. 1345   
      
   The cult which from time immemorial has been paid at Palermo and   
   elsewhere to this follower of St. Francis was confirmed in 1908.   
   Gerard, born about 1270, was the only son of noble parents in the   
   north of Italy. He lost his father at the age of ten, and his mother   
   not many years afterwards.   
      
      Resisting the persuasions of his relatives to marry, he distributed   
   his goods to the poor and led, until he was forty, the life of a   
   pilgrim and hermit, spending most of his time in the wilder parts of   
   Sicily. In the early years of the fourteenth century, the holiness and   
   miracles of St. Louis of Anjou, who though heir to a throne had become   
   a Franciscan, were much talked about. Gerard took him for his patron,   
   and about the year 1310 ended by joining the same order.   
      
     While he discharged duties of a lay-brother, his simplicity and   
   devotion were the admiration of all. On one great feast-day, when he   
   was acting as cook, being absorbed in prayer, he seemed to have   
   forgotten all about the dinner; when, late in the morning, the father   
   guardian, apprised that even the fire had not yet been lighted,   
   remonstrated with the brother on his neglect. Gerard, quite   
   unperturbed, took to the kitchen, where, assisted, it is said, by an   
   unknown youth of radiant beauty, he produced, punctually to the   
   moment, a more delicious meal than the community had ever before   
   eaten.   
      
      Many miracles were attributed to the intercession of the holy   
   brother. For example, it was said that, finding a child crying because   
   it had dropped and broken the glass beaker it was carrying home to its   
   mother, he collected the fragments, blessed them and restored the   
   vessel to the child as sound as it had been before. His miracles of   
   healing were commonly performed by anointing the sick with the oil   
   which burned in a lamp before a little shrine of his patron St. Louis.   
   His diet was bread and water, he slept upon a plank, he scourged   
   himself to blood, and there were many stories told of ecstasies in   
   which he was seen surrounded with light and raised from the ground. He   
   died on December 30, 1345.   
      
   See the decree of the Congregation of Rites in Analecta Ecclesiastica   
   (1908), vol. xvi, pp. 293-295 B. Mazzara, Leggendario Francescano   
   (1680), vol. iii, pp. 767-773; and Analecta Franciscana (1897), vol.   
   ii, pp. 489-497.   
      
      
   Saint Quote:   
   Everyone--past, present, and future--will be judged. Now, then, is the   
   time for mercy, while the time to come will be the time for justice   
   only. For that reason, the present time is ours, but the future time   
   will be God's only!   
   --St. Thomas Aquinas   
      
   Bible quote:   
   And answering, he said to them: Go and relate to John what you have   
   heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are made   
   clean, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, to the poor the gospel is   
   preached:  And blessed is he whosoever shall not be scandalized in me.   
   (Luke 7:22-23)   
      
      
   <><><><>   
   Persevere in your love for Christ   
      
   I urge you to persevere in your love for Christ and your faithful   
   observance of the law of Christ.   
      
   Our Goal is God, the source of all good. As we say in our prayer, we   
   are to place our trust in God and in no one else. In his kindness, our   
   Lord wished to strengthen your faith, for without it, as the   
   evangelist points out, Christ could not have performed many of his   
   miracles. He also wished to listen to your prayer, and so he ordained   
   that you experience poverty, distress, abandonment, weariness and   
   scorn.   
      
   God alone knows the reasons for all this, yet we can recognize three   
   causes. In the first place, our blessed Lord is telling you that he   
   desires to include you among his beloved sons, provided that you   
   remain steadfast in his ways, for this is the way he treats his   
   friends and makes them holy.   
      
   The second reason is that he is asking you to grow continuously in   
   your confidence in him alone and not in others.   
      
   Now there is a third reason. God wishes to test you like gold in the   
   furnace. The dross is consumed by the fire, but the pure gold remains   
   and its value increases. It is in this manner than God acts with his   
   good servant, who puts his hope in him and remains unshaken in times   
   of distress. God raises him up and, in return for the things he has   
   left out of love for God, he repays him a hundredfold in this life and   
   with eternal life hereafter.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)