            <div id="father_cummings_title">Father Cummings Homilies</div>
            <div id="father_cummings_excerpts">Excerpts</div><br/><br/>
            <div id="father_cummings_homily_title">Becoming Saints</div>  

            <div class="frcummings_content_paragraph">
                 <p> Our faith 
                    that conquers the world is a living faith, a faith that works through 
                    charity. This charity is not human love but divine love. Human love, even 
                    the most sublime married love, is very different. First comes attraction, 
                    passions and sentiments, then for that to become real love, the two individuals 
                    have to make a decision to love the other no matter what the cost. Even 
                    on a human level, love, properly speaking is a decision, but it usually 
                    comes later. It's the opposite with divine love. At the beginning God 
                    hides and even presents us with the cross. "Follow Me on the way of the 
                    Cross." And there is nothing attractive about the Man of Sorrows. There 
                    is no comeliness in Him. So we're called to make a decision first to follow 
                    Him without any consolations. Then, mysteriously, later on, when one has 
                    chosen the cross, then comes the joy, then the passions and the whole 
                    being can cooperate in the love of God. </p>
                  <p>We have 
                    to ask the Lord to transform our very useless human love into a little 
                    participation in that consuming fire that is the love of God. It's not 
                    something we can do on our own. We have to pray for it. We have to pray 
                    that the Lord will enable us to love. We should pray all the time, I want 
                    to love you, Lord, I want to love you more. How much I want to love You! 
                    We must admit, I don't love You the way I should. If you said this to 
                    a person, I don't love you, but I wish I did, they'd be offended. But 
                    God would not. So let us ask the Lord to give us that love. </p>
                  <p>Let us all 
                    look at ourselves differently in the mirror. Even though we know our faults, 
                    miseries and shameful pasts, we also know <i>that Christ Jesus came into 
                    the world to save sinners</i>, as St. Paul said, and though you might 
                    feel, like Paul, that<i> I am the foremost of sinners</i>, that must not 
                    dampen your confidence that He is able to make a saint out of you. Cardinal 
                    Schonborn reminds us, "When we begin, with rising alarm, to gain a sense 
                    of our unworthiness, when our own heart condemns us, God's infinite love 
                    tells us, <i>God is greater than our hearts.</i>" </p>
    
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