VIRTUE AS A SEED

As a spiritual mother, the Youth Congregation wanted its members to understand their identity as Christians and to live accordingly. Eugene uses the word “virtue” often in this context – virtue as a quality or behaviour considered morally good or desirable in a person.

Art. 2. It is to fulfill this duty for them that the Congregation will give all its members the most comprehensive instruction on all points of their religion either to teach them to know it well, or to provoke them to practice all the virtues it recommends.

Statuts, Chapitre XIV – Devoirs de la Congrégation envers les congréganistes

The knowledge and understanding of their faith and Christian identity had to be translated into daily life. For example:

The members will do their best to conduct themselves in relation to their families in such a way as to honour the virtue that they profess. Thus in order to please God, they accept with patience the little daily aggravations and imperfections of those around them.

Règlements et Statuts de la Congrégation de la Jeunesse, 1813, p. 24

Whatever we do lays a seed in our deepest consciousness, and one day that seed will grow. ~Sakyong Mipham

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1 Response to VIRTUE AS A SEED

  1. Eleanor Rabnett, Oblate Associate says:

    Today is, will be, a day of wonder, a day to celebrate Jesus, Christ our King. I awoke singing “With Drums and Dancing” (Dan Schutte)

    With this days writings I find incredible consolation, hope and promise. It offers the promise of something great for the “everydayness” of my life. “… they accept with patience the little daily aggravations and imperfections of those around them”. As always I beg, do not let me get ahead of myself. It would be so very easy to give into the weakness, the sin really, of looking at how much You give me and then to hold that up as a measure of others. Who am I to do that? It is only that you lift me up that I am able to see goodness at all. Much easier to look around and see the goodness of those around me, and celebrate it.

    “Whatever we do lays a seed in our deepest consciousness, and one day that seed will grow. ~Sakyong Mipham” This small short phrase though sends me soaring, with my soul, my being, wanting to take flight, to sing and dance with joy and abandon, with endless gratitude. All those small seeds that have been planted, not by me, but in truth by You, so tiny as to be invisible and seemingly insignificant. All those tiny hidden moments in my life, secretly germinating, taking root, and becoming a flower of the incredible beauty that is You. Dare I say it, growing in the shadow of the cross, growing at the foot of the cross with tendrils reaching inevitably higher and entwining.

    It is only in the deepest part of me that I begin to comprehend how your kingship is one with this cross, I know only that I am drawn to it in a way that is impossible to refuse. The seeds planted grow, they become the song of praise that I wish my life to be. It all comes back to You, and to what you have given me. Today let my song continue to be one of joy and praise and my very breath be that of gratitude. Today let all that I am be a bow before You, my Lord and Master, before You Jesus, the Christ, before You who is the only true son of the living God, before You who has mercy on me a sinner. Before You in a song and dance that began with the seeds of Your love at the dawn of eternity.

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