Franciscan Media – Franciscan Media

‘God Has Collected Your Tears’

Franciscan Media — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:30:00 +0000

I don’t think you can get to a place of being open to God’s grace unless you feel that your lament has been heard. Listening to God is about also realizing that God is listening to you. God has heard your cries. God has collected your tears in a flask. Lament is so fundamental to the human experience, but when you know God has heard you, then one becomes willing to hear God.

—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring Maureen O’Brien

Revelations of Grace

Franciscan Media — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility, which inclines Catholics to see the holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.

—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD

Savor the Sacraments

Franciscan Media — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Although we are baptized and confirmed only once, the effects of these sacraments continue to affect us daily. Every time we dip our fingers into holy water and make the sign of the cross, we profess our dying and rising to new life in Christ. The gifts of the Holy Spirit offered at Confirmation are released only as we have the grace to embrace them. The Holy Spirit, alive in us, enables us to have a fruitful faith. In 1984, I contracted breast cancer. Before surgery, I received the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick. When the priest laid hands on me, a sense of peace entered my being and has remained. Regardless of the outcome, I knew all would be well.

God has given us the sacraments to draw us into deeper relationship with him. Who would refuse such grace-filled gifts?

—from “Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church“
by Franciscan Media

We Must Pursue God

Franciscan Media — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Thomas Merton said that what it means to be myself is to be my true self. And to borrow language from St. Francis of Assisi, what that means is to be who I am in the eyes of God. And so, what I am before God, that I am, and nothing less and nothing more. Who we are before God is all that matters. But in order to get to that identity, in order to recognize it, we have to pursue God. We can’t know who we are before God by just living in our own world.

—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring Daniel P. Horan, PhD

This Communion of Saints

Franciscan Media — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Life is change. But it is not antithetical to the life that came before; it is not a negation of that or an elimination of it. In some ways, it might be a building upon it. If we think about God calling us into the communion of saints, it’s a deepening of relationship across time and space that we don’t always get to share in the same way in our earthly lives.

—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring Daniel P. Horan, PhD

Living into Death

Franciscan Media — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:30:00 +0000

I have encountered people who don’t recognize their physical and emotional pain because they’ve never had the opportunity to experience it deeply. Having worked with St. Francis‘ life and his Canticle is that it’s all a beautiful, complicated mess, and it’s all OK, and it’s all full, and it’s not superficial, and he didn’t glibly welcome sister death. He didn’t add that stanza until he was close to death.

This isn’t just something that he wrote out. This is something that he lived into. And I pray for myself that I live into this depth of presence and experience.

—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring Darleen Pryds, PhD