Sunday Meditation: Everyone Has a Heart to Love With

My spiritual reading yesterday kept leading me to the "heart" of the matter starting with the daily devotional from the SSPX which examined "purity of intention." A good question for each of us is this. Does my action come from a heart filled with love for God or other lesser motives? People can perform the same external actions with very different results in the eyes of God:

We can go to Mass out of routine or out of obligation, or else simply to see a particular person. We can also go to Mass out of love of God. Externally, the actions are the same, but in the eyes of God they are each very different. The same external act will be meritorious for some, not for others, depending on the purity of their intention. It is the same for our duty of state. We can set to work out of obligation, out of pleasure or out of love of God. The same action is meritorious for some and not for others. [Source]

A Stable is the Perfect Place for a Child to be Born

This is a stable

Every Christmas we're inundated with comments from the pulpit (and websites and blogs) about how Baby Jesus was "born in a smelly stable", "born among filth", "born in a filthy stable", "born in a really cold dank smelly stable". I just want to jump up and cry, "WHAT are you talking about?! Obviously you have never even BEEN in a stable!"

It's evident that many of these priests/people never experienced the sweetness of a clean stable so how do they know what a stable is like? Several decades of my life were spent in barns—hunter/show barns, Thoroughbred race-horse barns, racetrack barns, sales barns, horse farms, cattle farms, sheep farms - and throw a few chicken sheds in there too. 

The Grotto of the Nativity where Jesus Christ was Born