If you pay any attention to the news, you know that on Friday morning, December 14, a 20-year-old man shot and killed his mother in her home in Newtown, Connecticut, and then drove her car to a local elementary school and murdered six adults and twenty children. He then turned his gun on himself and committed suicide.
After pride, lust is the vice that the devil prefers to use to lure people away from God. Lust blinds the mind of a person, and since it is the mind that enlightens the will, once blinded, it no longer has the ability to lead the will away from the irrational urges of the body. Lust is an undiscerning passion that acts on fantasies, thoughts, and desires. Lust always leads to irrational, reckless, ruinous, and self-destructive behavior.
Last week after Georgette finished talking to a friend on the telephone, she said to me, “When I was talking about the benefits of praying the rosary, my friend (a former Catholic) asked, ‘If God is omnipresent, why would He approve of you praying to someone else, instead of directly to Him – and how do we know the saints can hear our prayers?’” Georgette then asked me, “How would you respond if someone asked you that question?”
In her book The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “…but it remains for us to become detached from our own selves and it is a hard thing to withdraw from ourselves and oppose ourselves, because we are very close to ourselves and love ourselves very dearly…It is here that true humility can enter.”
One Friday afternoon during my first year in law school (1979), while I was sitting in the law library, a girl who was in one of my classes walked over to me and asked, “What is that book you’re reading?” She had seen the title of the book, The Woman Shall Conquer, and was wondering what it was about.
In the mid-1980s, I taught a Business Law class at Illinois Central College (ICC). One of the areas of law that was covered in the class was contract law. I taught my students that there are four conditions that are necessary in order for a contract (or agreement) to be legally valid and binding. The four conditions are:
Last month, there was an event that caused me to stop what I was doing and think back to 1989. That was the year I purchased The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book written by Stephen Covey. The event that caused me to stop and think about Covey’s book was a report on the news that he had passed away. Covey died on July 16, 2012, at the age of 79. At the time of his death, he was a professor at the John Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University.
On June 13, 2012, Justin Siebenthal, a 21-year-old East Peoria, Illinois, man was shot and killed inside his home by two men. The crime took place in the middle of the night. Siebenthal opened his front door thinking that a man he had talked to earlier about buying some drugs was going to be standing outside the door. Instead, there were two men armed with handguns.