When Enough is Enough
October 29, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? I am so happy my personal outreach initiative is making waves. What I mean is it is gaining interest and reaching out to other sectors or areas. I am made to realize that the idea is good and when other persons start to reach out to those around them and share in their concerns then the initiative is achieving its objective. Moreover my personal outreach gets to identify with other outreach projects. Well I suppose that is the whole idea behind the inspired initiative.
Help me pray that it
be so.
Last October 27, we celebrated the 82nd birthday of the Prelate of Opus Dei, Msgr Fernando Ocariz. He succeeded Bishop Javier Echevarria in January 23, 2017. He has extensive background as a physicist, theologian, and a long-standing official within the Roman Curia and Opus Dei. Having lived in Rome alongside the organization’s founder, Saint Josemaria Escriva, he possesses deep-seated roots in the institution’s spiritual and pastoral history. He was born to a Spanish family exiled during the Spanish Civil War. He is the youngest of 8 children. He moved back to Madrid, Spain with his family at the age of three. He joined Opus Dei in 1961. He was ordained a Catholic priest on August 15, 1971 and focused his early ministry on youth and university students. He is Professor Emeritus of Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, which he helped co-found in the 1980’s. He is author of multiple texts on Christology and philosophy. He was Consultor for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (since 1986, working closely with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI); Consultor for the Dicastery for Evangelization. He served as Vicar General (1994-2014) and Auxiliary Vicar (2014-2017) under his predecessor, Bishop Javier Echevarria, accompanying him to over 70 countries.
Following is the continuation of the fifth word on gluttony (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
4 Gluttony
Gluttony is an inordinate indulgence in food or drink and may manifest itself either in taking more than is necessary, or in taking it at the wrong time, or in taking it too luxuriously. It is sinful because reason demands that food and drink be taken for the necessities and conveniences of nature, not for pleasure alone.
The Gospel describes Dives as being guilty of this sin. There is no mention in the story given to us by Our Blessed Lord that Dives was a wicked man. We have no record of him underpaying his servants or of being guilty of any moral turpitude. Our Lord tells us only that he was “clothed in purple and fine linen, and feasted sumptuously every day.” And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, who lay at his gate full of sores, desiring to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table, and no one did give him; moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man also died, and he was buried in hell. And lifting up his eyes when he was in torments, he saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said: “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, to cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.”
And Abraham said to him: “Son, remember that thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And besides all this, between us and you, there is fixed a great chaos: so that they who would pass from hence to you, cannot, nor from thence come hither.”
And he said: “Then, father, I beseech thee, that thou wouldst send him to my father’s house, for I have five brethren that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torments.” And Abraham said to him, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” But he said, “No, father Abraham; but if one went to them from the dead, they will do penance.” And he said to him, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe, if one rise again from the dead.
If there is any indication of the present degeneration of society better than another, it is the excess of luxury in the modern world. When men begin to forget their souls, they begin to take great care of their bodies. There are more athletic clubs in the modern world than there are spiritual retreat houses; and who shall count the millions spent in beauty shops to glorify faces that will one day be the prey of worms.
It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer, they protest that it is too long. Added to this is the shocking amount that is yearly spent, not in the normal pleasure of drinking, but in its excess. The scandal increases when one considers the necessary wants of the poor that could have been supplied by the amount spent for such dehumanization. The divine judgment upon Dives is bound to be repeated upon many of our generation, who will find that the beggars for whose service they refused to interrupt their luxuries will be seated at the banquet of the King of Kings, while they, like Dives, will be the beggars for but a drop of water.
Some reparation had to be made for gluttony, drunkenness, and excessive luxury. That reparation began at the birth of Our Lord, when He who might have pulled down the heavens for His housetop and the stars for His chandeliers, chose to be rejected by men and driven as an outcast to a cave in the hillsides of the least of the cities of Israel.
The very first sermon He preached was a plea for detachment: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). He began His public life by fasting for forty days and bade men, “Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on” (Matt. 6:25).
Traveling about as an itinerant prophet,
He admitted He was as homeless as at His birth and that the beasts and birds
had a better habitation than He: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the
air, nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head” (Luke 9:58).
There was no luxury in the way He dined, for we know of but one meal that He
himself prepared, and it consisted only of bread and fish.
Finally, at the Cross, He is stripped of His garments and denied a deathbed, in order to go out of His own world as He came into it — Lord of it and yet possessing nothing. The waters of the sea were His and all the fountains of the earth had sprung up at His word. He it was who drew the bolt of nature’s waterfalls and shut up the seas with doors. He it was who said: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him, shall not thirst for ever. If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 4:13; 7:37).
But now He lets fall from His lips the shortest of the seven cries from the Cross and the one that expresses the keenest of all human sufferings in reparation for those who have had their fill: “I thirst.”
A soldier immediately put a sponge full of vinegar on a stick and pressed it to His mouth. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy uttered by the psalmist a thousand years before: “In my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink” (Ps. 68:22).
He who fed the birds of the air is left unfed; He who changed water into wine now thirsts; the everlasting fountains are dry; the God-Man is poverty-stricken. The divine “Lazarus” stands at the door of the world and begs for a crumb and a drop, but the door of generosity is closed in His face.
Thus was reparation made for the luxury of eating and drinking. When Mirabeau was dying, he called for opium, saying, “You promised to spare me needless suffering. . . . Support this head, the greatest head in France.” When Christ is dying, He refuses the drug to alleviate His suffering. He deliberately wills to feel the most poignant of human wants, that He might balance in the scales of justice those who had more than they needed.
He even made Himself the least of all men by asking them for a drink — not a drink of earthly water. That is not what He wanted, but a drink for His thirsty heart — a drink of love: I thirst for love.
This word from the Cross reveals that there is a double hunger and a double thirst: one of the body, the other of the soul. On many previous occasions, Our Lord had distinguished between them: “Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger. Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:25). “Blessed are ye that hunger now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:21).
Then to the multitude who followed Him across the sea in search of bread, He said: “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto life everlasting, which the Son of man will give you” (John 6:27).
To the Samaritan woman who came to draw water at Jacob’s well He foretold: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him, shall not thirst forever: But the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting” (John 4:13–14). But above all other references to the food and drink of the inner man as contrasted with that of the outer man, He promised the supreme nourishment of Himself: “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:56).
It is in the light of this double hunger and thirst of body and soul that the distinction between dieting and fasting becomes clear. The Church fasts; the world diets. Materially there is no difference, for a person can lose twenty pounds one way as well as the other. But the difference is in the intention.
The Christian fasts not for the sake of the body, but for the sake of the soul; the pagan fasts not for the sake of the soul, but for the sake of the body. The Christian does not fast because he believes the body is wicked but in order to make it pliable in the hands of the soul, like a tool in the hands of a skilled workman.
That brings us down to the basic problem of life. Is the soul the tool of the body, or the body the tool of the soul? Should the soul do what the body wants, or should the body do what the soul wants? Each has its appetites, and each is imperious in the satisfaction of its wants. If we please one, we displease the other, and vice versa. Both of them cannot sit down together at the banquet of life.
The development of character depends on which hunger and thirst we cultivate. To diet or to fast — that is the problem. To lose a double chin in order to be more beautiful in the eyes of creatures or to lose it in order to keep the body tamed and ever obedient to the spiritual demands of the soul — that is the question. Human worth can be judged by human desires.
Tell me your hungers and your thirsts, and I will tell you what you are. Do you hunger for money more than for mercy, for riches more than for virtue, and for power more than for service? Then you are selfish, pampered, and proud. Do you thirst for the wine of everlasting life more than for pleasure, and for the poor more than for the favor of the rich, and for souls more than for the first places at table? Then you are a humble Christian.
The great pity is that so many have been so concerned with the body that they neglect the soul, and, in neglecting the soul, they lose the appetite for the spiritual. Just as it is possible in the physiological order for a man to lose all appetite for food, so it is possible in the spiritual order to lose all desire for the supernatural. Gluttonous about the perishable, they become indifferent to the everlasting.
Excessive love of money destroys a sense
of value; excessive love of the flesh kills the values of the spirit. Then
comes a moment when everything seems to rebel against the higher law of our
being. As the poet has put it, “All things betrayest thee, who betrayest Me” (Thompson,
“The Hound of Heaven,” line 15). Nature
is so loyal to its Maker that it is always, in the end, disloyal to those who
abuse it. “Traitorous trueness and loyal deceit” (See ibid., line 37)is its best poetic description, for in
faithfulness to Him it will always be fickle with us.
The fifth word from the Cross is God’s plea to the human heart to satisfy itself at the only satisfying fountains. God cannot compel men to thirst for the holy in place of the base, or for the divine rather than the secular. That is why His plea is merely an affirmation: “I thirst,” meaning, “I thirst to be thirsted for.” And His thirst is our salvation.
A twofold recommendation is hidden in
this short sermon from the Cross: first, to mortify bodily hunger and thirst,
and second, to cultivate a spiritual hunger and thirst.
We are to mortify bodily hunger and thirst, not because the flesh is wicked, but because the soul must ever exercise mastery over it, lest it become a tyrant. Quite apart from avoiding all excesses, the Cross commits us even to the minimizing of expenditures for luxuries, for the sake of the poor. How many ever think of forgoing an elaborate dinner and theater party, or a debut, out of genuine sympathy and affection for Christ’s poor? Dives did not, and he lost his soul because of that forgetfulness. How many in less ample circumstances even mortify themselves one movie a month in order to drop its equivalent in the poor box, that He who sees in secret may reward in secret?
The divine counsel concerning such restraint of bodily appetites is unmistakable. On one occasion, when Our Lord was invited to the home of the prince of the Pharisees, He addressed the host himself, saying: When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor thy neighbors who are rich; lest perhaps they also invite thee again, and a recompense be made to thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind; And thou shalt be blessed because they have not wherewith to make thee recompense; for recompense shall be made thee at the resurrection of the just. (Luke 14:12–14)
The Heavenly Judge cannot be bought with money, but He can be swayed by the poor. On that last day — the only one that really counts — will be fulfilled the beautifully prophetic words of the Mother of Our Lord: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away” (Luke 1:53).
When such surrenders of the superfluous
food and drink are made for the soul’s sake, let it all be done in a spirit of
joy. “And when you fast, be not as the hypocrites, sad. For they disfigure
their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Amen, I say to you, they
have received their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy head and
wash thy face; that thou appear not to men to fast, but to thy Father who is in
secret; and thy Father who seeth in secret, will repay thee” (Matt. 6:16–18).
And yet how few there are who ever think of nourishing their souls. How few there must have been in Jerusalem to have drawn from Our Lord the sweet complaint: “How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldst not” (Matt. 23:37).
Well indeed might the Savior say to us, as we listen to the cry: “I thirst,” the words He addressed to the woman at the well: “If thou didst know the gift of God, and who He is that saith to thee, give me to drink; thou perhaps wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water” (John 4:10).
But how many ask? Consider the greatest gift of God to men: the Bread of Life and the Wine that germinates virgins (see Zech. 9:17). How few avail themselves of the divine presence to break their fast each morning on the heavenly food of the soul!
How many are sufficiently conscious that Our Lord is present in the tabernacle, to pay a daily visit to Him in His prison of love? And if we do not, what does it witness to but the deadening of our spiritual sense. Our body would miss a dessert more than our soul would miss a Communion.
No wonder Our Crucified Redeemer thirsted for us on the Cross — thirsted for our unresponsive hearts and dulled souls. And let us not think that His thirst is a proof of His need, but of our own. He does not need us for His perfection any more than we need the flower that blooms outside our window for our perfection. In dry seasons we desire rain for the flower, not because we need the rain, but because the flower needs it.
In like manner, God thirsts for us, not because He needs us for His happiness, but because we need Him for our happiness. Without Him, it is impossible for us to develop. Just as certain diseases, such as rickets and anemia, arise in the body from a deficiency of necessary vitamins, so, too, our characters fail because of a deficiency of the Spirit.
The vast majority of men and women in the world today are so underdeveloped spiritually that, if a like deficiency showed in their bodies, they would be physical monstrosities.
How many millions of minds there are today that are devoid of a single satisfying truth that they can carry through life to sustain them in their sorrows and console them at their death? How many millions of wills there are that have not yet found the goal of life and that, because they are presently without it, flit like butterflies from one colored emotion to another, unable to find repose?
Let them cultivate a taste for something more than bread and circuses; let them sound the depths of their beings to discover there the arid wastes crying for the refreshment of everlasting fountains. Of course, these emaciated hungry souls are not altogether to blame. They have heard preachers without end preaching, “Go to Christ!” But what does that mean? Go back nineteen hundred years? If so, then have they, not a right to doubt the divinity of Him who could not project Himself through time?
Look up to heaven? If so, then what has become of His blessing, His forgiveness of sinners, His truth that He said would endure unto the end of time? Where is His authority? His power? His life now? If it is not someplace on earth, then why did He come to earth? To leave only the echo of His words, the record of His deeds, and then to slip away leaving us only a history and its teachers?
Somewhere on earth today is His truth: “He that heareth you, heareth me” (Luke 10:16). Somewhere on earth is His power: “Behold, I have given you power” (Luke 10:19). Somewhere on earth is His life: “The bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world” (John 6:52). Where find it?
There is an institution on the face of the earth that claims to be that, and to those who have knocked at its portals and have asked for a drink has come the elixir of divine life and with it the peace that comes to those who drink and never thirst again, and eat and never hunger again.
To each and every one of us, inside and outside the Church, our Lord asks: “Will you accept the cup of my love?” He took our cup of hate and bitterness in Gethsemani, and its dregs were so bitter that they made Him cry out: “My Father if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me” (Matt. 26:39). But He drank every drop of it.
If He drank our cup of hates why do we not drink His chalice of pardon? Why, then, when He cries, “I thirst,” do we reach Him vinegar and gall?
I cannot tell the half of it, yet hear
What rush of feeling
still comes back to me,
From that proud
torture hanging on His Cross,
From that gold rapture
of His Heart in Mine.
I knew in blissful
anguish what it means
To be a part of
Christ, and feel as mine
The dark distresses of
my brother limbs,
To feel it bodily and
simply true,
To feel as mine the
starving of His poor,
To feel as mine the
shadow of curse on all,
Hard words, hard
looks, and savage misery,
And struggling deaths,
unpitied and unwept.
To feel rich brothers’
sad satieties,
The weary manner of
their lives and deaths,
That want in love, and
lacking love lack all.
To feel the heavy
sorrow of the world
Thicken and thicken on
to future hell,
To mighty cities with
their miles of streets,
Where men seek work
for days, and walk and starve,
Freezing on
river-banks on winter nights,
And come at last to
cord or stream or steel.
The horror of the
things our brothers bear!
It was but naught to
that which after came,
The woe of things we
make our brothers bear,
Our brothers and our
sisters! In my heart
Christ’s Heart seemed
beating, and the world’s whole sin —
Its crimson malice and
grey negligence —
Rose up and blackening hid the Face of
God (Arthur Shearly Cripps, “The Death of St. Francis,” lines 34–61).
— Victory over Vice
Just when I am about to say adieu, I am prompted to share with you something about the communion of saints given that we are approaching All Saints Day and All Souls Day.
1 November
All Saints
The earliest certain observance of a feast in honor of all the saints is an early fourth-century commemoration of "all the martyrs." In the early seventh century, after successive waves of invaders plundered the catacombs, Pope Boniface IV gathered up some 28 wagonloads of bones and reinterred them beneath the Pantheon, a Roman temple dedicated to all the gods. The Pope rededicated the shrine as a Christian church. According to Venerable Bede, the Pope intended "that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons" (On the Calculation of Time).
But the rededication of the Pantheon, like the earlier commemoration of all the martyrs, occurred in May. Many Eastern Churches still honor all the saints in the spring, either during the Easter season or immediately after Pentecost.
How the Western Church came to celebrate this feast in November is a puzzle to historians. The Anglo-Saxon theologian Alcuin observed the feast on November 1 in 800, as did his friend Arno, Bishop of Salzburg. Rome finally adopted that date in the ninth century.
Comment:
This feast first honored martyrs. Later, when Christians were free to worship according to their conscience, the Church acknowledged other paths to sanctity. In the early centuries the only criterion was popular acclaim, even when the bishop’s approval became the final step in placing a commemoration on the calendar. The first papal canonization occurred in 993; the lengthy process now required to prove extraordinary sanctity took form in the last 500 years. Today's feast honors the obscure as well as the famous - the saints each of us have known.
2 November
All Souls
The Church has encouraged prayer for the dead from the earliest times as an act of Christian charity. "If we had no care for the dead," Augustine noted, "we would not be in the habit of praying for them." Yet pre-Christian rites for the deceased retained such a strong hold on the superstitious imagination that a liturgical commemoration was not observed until the early Middle Ages, when monastic communities began to mark an annual day of prayer for the departed members. In the middle of the 11th century, St. Odilo, abbot of Cluny (France), decreed that all Cluniac monasteries offer special prayers and sing the Office for the Dead on November 2, the day after the feast of All Saints.
The custom spread from Cluny and was finally adopted throughout the Roman Church. The theological underpinning of the feast is the acknowledgment of human frailty. Since few people achieve perfection in this life but, rather, go to the grave still scarred with traces of sinfulness, some period of purification seems necessary before a soul comes face-to-face with God. The Council of Trent affirmed this purgatory state and insisted that the prayers of the living can speed the process of purification.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 962: “We believe in the communion of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always attentive to our prayers.”
Question and
Answer Catholic Catechism of Fr. M. Guzman, nos. 168-172:
168. What does the term “the communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed mean?
The term “the communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed primarily means union in holy things, above all, in the Eucharist. Secondarily, it also means the union of the faithful on earth, the blessed in heaven, and the souls in purgatory, with Christ as their head.
169. Through the communion of saints, what can the blessed in heaven do for the souls in purgatory and the faithful on earth?
Through the communion of saints, the blessed in heaven can help the souls in purgatory and the faithful on earth by interceding with God for them.
170. Should the faithful on earth, through the communion of saints, honor the blessed in heaven and ask them to intercede with God for them?
The faithful on earth, through the communion of saints, should honor the blessed in heaven and ask them to intercede with God for them, because they are worthy of honor, and as friends of God will help the faithful on earth.
171. Can the faithful on earth, through the communion of saints, help relieve the sufferings of the souls in purgatory?
The faithful on earth, through the communion of saints, can help relieve the sufferings of the souls in purgatory by prayer, fasting and other good works, by indulgences, and by having Masses offered for them.
172. Can the faithful on earth help one another?
The faithful on earth, as members of the mystical Body of Christ, can help one another by practicing supernatural charity and especially, by performing the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.
Once again, let you and I bring the above topics to our conversation with Jesus in the quiet moments of our prayer every day. Let us listen intently to what He tells us and do as He tells us to do. It is the surest way to be happy even in this life as in the next. Doing God’s will at all times is the best response of love and gratitude, you and I can foster and cultivate in ourselves every moment of our daily ordinary life.
I was taking dinner the other day and I found the food
cold and tasteless. I whispered “the
food is cold and without any taste at all”.
Then came to my ears: “In purgatory the food is always hot.”
I blurted out “Oh
no, I don’t want to go to purgatory, Jesus”.
“Well
then.”
“Okay,
I offer my dinner for the Holy souls in purgatory and for your glory, Jesus”.
Please continue praying for the book, “Give It One More
Year, Sir”. Pray that it reaches out to
all ages. At the moment, the outreach initiative is a priority. Please pray for both.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may
you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care;
‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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