Prayers and Faith

It is hard to understand the bombings today at the Boston Marathon.  We all have our own opinions, thoughts, and reflections.  Please join us to pray for the victims, the families, and those who planted the bombs.  This is not the same as being in our "thoughts."  Our world needs real and actual prayer!

I will try not to get preachy or insert my own opinion.  I hope this encourages you, at this time when our faith is tested:

Faith makes us taste in advance the light of the beatific vision, the goal of our journey here below....  Now, however, "we walk by faith, not by sight"; we perceive God as "in a mirror, dimly" and only "in part."  Even though enlightened by Him in Whom it believes, faith is often lived in darkness and can be put to the test.  The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith.  Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice, and death, seem to contradict the Good News; they can shake our faith and become a temptation against it.

It is then we must turn to the witness of faith: to Abraham, who "in hope... believed against hope"; to the Virgin Mary, who, in "her pilgrimage of faith," walked into the "night of faith" in sharing the darkness of her Son's suffering and death; and to so many others: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith." [Catechism of the Catholic Church #163-165]