Strong Passions

(Fulton Sheen - found here)

“Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals who have carried their sinning to extremes should not despair or say, ‘I am too great a sinner to change,’ or ‘God would not want me.’ God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gesture, but with a ‘passionless passion,’ a ‘wild tranquility’. A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, any more than someone on dry land can swim; but as soon as a person takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done that keep one from God; it is present persistence in that wrong. Someone who turns back to God, as the Magdalene and Paul, welcomes the discipline that will enable him to change his former tendencies. ... Mortifications of the right sort perfect our human nature; the gardener cuts the green shoots from the root of the bush, not to kill the rose, but to make it bloom more beautifully.”
~Fulton Sheen

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