Burn Baby Burn!

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it. — Mother Teresa

Simple logic, add oil to keep the flame. Oil is the food that feeds the fire. Same basic principle for an electric light, we must have electrical current for a light bulb to glow. The electricity is the fuel that feeds the bulb.

So why am I spend time on such simple logic, we all understand this concept be it an oil lamp or even a human, we need food for our body’s to burn, to give us the energy we need to live. No big discovery there. But I would venture to guess that most people would not consider themselves an oil lamp. But that  is exactly what Mother Teresa was doing, she was calling each of us an oil lamp.

Each of us is a flame that burns in the darkness of the world. Yet a lot of us have the the oil run dry in our lamps, we have not provided the fuel it needs to keep burning. We have chosen to peruse other wants over our needs. We have chosen to make Sunday football our Holy Mass, we have chosen to study porn over our need to study Sacred Scripture. We have allowed the secular world to invade the sacred, to rape it and remove all aspects of what makes it sacred. We have deluded the Holy Oils that fills our lamps with the polluted waters of modernisms. We have allowed our faith to become a “If I have time” faith. A faith that has taken the back seat to the world.

We are called by the Church to be of this world, not to live in seclusion but to live in the world. And I whole hearty agree. We are to engage life, to participate in life and this world. We are to take our Catholic faith out in to the world to let our lamp light shine. Yet we fail to refill this lamp with new oil. We allow the world to overshadow our light.

How do we fill our lamp, were do we get this oil?

Catholics are afforded many opportunities to fill there lamps. We have:

• Daily Mass
• Sunday Mass
• Bible Study
• Catholic Radio
• Free or almost free Catholic Talks on CD’s
• Catholic Blogs
• Catholic Podcasts
• Catholic Web Sites
• Catholic Magazines
• Catholic Newspapers
• Classes at your local Catholic college or Seminary
• Catholic Seminars
• Catholic Books

The list is endless and the opportunities to fill your lamp with new oil is abundant. As Mother Teresa stated, “To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.” To keep your faith burning you must keep feeding it…

 

Paul