We're getting ready for our annual family beach trip to our beloved Dauphin Island, Alabama. This tradition stretches back to my own childhood, so we have extensive experience that I'll be sharing all next week. Come back then for my comprehensive guide to the island, along with my pitch for why this sweet, humble beach is the best beach for family time and memory-making.
Today, let's prepare to make any place a pilgrimage! Our faith—and life itself—cannot be separated from water. In the beginning, God created the oceans to bring forth life. He cleansed the broken world in the Great Flood. He led the His people to freedom and new life through the Red Sea. Later, John baptized Jesus in the River Jordan. To show His divinity and His tender love, Jesus walked upon the storming seas. Water brings us to new life as God's sons and daughters in Baptism. Water restores, cleanses, refreshes us as we sail toward eternity. Perhaps the beach, then, is the most natural pilgrimage of all.
All of my nothingness is drowned in the sea of your mercy.
+St Faustina Kowalska
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
+St Teresa of Calcutta
The Divine Heart is an ocean full of all good things, wherein poor souls can cast all their needs; it is an ocean full of joy to drown all our sadness, an ocean of humility to drown our folly, an ocean of mercy to those in distress, an ocean of love in which to submerge our poverty.
+St Marguerite-Marie Alacoque
You rule the raging sea; you still its swelling waves.
+Psalm 89:9
In her voyage across the ocean of this world, the Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life’s different stresses. Our duty is not to abandon ship, but to keep her on course.
+St Boniface
As mariners are guided to port by the shining of a star, so Christians attain to glory by Mary.
+St Thomas Aquinas
The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!”
+Matthew 8:27
He who communicates himself [receives the Eucharist] loses himself in God like a drop of water in the ocean. They can no more be separated.
+St Jean Vianney
The soul is in God and God is in the soul. God is closer to us than water is to a fish.
+St Catherine of Siena
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, you shall not be swept away.
+Isaiah 43:2
God the Father gathered all the waters together and called them the seas. He gathered all His grace together and called it Mary.
+St Louis de Montfort
The Passion of Jesus is a sea of sorrows, but also an ocean of love. Ask the Lord to teach you to fish in this ocean. Dive into its depths. No matter how deep you go, you will never reach the bottom.
+St Paul of the Cross
I asked myself: Who could be the master of these beautiful things?
+St Josephine Bakhita
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
+St Augustine
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