Posts by Padre Pio Devotions

My dear friend, in the body I am at Nazareth but in spirit I have been at Bethlehem for the last month. As I write to you I feel as though I am with Mary and Joseph beside the crib. It is good to be there. Outside are the cold and the snow, images of…

In each of us, just beyond the noise of our outward life, there is some place of silence and darkness, an emptiness where, if we have courage enough, we are alone with ourselves. There in this place of silence, we know that God alone can fill our emptiness, he alone can content us, he alone…

The Christmas story reminds us once again that it was not man’s idea that the Son of God should be born in a stable. And so the first thing we learn from Jesus’ birth is that the Lord will not always be found where we expect to find him. We tend to look for him…

You must do like the shepherds when they stay in the fields during winter. Life is a very long winter. The shepherds make a fire, but from time to time they hurry off to pick up some more wood to keep it going. If only we knew, like the shepherds, how to keep up the…

Somehow I realized that songs, music, good feelings, beautiful liturgies, nice presents, big dinners, and many sweet words do not make Christmas. Christmas is saying ‘yes’ to something beyond all emotions and feelings. Christmas is saying ‘yes’ to a hope based on God’s initiative, which has nothing to do with what I think or feel.…

St. Paul had a great and broad vision; he saw God’s plan from its beginning to its fulfillment. In one of his resounding sentences he wrote:But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law. In the same vein, Paul assures us that Christ died…

The dry, weary earth of my heart cannot live without refreshing water. My longing is for the divine waters to flow gently over the parched earth of my life and bring healing and coolness. I thirst for the divine water that heals and cleanses and restores newness of life. . . .I think God wants…

In what we so often think of as a terribly jaded age, there is a deep hunger for something beyond: a hunger to be reminded that this life is only the beginning, that all of the pain and suffering will one day be washed away; a hunger for support in this life so that we…

Obsessed by the struggle for temporal existence, we forget that man is both soul and body, that peace is not something this world can give. . .We want Christ on our terms; Christ gives himself only on his own. He is purity, truth, humility, simplicity, love. In him is the wholeness of man, soul and…

Keep a constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Jesus. Worries carry responsibilities that belong to God, not to you. Worry does not enable us to escape evil; it makes us unfit to cope with it when it comes. – Corrie Ten Boom