My wife Greta always sent our kids out of the house with a call to “be Holy.” She felt that if they focused on that, then everything else would work out. She also had a program she used around the virtues with the kids and each year, she would dedicate a month to one virtue and the saints that best gave truth to that virtue in life. She would spend time after our rosary in the evening talking about the virtue and the saint and asking each child what they had done that day to try to develop that virtue as a habit in their lives. She sent this program years ago to several Catholic schools and also to religious orders for them to use as they saw fit in teaching kids in the schools or other uses.

I found myself working on a virtue today and heard her voice chiding me for stretching things a little bit. “There are two roads to eternity and one leads to heaven.” It is where we get the saying being on the ‘stright’ and ‘narrow.’ The path to heaven is straight no matter how often we want to insert turns and it is definetly narrow. The habits required are the virtues and each of them is hard to develop and easy to break. The other road is wide and well travelled and it works very well with habits that are easy to develop and hard to break. It makes an examination of a ‘well formed’ conscience on a very frequent basis essential. God how I miss that woman.