Ponder: "we live as hedonists and die like Platonists"

"No longer seeing death, our focus is now ever more on the body.  We exercise and look after our body more than any previous generation, and we might do so under a veneer of Christian theology, arguing that ours is an 'incarnational faith' in which the body is the temple of the Spirit.  But then at death, when the coils of the mortal flesh are discarded, we think of the 'person' as liberated from the limitations of the body.  Today we live as hedonists and die as Platonists!
In a very real sense, we no longer see death today.  We don't live with it as an ever-present reality as has every generation of human beings before us.  To put it most extremely: today we must be killed in order to die.  What we call 'life' is capable of being sustained indefinitely by machines in an ICU; they must be switched off for the patient to die.  One cannot help but recall the warning in the final book of Scripture: 'And in those days, they will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die and death will fly away from them.'"
John Behr, The Joy of Life

The Holy Madness of Giving

Zita of Lucca was a thirteenth-century house servant. Patient and responsible, she was given to meditation and heard Mass daily. But she was known and loved most of all for her generosity. Whatever Zita had, she gave away to the poor.

One cold morning, compelled by her master to wear his cloak on her journey to church, she met a beggar and wrapped the cloak around him without a moment’s hesitation. Returning home without it, she was roundly scolded. Later that day, a mysterious stranger appeared at the door, the master’s cloak in hand. Another time, called away from the kitchen while baking bread to attend to a sick woman, her fellow servants were amazed to discover a company of angels tending the ovens.

The lives of the saints abound with stories like these. Saint Brigid gave her father’s prized sword to a leper, and, after being exiled to a work in a dairy in response, she slipped dozens of hampers of butter out the side door. Elizabeth of Hungary was chased from her castle for pawning her jewels to build a hospital during a plague, while Robert Bellarmine scandalized Renaissance Rome by ripping the tapestries from his walls to have them cut up for clothing for the poor. The walls, he assured his fellow clerics, wouldn’t catch cold. Even Martin Luther, for all his hostility to works of supererogation, had to insist that his wife Katie keep the key to the family strongbox. Otherwise, he would be sure to give it all away.