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Showing posts with label perfection series VIII. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfection series VIII. Show all posts

Friday, 3 April 2015

Divine Mercy and Purgation

Today begins the greatest novena of all, to The Divine Mercy.

Please take time to say this beautiful prayer. One more penance for your Good Friday....

In all humility, I must admit I omitted this for years. How careless I was not thinking of all those who would have benefited from these prayers.

Here is the novena...print this out, if you do not have a copy.

http://www.shoj.org/docs/prayer/divine-novena/divine-mercy-novena-and-chaplet-brochure-2-per_page.pdf

I am in the passive purgative way. But, one can also enter into the active purgation, by choosing mortification and extra prayer. As I have noted in the perfection series, one cannot be useful to the Church without personal sanctity. Another state rather than humility only creates actions of egotism.

Here is St. Faustina on this.  "O my Jesus, I know that, in order to be useful to souls, one has to strive for the closest possible union with You, who are Eternal Love... I can be wholly useful to the Church by my personal sanctity, which throbs with life in the whole Church, for we all make up one organism in Jesus."

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

From Today's Office of Readings

I love readings on holiness, as these fall into my long theme of perfection on this blog. Today, the great Basil, notes that to be holy is not merely living the life of the virtues, but dying to self, to sin, to the world.

Again, baptism must be the most misunderstood sacrament today. Many Catholics no longer believe that an unbaptized person is any different than a baptized one. But, oh, yes. The difference is eternal.
Basil is speaking to adult converts, who are breaking away from their life of sin in baptism. The beginning of new life can happen to a newly baptized adult, child, or baby. Using the same metaphor of the race as St. Paul, St. Basil remarks that once we start the race to holiness after baptism, we must continue until we reach the finish line.

Apparently, in this race track of Basil's acquaintance, the runners had to stop at one point, turn around and run back to finish the race. This reverse of direction provides a clear symbol of one turning away from all sin and living in the new life of grace.

The symbol of the water is not only the real, efficacious cleansing of the baptized person from Original Sin, but the death to that sin and those inclinations of sin. The person is on the road to perfection. Virtues become part of the soul and intellect.

In baptism, we repeat the Death and Resurrection of Christ, Whose sacrifice on the Cross and the winning of the battle with Evil over sin and death, brings life.

Indeed, we are, at that moment of baptism, washed whiter than snow.




By one death and resurrection the world was saved from the book On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop
When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Saviour made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way of life, he suffered, died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. He did this so that we could be saved by imitation of him, and recover our original status as sons of God by adoption.
  To attain holiness, then, we must not only pattern our lives on Christ’s by being gentle, humble and patient, we must also imitate him in his death. Taking Christ for his model, Paul said that he wanted to become like him in his death in the hope that he too would be raised from death to life.
  We imitate Christ’s death by being buried with him in baptism. If we ask what this kind of burial means and what benefit we may hope to derive from it, it means first of all making a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end. When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.
  Our descent into hell takes place when we imitate the burial of Christ by our baptism. The bodies of the baptized are in a sense buried in the water as a symbol of their renunciation of the sins of their unregenerate nature. As the Apostle says: The circumcision you have undergone is not an operation performed by human hands, but the complete stripping away of your unregenerate nature. This is the circumcision that Christ gave us, and it is accomplished by our burial with him in baptism. Baptism cleanses the soul from the pollution of worldly thoughts and inclinations: You will wash me, says the psalmist, and I shall be whiter than snow. We receive this saving baptism only once because there was only one death and one resurrection for the salvation of the world, and baptism is its symbol.

Thursday, 26 February 2015

Wow! Heresy in The Back of Church

Several weeks ago, I picked up three free booklets in the back of a church I was visiting. All three have out and out heresy and other errors in them. One is published by a diocese, one by an religious order, and one by a famous Catholic press.

Do not use these meditation books for Lent. They are corrupted by Modernist heresies and errors of judgement..

Lay people, please give up secondary texts and go straight to the Divine Office, for the sake of your souls. Blessed Paul VI told us to use the Breviary. Do it!

Some of the errors are so outrageous, they indicate a really worldly, and not God-given approach to Scripture. Some of the writings show a lack of knowledge of God and His saints.

A list of some errors:

Christ did not have the love of God but had to learn this. False. He is the Perfect Man, and God, never imperfect. This idea reflects the heresy of Arianism.

Christ "healed" Pilate's relationship with Herod. False, Pilate used Christ to make political points only.

Dorothy Day is an example of a saint. No, she was a Marxist, sadly,believing in what she called "Christian communism" which is a fallacy. She was confused as to distributism.

The confusion, maybe purposeful, of liberation theology (condemned by the Church) and the theology of liberation.

Huge emphasis on me, me, me, me and my gifts. This is all false theology, as all  spiritual gifts come through the sacraments, and from God, not nature. Natural gifts do not gain us heaven.

Outright denial of Christ's call to all of us for perfection and the misquoting of Christ....He did not say, "Be perfect, as I am", but "Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." And, perfection is demanded of all of us.

Perfection is NOT maturity or wholeness. This is a modern, psychological interpretation which is wrong. Maturity has to do with natural growth, NOT supernatural perfection.

The denial that there is a call to perfection, to holiness, is a sign of the weakening Church and the lack of holiness among the priests. Most of the homilies and sermons on holiness I have heard in the last five years have been at St. Kevin's Harrington Street, in Dublin, where there are at least three priests who understand the road to perfection, because they have done or are walking on this road. What a difference of perspective!

Wholeness is not a measure of sanctity and never has been. This term is "New Age" and has nothing to do with perfection.....see my over 700 posts on perfection and the Doctors of the Church series I have done on perfection.

Following the letter of the law is "meaningless" wrote one priest. Absolutely not...we are formed in obedience and following the law is the first step to holiness.

References to tv shows. WHY? To be trendy and encourage modern entertainment show a lack of holiness on the part of the priest. Why is he watching tv anyway? He should be using the time for contemplative prayer.

Stop calling Mary a teenager! That word did not exist until the 20th century as there was no such category in Western or Eastern society. Mary was a child but by adolescence was being trained to be married and do all the chores and duties of a married person. To call Mary a teen is ridiculously anti-historical and implies all the problems and errors of the modern teen.

Misunderstandings of the time and people in the Bible--to many to mention any.

And so on,,,,

All these books which are on "gifting" are false and from the Protestant denominations.

All our gifts come in Confirmation. Any natural talents must be perfected in the Dark Night when egotism is destroyed before they can be used and bear fruit. To concentrate on the self is to deny the author of all gifts, God.

Too much me will not get anyone to heaven...Do not rely on other people's interpretations, but learn to read Scripture yourself through the guidance of the Church-St. Augustine, and the other saintly Doctors of the Church are better than these so-called modern expert priests.






Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Raissa's Journal Perfection Series VIII Part XXXX

This will be the last posting on Raissa'a Journal, at least for a while. I shall move on to another book soon.

I want to merely highlight three things in this post and move on.

Several selections from her book follow. She addressed someone who hated the idea of God, who actually hated her and who hated Catholics. She engaged elegantly in the arguments necessary to aid conversion, but her telling description of this man's state of mind reveals the mindset of many today of those who want to turn over all the goodness of Western Civilization.

In a letter, she writes, "Do you really find in the paganism that precede those twenty centuries (of Christianity), the true direction of life which the blood of Christians has turned aside from its course? I that the direction in which you want to go? Towards subjugation to the gods of the city, towards cruelty in the service of luxury, towards the slavery which alone would sustain such a civilisation? No, doubtless. It would not be worth the trouble of wanting to change everything; our capitalist and atheist society, itself the result of the so-called Renaissance, has almost rediscovered the tradition..."

Raissa notes that God cannot be driven out of societies which want justice and mercy. But, for those societies which do not want justice or mercy, loyalty or love, God can be driven out to a certain extent.

But, as she states, "It is difficult to drive God our altogether. Invariably he returns humbly disguised under one name or another; and under the name we have chosen he makes himself loved without our knowledge."

Such are the saints, who remind us of God in the world through holiness and a type of purity given to them. This leads to another point on the command of love by Love, who is God.

Let me share her insights here: "Passivity...in the sense of the first and principal action of the Holy Spirit in the mystical life, is ontologically the essential characteristic. Psychologically, this passivity, passio divinorum, is expressed not only by the ligature and (apparent)death of our natural faculties, but also, in certain cases, by the heightening of them..."

"In contemplation, this passivity manifests itself above all by ligature, powerlessness, annihilation, because our faculties of knowing are utterly disproportionate to the object of contemplation, which is God in Himself. Here the intellect must recognise its incapcity, and submit to love which, through the infusion of divine Wisdom, connaturalises the soul with God and makes it know him with an obscure and ineffable certainty.

By the other Gifts, whose object is in some way more particularised, the Holy Spirit, on the contrary, heightens our faculties and proportions them to arduous, heroic, saintly acts, by setting them to work himself, by enlightening them and strengthening them."

In the passivity of the Dark Night, this passivity leads to the obscurity, the darkness of the purifying Night.

Again, Raissa on this point, "....the purifying Night, infinitely painful, which ceases when the soul has attained the degree of purity and holiness willed by God....St. John of the Cross says: 'the fire begins by blackening the wood; it does not set it aflame until it has dried it out.' Therefore one has to pass through nights, through all the anguishes and terrors of the night, see oneself engulfed in darkness and be dried up with suffering, before the soul is truly set on fire, kindled into flame that does not consume like natural fire, the vivifying flame of eternal life."

Lastly, "God is perceived as Love because he attracts and unites, makes one suffer, or gives one joy, reveals himself to the soul as its end, its repose, its beatitude."

Raissa, like myself and another friend of mine, makes the connection between Love of God, God's Love and Romantic Love. One is allowed to suffer in Romantic Love. Raissa writes "The demands of Christ as regards his disciples are absolutely inhuman; they are divine. There is not doubt about it, he who wishes to be Christ's disciple--must hate his own life. The image of Jesus Crucified is for the disciple.

...it is not the sinner, the "worldly" one, who has the greatest fear of God---rather it is those who, having been chosen as disciples, know that they are, and will be, more severely treated. From these, all in demanded."

In my humble opinion, the remnant will be and is made up of the disciples, only. for the times will be so difficult that only those who give all to God, who seek His Love, will be able to survive and not be confused.

In a post, soon, I shall described some of the remnant people's I have met, who are suffering already and becoming saints in the process.

Monday, 12 January 2015

Reposts involving meditations on death, sin, the universe

09 Jul 2012
The Four Last Things form a topic which has been the subject preached from the pulpits of the world, that is, until recent times. Now, it is both politically incorrect and indecent, apparently, to speak of Death, Judgment, Hell and ...
23 Oct 2014
We are, as Catholic, to think about the Four Last Things. These are, as some of you know, Death, the Last Judgment, Hell and Heaven. These things are rarely spoken of from the pulpits of either America or Europe, to the ...
09 Jul 2012
Catholics seem to be doing a run around the goal by not talking about the four last things nor teaching their children that we must prepare for our particular judgment. Many Catholics do not know what the particular judgement ...
27 Oct 2014
Again, synchronicity considering I just wrote about the Four Last Things. He stressed that we should consider death daily. He shared his e-mail with me and I shall write to him. God makes new doughnuts every day. Yesterday ...
18 Feb 2012
... 1595; St-Omer, 1610; London, 1867; his "Fourfold Meditations of Four Last Things" (once attributed to Southwell ), London, 1895; his "Verses on the Passion", by the Cath. Record Soc., VI, 29. from the Catholic Encyclopedia ...
01 Jul 2014
One cannot "rage" into the night. As much as I love the poetry of Dylan Thomas, I disagree with his famous poem. He missed the point, which is that we must prepare AT ALL TIMES to die. Thinking on the Four Last Things is ...
15 Jul 2014
The priest's fault, according to the diocesan school office, would be that he had spoken to his young students about The Four Last Things, among which he mentioned hell and purgatory; “lessons not suitable for children at ...
28 Jul 2014
If one does not face death, one will pretend one is immortal. So many young people think they are immortal. This idea is dangerous. It is time for priests to begin to preach about death and the four last things again. We all need ...
13 Jun 2014
Noise blocks out thoughts of sin, of the four last things. Noise covers up the need for listening to God. Cardinal Manning writes this in his chapter on “The Gift of Counsel”: “…the characteristic mark of these latter days; I mean ...
09 Jun 2012
He mentioned the emphasis on the Four Last Things, which has been lost. His emphasis on the spirituality of the TLM and Trent was great and a much needed conversation. This is a huge subject which I hope he continues on ...
12 Dec 2012
My generation was raised with manners, but we never used this word "tact"to criticize strong feelings regarding heaven, hell, or the four last things. Some Millenials do not want to hear the Truth unless is comes in a nice ...
31 Jul 2013
... and the Jesuits . According to Randy Engels and Steven Brady a homosexual Priest hates speaking and even thinking of the four last things which answered a lot of my questions regarding contemporary preaching.
19 Jun 2013
... as we were working in an very affluent area, as well as with others not so affluent, and with youth who were narcissistically caught us in themselves and needed some good old fashioned awareness of the four last things.
28 Oct 2014
No teaching about cohabitation,contraception,or any teaching on the four last things;or actual and sanctifying grace;or redemption,.Instead we are fed a diet of missy messy pottage of love-love-lone.My mind aches and i pray ...
09 Jul 2012
Four, the goal is self-realization, not god of God, really. Five, the early Christians threw out this nutsy stuff as part of the occultic thinking of both the West and East, realizing that myth, paganism and magic would not save one, ...
09 Jul 2012
The last episode, which happened in January, was covered by very few news agencies. No one is reporting these abuses but about six sites which I found, and all are Christian based. Why? And, why are not the feminists in ...
10 Dec 2013
http://supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-four-last-things.html · http://supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-fear-of-death-among-catholics.html and more from St. Alphonsus.... 1.
18 Sep 2013
It is so sad, as none of these things are true and we do not even need to follow private revelations anyway. So why do .... As you know, there are more posts on this in the last three or four days, so check those out. God is a ...
24 Aug 2014
(Mt. 24:4–31). Thus, these things that are now happening to Christians are not new or sudden; since the good and righteous, and those who are devoted to God in the law of innocence and the fear of true religion, advance always through afflictions, wrongs, the severe and manifold penalties of troubles, and in the hardship of a narrow path. Thus, at the very beginning of the world, ..... We are in the beginning of the last stage. But, many Catholics think that persecution ...

04 Sep 2014
Thursday, 4 September 2014 ... One of my dear friends, in her early forties, and an excellent cook, told me last March that people in her generation do not know how to cook. She is a Gen Xer. Their moms did not teach them how to cook, sew, can, clean, ... How many kids have never done anything like fix steps, paint walls, plan and take care of an entire garden, learn easy plumbing jobs for maintenance, make things, bake. Two generations are lost. I am not sure they can be found.
28 Aug 2013
As Montessori writes, the child of four knows the difference between the water in the holy water stoup and that of the sink where he washes his hands. Here are her words, ... They has machines for making hosts, all without electricity, and all of these things wheat and hosts were part of the Bishop's procession on Corpus Christi. The grapes were ... Also, the reference to the Last Supper with little characters of Jesus and the Twelve can be part of this. If little peasant ...
01 Feb 2013
I strongly disagreed with Bl. John Paul II's apologies concerning some things in our Catholic past, as these merely added to the vilification and did not end such weak thinking. If one grew up as I did in the Lutheran Midwest, ...

Sunday, 11 January 2015

Raissa's Journal Perfection Series VIII Part XXXlX


Raissa could be called a suffering servant. It is obvious that she suffered for Jacques and for her own nation and her people.

She writes this on suffering-"Every acceptance of suffering (if it is proceeds, not from a brute passivity or from some philosophical pride, but from humility and courtesy) is alreay boun to charity, beholden to divine grace. The saints do more than accept suffering--they ask it of God for the love of God and the salvation of souls."

Those saints who unite themselves with Christ's Sacred Heart allow God to complete the suffering of Christ in their lives.

Raissas states this on perfection. "To be capable of receiving much from God, that is the whole of perfection."

This "much" includes suffering.


Raissa's Journal Perfection Series VIII Part XXXVIII


Years ago, I wrote a chapter in a dissertation on this subject of the connection between contemplation and the artistic intuition which leads to the creation of poetry.

Jacques Maritain has a note on this subject from Raissa's insights on the subject.

Here are some bullet points.

  • “...the end of contemplation is loving union with God in the silence bereft of concepts and words, whereas the end of poetic intuition is the work produced”
  • “but what is the end of poetic intuition can be superabundance (and normal superabundance, overflowing from the possession of the end or from the movement towards it) for contemplation.”

All people are called to contemplation in different ways, but this still is the normal way, outside of martyrdom to perfect union with Christ.

These times of crises are the times to ask God for the graces of contemplation and keen discernment.


Friday, 19 December 2014

Raissa's Journal Footnote Perfection Series VIII Part XXXI

Raissa writes something which pagans simply do not understand. I remember years ago at Notre Dame, one of my professors saying that the Catholic Church was perverse because of the teaching of celibacy and chastity, which encouraged suffering and self-denial.

Yes, it does. Our God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, died on a cross. He showed us the way to self-denial and redemptive suffering. He call us to love without return, to sacrificial love.

Raissa writes something which reminds me of St. Bernadette's comment that although she suffered terribly from tuberculous of the bone, the waters of Lourdes were not for her.

Raissa notes that she knows that God will not give her any happiness in this world. She was not created to be happy on earth, but to suffer. She writes that she will never have but moments of joy with God alone, and not human happiness, not natural happiness except in rare moments.

Some people may find this idea shocking, that God would, from the beginning of a person's life, call them to the via negativa, denying that person any human or Godly consolation while on earth.

The person who is called to live in suffering has a vocation which now is popularly called being a "victim soul". Raissa knew that she was a victim soul but expresses it in different words in her diary.

One cannot decide to be a victim soul, one just is. God decides that a person will live in a darkness and a loneliness. One is called to a complete detachment of normal human joys. One cannot expect human love.

That Raissa was Jewish, and that the Jews gave us the beginning of the Revelation of God, also allows her to understand the mystery of the unknown God, the God of the Burning Bush, the God Who wrestled with Jacob in the night, the God Who disappeared from Jewish history directly for several hundred years before Christ, when prophecy dried up and the world awaited the Messiah, the Revelation of God,  the via negativa was mixed with the via affirmativa. 

One who is centered on Christ may be called to times of both ways. But, one way usually is dominant. Some people are asked to be rooted in the joy of the Incarnation. Some have to rest in the Passion of Christ.

Years ago, I read The Philokalia, which includes some of the writings of Maximus the Confessor, a proponent of the via negativa. What we do not know about God is just as important as what we do know, especially when one is in the Dark Night of the Spirit. God wants to strip us of false images of Him. 

That God is hidden in the darkness of that spiritual time cannot be denied. He is and He is not present. One knows He is present, one senses the Presence of God by faith. This causes a suffering of denial even of desire, which is very hard, but not impossible.

Raissa needed Jacques' love although they were separated on a regular basis because of his work. She still had that basis, but God called her to Himself as the Bridegroom and her suffering was both purgative and redemptive. She did not use the term "victim soul" but she knew she was suffering for Jacques, who was constantly attacked by the liberal Catholics and secular philosophers, and for others.

The couple brought many people into the Church.

To be in the Presence of God which is also an Absence is a mystery which causes the person to live in faith, hope and love, in that order. It is the mystic way and the way of the contemplative.

I shall return to her Journal in a few days. I am taking a break from it for a day or two to read some other books and to ponder on these hard words, Here is Raissa in her own words. 

"Human felicity has not place in my destiny. I know very definitely that god will never allow me to belong to myself and to seek my own happiness. He has never allowed it. I belong to Him, and through Him and with Him to those whom He wishes. It is He who chooses any intimates for me. In the midst of all my sufferings, God has given me a very clear view of my destiny. I have a destiny, and that, in itself, is marvellous. For a destiny make the unity, the usefulness and beauty of life. And my destiny is not to belong to myself. God has granted Jacques and me the same destiny and, as a viaticum, a unique and marvellous mutual affection."

I wish God had given me such a companion in destiny, but it has not been so. She admitted later in life that for her to be celibate and without Jacques was much harder on her than him. Such was her intense love for him, but God did not allow her that consolation. That was all part of their mission in the world. 

I also wish that God would make it clear to many of us the destiny of our lives. In these days of chaos, so much like the times of the Maritains, we need direction to keep us focused. But, not knowing is also humbling and part of the suffering.

to be continued..


Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Perfection Series VIII Part XXX Section Two Why The Desert


The last post was a list of previous desert posts as a warm up, no pun intended, for what Raissa writes on November 24, 1934.

"Terrible ordeal in silent prayer. Felt all the bitterness of death. God asks of me more than my life; to accept living death, existence in a barren desert. That is giving more than one's soul....."

Then, on the next day, she writes this, "In some manner, I am having personal experience of that great mystery St. Paul speaks of, making up what is lacking in the Passion of Christ. Being the Passion of God, it is forever gathered up into the eternal. What is lacking is a development in time....Those who allow themselves to become his to the point of being perfectly assimilated to him, accomplish, throughout the whole length of time, what is lacking in his Passion. Those who consent to become flesh of his flesh. Terrible marriage, in which love is not only strong as death but begins by being a death, and a thousand deaths....(this gift) involves a manner of redeeming the world, and of suffering, which is accessible only to sinners. By renouncing the good things of this world, which in certain cases more numerous than one might think, sin would have procured us--by giving to God our human and temporal happiness, we give him proportionality as much as he gives us, because we him our all, the widow's mite in the Gospel."

Raissa is describing the mystical marriage. She refers to Angela of Foligno, as I did last summer.

Why the desert? So God can take the beloved away from all people and reveal Him in the solitude as the Bridegroom.

There are more than what are listed below. Here are the links.

Etheldredasplace: Attributes: Continuation Using StAngela
17 Jun 2014
Earlier this year, I wrote a bit on the Attributes of God. As I am finishing up The Book of Divine Consolation Of The Blessed Angela of Foligno (now saint), I can return to this theme, using some of her great insights given to her ...

11 Jun 2014
Continuing with Angela of Foligno, one sees the progression of her road to holiness. This saint admits that she had lived a loose life. She is sharing insights concerning the siren call of the world as one who escaped, through ...
11 Jun 2014
Those who see the value of poverty, notes Angela of Foligno, freely give up things and status. The nuns and monks who give up owing their own personal things, give up any chance of being seen as worthwhile in the world.
13 Jun 2014
Perfection Series II: St. Angela Part Eight. Posted by Supertradmum. St. Angela of Foligno writes of the third level of the poverty of Christ. This is the poverty in which Christ chose to become impotent in the world, setting aside ...

22 Jun 2014
Having finally finished the book of St. Angela, I can state absolutely that her language and experiences are quite similar, if not exact, to those of Julian of Norwich. Julian's statement that God is closer to us than our own souls is ...
17 Jun 2014
Earlier this year, I wrote a bit on the Attributes of God. As I am finishing up The Book of Divine Consolation Of The Blessed Angela of Foligno (now saint), I can return to this theme, using some of her great insights given to her ...

11 Jun 2014
St. Angela of Foligno. Posted by Supertradmum. Perfection Series II: Angela of Foligno. The Book of Divine Consolation of The Blessed Angela of Foligno provides another help for those seeking perfection. The perfection ...
14 Jun 2014
Interesting that St. Angela Foligno writes something which came to me years ago-that God the Father suffered with Christ on the Cross, and that part of Christ's sufferings were those inflicted by ungrateful children on the Father ...
12 Jun 2014
St. Angela writes that Christ's entire life was one of penance. This seems obvious after one points this out. God on earth must have suffered constantly. I was thinking last night, as I was suffering intensely, of the great Desert ...
19 Jun 2014
That God is Good seemed to be the attribute which encompassed the entire spectrum of St. Angela's experience of God's relationship to the world. Angela's words remind me, as I have noted before, those of Julian of Norwich.

Perfection Series VIII Part XXX Section One Why The Desert

11 Dec 2013
This means that God calls us into the desert, and a desert has few colors, few delights. St. John writes this: IT now remains to be said that, although this happy night brings darkness to the spirit, it does so only to give it light in ...
17 Feb 2013
Noting that it is for this reason that the Church traditionally proclaims the Gospel narrative of Christ's temptation in the desert on the first Sunday of Lent, Pope Benedict said, “The tempter is subtle: he does not push us directly ...
02 Jul 2014
When Moses had to flee from Egypt , into Sinai, he was not seeking God. He was being drawn to God by God. God was calling him to purgation and perfection. Purgation came in the long weeks in the desert, before he came ...

03 Nov 2013
The name El was the title of the desert god of many of the ancient religions. El was also the god of the storms. However, the One, True God took the name and made it His Own, the God of all Creation, the Father of all Mankind, ...
19 Feb 2013
The desert is hard. It is very hot in the day and very cold at night. Sand gets into one's skin, eyes, hair. It is full of dangerous animals. Water is scarce. One has to rely on God totally in the desert. He is our Guide, as we cannot ...
07 Jan 2014
The desert proved to be colder than Antonio anticipated. He had a day, a night and a morning to meet his priest, whose letter was one of the four in his pocket. Daniel Morales had written to the Nuncio of the terrible deaths of ...

02 Aug 2013
He says, then, thus: 'In the desert land, waterless, dry and pathless, I appeared before Thee, that I might see Thy virtue and Thy glory.'90 It is a wondrous thing that David should say here that the means and the preparation for ...
11 Feb 2014
St. John the Baptist went into the desert. So did Christ and St. Paul. Our homes can be "desert homes". Create a place where holiness and perfection can take root and grow. Without this, parents are cooperating with God to ...
11 Oct 2014
14 And they coveted their desire in the desert: and they tempted God in the place without water. 15 And he gave them their request: and sent fulness into their souls. 16 And they provoked Moses in the camp, Aaron the holy ...
30 May 2013
God is calling the soul to Himself and takes her out into the desert in order for her to see Him as He is and to love Him for Himself and not for what He can do for her. This is real free love, the love with is not attached to anything ...

19 Dec 2013
I want you to fly to a desert like S. Mary of Egypt, S. Paul, S. Anthony, Arsenius, or the other hermits, but it is well for you to retire sometimes within your own chamber or garden, or wheresoever you can best recollect your mind, ...
12 Dec 2013
18 I will open rivers in the high bills, and fountains in the midst of the plains: I will turn the desert into pools of waters, and the impassable land into streams of waters. 19 I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, and the thorn, and ...
12 Feb 2013
On some occasions we read that the herald was God, for example, when with a living voice from heaven he gave the law of justice to a whole people in the desert. On other occasions, the herald was an angel of the Lord, ...
21 Sep 2014
[35] So again His Nativity in a lonely stable might find a foreshadowing in the owl of the desert, bemoaning and lamenting: and in His Ascension He was like the sparrow rising high above the dwellings of men. Thus in each of ...

20 Nov 2013
These types of reaction spreads like a cancer and results in murmuring, the great sin of the Israelites in the desert. Complaining creates a miasma of unfaithfulness and turns people to evil by doubting God's Divine Providence.
08 May 2014
26 Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying: Arise, go towards the south, to the way that goeth down from Jerusalem into Gaza: this is desert. 27 And rising up, he went. And behold a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch, ...
22 May 2014
They were walking in the rocky semi-desert land which lay behind Michael's new farm near Enna. He planned to turn it into a holiday farmhouse, but live there part of the year. The two were making plans when Christine found ...

01 May 2014
This is Christ, who hungered in the desert and was tempted but did not give in and was just. 7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Christ was merciful on the Cross, forgiving all, so that we can be merciful.
09 Sep 2014
St. Zosimas met her and gave her Communion on the day she died, after she spent fifty years or so in the desert making reparation for her early life of serious sin. A lion helped St. Zosimas bury her body. She is a saint who ...
20 Oct 2014
And they are being taxed with the infidel tax. “The only pseudo-juridical instance in the desert is the Arab tribes' court that has levied a tax of 150,000 Egyptian pounds (about 21,000 USD) on the monks,”. Email ThisBlogThis!
07 Apr 2013
But, if I had to choose one book dealing with classical education to take to a desert island, it would be the Doctor of the Church St. Isidore of Seville's Etymologie. This work is a compilation of knowledge and definitions from the ...
30 Sep 2013
It must have been a very hot day in the desert. Jerome's supposed cardinal's robe is off his body and his hat on the wall. He was not a cardinal, nor would this dress been the norm in his day. However, the point is that Jerome ...
05 Oct 2014
26 If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. 27 For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the ...

22 Jan 2013
Moses found God in the desert. God came to him unexpectedly. So, too, with us. 20 posts yesterday, and 22 today, plus the rest of the weekend is full as well. Take time to read these. We do not have much time to have this ...
12 Jun 2014
St. Angela writes that Christ's entire life was one of penance. This seems obvious after one points this out. God on earth must have suffered constantly. I was thinking last night, as I was suffering intensely, of the great Desert ...
18 Nov 2014
7 Wherefore, as the Holy Ghost saith: To day if you shall hear his voice,. 8 Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation; in the day of temptation in the desert,. Since 2007, I have written about the coming persecution of real ...