Friday, 26 April 2013

Record Post Day

15 and I am surprised.

I was on a train most of the day!


Thanks to wikimedia...

I shall blog until Wednesday

I am going to miss you good readers so much. The support I have received from my readers has been overwhelmingly kind and generous in spirit and in physical help.

Thank you all. I shall blog until Wednesday, May first.

If I do not "make it" in this second venture in the convent, I shall be back. However, let us all pray that in all things, God's Perfect Will be done

Supert.


False Idea from The Warning

 This time, He will not come as man in the flesh. Found here.

OOPs our friends at the Warning have contradicted Catholic Teaching yet again.

When Christ returns, He, of course, will come as the Incarnate God.

Thoughts on Black and White

Well, an update…I have given away most of my colored clothes and shoes which are not black, and am moving into a black and white stage. I have already passed on all my books, except the few I need for the convent (NO daily and Sunday missals, Rule of St Benedict, diaries and notebooks), and am finishing collecting things on the list from Mother General.

Going into a black and white stage is really dying to self. That is the entire point of a habit. It is not only a “sign of contradiction in the world” but a denial of self-expression.

I did not think this would be so hard, as I am not particularly attached to my clothes, but the reality of giving away things and living by a list complied by someone else is the beginning of purgation.

The commentators on the Rule of Benedict write that it is sometimes the small things which cause the most anxiety at first. One’s favourite pen, or one’s special tea cup or coffee mug; one’s hair-dryer or one’s bubble bath are not BIG things, but part of the rhythm of life about which one surrounds one’s self for comfort and continuity.

There will be a new continuity, which I have partially experienced, of the daily hours and daily schedule organized for centuries in Benedictine convents and monasteries throughout the world.

Prayer, work, study, more work, more prayer. The denial of free time or coffee breaks again is part of the denial of self in a small way. One cannot stop and have a cuppa when one feels like it. One cannot sit down in choir, but kneels or stands.

The denial of self happens in the world as well, such as when one faces financial ruin, or cancer, or the death of loved ones.

One cannot escape, nor should one run from suffering. Sometimes God paints us into a corner, so that we cannot run away unless we want paint all over our shoes and leave a messy, ruined floor behind.

The denial of color allows God to paint the empty canvas of the soul. Memory, understand and will become purified over time. The advantage of the monastery is that this process speeds up the three-fold movement towards perfection, if one cooperates.

Cooperation involve many things: obedience, conformity, denial of singularities and eccentricities (which are caused by pride and encourage pride), setting aside one’s own ideas and even ways of working.

Last year, I had to learn how to clean without cleaning supplies, as the monastery in Cove only uses water on the floors and rarely uses sprays. The nuns live as if the 20th and 21st century had never occurred.

The value of all this self-denial must be rooted in the growing awareness of God’s Love.

One can set aside one’s own ideas and habits and even expertise for one reason only, and that reason is love, the love of God.

Even that love is sprinkled with pride and self-seeking until one gives up everything.

Purification is death.

The black and white clothes I am rolling up and packing in my suitcase remind me of death.

But, the truth is that we all die and face God. Is it not better to allow Him the freedom to start the process of purification, leading to illumination and, finally, unity, now?

If one loves someone, one will do anything for that person. One wants to be with that person, and eventually, one wants to be completely united with that person.

So, too, with the Brides of Christ in Tyburn. They only want to love and be loved.

Black and white, life and death, death and life, love and sacrifice for the Significant Other, who is Christ.

People ask me why I want to do the hard thing. I want to be like Christ.



The Modernist Soup of the Witches of Macbeth

The Baby Boom generation represents the good, the bad, and the ugly. Abortion became law when most of us were in our teens. We did not understand what was happening. Some of us had read Humanae Vitae
in college or high school. Some of our parents read it. Some of us praised Pope Paul VI for this document, perhaps THE most important encyclical of the entire 20th century. Some of us had a maze-like way out and back to the Church. Some of us were political activists and some flower children. Some of us by the mid-1970s saw clearly the death of the West. Perhaps we were deluded for a time by the optimism of the 1980s, but this optimism changed to reality with the growing use of abortifacients and infanticide.



But, the damage was done under our watch and our parents watch. Few "twigged" onto the prophetic nature of this encyclical.

I am going to quote three small sections of this pivotal work, which is infallible, and which is linked above. One quotation is one the picture here.



Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

23. And now We wish to speak to rulers of nations. To you most of all is committed the responsibility of safeguarding the common good. You can contribute so much to the preservation of morals. We beg of you, never allow the morals of your peoples to be undermined. The family is the primary unit in the state; do not tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God. For there are other ways by which a government can and should solve the population problem—that is to say by enacting laws which will assist families and by educating the people wisely so that the moral law and the freedom of the citizens are both safeguarded.




Those of my generation who voted for the most anti-life president ever must face the judgement of God. Those of my generation who do not understand that contraception and abortion are THE issues of the day, will have to answer to a Just Judge, who loves the innocent, as He is innocent.

Those of my generation who continue to compromise within the Church, and thereby weaken the Church, ESPECIALLY priests and bishops, will have to answer to the One Who died for our sins.

By 2008, one million embryos, that is human beings with souls, had been destroyed by IVF. There are Catholics here and in Malta who think IVF is ok despite the teaching of the Catholic Church. These people choose to ignore this call to suffering without children, or the call to adoption.

Look at this older article. .http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/1_million_embryos_destroyed_in_uk_in_14_years

The entire globe is sick and getting more ill by the day. Ireland is about to pass an abortion law and Malta will follow within a year.

Some of us watched The Seventh Seal as youth. It became a cult film. Bergman hated both communism and the Catholic Church. His vision of the future was that humans had to free themselves from all "isms". Sadly, he lacked faith in Jesus Christ, and put too much faith in the goodness of men and women to change the earth. This is a false view, which is part of the modernist heresies of both millenarianism and progressivism.

Star Trek, as I wrote in my first blog, also preached the gospel of humanism, progressivism and the so-called spiritual evolution of mankind. Both these iconic media formed a generation who left the teachings of the Church. Humans become the center of all, and finally, the individual became the narcissistic center of his or her own universe. The ideal of civic order and civic duty died. The next generation, the "Me Generation" of Generation X was born into this modernist soup.

Modernism in the Church is the witches' brew of selfishness, ambition, pride and lust. The very pope who gave us Humanae Vitae noted the age of dissent, and this is a translation and explanation found here:


Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father affirms that he has a sense that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”  There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation.  There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life.  And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life.  Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light.  Science exists to give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all the more and celebrate him with greater intensity; instead, science gives us criticism and doubt.  Scientists are those who more thoughtfully and more painfully exert their minds.  But they end up teaching us:  “I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.”  The school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd contradictions.  Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world. June 29, 1972.



There are false mediums who think they are explaining what will happen in our short, Baby Boomer futures.

They only have to look at the anarchy they allowed to occur.

My generation could have changed this great movement into moral anarchy.

We did not. We shall witness more and more moral anarchy and the age of the martyrs. We allowed the door to open to death and death walked in, stomping about the earth and claiming nations for his own. Only the one, true, holy and apostolic Catholic Church will stand firm against this destruction of the moral framework of the rule of law.

We have experienced an age of Mercy. Do not pass Mercy by....He is Real, the Incarnate One, and He stands at the door and knocks.

Pray, think, reflect, act.

A Sad Synchronicity

Yesterday morning, I had a long talk with a friend of mine about this very subject. Michael says it better than I can. This was another Michael (friend) with whom I was discussing the lack of teaching in the Church here. He was decrying the lack of guidance on IVF, abortion and contraception from the pulpit in England. I have several friends in the 65-75 age group. None of them, NONE, have ever heard a sermon against abortion, contraception or IVF in England. None.






Encore Ear Feast



1972, Pavarotti and Sutherland.

1965, Pavarotti and Sutherland




Sigh, Ear Feast Three



Because opera is wonderful...