If you want to understand STM, read this book, which I wrote about two years ago.
None Other Gods, by Robert Hugh Benson
It is online here.....http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17627/17627-h/17627-h.htm
Monday, 12 January 2015
When I finally get to where I am going
I shall have something very interesting to share with you all.
Catholic Love-Romantic Love-Musings
Other peoples, and I confine my discussion to the West, did not have this ideal, which grew into the cult of Romance one sees in French history, literature, and music, spilling into England early in the Middle Ages.
The ideal of courtly love is missing among many peoples. I am not going to point to various groupings, but one can make the connections one's self.
A brilliant friend of mine noted that the secular humanists align themselves with others who do not understand romantic love, or agape, Christian love.
Here are two quotations from the CCC from St. Basil and St. Augustine:
Part 3: Life in Christ 1828-1829
"The practice of the moral life animated by charity gives to the Christian the spiritual freedom of the Children of God. He no longer stands before God as a slave, in servile fear, or as mercenary looking for wages, but as a son responding to the love of him who "first loved us."
1829
"Love is itself the fulfillment of all are works. There is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest. "Readers can go back into my archives and look at the commentaries on the Pope Emeritus's encyclical on love.
The point of this post is that without an understand that God is Love, some people either secularists, or those from other man-made religions, cannot move towards repentance, conversion and a life of sacrificial love.
Secularists see this type of life as perverted, as one atheist professor at a major Catholic university told me.
He said bluntly that any type of sacrificial love was unnatural and to be discouraged, choosing instead a like of hedonism. His view is that Christ's message is actually dangerous.
It is dangerous. This message creates martyrs. This message of love creates heroes.
Now, back to Romantic Love.
Without a sense that we are all children of God through baptism and united as such and without the idea that the goal of life is living in love, a person's viewpoint of the world becomes one of the necessity for power and violence.
A brilliant friend of mine, an "Arab expert", taught the religion and language of those areas for years, and spent a long time in the Middle East. Recently, he wrote this to me,
I remember that many of the Iraqis who were not overt "religious people" were trying to understand romantic love. They loved romantic novels and stories about falling in love because it is something that Islam could not give them. Islam gave them a sadistic orgiastic culture. The consciences of some revolted against this and this is something in natural law that tells them that something is wrong. Islam and Secularism are prisons of desperation.
It is interesting that the Hindus have a sense of Romantic Love, as seen in Bollywood stories.
The understanding that all women deserve love and honor is foreign to some seculars and others.
Of course, the love the Church has for Our Lady Mary fed into the cult of Romantic Love. Mary became the knights' "Lady".
To be continued...
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, ...
People Die
One of the results of the recent horrors here in France is the realization of the brevity of life.
People die. In the West, we have sheltered ourselves from death. In past centuries, war and disease made death more real, and less frightening for most people. But, the vulnerability of life is such that one must stop and think of the last four things.
I have several posts on this.
Stay in sanctifying grace, stay holy, make God your priority in life.
Realize that life is short, very short.
People die. In the West, we have sheltered ourselves from death. In past centuries, war and disease made death more real, and less frightening for most people. But, the vulnerability of life is such that one must stop and think of the last four things.
I have several posts on this.
Stay in sanctifying grace, stay holy, make God your priority in life.
Realize that life is short, very short.
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