Herman the Cripple…

As I said Father recommended some reading material recently.  Here is yet another offering from Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones: Spiritual Answers to Psychological Questions by Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.  This poem was written by a physician admirer of Blessed Herman.

 

Herman The Cripple
by
William Hart Hurlbut, M.D.

I am least among the low,
I am weak and I am slow;
I can neither walk nor stand,
Nor hold a spoon in my own hand.

Like a body bound in chain,
I am on a rack of pain,
But He is God who made me so,
that His mercy I should know.

Brothers do not weep for me!
Christ, the Lord, has set me free.
All my sorrows he will bless;
Pain is not unhappiness.

From my window I look down
To the streets of yonder town,
Where the people come and go,
Reap the harvest that they sow.

Like a field of wheat and tares,
Some are lost in worldly cares;
There are hearts as black as coal,
There are cripples of the soul.

Brothers do not weep for me!
In his mercy I am free.
I can neither sow nor spin,
Yet, I am fed and clothed in Him.

I have been the donkey’s tail,
Slower than a slug or snail;
You my brothers have been kind,
Never let me lag behind.

I have been most rich in friends,
You have been my feet and hands;
All the good that I could do,
I have done because of you.

Oh my brothers, can’t you see?
You have been as Christ for me.
And in my need I know I, too,
Have become as Christ for you!

I have lived for forty years
In this wilderness of tears;
But these trials can’t compare
With the glory we will share.

I have had a voice to sing,
To rejoice in everything;
Now Love’s sweet eternal song
Breaks the darkness with the dawn.

Brother’s do not weep for me!
Christ, the Lord, has set me free.
Oh my friends, remember this:
Pain is not unhappiness.

 

One Very Ill…

Father recommended some reading material recently.  One of those books is Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones: Spiritual Answers to Psychological Questions by Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.  Close to the end of the book I found several things that really spoke to me.  One of them was a prayer, a prayer of hope but of hope born of pain and suffering.

The Prayer of One Very Ill…

Lord, the day is drawing to a close and, like all the other days, it leaves with me the impression of utter defeat. I have done nothing for You: neither have I said conscious prayers, nor performed works of charity, nor any work at all, work that is sacred for every Christian who understands its significance.  I have not even been able to control that childish impatience and those foolish rancors that so often occupy the place that should be Yours in the “no-man’s land” of my emotions.  It is in vain that I promise You to do better.  I shall be no different tomorrow, or on the day that follows. 

When I retrace the course of my life, I am overwhelmed by the same impression of inadequacy.  I have sought You in prayer and in the service of my neighbor, for we cannot separate You from our brothers any more than we can separate our body from our spirit.  But in seeking You, do I not find myself?  Do I not wish to satisfy myself? Those works that I secretly deemed good and saintly dissolve in the light of approaching eternity, and I dare no longer lean on these supports that have lost their stability.

Even actual sufferings bring me no joy, because I bear them so badly.  Perhaps we are all like this: incapable of discerning anything but our own wretchedness and our own despairing cowardice before the light of the Beyond that waxes on our horizon.  But it may be, O Lord, that this impression of privation is part of a divine plan.  It may be that, in Your eyes, self-complacency is the most obnoxious of all fripperies, and that we must come before you naked so that You, You alone, may clothe us.  

 ~Marguerite Teilhard de Chardin, president of the Catholic Union of the Sick, and sister of the well known Jesuit writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

My Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

Such a small book… I’ve had it for over a year… and yet I have not been able to complete it even once.  I keep reading a bit and then having to put it down so that I can meditate on the contents of those few pages.  The next evening, I pick it up again and find that I need to reread those passages and feel I can not go on until I have internalized the message and made better headway in  its practice.  So much wisdom, so much Truth… I need to get copies of this little book for my children.

A few excerpts…

Chapter 1

What doth it avail thee to discourse profoundly of the Trinity if thou be void of humility, and consequently, displeasing to the Trinity?

In truth sublime words make not a man holy and just: but a virtuous life maketh him dear to God.

I would rather feel compunction than know its definition.

These sentences particularly resonated… (but then you’ll find so much of this little book does with me) and especially that last line.  As much as I have studied to learn the faith, doing so still, I would rather experience it than know it intellectually. I would rather BE penitent than know its definition.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive by any means… just that so often we err in thinking that knowing is equivalent to doing. 

If thou didst know the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it all profit thee without the love of God and His grace?

 (from a long list of vanities) 

… It is vanity to follow the lusts of the flesh and to desire that for which thou must afterwards be grievously punished…

Study, therefore to withdraw thy heart from the love of visible things, and to turn thyself to things invisible.  For they that follow their sensuality defile their conscience and lose the grace of God.

Chapter 2

The more and better thou knowest the more heavy will be thy judgement unless thy life be also more holy.

Be not, therefore puffed up with any art or science: but rather fear because of the knowledge which is given thee.

If it seem to thee that thou knowest many things and understandest them well enough, know at the same time that there are many more things of which thou art ignorant.

Be not high-minded, but rather acknowledge thy ignorance.  Why wouldst thou prefer thyself to any one, since there are so many more learned and skillful in the law than thyself?

If thou wouldst know and learn anything to the purpose, love to be unknown and esteemed as nothing.

This is the highest science and most profitable lesson, truly to know and despise ourselves.

To have no opinion of ourselves and to think always well and commendably of others, is great wisdom and high perfection.

This rings so true.  It is so common for people to think well of themselves… all we hear about is ‘self-esteem’ anymore, even from Christians… whatever happened to being like Christ? LIKE Christ?  Did Christ consider himself above others? Did he send those who came to him off to study the law or did he send them out to sin no more? 

It isn’t easy by any means… but just the attempt to consider others better than myself, to see where I am sinful and despise that in myself as our Lord does has been a worth while exercise to say the least.  Still, it has been amazing to me how many of my other sins and failings, that list that could be xerox’d from confession to confession with a set of blank lines for the changeable things, have been curtailed or made better in the attempt.  Anger, impatience, and other such sins that come from pride and selfishness… all rooted in valuing myself above those around me whether I realize it and intend to do so or not.

Chapter 3

He to whom the eternal Word speaketh is set at liberty from  multitude of opinions.

From one word are all things, and this one all things speak; and this is the beginning which also speaketh to us.

Without this word no one understands or judges rightly.

…

Learning is not to be blamed nor the mere knowledge of anything which is good in itself and ordained by God; but a good conscience and a virtuous life are always to be preferred before it.

But because many make it more their study to know than to live well, therefore are they often deceived, and bring forth none, or very little fruit.

Oh, if men would use as much diligence in rooting out vices and planting virtues as they do in proposing questions there would not be so great evils committed, nor scandals among the people, nor so much relaxation in monasteries.

Verily when the day of judgment comes, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done; nor how learnedly we have spoken, but how religiously we have lived.

Tell me where are now all those great doctors with whom thou wast well acquainted whilst they were living and flourished in learning?

Now others fill their places, and I know not whether they ever think of them.

In their lifetime they seemed to be something and now they are not spoken of.

Convicting indeed. I do not spend nearly enough time in rooting out vices and planting virtues as I should… I am just as guilty of reading more and acting less.

Chapter 3 cont’d

How many perish in the world through vain learning, who little care for the service of God!

And because they chose rather to be great than to be humble, therefore they are lost in their own imaginations.

He is truly great who is great in charity.

He is truly great who is little in his own eyes and holdeth as naught the pinnacle of honor.

He is truly prudent who looks upon all earthly things as nothing that he main gain Christ. Phil 3:8

And he is very learned indeed who does the will of God and renounces his own will.

Amen.  I have much work to do… it is work, after all, cooperating with God’s will and allowing Him to do the necessary bits.  I am hardly a willing sacrifice and rather wish He’d just lash me to the altar instead of having to hang onto it myself. I keep praying a ‘trump’ prayer… Lord, no matter what I say later, I want Your will in my life and to be transformed into Your likeness, regardless of what it takes… and then try not to whine too much when He takes me up on it.

 

Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads (Part 1)

This book by Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. was recommended to me by a friend who said “This is a MUST buy! RUN, don’t walk, RUN to Amazon…” and so I did. She is rarely wrong about such things.  I began it shortly before leaving on the two week interview odyssey with my family (husband is changing jobs) and continued to read it between my spousal obligations at each interview location. While far from finished, I must admit to being grateful the highlighter I’m using is a fresh one… certainly it is getting a LOT of use.

The book is divided into ‘chapters’ but they are not numbered, being differentiated instead by their title.   I begin here with the ‘chapter’ titled The Fertile Ground.  While it is all excellent, I’m just sharing some bits that really jumped out at me for one reason or another and read as a whole it flows much better than hacked into such ‘bits’.

The Fertile Ground

Conversion* is a turning of the heart toward God, which means that the heart has to turn away from the quick and the transient satisfactions of this world in favor of its birthright, which is everlasting reunion with God (Gn 25:29-34).

So from earliest times monks and nuns often sang psalms.  Sometimes they sang all hundred and fifty psalms, and sometimes they chose certain ones appropriate to the intentions of their prayers; but either way they all used psalms as a basis for meditative prayer – “I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the understanding also; I will sing with the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also”, as St. Paul advised (1 Cr 14:15-16). And they added standard prayers like the Kyrie after each, no matter what arrangement of psalms they sang. Historians like Eusebius, John Cassian, and, long before them, St. Paul himself (Eph 5:19; Cl 3:16) testify that the laity, too, established the Psalter as the basis of their private devotions very early in the Church’s history.  Day and night, the people flocked to the oratories of the monasteries and convents to participate in those devotions, and they were certainly welcome; the communal prayers of monastic communities are above all the prayers of the whole Church for the whole Church, and for the salvation of the whole world. In fact, the monks didn’t just admit people who happened by; they invited the laity to join in.  By the turn of the fifth century St. Porphyrius of Gasa had already added an invitatorium to the psalmodic prayers of the monks in his diocese; he put Psalm 94 – Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord – at the beginning of the devotions, and there it has stayed ever since across Christendom.  The Mozarabic Rite still calls this sonus, because it’s sung while the bells are being rung to summon people to prayer, and since at least the time of Charlemagne the rubrics in Europe have specified that it should be sung slowly, to give people enough time to get there.

Still, plenty of people could read, in the Middle Ages. In fact, the Book of Psalms was the basic textbook that the Church used to teach people to read.  And the practice is as old as Scripture itself – it’s why Psalms 110, 111, and 118 are arranged as little alphabet-books for Hebrew children.  The real problem was that before the invention of printing nobody could figure out how to make enough copies of the liturgical books so that everybody who could read could use one.  We sometimes forget that mediaeval Europe didn’t even have paper; a single sheet of parchment or vellum costs the life of a farm animal, not to mention weeks of preparation.  Even today good ink is costly, brewed by hand.  Manuscripts took years to copy, and they were unbelievably expensive.  A Psalter was worth a farm and a Bible a whole village.

To understand Mt 6:7 clearly, you have to go back to the Church’s Bible, which was the only Bible in existance when the King James commission started working on their own version.  The original Greek… In it’s classical sense… means “to stammer”, and it’s also used to mean to chatter any empty, meaningless sound.  Eustathius, the twelfth-century bishop of Thessalonika – who certainly knew his Gospel – used it in his commentary on Homer to refer to the twittering of birds.  Either way, the word doesn’t mean saying the same thing over and over; it means hemming and hawing, babbling meaninglessly instead of saying what you want to say, or just not getting to the point…. In the Latin Bible… nolite multum loqui just means “don’t talk a lot; don’t run off at the mouth; don’t rattle on like the pagans do: get to the point” – exactly what the Greek means…. So Mt 6:7 is a warning against confusing quantity witih quality; “first of all,” St. Augustine said, “Our Lord excluded loquaciousness” (Sermon 56:4).  Christ advised against twittering and talking too elaborately, which is a different thing entirely from repeating the same prayers over and over.  In fact – like pious people in the Old Testament (1 Kn 12) – he himself spent whole nights in prayer; he himself repeated what he said time and again (Mt 26:44), and he himself said that repeated prayers work even beyond the claims of justice (Lk 11:5-8, 18:1-8; cf. Jm 5:16-17; 3 Kn 17-18).

The simple answer to the objection, then, is that proper repetitions of vocal prayers aren’t vain, in either sense of the word. The words of vocal prayer are not meaningless – it’s a fault to babble them out without paying any attention to them (Mr 7:6), but words have meaning and, because the human mind operates in terms of language, words have power, the power to change the way you think.  If you repeat the words automatically, you’ve wasted this power, and you’e missed the point of vocal prayer, which is after all communication that asks for an answer.

If you’re saying it right, you can’t say it often enough; and if you’re saying it wrong, it doesn’t matter how often you say it.

But beyond that an objection to the repetition of vocal prayer in devotions like the Rosary misses the point, precisely because these vocal prayers are repeated as a way to achieve a state of clear meditation, a lively regard of God or of some aspect of God: he who only follows words has nothing, but he who possesses his own mind cares for his soul (Pr 19:7-8). Repetitions aimed at that goal can appear vain only to those who have not been taught the skill of meditative prayer.

If we’re working with our hands on earthly things, Richard Rolle asked in the fourteenth century, “what is to keep us from working with our hearts on heavenly things?”

… the laity across Europe had the habit of praying as they worked, too…. They counted their prayers by means of little stones, or they knitted those prayers together with a length of string, a circlet of cord knotted or strung with beads.

In fact, our English word “bead” really means “prayer”.

It’s also why the venerable St. Bede, the eighth-century English writer, was named that; his name means prayer.

For the word to enter our language as it did, the Angles must have used beads almost exclusively for counting prayers, and the Saxons must have worn their strings of prayer beads around the waist – the Saxon word for prayer is belt.

….the modern Rosary itself, lay far in the future in the year 800. But by then all the elements were there: the Faithful throughout Christendom, lay and clerical alike, were regularly practicing meditative prayer; they were structuring their meditations on the repetitions of vocal prayers anchored to the Lord’s own prayer, the Our Father; they added the Angelic Salutation after each Pater noster, and they counted these vocal prayers on beads, after the pattern of the psalms, grouping them in fifties for a total of a hundred and fifty.

 Some of these ‘bits’ were things that rang true from past experience… others were things that connected for the first time in a rapid fire chain and left me saying ‘duh, of course!’ such as the meaning of the word bead and how it translated to the name of the Venerable Bede (which I got before the book made the connection for me).  As much as I have appreciated the Rosary these past two years, this book (along with Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn) has helped me realize that I have only scratched the surface and that there is so much more to the beads I hold in my hand than I realize… and so much more that God can teach me through this devotional form of prayer.  Again the joy of new discovery breaks over me, the knowledge that no matter how long I live or how much I devote myself to the faith, the feast that God has brought me to in the Catholic Church is large enough to sustain me, fresh as though newly prepared and yet two thousand years old with wisdom that God has protected through the ages, simple enough to minister to my youngest child and yet rich and complex enough to satisfy the most discerning adult.  How thankful I am that God had not created within me a hunger for more of Himself that He did not intend to satisfy, and how I rejoice as He shares glimpses of what lies ‘further up and further in’.

*Many people use the word ‘convert’ when speaking in terms of a move from the Protestant arena to the Catholic Church.  This use does not accurately reflect what has happened however.  The proper term would be ‘reconciled’… so and so ‘reconciled’ to the Catholic Church.  This would be true regardless of whether or not they had ever been Catholic before.  The word ‘conversion’ in the Catholic faith refers to the ongoing process of the Christian walk, the Christian life. A cycle containing both  God’s saving grace (and other graces) and our loving response to Him through our prayers and Acts of Mercy, whether spiritual or corporeal, which changes or ‘converts’ us – our habits, desires, tendencies, thought processes, etc – into more Christ-like people. 

 

What I’m Reading…

I’ve been tagged.  Red Neck Woman wants to know what I’m reading… well, that’s probably not true. Likely she KNOWS what I’m reading (since she usually recommends a great deal) but wants me to share anyway.  Oddly, my list is short at the moment. 

Night Table Reading:

Triumph: The Power and Glory of the Catholic Church by H.W. Crocker III

Very good book on the impact of the Church on history… at least so far….

Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI

Very good daily reading material by the Holy Father.  Great way to end the day after Night Prayers.

The Facts About Luther by Msgr. Patrick F. O’Hare, LL.D.

Very good book.  Excellent insight into Luther.  I have been impressed with the compassion  in this book for the weaknesses in Luther and the choices that he made while never condoning the heresy he created.

The How-To Book of Catholic Devotions: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You by Mike Aquilina and Regis J. Flaherty

Trying to do exactly that, make up the deficiency in my theological and devotional education.  While very simple, this book helps and will be a good tool for helping teach my children.

Bookmarked Books:

Controversies: High Level Catholic Apologetics by Karl Keating

Excellent book. Excellent.  Reading parts of this reminds me of theological debates on the homeschool learning forum I frequent. 

Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc

Belloc is always good. Always.  In one of these essays he was eerily prophetic.

How the Reformation Happened by Hilaire Belloc

More of that reading to remedy my exceedingly lopsided historical education.  Also a good read. Belloc is a bit like Chesteron… always good.

Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham

This is a good book.  I love Merton.  I think I prefer reading the books in their entirety however, instead of clips from them as this book contains.

Just Finished:

Heresy: A Catherine Levendeur Mystery by Sharan Newman

Picked this up in the airport on my way home from Easter.  A mystery set in the Middle Ages with a very Catholic flavor.  A little heavy on the historical detail and too light on plot development but it was a nice break from my usual fare.

Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  It is absolutely excellent.  While I had already come to understand and appreciate the Catholic perspective on Mary, this book took that knowledge, understanding and appreciation to a whole new level.  As much as I’ve gotten out of the rosary already, I realize after reading this book that like all other things Catholic, there are depths to that meditation that I have yet to apprehend. I rejoice at the feast laid out for the journey yet again.  Must have book.

Roots of the Reformation by Karl Adam

Slender book but an excellent resource along with The Facts About Luther to remedy a lopsided view of the man and the Reformation. This book presents a remarkably objective view.

… and then there are the ‘wanna order’s'… you do NOT wanna know how long my wish list is.

 I tag cause of our joy, Standing on My Head, and the Hermeneutic of Continuity.

 

The New Paganism by Hilaire Belloc

I’ve been reading Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc.  Belloc is like Chesterton in that I have yet to read anything written by either man that did not strike me as brilliant and profound.  The first essay in the book is “The New Paganism”* from which I’ve taken the following quotes…

… a Christian man or society is one that has some part of Catholicism left in him. But when every shred of Catholicism is lost we call that state of things “Unchristian.”

I have found this to be so true… we might not use the word unchristian, but certainly we use words that are interchangeable with it. Even in the protestant faiths, we see slivers of Catholic (universal) Truth that remain to some degree, though I have seen of late some who’ve shredded it entirely and yet claim the title Christian.

…with the attack on faith and the Church at the Reformation, the successful rebellion of so many and their secession from united Christendom, there began a process which could only end in the complete loss of all Catholic doctrine and morals by the deserters.  

Rebellion indeed, for that is what the Reformation was.  Belloc claims that we are today reaching this consummation and that was in 1931 or there abouts. Indeed, so we are even more today… and yet the Church remains, true to the faith she was given.  She is yet a shining beacon, parenting her children through the rocky shoals of this journey, a light to guide those who still seek and treasure truth.  It has been many years since the fathers of the rebellion began their denomination of their faith… how many will be lost because of it? How many will live out their lives in service to God in the desert created for them by their forefathers, so far and yet so close to the bounty God left to sustain His people here in these shadow lands. They do so much despite serving on such scant rations!

…there are, spreading over what used to be the Christian world, larger and larger areas over which the Christian spirit has wholly failed; is absent… …both larger moral and larger physical areas, but especially larger moral areas. There are now whole groups of books, whole bodies of men, which are definitely pagan, and these are beginning to join up into larger groups. It is like the freezing over of a pond, which begins in patches of ice; the patches unite to form wide sheets, till at last the whole is one solid surface. … they are coalescing—to form a corpus of anti-Christian influence. It is not so much that they deny the Incarnation and the Resurrection, not even that they ignore doctrine. It is rather that they contradict and oppose the old inherited Christian system of morals to which people used to adhere long after they had given up definite doctrine.

Is this not what we bemoan regularly in our own society as well as others? In my own life I see quite close at hand a life that embodies this description.  Truly, this life is pagan, yet not pagan with a hope of something better… a new pagan such as Belloc describes in this essay… a pagan who has turned their back on hope, disdained it and chosen paganism, humanism, as their god. 

So often pundits insist that we ‘can’t legislate morality’.  On the contrary, morality is the root of all legislation… what is legislation but the common morality chosen for a group of people to which they are held by penalty? Personally, having seen the various ‘types’ of legislated morality available in the world today, I far prefer the ones that are based upon Christian doctrine.  This is not due primarily to my own faith, so much as it is the preference for the results of that doctrine’s morality taken to it’s conclusion in those given cultures.

What does doctrine have to do with morals? Belloc is succinct.

…morals are the fruit of doctrine.

Belloc goes on to identify the source of this trend… 

The true origin of this attitude of mind in modern times is the powerful genius of Calvin, though those who most suffer his influence would most strenuously deny their subjection to it, partly because they have never read him, much more because they do not see it in their daily papers…

Calvin, then, is at the fountainhead of this new sense of doom. But behind Calvin the fatalist attitude is an attitude as old, of course, as the hills. It is a temptation to which the human intellect has yielded on important occasions from as far back as we can trace its recorded experience and definitions. To the mind in that mood all things are part of an unchangeable process following from cause to effect immutably. 

… that one very powerful agent in producing this mood is the desire to be rid of responsibility.

Denial of man’s free will indulges that desire to be rid of responsibility.  If we deny freedom of will to choose, we deny our own responsibility and can reject every objectionable thing with ‘it’s not my fault…’ This is pervasive in our society even more so today.

…the New Paganism has already begun to produce and cannot but produce more and more a mass of restrictive legislation.  

More restrictive legislation while being more permissive of inhumanity.

It is a paradox, of course, that such restrictive legislation should be bred from a mood which proceeded originally from rebellion against restriction, but the fact is undoubted—it is before all our eyes. With the denial of the will there necessarily appears the questioning of any content to the word “freedom.” In a Christian society you were free to do a number of acts, for some of which you could be punished under Christian laws, for others of which no state or other authority could punish you, but which were opposed to the social atmosphere in which you lived. But the New Paganism will tend, not to punish, but to restrain with fetters; to prevent action, to impose coercive bonds. It will be at issue more and more with human dignity. It has already, in certain provinces (the Calvinist canton of Vaud in Switzerland is an example), enacted what is called “the sterilization of the unfit” as a positive law. It has not yet enacted, though it has already proposed and will certainly in time enact, legislation for the restriction of births. Not only in these, but in many other departments of life, one after another, will this mechanical network spread and bind those subject to it under a compulsion which cannot be escaped.

and…

The battle for right doctrine in theology is always also a battle for the preservation of definite social things (institutions, habits) following from right doctrine; nor is there anything more contemptible intellectually than the attitude of those who imagine that because doctrine must be stated in abstract terms it therefore has no practical application nor any real fruit in the real world of real men. Contrariwise, difference in doctrine is at the root of all political and social differences; therefore is the struggle for or against true doctrine the most vital of struggles. . . .

and… 

The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see.

The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing; the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.

The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing; all the poetry of the Old Paganism, even where it despairs, has this sense. And you may read in those of its writers who actively opposed religion, such as Lucretius, a fine religious sense of dignity and order. The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.

There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. 

A blog entry can in no way do this essay justice. It is powerful and prescient. Belloc was truly a great historian and a brave man to continue to speak truth when it was unpopular to do so.

Rod Bennet of tremendous trifles  has blogged on Belloc’s writings on the New Paganism as well and his entry is well worth reading.

*an incomplete rendering of the essay (but at least it is partly available online )where perhaps can be read more fully the context of the quotes I’ve taken.

 

Saints… Dead or Alive?

Again quoting from Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham… 

Saints of the fifteenth century. In the collapse of medieval society, amid the corruption of the clergy and the decadence of conventual life, there arose men and women of the laity who were perfectly obedient to God. Nicholas of Flue, for instance, and Joan of Arc. They were simple and straight forward signs of contradiction in the middle of worldliness, prejudice, cruelty, despair, and greed. They were not rebels at all. They were meek and submissive instruments of God who, while being completely opposed to the corrupt norms around them, gave every man and every authority his due.  They show clearly and convincingly what it is to be not a rebel, but obedient to God as a sign to men – a sign of mercy, a revelation of truth and power. We are spontaneously drawn to these signs of God with all the love of our hearts.  We naturally trust them, believe in their intercession, knowing that they live on in the glory of God and that God would not give us such love for them if they were not still “sacraments” of His mercy to us.

Saints and our relationship with them has been a great treasure to me as a new Catholic.  How often I  have looked at the current ‘heroes’ and role models of our culture and thought that for the most part they are absolutely NOT what I want for my children to emulate… but where WERE all the good ones?  Where were all the REAL heroes? The men and women who did truly great things with more lasting effect than the ‘Hail Mary’ touchdown.  They were missing in action… or so I thought.

The truth is that they’ve always been there… silent witnesses who still inspired and reached millions of people.  I just didn’t have access to them, didn’t know about them… because I was raised protestant.  The communion of saints, despite being in the Creeds to which most Christians at least nod if not actually adhere, was yet another Truth, another blessing, another grace which protestantism had stripped away from the fullness of the Faith. 

These saints live still… they are the Church Triumphant, the Church who has been perfected and dwell with the Lord having completed their race… and they are our cloud of witnesses who cheer us, the Church Militant, on in ours, interceding for us to the Father of us all.  We do not idolize them anymore than we idolize our brothers and sisters in Christ here on earth. We do not worship them any more than we worship a beloved sister or brother here on earth.  Rather, together as the complete Body of Christ we worship God together, and intercede for one another.

Ps. 103:20–22 Bless the LORD, all you angels, mighty in strength and attentive, obedient to every command. Bless the LORD, all you hosts, ministers who do God’s will. Bless the LORD, all creatures, everywhere in God’s domain. Bless the LORD, my soul!

Psalms 148: 1-2 Hallelujah! Praise the LORD from the heavens; give praise in the heights. Praise him, all you angels; give praise, all you hosts.

Just as surely as they worship God with us, do they also intercede for us. We do ask them to intercede for us… just as we ask brothers and sisters in Christ here on earth… Do not the prayers of the righteous avail much? (Jas. 5:16) Scripture itself speaks to the intercession of men and angels in heaven…

 Rev 5:8 When he took it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each of the elders held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the holy ones.

This shows that the saints and angels are aware of our prayers to God, else they would not be offering them to Him… They are aware of our prayers and intercede for us, presenting our needs to God as this scripture testifies.

Rev. 8:3–4 Another angel came and stood at the altar, holding a gold censer. He was given a great quantity of incense to offer, along with the prayers of all the holy ones, on the gold altar that was before the throne. The smoke of the incense along with the prayers of the holy ones went up before God from the hand of the angel.

Indeed we are cautioned as to the strength of their intercession…

Matt. 18:10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.

The testimony of the Early Church Fathers agrees with sacred scripture and we see it lived out in their example to us. 

Hermas

“[The Shepherd said:] ‘But those who are weak and slothful in prayer, hesitate to ask anything from the Lord; but the Lord is full of compassion, and gives without fail to all who ask him. But you, [Hermas,] having been strengthened by the holy angel [you saw], and having obtained from him such intercession, and not being slothful, why do not you ask of the Lord understanding, and receive it from him?’” (The Shepherd 3:5:4 [A.D. 80]). 

Clement of Alexandria

“In this way is he [the true Christian] always pure for prayer. He also prays in the society of angels, as being already of angelic rank, and he is never out of their holy keeping; and though he pray alone, he has the choir of the saints standing with him [in prayer]“ (Miscellanies 7:12 [A.D. 208]). 

Origen

“But not the high priest [Christ] alone prays for those who pray sincerely, but also the angels . . . as also the souls of the saints who have already fallen asleep” (Prayer 11 [A.D. 233]). 

Cyprian of Carthage

“Let us remember one another in concord and unanimity. Let us on both sides [of death] always pray for one another. Let us relieve burdens and afflictions by mutual love, that if one of us, by the swiftness of divine condescension, shall go hence first, our love may continue in the presence of the Lord, and our prayers for our brethren and sisters not cease in the presence of the Father’s mercy” (Letters 56[60]:5 [A.D. 253]). 

  “Atticus, sleep in peace, secure in your safety, and pray anxiously for our sins” (funerary inscription near St. Sabina’s in Rome [A.D. 300]).

“Pray for your parents, Matronata Matrona. She lived one year, fifty-two days” (ibid.). 

Methodius

“Hail to you for ever, Virgin Mother of God, our unceasing joy, for to you do I turn again. You are the beginning of our feast; you are its middle and end; the pearl of great price that belongs to the kingdom; the fat of every victim, the living altar of the Bread of Life [Jesus]. Hail, you treasure of the love of God. Hail, you fount of the Son’s love for man. . . . You gleamed, sweet gift-bestowing Mother, with the light of the sun; you gleamed with the insupportable fires of a most fervent charity, bringing forth in the end that which was conceived of you . . . making manifest the mystery hidden and unspeakable, the invisible Son of the Father—the Prince of Peace, who in a marvelous manner showed himself as less than all littleness” (Oration on Simeon and Anna 14 [A.D. 305]).

“Therefore, we pray [ask] you, the most excellent among women, who glories in the confidence of your maternal honors, that you would unceasingly keep us in remembrance. O holy Mother of God, remember us, I say, who make our boast in you, and who in august hymns celebrate the memory, which will ever live, and never fade away” (ibid.).

“And you also, O honored and venerable Simeon, you earliest host of our holy religion, and teacher of the resurrection of the faithful, do be our patron and advocate with that Savior God, whom you were deemed worthy to receive into your arms. We, together with you, sing our praises to Christ, who has the power of life and death, saying, ‘You are the true Light, proceeding from the true Light; the true God, begotten of the true God’” (ibid.).

Cyril of Jerusalem

“Then [during the Eucharistic prayer] we make mention also of those who have already fallen asleep: first, the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, that through their prayers and supplications God would receive our petition . . . “ (Catechetical Lectures 23:9 [A.D. 350]).

Hilary of Poitiers

“To those who wish to stand [in God’s grace], neither the guardianship of saints nor the defenses of angels are wanting” (Commentary on the Psalms 124:5:6 [A.D. 365]).

Ephraim the Syrian

“You victorious martyrs who endured torments gladly for the sake of the God and Savior, you who have boldness of speech toward the Lord himself, you saints, intercede for us who are timid and sinful men, full of sloth, that the grace of Christ may come upon us, and enlighten the hearts of all of us so that we may love him” (Commentary on Mark [A.D. 370]).

“Remember me, you heirs of God, you brethren of Christ; supplicate the Savior earnestly for me, that I may be freed through Christ from him that fights against me day by day” (The Fear at the End of Life [A.D. 370]).

The Liturgy of St. Basil

“By the command of your only-begotten Son we communicate with the memory of your saints . . . by whose prayers and supplications have mercy upon us all, and deliver us for the sake of your holy name” (Liturgy of St. Basil [A.D. 373]).

Pectorius

“Aschandius, my father, dearly beloved of my heart, with my sweet mother and my brethren, remember your Pectorius in the peace of the Fish [Christ]” (Epitaph of Pectorius [A.D. 375]).

Gregory of Nazianz

“May you [Cyprian] look down from above propitiously upon us, and guide our word and life; and shepherd this sacred flock . . . gladden the Holy Trinity, before which you stand” (Orations 17[24] [A.D. 380]).

“Yes, I am well assured that [my father’s] intercession is of more avail now than was his instruction in former days, since he is closer to God, now that he has shaken off his bodily fetters, and freed his mind from the clay that obscured it, and holds conversation naked with the nakedness of the prime and purest mind . . . “ (ibid., 18:4).

Gregory of Nyssa

“[Ephraim], you who are standing at the divine altar [in heaven] . . . bear us all in remembrance, petitioning for us the remission of sins, and the fruition of an everlasting kingdom” (Sermon on Ephraim the Syrian [A.D. 380]).

John Chrysostom

“He that wears the purple [i.e., a royal man] . . . stands begging of the saints to be his patrons with God, and he that wears a diadem begs the tentmaker [Paul] and the fisherman [Peter] as patrons, even though they be dead” (Homilies on Second Corinthians 26 [A.D. 392]).

“When you perceive that God is chastening you, fly not to his enemies . . . but to his friends, the martyrs, the saints, and those who were pleasing to him, and who have great power [in God]” (Orations 8:6 [A.D. 396]).

Ambrose of Milan

“May Peter, who wept so efficaciously for himself, weep for us and turn towards us Christ’s benign countenance” (The Six Days Work 5:25:90 [A.D. 393]).

Jerome

“You say in your book that while we live we are able to pray for each other, but afterwards when we have died, the prayer of no person for another can be heard. . . . But if the apostles and martyrs while still in the body can pray for others, at a time when they ought still be solicitous about themselves, how much more will they do so after their crowns, victories, and triumphs?” (Against Vigilantius 6 [A.D. 406]).

Augustine

“A Christian people celebrates together in religious solemnity the memorials of the martyrs, both to encourage their being imitated and so that it can share in their merits and be aided by their prayers” (Against Faustus the Manichean [A.D. 400]).

“There is an ecclesiastical discipline, as the faithful know, when the names of the martyrs are read aloud in that place at the altar of God, where prayer is not offered for them. Prayer, however, is offered for the dead who are remembered. For it is wrong to pray for a martyr, to whose prayers we ought ourselves be commended” (Sermons 159:1 [A.D. 411]).

“At the Lord’s table we do not commemorate martyrs in the same way that we do others who rest in peace so as to pray for them, but rather that they may pray for us that we may follow in their footsteps” (Homilies on John 84 [A.D. 416]).

“Neither are the souls of the pious dead separated from the Church which even now is the kingdom of Christ. Otherwise there would be no remembrance of them at the altar of God in the communication of the Body of Christ” (The City of God 20:9:2 [A.D. 419]).

Indeed, Jesus is the only mediator between God and man…

1 Tim. 2:5 For there is one God. There is also one mediator between God and the human race, Christ Jesus, himself human,

However, this does not mean that we can’t or shouldn’t ask others to pray for us as we see in the verses immediately preceeding that…

1 Tim. 2:1–4 First of all, then, I ask that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone, for kings and for all in authority, that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all devotion and dignity. This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.

Just as our brethren who pray for us here on earth, the saints and angels do not bypass Christ, but rather intercede with and for us TO God THROUGH Christ… saying as He taught us ‘Our Father…’ among the many other forms of prayer which we offer to God.

Before the fall, in the Garden of Eden when all was as He created it to be … what did Adam do? God gave him work right? A way to join God in what He was doing… After the fall, where we are now… does God allow us to join Him in His work? Sure… even those of us who are not ‘officially’ in ministry are not only allowed to join Him, it is expected of us, is it not? Then why do we think it will be any different when we are once again perfectly joined with Him and reside with Him again side by side?

Matt. 17:1-3  After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.  And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him.

Why do we assume that He will not give us ‘work’ then as well in assisting Him in caring for others, even when He has SHOWN us He does exactly that in sacred scripture!

God continually renews my mind, teaching me things of Himself and His ways that have been neglected in my spiritual education.  They are not always pleasant, these lessons… rarely in my ‘comfort zone’… but so richly blessed am I that I rejoice in His instruction and turning my face to Him, beg Him to continue for the sheer joy of learning at His feet despite the pain and suffering it may bring.  Truly, this is the Christ life…

 

Hear and Understand God’s Tradition…

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

I’m currently reading Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham and it is from this that I am quoting…

There are traditions which God has given us. They are so to speak a memory we are born with and into which we are born: a store of meanings, of symbols, of signs. What is born in us is the connatural ability to understand these great buried signs as soon as they are manifested to us.  What is given us in society is a more or less authentic manifestation of the signs. If society loses its “memory,” if it forgets its language of traditional symbol, then the individuals who make it up become neurotic, because their own memories are corrupted by uninterpreted, unused meanings. Then traditions themselves become mere dead conventions – worse than that, obsessions – collective neuroses.  To replace one set of conventions with another, however new, does nothing to revive a truly living sense of meaning and of life. This is our present condition.

This resonates strongly within me.  In my own experience, growing up as a Baptist (Southern of some flavor), I often felt drawn to certain things… liturgical tradition drew me, though I knew not what to call it. The austere nature of our faith and its tradition (or rather traditional lack of the same) left me feeling as though something were missing.  As a young child, striving to fill that unspoken void, I would contrive my own ‘traditions’ or forms of reverence. Having a lace trimmed hanky to lay my Bible is one good example, and yet this felt contrived even to my infant sensibilities and I soon gave it up in shame for having taken up such ‘pretensions’. 

Later, when I saw my first crucifix, I remember being struck by it – feeling a hushed awe and reverence within that was inexplicable… Later still in a similar setting, kneelers were intuitive in response as I felt immediately the desire to drop to my knees and pray. I worked hard (funny that since we were repeatedly taught that works were of little import) to be a workman approved before the Lord and stifled those childhood fancies, all the while feeling as though something important were missing… that such a holy God, such a magnificent Lord and Master deserved more than what was given… and that burning desire to give such to the Lord whom I loved was banked.

Even when I began to attend Church with my Catholic husband, the fear and misunderstanding taught me in my youth kept me from really seeing that what I witnessed there was the very fulfillment of what my young soul had yearned for.  When I finally was reconciled to the Church by God’s mercy and command, the protective walls bricked up over time to protect myself from that which I was forbidden to give as a protestant began to come down.  As I have lived a full year now as a Catholic with the blessings of the Sacraments, the joys of Eucharistic Adoration, the Liturgy and the Liturgical Calendar with all it entails, I have found at last that which my soul within naturally knew and longed to give as right to the Lord.  Truly, God has written His law upon our hearts… we ignore and deny this innate understanding to our peril.

We as a protestant society have lost our memory.  Our forefathers denied it; their descendents fought it, suppressing it more and more until it is so very lost that we of the common era in this protestant culture no longer recognize it within ourselves and rail against it embraced by others with vile blasphemies. We have reduced those beloved traditions given us by God to dead conventions so long that they have become  collective neuroses.  We have replaced God’s traditions, God’s ways with our own. New conventions, new traditions that reject all but that which seems comfortable, godly, and right in our own eyes.  In the process not only do we deify ourselves, but we forfeit life and all its meaning. We no longer show respect to any, much less the equal respect to all that we claim. We proclaim proudly that we bow our knee to NO man, and in the process, refuse to bow our knee to God. We have lost all sense of honor, of respect, and have no true understanding or experience of humility.  What else is dying to self but considering others better than we do ourselves?

Esteeming others, being willing to be humbled, being willing to abase ourselves, to be SERVANT to ALL men… this is the calling of the followers of Christ. If we are so unaware of the traditions of God that we no longer recognize true Worship, then we call things worship in error in order to have it at all. Such ignorance leads to not only great pride, but great sin. Let us not be so ignorant due to hard hearts and pride that we call speech, lectures, song-a-longs, and any humbling position of body worship. Let us not be so prideful in our ignorance that we can no longer bend our knee in respect to another lest it be construed as worship where none exists.  Let us again learn what we once knew and rejoiced to do, obey the traditions of our God and walk humbly before Him always.

Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.

“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”

Let us hear, understand, and obey the traditions which He, our God, has given to us.  Blessed be God forever!

 

Gluttony…

I think I may have blogged on gluttony before – and personal struggles with it, but someone posted about whether or not gluttony is really a sin on the homeschool forums I frequent and in an effort to answer a question, came across the following quote on a site discussing gluttony…

St. John of the Cross, in his work “The Dark Night of the Soul” (I, vi), dissects what he calls spiritual gluttony. He explains that it is the disposition of those who, in prayer and other acts of religion, are always in search of sensible sweetness; they are those who “will feel and taste God, as if he were palpable and accessible to them not only in Communion but in all their other acts of devotion.” This he declares is a very great imperfection and productive of great evils.

I’ve worked my way through “The Dark Night of the Soul” a couple times, mostly superficially and in bits because it’s so heavy for me at this point, which is probably why I never caught this tidbit that today happened to hit me like a Mack truck.  This is SO true… and so incredibly pervasive in our society today!  Very powerful quote which has really stuck with me and upon which I have been meditating quite a lot.

 

3rd Installment of Seven Storey Mountain…

Speaking of pledging in a fraternity…

I cheerfully accepted penances which, if they were imposed in a monastery, for a supernatural motive, and for some real reason, instead of for no reason at all, would cause such an uproar that all religious houses would be closed and the Catholic Church would probably have a hard time staying in the country.

How true.  Our society tends to scoff or express outrage at the concept of penance, the more strict the penance, the greater the outrage, and yet often hazing is just kids being kids, so long as no one gets hurt and they don’t take it too far.  What does that say about a people, that they are willing to be debased for popularity’s sake but not to attain righteousness or humility? Certainly nothing good…

Here I was, scarcely four years after I had left Oakham and walked out into the world that I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all its pleasures and satisfactions.  I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted.  What a strange thing!  In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. 

So much wisdom in this one man.  We go out, ready to plunder the world, to conquer it for ourselves… even if only our tiny part of it, to ‘make our way in the world’… and what happens? The world has its way with us instead… and leaves us lying in a ditch on the roadside… emptied and robbed and gutted, having lost everything… and as we lie there, He who haunts us, the One Who Has Everything comes to us yet again and asks if we are willing to lose everything, so that we will gain more than it all…  and sometimes we laugh Him to scorn… we poor filthy wretches in the dirt… but sometimes we are weary… and giving up what we know from experience we’ll only lose seems a better way and so, like children, we lift up our arms to He Who Bends Near, open up our hands and let go the clutches we had on it all… all our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, our loves, our hates, our sorrows, our joys, our family, our friends, our children, our tomorrows, and sometimes the most difficult… our yesterdays… and He takes them from us… and carries us.  At some point we realize we are able to walk again… but we don’t care, walking or being carried is all the same as long as we’re with Him… and over time on that journey, little gifts appear… our hopes given back to us, seen through new eyes, with new purpose, no longer haunt us.  Our dreams are given back, not to taunt us, but to hope anew in freedom, our aspirations no longer seem impossible but probable because they aren’t our will anymore, but His. Our loves we find are true loves now, because they are no longer selfish, but selfless, our hates are no longer hatred, but are transformed into loving- really loving- our enemy. Our sorrows become gifts of suffering to the One Who Suffered, our joys are His Works, our family, our friends are His Church made our brethren, our children are His Gifts on loan, His way of showing us what love really is.  Our tomorrows no longer ours, and our yesterdays no longer regrets but tools for the Master… He Who Has, He Who Bends, He Who Gives…and we are no longer wretched refuse, but sons and daughters on their way Home.

We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God’s plan for a  purely natural beatitude.

We simply can’t be happy apart from Him, and insofar as we don’t embrace the fullness of His graces for us here on earth, we can’t be completely happy. 

If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God’s work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

What is “grace”? It is God’s own life, shared by us.

What a great definition… and who are we to decide what God’s own life is?  Only HE can say, and He has said, He has left instructions for us in how to share His life… if only we will accept, believe, obey, receive…

What happens when a man loses himself completely in the Divine Life within him? This perfection is only for those who are called the saints – for those rather who are the saints and who live in the light of God alone.

It probably should be noted that ‘saints’ here is little ‘s’ saints… However, that is why we have the big ‘s’ Saints… to show us what it LOOKS like when a man completely loses himself in God… to show us it CAN be done, as a measuring stick for when we, in our pride and vanity, think we are doing pretty good next to the schmuck two doors over.  That said, they are also a great blessing when we are lost in despair, when we think we can go on no longer, when we think it can’t be done. 

We must check the inspirations that come to us in the depths of our own conscience against the revelation that is given to us with divinely certain guarantees by those who have inherited in our midst the place of Christ’s Apostles – by those who speak to us in the Name of Christ and as it were in His own Person. Qui vos audit me audit; qui vos spernit, me spernit.

So often we think we check the inspirations against scripture alone, sola scriptura… but that way lies error.  If it is an inspiration which seems right to us, and pleasant, we can always find a ‘verse’ to ‘verify’ it… and if an inspiration seems too hard, or unpleasant, or if something within us rebels, it is so easy to find an ‘excuse’.  In the end, we can not be completely trusted to hold ourselves accountable and to check truthfully without trying to ‘read’ it the way we prefer.  It is only in checking ourselves against the revelation left for us, in the hands of the authority to which it was entrusted, that we can have any faith for true reckoning.

When it comes to accepting God’s own authority about things that cannot possibly be known in any other way except as revealed by His authority, people consider it insanity to incline their ears and listen.

We are such a stiffnecked people… considering listening to the authority set over us by God to be insanity, and setting up authorities for ourselves which can be swayed with power, and money, and vice. Oh that God’s authority would be esteemed and valued, if only we would turn from our wicked ways and submit instead of setting ourselves up as our own gods, our own authorities… what wickedness could prevail if God’s people would seek His face and submit to His will? and what good can come while we insist on our own way, our own interpretation, our own knowledge, our own understanding… Has He not said lean not unto your own understanding?  Why do we not realize that as the caution it is?  We claim to be acknowledging Him, yet deny His priests, His authority. We insist He is directing our paths, and yet we ARE leaning on our own understanding, we AREN’T aknowledging Him, and so how can He direct our paths?  I have a friend with a heart for unity, who mourns the division in the Body… and I never understood it when we’d sit and talk, and she’d cry… I WANTED to, I sensed that I should understand… but I was protesting still… Now, I have nothing more to protest… and I also mourn the division in the Body and I understand…

Speaking of the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur in a book he had chosen, and the disgust and deception that he felt upon seeing it, he concludes that the very notion of the authority of the Church and the idea of its judgement on anything, even this book…

…immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition.

I have rapidly come to the end of my proverbial rope with the constant ‘What about the Inquisition????”  I know it is a question asked in ignorance and misunderstanding, born of lies and deception, but everything in me cries out in revulsion at the Church being so unfairly judged.  What unbeliever confronted with the faith in a protestant church demands a justification or explanation of the excesses of Henry the VIII or Elizabeth I?  What unbeliever insists they want nothing to do with protestants because at one time they slaughtered their own? No Church but the RC is held to such a standard, and yet, the gates of Hell hath not prevailed against her… she has been scarred and bloodied but she still stands firm and true, guarding the deposit of faith with everything she has and extending more grace than any other church body on earth… and those who claim to love the God who created her are some of her most vicious critics… and I, God forgive me, was once just as guilty. Even the Papal apology in March of 2000 has been ignored and forgotten by those who deny Christ’s Church, and yet they scream for blood over the Inquisition, or the exaggeration they have bought into rather than the truth of what it was, or even the rest of the events of that time.

…while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church.

…what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear.

Speaking of his understanding of the God Christians taught to the world…

I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

Lots to think of in that…

I know many people are, or call themselves, “atheists” simply because they are repelled and offended by statements about God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms which they are not able to interpret and comprehend.  They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they turn away….

What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him.

Further than that it seemed I could not go, for the time being.

How many there are in the same situation! They stand in the stacks of libraries and turn over the pages of St. Thomas’s Summa with a kind of curious reverence.  They talk in their seminars about “Thomas” and “Scotus” and “Augustine” and “Bonaventure” and they are familiar with Maritain and Gilson, and they have read all the poems of Hopkins – and indeed they know more about what is best in the Catholic literary and philosophical tradition than most Catholics ever do on this earth….

…But they never come into the Church.  They stand and starve in the doors of the banquet- the banquet to which they surely realize that they are invited – while those more poor, more stupid, less gifted, less educated, sometimes even less virtuous than they, enter in and are filled at those tremendous tables.

Wow.  He says this so well…. and yet it is so SAD. How hard it is to watch those with so much knowledge stand in the door… and refuse to budge… for whatever reason… So close… and yet so very far away…

…God wanted me to climb back the way I had fallen down.

I have seen this more than once, both in my life and in lives around me.  God gives us second chances… chances to make right decisions where we failed before… and what a treasure it is when we recognize it and make the right choice… what a joy… and what a hideous failing and sorrow when we fail yet again… because sometimes those second failures cost us even more than the first.  Thank you Lord for those chances to ‘do over’… and please God, help me always to recognize them for what they are, and choose wisely the second time.

And when it came time to say the Apostles’ Creed, I stood up and said it, with the rest, hoping within myself that God would give me the grace someday to really believe it. 

Sounds very like ‘Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief’ doesn’t it?

God has willed that we should all depend on one another for our salvation, and all strive together for our own mutual good and our own common salvation. Scripture teaches us that this is especially true in the supernatural order, in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which flows necessarily from Christian teaching on grace.

God uses us, and we, by our choices, either strengthen each other or weaken each other… and each part of the Body which insists on its own way damages the Body of which it claims to be a part. We either work together to assist others to salvation, or we, in our division and insistance on our own personal doctrines, work against that salvation.

All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things. (That is why the whole economy of the Sacraments, for instance, rests, in its material element, upon plain and ordinary things like bread and wine and water and salt and oil.)…. But these things are themselves not enough.

So true… God uses these normal and ordinary things to impart grace, as surely as His Son took on the normal and ordinary flesh to impart grace to us.  However,the bread and wine alone is not enough… it must be consecrated for God’s use in imparting that grace to be anything but ordinary bread and ordinary wine.

The main problem is to fight our way free from subjection to this more or less inferior element, and to reassert the dominance of our mind and will: to vindicate for these faculties, for the spirit as a whole, the freedom of action which it must necessarily have if we are to live like anything but wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces.  And the big conclusion from all fo this was: we must practice prayer and asceticism.

What a bizarre thought *rolls eyes*! Prayer and asceticism??? How many people do you know that actively do these things? Not just prayer mind, but prayer and asceticism, prayer and some active regular form of fasting?  We are so confident in our ‘great piety’ and yet we do not that which Christ did regularly and took for GRANTED THAT WE WOULD DO AS WELL!  “Lord, why did that demon not come out for US?” asked the Apostles?  Can’t you just see His face in your mind’s eye when He replies, “That kind only come through prayer and fasting?”  Like boys, this is Christianity 101… get with the program.  Seriously  motivating and convicting.

…my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification. I was content to accept the latter truth purely as a matter of theory: or at least, to apply it  most vociferously to one passion which  was not strong in myself, and did not need to be mortified: that of anger, hatred, while neglecting the ones that really needed to be checked, like gluttony and lust.

Ouch.  So many don’t recognize gluttony and lust etc as things that should be mortified… I know I didn’t… and it is stunning how it is the most difficult and innocuous things to conquer, and yet not so stunning how it is those very things which most people ignore and joke about…  just look at any group of people in America and you’ll see that most of us are guilty of at least one of those… I have been struggling with the sin of gluttony (mostly due to comfort eating) for some time.  It is not an easy battle, but slowly it is being won… not that you can tell by looking at me… the weight is coming off so very slowly… it is harder to rectify the consequences than it is to get here in the first place.

While discussing Blake, Merton quotes him saying…

…having discovered Dante, [Blake] came in contact, through him, with Catholicism, which [Blake] described as the only religion that really taught the love of God.

The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings – by which man becomes one with God.

Beautiful, and true.  Love is an act of the will. It is not simply a feeling.  That lie has cheapened love into something unrecognizable.

A devout Hindu friend told him that…

‘all Christian missionaries… suffered from this big drawback: they lived too well, too comfortably.’

and…

Christians don’t know what asceticism means.

We, who should know… do not… and others know it.  Yet I am the chief of sinners in this regard… I want to do more than I do…  this too is convicting.

Hearing of the Hindu friend’s experiences in other Churches, sometimes having been asked to preach from the pulpit, Merton says…

But I was interested to hear [the Hindu's] opinion of the Catholics.  They, of course, had not invited him to preach in their pulpits: but he had gone into a few Catholic churches out of curiosity. He told me that these were the only ones in which he really felt that people were praying. 

It was only there that religion seemed to have achieved any degree of vitality, among us, as far as he could see. It was only to Catholics that the love of God seemed to be a matter of real concern, something that struck deep in their natures, not merely pious speculation and sentiment.

Ok, OUCH. I know that hurt. Heck, it hurt even when I’m only now a FORMER protestant. However, to hear the perspective of a Hindu, someone completely outside… interesting.

This same Hindu gave Merton advice…

“There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians.  You should read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ.” Of course I had heard of both of them: but he was speaking as if he took it for granted that most people in American had no diea that such books ever existed… “Yes, you must read those books.” It was not often that he spoke with this kind of emphasis…  So now [after having turned to the east] I was told that I ought to turn to the Christian tradition, to St. Augustine – and told by a Hindu monk!

I can’t help but laugh at this.  God does have a sense of humor.

Everybody makes fun of virtue, which now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent.

…virtue- without which there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.

So true… without virtue, there is no happiness… only emptiness.

Now we get to the good stuff… or so I thought… but you can see I found plenty of good stuff before this point!!! lol…

I began to desire to dedicate my life to God, to His service. The notion was still vague and obscure, and it was ludicrously impractical in the sense that I was already dreaming of the mystical union when I did not even keep the simplest rudiments off the moral law.

We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility.

WHOA… the WHOLE BOOK was worth reading for that ONE SENTENCE!!! Sorry, had to stop myself there to say that. He continues immediately thereafter…

The desires of the flesh- and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgement, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire.

And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions.  There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.

The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace. I was still in the precarious position of being my own guide and my own interpreter of grace. It is a wonder I ever got to the harbor at all!

Ok, I was practically jumping up and down screaming at this passage. He is SO RIGHT! I have found this true in my own life and yet have been unable to articulate it so well as Merton does here.  This is SO PREVALENT in Christianity today… so tragically prevalent.

On going to Mass…

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious  of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfil a religious obligation, not a human one.  For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a protestant church were people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.

On hearing a young man discuss a point of Catholic Doctrine…

How clear and solid the doctrine was: for behind those words you felt the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition.

On De Fide Divina…

If you believed it, you would receive light to grasp it, to understand it in some measure. if you did not believe it, you would never understand: it would never be anything but scandal or folly.

Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you  must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgement into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor. 

Above all, eat your daily Bread without which you cannot live, and come to know Christ Whose Life feeds you in the Host, and He will give you a taste of joys and delights that transcend  anything you have ever experienced before, and which will make the transition easy.

Amen.  I have been called out of Egypt, to a new land. I no longer live as I lived there… Behold, all things are made new…

The saints are full of Christ in the plenitude of His Kingly and Divine power: and they are conscious of it, and they give themselves to Him, that He may exercise His power through their smallest and seemingly most insignificant acts, for the salvation of the world.

This is saints little ‘s’… and it is true. It is very like this… and He delights in showing His works to us as we hide ourselves in His Face.