Stay In Touch -Have I not proven to you that I Am in the saving sinners business? -Jesus
Friday, March 28, 2014
Happy Catholic*: Well Said: Meaning for Your Life
Happy Catholic*: Well Said: Meaning for Your Life: Don't invent a meaning for your life. It is there. Find it. Dr. Viktor Frankl This makes me think of Mother Theresa saying, "Find ...
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Crimea to Kiev...Bloodlands Revisited: We Must Pray
Crimea to Kiev, "the conflict is a military phase"
The Point.fr - Published - Changed the
[Crimée : pour Kiev, "le conflit passe à une phase militaire"]
The prime minister said Tuesday that Russian troops had "started shooting" at the Ukrainian soldiers and described their actions as "war crimes."
Monday, March 17, 2014
Bend Sinister
Bend Sinister
posted by D.G. Meyers...Excerpt:
The University president appeals to Krug’s fond memories of school days with the dictator. “You are the victim of a sentimental delusion,” the philosopher answers. Krug remembers the dictator as the Toad. That’s what all the boys called him at school. “What I and the Toad hoard en fait souvenirs d’enfance [in terms of childhood memories] is the habit I had of sitting upon his face.”
The funniest parts of the book are the first chapters, in which Krug resists the petty tyranny (and stupidity) of Ekwilist soldiers by means of a voluble individualism. One band of soldiers permits him to cross a bridge, but the soldiers on the other side force him back across to obtain a signature on his pass. When he returns, the first band fails to recognize him:
“Do you live on the bridge?” asked the fat soldier.
“No,” said Krug. “Do try to understand. C’est simple comme boujour, as Pietro would say. They sent me back because they had no evidence that you let me pass. From a formal point of view I am not on the bridge at all.”
“He may have climbed up from a barge,” said a dubious voice.
“No, no,” said Krug. “I not bargee-bargee. You still do not understand. I am going to put it as simply as possible. They of the solar side saw heliocentrically what you tellurians saw geocentrically, and unless these two aspects are somehow combined, I, the visualized object, must keep shuttling in the universal night.”
The comedy does not last long, although it gives out before Krug’s resistance. The Ekwilists increase the pressure on the philosopher, arresting his friends and colleagues. The dictator himself summons him to an interview. Krug demands to know why his friends have been arrested:
posted by D.G. Meyers...Excerpt:
The University president appeals to Krug’s fond memories of school days with the dictator. “You are the victim of a sentimental delusion,” the philosopher answers. Krug remembers the dictator as the Toad. That’s what all the boys called him at school. “What I and the Toad hoard en fait souvenirs d’enfance [in terms of childhood memories] is the habit I had of sitting upon his face.”
The funniest parts of the book are the first chapters, in which Krug resists the petty tyranny (and stupidity) of Ekwilist soldiers by means of a voluble individualism. One band of soldiers permits him to cross a bridge, but the soldiers on the other side force him back across to obtain a signature on his pass. When he returns, the first band fails to recognize him:
“Do you live on the bridge?” asked the fat soldier.
“No,” said Krug. “Do try to understand. C’est simple comme boujour, as Pietro would say. They sent me back because they had no evidence that you let me pass. From a formal point of view I am not on the bridge at all.”
“He may have climbed up from a barge,” said a dubious voice.
“No, no,” said Krug. “I not bargee-bargee. You still do not understand. I am going to put it as simply as possible. They of the solar side saw heliocentrically what you tellurians saw geocentrically, and unless these two aspects are somehow combined, I, the visualized object, must keep shuttling in the universal night.”
The comedy does not last long, although it gives out before Krug’s resistance. The Ekwilists increase the pressure on the philosopher, arresting his friends and colleagues. The dictator himself summons him to an interview. Krug demands to know why his friends have been arrested:
“All we want of you is that little part where the handle is.”
“There is none,” cried Krug and hit his side of the table with his fist.
“I beseech you to be careful. The walls are full of camouflaged holes, each one with a rifle which is trained upon you. Please, do not gesticulate. They are jumpy today. It’s the weather. This gray menstratum.”
“If,” said Krug, “you cannot leave me and my friends in peace, then let them and me go abroad. It would save you a world of trouble."
“What is it exactly you have against my government?”
“I am not in the least interested in your government. What I resent is your attempt to make me interested in it. Leave me alone.”
Thus the State, “bloated and dangerously divine,” must get him to capitulate, or destroy him.
he continues, the tragedy has not changed “the relationship, the bond, the agreement” which Krug has entered into. “Individual lives are insecure,” he says; “but we guarantee the immortality of the State.” In response, Krug plunges into insanity. His freedom of thought is taken away... ~Vladimir Nabakov
Thus the State, “bloated and dangerously divine,” must get him to capitulate, or destroy him.
he continues, the tragedy has not changed “the relationship, the bond, the agreement” which Krug has entered into. “Individual lives are insecure,” he says; “but we guarantee the immortality of the State.” In response, Krug plunges into insanity. His freedom of thought is taken away... ~Vladimir Nabakov
Addendum:
Leo Tolstoy
In the passage below from The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy contemplates a local governor, on a train with a small battalion of soldiers, on their way to forcibly remove peasant families from a plot of forest claimed by a rich landowner— ‘a young landowner,’ as Tolstoy writes, ‘who had an income
of one hundred thousand, to gain three thousand rubles more by stealing a forest from a whole community of cold and famished peasants, to spend it, in two or three weeks in the saloons of Moscow, Petersburg, or Paris…’
'The train I met on the 9th of September going with soldiers, guns, cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner in the possession of a small forest which he had taken from the starving peasants, which they were in the direst need of, and he was in no need of at all, was a striking proof of how men are capable of doing deeds directly opposed to their principles and their conscience without perceiving it.
The special train consisted of one first-class carriage for the governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage vans crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in their clean new uniforms, were standing about in groups or sitting swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage vans. Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and laughing, others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the platform to drink some water from a tub there, and when they met the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious faces as though they were doing something of the greatest importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed by them, and then set off running still more merrily, stamping their heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of healthy, good-natured young fellows, traveling in lively company.
They were going to assist at the murder of their fathers or grandfathers just as if they were going on a party of pleasure, or at any rate on some quite ordinary business.
The same impression was produced by the well-dressed functionaries and officers who were scattered about the platform and in the first-class carriage. At a table covered with bottles was sitting the governor, who was responsible for the whole expedition, dressed in his half-military uniform and eating something while he chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he had met, as though the business he was upon was of so simple and ordinary a character that it could not disturb his serenity and his interest in the change of weather.
At a little distance from the table sat the general of the police. He was not taking any refreshment, and had an impenetrable bored expression, as though he were weary of the formalities to be gone through. On all sides officers were bustling noisily about in their red uniforms trimmed with gold; one sat at a table finishing his bottle of beer, another stood at the buffet eating a cake, and brushing the crumbs off his uniform, threw down his money with a self-confident air; another was sauntering before the carriages of our train, staring at the faces of the women.
All these men who were going to murder or to torture the famishing and defenseless creatures who provide them their sustenance had the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty, and some were even proud, were “glorying” in what they were doing.
What is the meaning of it?
All these people are within half an hour of reaching the place where, in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants, they may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive, to murder or torture, as was done inOrel
beings, their brothers. And they see the place and time approaching with untroubled serenity.
To say that all these government officials, officers, and soldiers do not know what is before them is impossible, for they are prepared for it. The governor must have given directions about the rods, the officials must have sent an order for them, purchased them, and entered the item in their accounts. The military officers have given and received orders about cartridges. They all know that they are going to torture, perhaps to kill, their famishing fellow-creatures, and that they must set to work within an hour.
To say, as is usually said, and as they would themselves repeat, that they are acting from conviction of the necessity for supporting the state organization, would be a mistake. For in the first place, these men have probably never even thought about state organization and the necessity of it; in the second place, they cannot possibly be convinced that the act in which they are taking part will tend to support rather than to ruin the state; and thirdly, in reality the majority, if not all, of these men, far from ever sacrificing their own pleasure or tranquillity to support the state, never let slip an opportunity of profiting at the expense of the state in every way they can increase their own pleasure and ease. So that they are not acting thus for the sake of the abstract principle of the state.
What is the meaning of it?
Yet I know all these men. If I don’t know all of them personally, I know their characters pretty nearly, their past, and their way of thinking. They certainly all have mothers, some of them wives and children. They are certainly for the most part good, kind, even tender-hearted fellows, who hate every sort of cruelty, not to speak of murder; many of them would not kill or hurt an animal.
Moreover, they are all professed Christians and regard all violence directed against the defenseless as base and disgraceful.
Certainly not one of them would be capable in everyday life, for his own personal profit, of doing a hundredth part of what the Governor of Orel did.
Every one of them would be insulted at the supposition that he was capable of doing anything of the kind in private life.
And yet they are within half an hour of reaching the place where they may be reduced to the inevitable necessity of committing this crime.
What is the meaning of it?’
of one hundred thousand, to gain three thousand rubles more by stealing a forest from a whole community of cold and famished peasants, to spend it, in two or three weeks in the saloons of Moscow, Petersburg, or Paris…’
'The train I met on the 9th of September going with soldiers, guns, cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner in the possession of a small forest which he had taken from the starving peasants, which they were in the direst need of, and he was in no need of at all, was a striking proof of how men are capable of doing deeds directly opposed to their principles and their conscience without perceiving it.
The special train consisted of one first-class carriage for the governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage vans crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in their clean new uniforms, were standing about in groups or sitting swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage vans. Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and laughing, others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the platform to drink some water from a tub there, and when they met the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious faces as though they were doing something of the greatest importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed by them, and then set off running still more merrily, stamping their heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of healthy, good-natured young fellows, traveling in lively company.
They were going to assist at the murder of their fathers or grandfathers just as if they were going on a party of pleasure, or at any rate on some quite ordinary business.
The same impression was produced by the well-dressed functionaries and officers who were scattered about the platform and in the first-class carriage. At a table covered with bottles was sitting the governor, who was responsible for the whole expedition, dressed in his half-military uniform and eating something while he chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he had met, as though the business he was upon was of so simple and ordinary a character that it could not disturb his serenity and his interest in the change of weather.
At a little distance from the table sat the general of the police. He was not taking any refreshment, and had an impenetrable bored expression, as though he were weary of the formalities to be gone through. On all sides officers were bustling noisily about in their red uniforms trimmed with gold; one sat at a table finishing his bottle of beer, another stood at the buffet eating a cake, and brushing the crumbs off his uniform, threw down his money with a self-confident air; another was sauntering before the carriages of our train, staring at the faces of the women.
All these men who were going to murder or to torture the famishing and defenseless creatures who provide them their sustenance had the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty, and some were even proud, were “glorying” in what they were doing.
What is the meaning of it?
All these people are within half an hour of reaching the place where, in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants, they may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive, to murder or torture, as was done in
beings, their brothers. And they see the place and time approaching with untroubled serenity.
To say that all these government officials, officers, and soldiers do not know what is before them is impossible, for they are prepared for it. The governor must have given directions about the rods, the officials must have sent an order for them, purchased them, and entered the item in their accounts. The military officers have given and received orders about cartridges. They all know that they are going to torture, perhaps to kill, their famishing fellow-creatures, and that they must set to work within an hour.
To say, as is usually said, and as they would themselves repeat, that they are acting from conviction of the necessity for supporting the state organization, would be a mistake. For in the first place, these men have probably never even thought about state organization and the necessity of it; in the second place, they cannot possibly be convinced that the act in which they are taking part will tend to support rather than to ruin the state; and thirdly, in reality the majority, if not all, of these men, far from ever sacrificing their own pleasure or tranquillity to support the state, never let slip an opportunity of profiting at the expense of the state in every way they can increase their own pleasure and ease. So that they are not acting thus for the sake of the abstract principle of the state.
What is the meaning of it?
Yet I know all these men. If I don’t know all of them personally, I know their characters pretty nearly, their past, and their way of thinking. They certainly all have mothers, some of them wives and children. They are certainly for the most part good, kind, even tender-hearted fellows, who hate every sort of cruelty, not to speak of murder; many of them would not kill or hurt an animal.
Moreover, they are all professed Christians and regard all violence directed against the defenseless as base and disgraceful.
Certainly not one of them would be capable in everyday life, for his own personal profit, of doing a hundredth part of what the Governor of Orel did.
Every one of them would be insulted at the supposition that he was capable of doing anything of the kind in private life.
And yet they are within half an hour of reaching the place where they may be reduced to the inevitable necessity of committing this crime.
What is the meaning of it?’
—from The Kingdom of God is Within You (first
published in German in 1894; translated here from the Russian by Constance Garnett)
"I stared at the beast's hands...the left bloody and filled ...the right bloody and filled...as its engorging turned sickening and brutal..."
published in German in 1894; translated here from the Russian by Constance Garnett)
"I stared at the beast's hands...the left bloody and filled ...the right bloody and filled...as its engorging turned sickening and brutal..."
"The Deer's Cry", or St. Patrick's Breastplate, sung by Angelina, (EWTN)
St. Patrick Ora Pro Nobis! Save the Irish!
Love is....
I ARISE TODAY
I arise today, through the strength of heaven;
light of sun, radiance of moon,
splendor of fire, speed of lightning,
swiftness of wind, depth of the sea,
stability of earth, firmness of rock.
I arise today, through God’s strength to pilot me;
God’s eye to look before me, God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me,
from all who shall wish me ill, afar and a-near
alone and in a multitude.
Against every cruel merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise, Christ to shield me.
Christ in the heart of every one who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks of me,
I arise today.
Addendum:
“Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.”
But do 'I' choose to do so? This is the real question,non?
"If you see your brother sick, or ill, or.............and you care for him/her/'them/...then that is done to ME...
~Jesus Christ
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Friday, March 14, 2014
Sometimes Fathers.....'Do You Forgive Me?'...
Easing the burden
St. Patrick, St. Brigid, St. Columcille
Ora pro nobis!
Excerpt:
...My son knows he is supposed to ask for forgiveness, just as his brother knows that sooner or later he will be expected to say yes.
He knows to say it because he knows he is supposed to forgive. What is on the lips and in the heart can be day and night, and so one challenge a parent faces is to encourage right action without engendering falsity. Like when the offending brother’s apology is as the litany of a foreign tongue: I’msorrydoyouforgiveme.
There is work to do in their hearts, in mine. And so my children ask and grant forgiveness. Sometimes they even mean it...
find myself coming repeatedly to a hard reality, for myself, for them. If God is to be believed in and therefore believed, then forgiveness is conditional. We are forgiven as we forgive. It is jarring, when I stare it in the face, especially when I consider the grudges I am prone to harbor in the darkened places of my heart.
Perhaps even more jarring is the implication of this condition, which is that our every trespass against another jeopardizes his soul. We heap burdens on others. How many of us heap the greatest burdens on those we claim to love the most?
I try to explain this to my sons, not because I believe they are steering one another toward the abyss with their occasional trespasses, but because I want them to comprehend the awful power they will carry with them all their days.
I once heard someone say that if we Christians really believe in salvation and damnation, then more people ought to approach hell with our hands gripping their ankles. I used to think that meant offering them clever words about God. More and more I think it means the much harder and more radical work of actually living out what we say we believe. All that business about loving our neighbors, and giving alms to those in need, and humbling ourselves.
I think about this especially during this season of Lent. To repent is to turn away, to desire to undo the wrong. But how to take back that boulder on my brother’s shoulder, the boulder I placed there when I lied to him, cut him with my words, gave him the passive scorn of my neglect?
There is no path, is there, but to beg for forgiveness? I’m still learning how. Still working to graft the humility it requires onto a hardened heart. And working, at the same time to help humility take root in the hearts of my children.
My hope is that their heart’s ground becomes more fertile as they realize that we are not, each of us, working out his personal salvation alone. The Scottish pastor John Watson put it this way:
“This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.”
Do not add to the weight under which your brother labors, Watson was saying, for you know what a load it is to bear. I hope my children learn to forgive, and to beg it. Our lives are intertwined. My struggle affects yours, for better or worse. Do you forgive me?
~Tony Woodlief, Sand In the Gears
...When was the last time we said that to our brethren?...
..................... &...................
...sometimes I am afraid, because they always seem shocked, and maybe they really didn’t know what evil had taken root in their families, which means I may not know, nor you either.
We fear they will be slaughtered sheep and we fear they will become wolves, and we feel helpless.
Some of us celebrated the capture of a Boston bomber because now we get to kill him. We celebrate because our yearning for vengeance runs deep, and our desire to know that we are not ourselves monsters runs deeper. That boy is a monster and so is the one who murdered all those children in Connecticut and so is the one who gunned down people in a Colorado movie theater. Something in them is broken and they are not human.
We need to believe this. We need to kiss our children as they sleep, and know they are normal, that it’s the severely broken who do unspeakable things, and our own can’t be broken like that because even now we would know, we would peer into their eyes and see the deadness there and we would know.
Instead we see their eyes filled up with love and so they can’t be monsters, not now or ever, because monsters could never have loved anyone, not even their own mothers and fathers.
Their mothers and fathers. What hell must it be, to gaze at a picture of your child, and know it would have been better had you strangled him in his crib? What hell to wonder what you did wrong, to wonder if he was always broken or if it was you who broke him, to wonder if this blood is on your hands, if the fires of hell burn hot for the child you wrongly raised?
What hell, what hell, and if all this doesn’t keep you on your knees for your children then you haven’t considered what world awaits them, how it hungers to make them wolves and slaughtered sheep in equal measure.
This world hungers, and we parents weep, and we pray that our pleading is heard, that if there is something in us that can be altered so they can be spared, God will alter it; that if our flesh might be torn in place of theirs, God might rend it; that if sheep must be slain, God will pass over our own, because the cost is more than we can bear.
For years, his demons made the boy tear his own clothes, hurl himself into the fire, leap into the sea’s deep waters. For years, his father kept him close, no doubt despite those who hissed in his ear: “This is because of your sin.” Religious experts couldn’t help the boy, priests couldn’t save the boy. That boy was helpless and without hope and still his father persevered, even where others would have let him perish, or would have bound him in a graveyard like the Gadarenes.
Then comes this roving, raving miracle-worker, and the father says to him: “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” The father is weary and wary. He has seen miracle-workers before.
“If you can believe,” Christ replies, “all things are possible to him who believes.”
If. Who hasn’t lain awake at night, tormented by this if? We want to believe there is a good God who can spare our children the horrors of these recent days. Yet this same God allowed horrors for those parents, for their children. The gulf of if is wider than faith, sometimes.
“Lord,” cries the father, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
This is every parent, each of us believing our children will be safe, each of us struggling against the fear they will be anything but safe. We believe and we disbelieve and we pray the kingdom of heaven comes soon, for it belongs to such as these, and we who are no longer children have made such a wreck of it. We pray he will remember our children, that he will save them in spite of us. We pray in belief and we pray against disbelief, and we pray that he is listening. ~Tony Woodlief, Sand in the Gears
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Abbey-Roads: St. John of God ... a troubled life.
Abbey-Roads: St. John of God ... a troubled life.: At one time the Infant Jesus appeared to him and gave him the name, John of God and bid him to go to Granada. Until that period in his ...
...His crazy period is interesting - reminding me of the Russian 'fool for Christ' vocation. Mental instability isn't always that unusual in the lives of the saints and others who may go through intense conversion experiences...
...His crazy period is interesting - reminding me of the Russian 'fool for Christ' vocation. Mental instability isn't always that unusual in the lives of the saints and others who may go through intense conversion experiences...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)