Archives

Jan292021

Hidden self-love

After ruthlessly denouncing the subtle self-love that separates us from God, the pride that eats away at our hearts and vitiates our best actions, Giustiniani again shows that the only true path of return to God is humility, the humility that was perfectly exemplified in Christ.

Our hidden self-love brings forth all manner of illusions: ecstasies, visions, revelations, prophecies, abstinences impossible to human strength; the experience of Christ’s sufferings, the wound in the side, the stigmata, knowledge acquired without study, speaking in strange languages, the desire to be damned for the love of Christ; extraordinary humiliations, sublime confessions, fasting from all food except the blessed Eucharist, vigils beyond human strength, unduly prolonged prayer, knowledge of the secrets of hearts, miracles, and cures. All these marvels are, in some instances, nothing but the work of him who said, and would like to induce us to say: “I shall be like the Most High. I shall do what He does….” I think that these saints under the influence of Lucifer are much more numerous, or rather much better known and more admired by the world, than the true saints, who do nothing in order to be known by the world, but stay hidden. Christ’s true servants love God totally and not themselves. So sheltered are they by humility that they are known to God and not to men.  –Blessed Paul Giustiniani

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Jan282021

Know Thyself

Lord Jesus, who are the light without which nothing is enlightened, who alone see the darkness that surrounds me, I dare not say: give me the light to see Your light. It is enough for me that You make me see my darkness. I am so blind that I cannot see it. I even take it for light. I am so deeply in error that I do not perceive my error: I mistake falsehood for truth. Death has advanced upon me so far that, wounded and all covered with sores, I no longer feel my pain and my wounds. Bring me back to myself: for in my misery I have strayed not only from You but also from myself; I have become a stranger to myself. Bring me back to myself in order that I may then go towards You. Make me know my darkness, so that I may then look at the Light: if I do not know my own misery, I will not have recourse to Your mercy. Because of my sins I am reduced to nothing in the sight of Your Majesty: grant that I may be reduced to nothing in my own eyes also; grant that I may despise myself completely, that I may gauge the extent of my impurity. I am nothing in Your sight until I am brought to nothing in my own eyes. I cannot arise from my wretchedness as long as I do not see it. And so I do not say to You with Moses: “Show Thyself to me”; I only say to You: “Show me to myself.”  –Paul Giustiniani

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Jan272021

Nothing to Show

There is nothing I have to show you,
To impress, nor to make things new,
Minimalist negation, the silence of hooves,
Pounding, a parade of ghosts, a mental procession,
I broke my back dancing to the edge of the world, babe,
I don’t want to see anything, nor meet anyone,
No refined dinners. No concerts or shows.
No personalities. No global celebrities.
No worldly entertainment. No. No. No.
Repudiation providing a path, detachment, abrogation,
I fell, bruised knees, countless times bumbling,
Meditating, I tried to frame what I saw,
With my fingers forming, no shape nor despair,
Theological virtues: faith, hope, and love,
Cascading, an image of the saint I was not,
Fearfully reciting, surpassing unspoken words, usurping,
Nervous, left to recesses lacking imagination, a multitude of voids,
A bridge forming, built upon breaths, leading away,
Waves coming and going, an undercurrent dispatching to the deep,
Abandonment, disconnected, blocked,  concrete walls dissolving,
What’s that? You can’t hear my whisper?
I can’t speak up, the blinding light,
Darkness enveloping, too much light, I can’t see,
Saturation, a blending, all things converging into rejection,
NO! I will sit still. Aware. I will be still.
Doing nothing, nothing to be done.
Here I am! Allowing, immovable for now,
Answering the quiet, the repeating undefined questions,
I am numb. I am dumb.
Everyone else is clever. I don’t mind,
The shop unattended, motionless,
Within, the mobile spins to its collision.
A life, an identity, a beginning, an end,

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Jan262021

Contemplative life

…Most men find their balance in life through action or creation. A totally contemplative life demands a special grace and a special faithfulness. It also requires a maturity, a richness of soul not often found among the converts. At least this seems to be the case from our experience. But to contemplate, in the first sense of the word, i.e. to gaze upon God while staying immobile, repose and purity being both the condition and the result of such a gaze, is truly speaking the real life, the eternal life for which we have been created.” –Carthusian spirituality

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Jan252021

A Call for Concentration

“Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,” he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.

“Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,” he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.

He saw himself submitting to the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold his tongue?

In any case peace was for ever lost. How in fact was he to rally and recover when he was obliged to dwell in a place of passage, in a soul open to all winds, visited by a crowd of public thoughts? His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew on him.

“No……….

JK Huysmans ‘Enroute’

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Jan222021

Eastern Orthodox axiom

St. John of Damascus writes:

“St Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, recounts in his ‘Spiritual Garden’ that Abbot Theodore Aeliotes told of a holy hermit on the Mount of Olives, who was much troubled by the demon of fornication.

One day when he was sorely tempted, the old man began to complain bitterly, “when will you let me alone? be gone from me! you and I have grown old together.”

He said this to the devil. The devil then appeared to him, saying, “Swear to me that you will keep what I am about to tell you to yourself, and I will not trouble you any longer.”

And the old man swore it. Then the devil said to him, “Do not venerate this Icon, and I will cease to harass you.”

The Icon in question represented Our Lady, the holy Theotokos, bearing in her arms our Lord Jesus Christ.

You see what those who forbid the veneration of Icons hate in reality, and whose instruments they are. The demon of fornication strove to prevent the veneration of Our Lady’s Icon rather than to tempt.

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