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Reflections upon Mary, the woman

The-Veiled-Virgin-is-a-Carrara-marble-statue-carved-in-Rome-by-Italian-sculptor-Giovanni-Strazza

Because, doing your actions (devotion) by our Blessed Lady, as this practice teaches, you abandon your own intentions and operations, although good and known, to lose yourself, so to speak, in the intentions of the Blessed Virgin, although they are unknown. Thus you enter by participation into the sublimity of her intentions, which are so pure that she gives more glory to God by the least of her actions—for example, in twirling her distaff or pointing her needle—than St Lawrence by his cruel martyrdom on the gridiron, or even all the saints by their heroic actions put together. It was thus that, during her sojourn here below, she acquired such an unspeakable aggregate of graces and merits that it were easier to count the stars of the firmament, the drops of water in the sea or the grains of sand upon its shore, than her merits and graces –St Louis de Montfort ‘True Devotion to Mary’

What did you do here upon the earth Holy Mother that produced such splendid praise? It was more than birthing Jesus. It must concern the way you lived your life throughout your life. How did you conduct yourself? Weren’t there people who used the name of your Son improperly that upset you? There had to be times you were right, yet others perceived you being wrong? Justifiable anger, did it overwhelm you even once? Enduring the suffering of Our Savior at the hands of the Roman soldiers how could your heart not be filled with anger and hate? During His passion, did you feel only sorrow, love and compassion for your Son? How did you do it Holy Mother? Your Son, Our Lord and Savior is Divine, the Son of God, yet you were absolutely human. How could you control your emotions and feelings so peacefully?  Did prayer come naturally, purely, and easily to you?  Didn’t others frustrate you through their imperfections? Weren’t there days you were slothful in thought and action? Times you wanted to curse God? Did not the praises of Elizabeth and Simeon fill you with even the slightest arrogance? Ohh Holy Mother listen to the pleading of one devoted to you, one who fails so miserably time after time. How did you do it Holy Mother? There had to be a time when pride overwhelmed you when you contemplated who you carried within your womb? How could you not feel righteous in raising yourself in your own eyes above others? You the truest of contemplatives, how did you know how to conduct yourself as you did? Who instructed you?  Didn’t being so powerful in prayer elevate your self-esteem? False humility never plagued you? Playing the profound mystic for others never tempted you? Being admired as holy and wise never attracted you?  You never lusted after sweet consolations? The wonders you experienced how could you not be self-absorbed? How could you be in constant acquiescence to Holy will? Did you not want to teach everyone, being right about all matters regarding your Son? Did the apostles comprehend the immensity of your majesty while enjoying your company? Did the beloved disciple John recognize you would be crowned in heaven, granted reign as Queen above all queens? I know so little about your earthly life. While alive, I see you as such a simple, quiet, yet commanding woman, one who garnered profound respect with a whisper, working efficaciously behind the scenes, while never dominating the thoughts of your compatriots.  How could you be so simple, you amidst the most complex of lives? As my Holy Mother, I know you so well.  I love you so dearly. You have always been so near. How blessed it is to have you always above me, sheltering me with your loving mantle. I have never doubted your presence, even during my darkest hours.

Our Lady’s words to Juan Diego: Let not your heart be disturbed. Am I not here, who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything.

On the day after the feast of the Assumption he was again shown great joy in the court of heaven. No one was trying to gain entrance who arrived unworthy. As the servant was trying to get in, a young man came up, grabbed him by the hand, and said, “Friend, you do not belong in there at this time. Stay outside. You have incurred guilt, and before you may hear the heavenly singing, you have to make up for your misdeed”. And he led him somewhere down a crooked path into a hole under the earth. There it was dark and barren and wretched.  He could go neither this way nor that, like someone who lies captive where he can see neither sun nor moon. Finding this painful, he began to sigh and feel miserable because of his imprisonment. Soon the messenger came and asked how he was doing. “Poorly, poorly,” he replied. Then the young man said to him, “You should know that the exalted Queen of heaven is angry with you for that failing because of which you are a prisoner here”. The servant became frightened and said, “Alas, wretched me! How have I offended her?” He said, “She is angry with you because you do not like to preach about her on her feast days. And yesterday on her great feast day you refused, against the wish of your superior, to preach about her.” The servant replied, “Dear friend and lord, I think she is worthy of such great honor that I feel unequal to the task, and I leave it to the more mature and worthy (friars) because it seems to me that they can preach about her more worthily than a poor man like me”. The youth said, “Know that she would like you to do it, that she considers it a pleasing service from you. And so do not refuse anymore”. The servant began to weep and said to the young man, “Dear messenger, reconcile me to the pure Mother. I give you my word that it will never happen again”. The young man looked at him amicably, consoled him kindly, and led him out of the prison and back home. He said, “I could tell by the look on the friendly face of the Queen of heaven and by her words when she speaks of you that she forgives you. She is no longer angry with you and wants always to be like a mother to you”. Henry Suso “The Exemplar, The Life of The Servant”

Ann ease with the fighting nature. I truly had a premonition. I was concerned. Do not be so obstinate. I will approach you after mass calmly, holding to the Eucharist. If all is good say ‘do not worry’. If you struggle, please speak with me.

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The Essence of Prayer Perfected

This divine knowledge of God never deals with particular things. This sublime knowledge can be received only by a person who has arrived at union with God, for it is itself that very union. It consists in a certain touch of the divinity produced in the soul, and thus it is God Himself who is experienced and tasted there… –John of the Cross

St John of the Cross Adoring

St John of the Cross Adoring

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Holy Week and Easter reflections

Now during the octave of Easter, the time of the resurrected Christ, in remembrance of the time before the assumption of Christ, I want to reflect upon the previous week.  I have a holiday from work, enjoying a day of leisure.

My personal life has undergone drastic changes, the exhuming of what I once recognized as my spiritual partner included. The differences between us became conflicting to the point of absolute abrasiveness.  My mind went to a story that shaped me as a young man, Herman Hesse’s ‘Demain’.  In the turn of the century novel, the idea of outgrowing someone spiritually is tenderly dealt with when Sinclair becomes aware it is proper to leave his scholarly, musically skilled, instructor/confidant Pistorius behind.  Overcoming sentimentality, overcoming the urge to devalue himself for the sake of protecting another, he realizes in order to mature he must leave behind one who no longer can supplement growth.

Identifying the coarse faults of another, with a nonjudgmental calm cool compassionate heart and mind, consequences must be rendered.  Paths must be divided and God must remain forefront.  I think of my time leaving the friary.  I undertook matters in an improper manner, simply and stealthily slipping out through a back door, yet there was consultation with a spiritual guide before the abrupt act.  A time of parting, detaching is necessary when spiritual intimacy creates stagnation and corruption.  When temporal brokenness supersedes holiness matters must be confronted.

I am a passionate man.  I embrace the fact, aspiring for my violent nature to strengthen my resolve to grow spiritually.  I have lost all concern for justification, parting from another with a mind of righteousness means nothing.  I remember speaking to a friar after leaving the friary, the sincere brother attempting to figure out exactly what happen.  I imparted the message for the brother not to concern himself, to think of me as a bad guy.  If resolution existed within making me a bad guy, I was willing to assume the role.  I cared nothing for advancing matters to the point I needed to walk about as if everything meant nothing to me due to the fact I was so righteous.  I understood the ignorance of being immersed within a conflict and not to assume personal responsibility and accountability.  To distance myself from a conflict while subtly portraying a clear conscience is an abomination, selfish and shallow, unembracing, lacking the penetrating vision of Christ.  I advance embracing the emptiness of offering sorrow to God, pleading for discernment, offering myself as an unworthy servant.  Scripture speaks, beckoning truth, Ecclesiastes: But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hate man does not know. Everything before them is vanity,

The Hesse novel ‘Demian’ was important to my formation as a young man.  Words and sentences in the novel etched themselves in my consciousness, at the time of reading seemingly alive as absorbed.  Yet Hesse was an author I learned to move past.  There was a self-consciousness to his writing, a lack of interior self-effacing truth that did not allow me to view him as enduring.  Lacking profound humility, he was a man always in his own way.  Important, essential, I had to move through him to penetrate Christ.  Overall, Hesse increased myself, thus not allowing an increase in Christ.  Older, I find influences that properly decrease myself through strengthening and confidence produce the cleansing of the vessel necessary for the filling of God.

Pistorius stagnated for several reasons, one of them being his attachment to scholarly learning simply for the thrill of accumulating knowledge, the ‘sweet consolation’ of being a learned man meant everything to him.  The increasing of himself took priority.  My former spiritual partner lost her way in pop psychology.  The concentrating upon childhood, previous, experiences to a point of accumulated years and obsessive mental warping.  Never establishing the discipline of an authentic prayer life, she attempted to vanquish demons through psychological introspection.  A woman of remarkable intellect and strength, she never really stood a chance of going further with the implementation of inferior ways.  Unable to open her heart and mind through prayer, never nurturing charity, she has been abandoned to a life dominated by self-will, arrogance and delusion desperately sheltering the core of her being.  Today, I felt her in mass, determined to form and shape everything into victory for herself, enduring mass lacking the ability to commune with God, a soul existing impurely through self-will.   She never stood a chance of truly turning her life and will over to the care of God by attempting to do everything herself, unable to surrender through, with, and in prayer.

God is unique.  During mass today, a couple sat directly behind me.  Their presence prayerfully joining me in participating, Christian fellowship, no agendas existing, self-consciousness and self-awareness humbled.  The previous week they sat next to me as we were asked to represent disciples for the celebratory washing of feet.  I ran into the woman at an Italian deli also the previous week, waving to her husband as he sat in the car waiting for his bride.  Sincerely surrendering to faith, hope, and charity, God provides people of like minds.  It is the fundamental structure of the Church.  We do not go about our spiritual life alone.  We do not shun those of the Church, while embracing secular individuals for entertainment.  We must treat one another through the example of Christ: Father, I honor the Sacred Heart of Your Son, brutally corrupted by my deeds, yet symbol of love’s triumph, pledge to all that I am called to be.  Teach me to see Christ in all the lives that I touch, offering to My Lord living worship through love-filled service to my brothers and sisters.

Herman Hesse’s “Demian’

We were lying before the fire…he was holding forth about mysteries and forms of religion, which he was studying, and whose potentialities for the future preoccupied him. All this seemed to me odd and eclectic and not of vital importance; there was something vaguely pedagogical about it; it sounded like tedious research among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt a repugnance for his whole manner, for this cult of mythologies, this game of mosaics he was playing with secondhand modes of belief. “Pistorius, ” I said suddenly in a fit of malice that both surprised and frightened me. “You ought to tell me one of your dreams again sometime, a real dream, one that you’ve had at night. What you’re telling me there is all so–so damned antiquarian”.  He had never heard me speak like that before and at the same moment I realized with a flash of shame and horror that the arrow I had shot at him, that had pierced his heart, had come from his own armory: I was now flinging back at him reproaches that on occasion he had directed against himself… He fell silent at once. I looked at him with dread in my heart and saw him turning terribly pale. After a long pregnant pause he placed fresh wood on the fire and said in a quiet voice: “You’re right, Sinclair, you’re a clever boy. I’ll spare you the antiquarian stuff from now on”.  He spoke very calmly but it was obvious he was hurt. What had I done? I wanted to say something encouraging to him, implore his forgiveness, assure him of my love and my deep gratitude. Touching words came to mind–but I could not utter them. I just lay there gazing into the fire and kept silent. He, too, kept silent and so we lay while the fire dwindled, and with each dying flame I felt something beautiful, intimate irrevocably burn low and become evanescent. “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me”.  I said finally with a very forced and clipped voice. The stupid, meaningless words fell mechanically from my lips as if I were reading from a magazine serial. “I quite understand”.  Pistorius said softly. “You’re right”.  I waited. Then he went on slowly: “Inasmuch as one person can be right against another”.  No, no! I’m wrong, a voice screamed inside me–but I could not say anything. I knew that with my few words I had put my finger on his essential weakness, his affliction and wound. I had touched the spot where he most mistrusted himself. His ideal way “antiquarian”, he was seeking in the past, he was a romantic. And suddenly I realized deeply within me: what Pistorius had been and given to me was precisely what he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that would transcend and leave even him, the leader, behind. God knows how one happens to say something like that. I had not meant it all that maliciously, had had no idea of the havoc I would create. I had uttered something the implications of which I had been unaware of at the moment of speaking. I had succumbed to a weak, rather witty but malicious impulse and it had become fate. I had committed a trivial and careless act of brutality which he regarded as a judgment. How much I wished then that he become enraged, defend himself, and berate me! He did nothing of the kind–I had to do all of that myself. He would have smiled if he could have, and the fact that he found it impossible was the surest proof of how deeply I had wounded him. By accepting this blow so quietly, from me, his impudent and ungrateful pupil, by keeping silent and admitting that I had been right, by acknowledging my words as his fate, he made me detest myself and increased my indiscretion even more. When I had hit out I had thought I would strike a tough, well-armed man–he turned out to be a quiet, passive, defenseless creature who surrendered without protest. For a long time we stayed in front of the dying fire, in which each glowing shape, each writhing twig reminded me of our rich hours and increased the guilty awareness of my indebtedness to Pistorius. Finally I could bear it no longer. I got up and left. I stood a long time in front of the door to his room, a long time on the dark stairway, and even longer outside his house waiting to hear if he would follow me.

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A work in formation

Farewell discourse, Savior and disciples, walking, talking, traversing, not understanding, preparing,
Unification, many rooms in the Father’s house, Heaven adore, the plenty a splendor, eternity endeavor,
‘I have been with you for so long’, desolation not an option, mortification, accepting commandments, denying desire, failing,
Father, the Holy Spirit, the Word, obedience a haven, resource love, failures fading, a step back forward,
The passion consumes, while presuming nothing, advance slowly, intensely intent, crawling advent,
Do few things, yet do them well, listen, wait, confess, pray profusely, sweat yet not blood, communion, breathe, be still amid a beating heart,
‘Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid’,
Attending mass, attentive, aware,
‘Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day’,
‘In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety’,
‘As we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ’.

Receiving in the House of God, an unworthy servant blossoms into a friend,
In the world, inevitably disturbed, shaken, wolves in sheep clothing prey, leering, pridefully lusting, circumambulating, hunting while picking fresh meat from their teeth, yearning to be, hungry denial,
Needing, false teachers assume power, insincere profession, leading astray, pretense, exercising judgment betrayed, falling snowflakes into the fire, identity lost within damnation, misery adores company,
‘Rise let us go hence’, true teacher prevail, call in a clear voice, winged words in silence, usurp incessant noise, cessation, liberate identity, integrity graced,
Perfection a process, propagate, proliferate, prune the fruit in order to produce, multiply, magnify magnificence, sweet consolation not, a bitter reward,
Stand alone in order to fall, independence generate generational enslavement, movement of wickedness, self-will run riot, dominoes falling, affecting, an island despair produces waves,
Going out, weakness bemoans the need to assert, dependence creates abundant freedom, together a man speaks properly into himself, broadening understanding, decreasing to increase, a prisoner released from confinement,
Rise above the world, abiding in Christ, death and joy to be full, welcoming, inviting time, open, honest, and willing, preserve peace, the smiling heart of a suffering unity,
Friend and foe, charity prevail, the highest perfection, to be hated demands no reciprocation, suffocate wrath, dealing unselfishly, unassuming, natural and pure, simply discreet,
Be strong in unified individuality, proper identity, self-effacing, be a kind pretty face, comprehend, know who Christ is, know who I am, love others, behave, be good, holiness attain, reveal from within,
Abandon appetite attachment to advancing aspiration, banish brilliance, castaway cleverness, ‘A servant is not greater than his master’,
Humility the ultimate tool, the weapon of mass destruction, the annihilating force, the commingling of faith, hope, and charity, be humble, embrace criticism,
No reward, persecution presume, no accolades, adulate suffering, offering woe at the foot of the cross, witness bloody wounds, infuse blood and water,

(To be expanded throughout Holy Week)

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Imitation of Christ

Christ, is superior to all other men in that he is the head of Christianity, just as one speaks of the head of a man in relation to his body, as it is written that all those whom he has foreordained, whom he has prepared, would become of the same form as the image of God’s Son, that he is the firstborn among many others. Hence, whoever wants to achieve a true return and become a son in Christ, let him in true detachment turn to Him and away from self. –Henry Suso

Crucifix

Crucifix

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Unrequited Expression

Sound and vision, harsh realities assailing, dismal moon shadows cast unrepentant, undefined images, the heart,
A harp, Nick Cave play a piano song for me, reverberate sadness, create space within distance, nowhere stand, abstain,
Tell a glaring tale of a starring man wounded walking, debilitating distraction, unable to reach beneath, pluck the cello, pull the trigger, the badlands
The startling totality of dead wanting, longing, hypnotic chord strumming, desiring hollowness, echoed knocking, a grain falling, waving past the nonreflecting, a banjo twang, a toothless grin, a retart incestuous and vain, all things beautiful,
Lord, I want to live a life full, the world a wonder, arms around wrapping, adventure, satiation, a stallion, a thousand drums beating,
Beyond banality, beyond lacking, beyond attracting, beyond detachment, beyond profound expression,
Beyond being right, beyond being wrong, beyond creating, beyond being, emotionally asunder, an intentional blunder, a heart broken,
A kiss of recognition, existential and underground, emotionally capitulating, amiss a mass of intentions gone awry, mistaken identity, the knot tightens,
Capturing it all in a look of resignation unseen by all, false impressions, rejection of rejection, a palpable negation, identity tossed aside,
Silently and still, efficacious, waiting upon my Man,
An aftermath, vast experiencing, knowing not needing to conceive, finality, darkness, concluding discourse, finishing fate,
My Man paining upon a cross, forgiving all cost, pierced, flooding blood and water, holy wine, holy water,
He saunters past undetected, striding, standing beyond seven feet tall, nose to the wind, focus afar, breathing slow, sackcloth and ashes,
Listen, He approaches,
Divine mercy, He loves,
Resurrected, assumption, sitting He waits,
The Eucharist.

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Perfection discipline, practice greater

St Dorotheus says, that nothing so much helps us to advance in virtue, and to acquire peace and tranquility of mind, as the opposing and resisting of our own will… ‘You are going somewhere…and you have a great mind to turn about and look at something on the way; overcome your curiosity, and do not look at it. You are in conversation—something occurs to your mind, and you think that the saying of it would make you pass for a wit; let it alone, say nothing… By chance you cast your eyes upon something brought into the house that is new, and you wish to know who brought it; ask not who did so. You see a stranger enter—curiosity urges you to know who he is, whence he comes, whither he goes, and for what business; mortify yourself by making no inquiry after him’….this exercise very much helps to produce a habit of mortifying our will; because if we accustom ourselves to renounce it in these small things, we shall the sooner be able to deprive ourselves of greater. –St Alphonsus Rodriguez ‘Christian Perfection’

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