Monthly Archives: January 2017

Jan182017

Virtue before contemplation

“Perhaps you also desire,” he says, “this happy repose of contemplation, and you do well. Only be sure not to forget the flowers which should adorn the bed of the Bridegroom. The practice of virtues ought to precede contemplation repose as the flower precedes the fruit. Renounce your own will. If your soul is covered with the weeds and nettles of disobedience, how can He give Himself unreservedly to you. Who loves obedience to such a degree that he preferred death to the loss of it? There’s some here whom I cannot understand. They have troubled us by their singularities, grieved us by their impatience, despised us by their obstinacy; all day long they are a source of annoyance to their brother and a menace to the peace of the house. And nevertheless they have the impudence, by insistent prayer, to invite God of all purity to take His repose in their sin soiled hearts! No, your bed is not decorated with flowers, it is malodorous. Set about purifying your conscience from every defilement of anger, murmuring, quarreling and envy. Make haste to exclude from your heart whatever you find there opposed to the peace of the community or to the obedience you owe superiors. Then surround yourself with the flowers of every good action, every good desire, and perfume your soul with the sweet scent of the virtues. Whatsoever is true, whatsoever is chaste, whatsoever just, holy, amiable, of good repute, everything that appertains to virtue and discipline meditate on all these things and cultivate them….” Abbot Vitalis Lehodey from ‘Holy Abandonment’ quoting St Bernard of Clairvaux

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Jan172017

Fasting

The Master Cleanse reduces appropriately, stripping my routine of eating, eliminating the entertainment of food.  The clarity and seriousness it brings always impresses.  Fasting proves efficient in strengthening my prayer life.  Shedding is the process advancing into ordinary time.  An emptiness pervades that is welcomed.  Whereas the knee-jerk advice would be not to isolate, I discern a call to isolate.  I scheduled a session with Dr. Nitcha out of obligation to Highland Springs, while remaining convinced it is unnecessary.  My confidence is proper.  My reading has resumed, storytelling central to the interior gathering within exterior and interior removal.  I watched a Russian movie entitled ‘The Island’, the absorbing story of a bizarre orthodox monk who becomes recognized as a holy man, a babbling man able to pierce souls and heal.  The movie opens with an introduction to his deplorable past.  During World War II, working a coal barge, the man is framed unsympathetically, a coward when a German freighter overtakes his barge.  Boarding, German soldiers find the man hiding, buried beneath the coal.  The man begs for his life, crying, and surrendering pathetically.  The Germans demand to know where his captain is.  The man reveals his captain’s hiding place.  His captain is a proud brave man, scolding him for crying and begging for his life.  When the Germans point a pistol to execute the captain he silently stares them down, calmly lighting a cigarette.  The future holy man crawls upon the ground, weeping, pulling at the German’s legs begging for mercy.  The executing German soldier stares down the strong captain, before turning to his weak comrade, throwing him his pistol.  He tells the man who will be a monk to shoot your captain and we will let you live.  Crying and hysterical, he shoots his captain.  His captain falls into the sea.  The mystery begins within a life that becomes singularly and passionately devoted to God.  A strange email arrived last night.  A discalced Carmelite order in Arizona responded to a vocational inquiry I sent them in October.  Many things coalesce, I strive simply for peace.

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Jan172017

Day 3 Our Lady Undoer of Knots

Meditating Mother, Queen of heaven,
In whose hands the treasures of the King are found,
Turn your merciful eyes upon me today.
I entrust into your holy hands this knot in my life,
And all the rancor and resentment it has caused.
I ask Your forgiveness, God the Father, for my sin.
Help me now to forgive all the persons who consciously or unconsciously provoke this knot.
Grant me the grace to forgive myself for provoking this knot.
Only in this way can You undo it.
Before You, dearest Mother, and in the name of Your Son Jesus, my Savior, who has suffered so many offenses,
I lay my burdens before thee, accepting forgiveness, accepting myself,
Granted forgiveness, I forgive those individuals and myself.
Thank you, Mary, Undoer of Knots for undoing the knot of rancor in my heart.
Amen.

Yesterday was day one of fasting, a Master Cleanse engaged for the healing of the body.  I, also, purchased an elliptical machine allowing convenient exercise.  Mind, body, and spirit mortified.  Yesterday’s Gospel reading, a portion.

But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast on that day.
No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak.
If he does, its fullness pulls away,
the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.
Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins”

Gospel of Mark chapter 2

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Jan162017

Mea Culpa

Ethna Carbery

Be pitiful, my God !
No hard-won gifts I bring,
But empty, pleading hands.
To Thee at evening.

Spring came, white browed and young:
I, too, was young with Spring ;
There was a blue, blue heaven
Above a skylark’s wing.

Youth is the time for joy
I cried. it is not met
To mount the heights of toil
With childish feet.

When Summer walked the land
In Passion’s red arrayed,
Under green sweeping boughs
My couch I made.

The noontide heat was sore,
I slept the Summer through;
An angel waked me -“Thou
Hast work to do.”

I rose and saw the sheaves
Upstanding in a row;
The reapers sang Thy praise
While passing to and fro.

My hands were soft with ease,
Long were the Autumn hours;
I left the ripened sheaves
For poppy-flowers.

But lo! now Winter glooms,
And gray is in my hair;
Whither has flown the world
I found so fair?

My patient God, forgive!
Pray Thy pardon sweet,
I lay a lonely heart
Before Thy feet.

The poet is a woman who died young, at the age of thirty-five, yet the humble world weary tone of the poem reflects the mind of one wizened with aged.  I find the third stanza interesting.  Youth being a time of joy, yet none is met.  I think of my young adulthood, a time I envisioned to be of grand adventure and thrill seeking–experience and elation, yet in truth it was a horrid struggle, severe confusion and aimless wandering.

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Jan152017

Sunday reflection

I celebrated Mass today at St Paul Shrine; coffee and leftovers from the Jubilee celebration of Mother Superior from the day before enjoyed afterwards.  I have been considering pulling away from the Shrine again, not attending yesterday as I did not spiritually need a social experience.  The interior needs tending and St Dominic satisfied.  Today, during coffee, croissant sandwiches, and potato salad fellowship proved subtly meaningful.  Someone has been gossiping at the Shrine. I detected the matter, yet more revealing was the response.  Some I did not expect anything from expressed quiet and dignified gratitude in sharing conversation.  I am pleased with my reputation, grateful for the respect I have garnered.  I stand humbly upon my prayer life and interaction with others.  I perceive a hardness entrenched within my soul at this time.  The Christmas season explosion has altered.  It will take time to settle.  Nonsense will not be tolerated and I will be confident and self-reliant piecing this together.  To pull away from the Shrine will be mandated strictly upon an inability to celebrate Mass with the Rescuer.  The complications and self-consciousness slight everything spiritual and natural, reducing matters to a selfish lower level—delusional and demented.  I demand more.  I have no doubt, hopeful and loving, grace will provide.  In fact, for the purpose of this blog, the Rescuer will be identified as Poison from henceforth.  The time of recusing has been destroyed—the dawning of new days commences.  During post-Adoration Mass thoughts struck relevant: If you cannot meet my strength, I cannot show you my weakness.  If you cannot meet my strength and I offer my weakness, you will feast upon my weakness, maneuvering to embolden yourself.  My weakness cannot be your strength, your means of control, if you cannot meet my strength.  Supernaturally, I relate the matter to the difference between Divine and evil interaction.  Divine interaction compassionately tenders, allowing human weakness to become an attribute, identifying strength, promoting growth, while influencing on the level of overcoming.  Evil interaction seeks its own good, arrogantly using weakness to seize control, to dominate and rule; temptation, whispers, and subtle intuitions exploit human weakness.  Where Divine interaction wisely recognizes the greater good, evil interaction pursues authority.  Poison has been gossiping.  The bizarre totality confounds.  The discernment of whether to continue at the Shrine becomes intricate.  Today is day one of a Novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots.

Virgin Mary, Mother of fair love,
Mother who never refuses to come to the aid of a child in need,
Mother whose hands never cease to serve your beloved children
because they are moved by the divine love
and immense mercy that exists in your heart,
cast your compassionate eyes upon me
and see the snarl of knots that exist in my life.
You know very well how desperate I am,
my pain and how I am bound by these knots.
Mary, Mother to whom God entrusted the undoing of the knots in the lives of His children,
I entrust into your hands the ribbon of my life.
No one, not even the evil one himself, can take it away from your precious care.
In your hands there is no knot that cannot be undone.
Powerful Mother, by your grace and intercessory power
with Your Son and My Liberator, Jesus,
take into your hands today this knot
I beg you to undo it for the glory of God,
Once and for all, you are my hope.
O my Lady, you are the only consolation God gives me,
The fortification of my feeble strength,
The enrichment of my destitution and with Christ the freedom from my chains.
Hear my plea.
Keep me, guide me, protect me, o safe refuge!
Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for me

Mary Undoer of Knots

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Jan152017

A night at the movies

I am amazed sometimes at the reflective nature of visual stimulation from the big screen; moving images, vistas and wonder, storytelling and contemplation. The movie I saw last night astounded in its beginning. The panoramic scenes from the sky drawing down to the story of a young Hindu Indian boy—cute and entrancing, innocent and engaging—became metaphysical in the sense of a greater story of being lost, a naïve childish soul whirled away from his home. Based upon a true story, the young boy ventures, unwarranted and against the will of his mother, away from his home with his older brother, hoping to join his brother in an elderly adventure. Seeking to experience life with his brother beyond his time, the boy becomes exhausted, falling asleep upon a train station bench. Waking, his brother nowhere in sight—in truth his brother struck and killed by a train, the boy wanders the train station searching, eventually falling asleep once again, this time upon a train, a decommissioned train waiting to travel across India. The boy is brought forth from sleep by the rustling of the moving train. Alone, he is locked in the train as it travels a thousand plus kilometers away from his home, into Bengali land and a foreign language he cannot understand. Every scene with the vivacious child is precious, expertly filmed and presented. The ending becomes too melodramatic, relying too much upon emotion and tears, yet the beginning of the movie proved to be a remarkable cinematic experience.

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Jan142017

Refreshment

Early Saturday morning rising proved fruitful in peace rendering. I attended Mass and Holy Hour at St Dominic—promoter of the Rosary. The quiet and prayerful start of the day proved necessary, allowing a return home to deep sleep. Christo-centric, the devout service devoid of complexities, religious practice rooted in necessity, settled nicely into a homage, a home and foundation to build upon. ‘Day by day, stone by stone, build your secret slowly’.

Borrowed prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, pierce my soul with Your love,
So that I may always long for You alone,
Who are the bread of angels,
And the fulfillment of the soul’s deepest desires.
May my heart always hunger and feed upon You,
So that my soul may be filled with the sweetness of Your presence.
May my soul thirst for You,
Who are the source of life, wisdom, knowledge,
Light and all riches of God our Father.
May I always seek and find You,
Think upon You, speak about You,
And do all things for honor and glory of Your Holy Name.
Be always my only hope, my peace, my refuge and my help,
In Whom my heart is rooted,
So that I may never be separated from You.
Amen.

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