All is good.  God is good.  Work is good.  I am evaluating everything.  What happen was important on all levels.  I will write tonight after work.

I met with my Hospice organizer this morning, a wonderful experience.  Communication is excellent.  The overall sense that God is guiding my every breath becomes apparent.  I have found my calling, amazed by the totality of my volunteering efforts.  Socially–spiritually and worldly-it presents fulfillment.  I am told I am a hot commodity being a male, opportunities exist involving attendance to minor league baseball games, sporting events, accompanying boys stricken with terminal illness who need an older male to guide and provide fellowship.  I almost asked her ‘are you serious?  I can enjoy such splendor?  How much do I have to pay?’ It is nothing, only God asking me to be of service.  I feel absolutely blessed.  I want to share a letter from a friend delivered during mass yesterday.

Mary’s month of the Holy Rosary 2015

James,

Thank you for the kindness you have shown me by inviting me to the Poor Clare’s auction and brunch.  Not to mention our lunches at Aladdin’s.  You must allow me to treat you to lunch sometimes Jim.  The Lord is working through you in so many wonderful ways.  He’s always putting you right where He needs you to be.  And you are always doing just what He needs you to do.  May you continue to reach out to those who need a helping hand a piece of your caring, listening heart…your prayers and your LOVE.  Thank you for the friendship you have offered.  I pray that I may be worthy to be your friend and a friend of Jesus.  I pray that God gives me the grace and courage to overcome my pride and embrace the virtue of humility.  I pray that you Jim are given the gift of patience.  In God’s time may you receive your mission and share your heart with those in need.  May you continue to spend time in silence before your Eucharistic Lord adoring Him, praising Him and thanking Him.  May you continue to grow close to Our Brother Jesus and His Holy Mother Mary.  Remember angels and saints surround you.

I eat my lunch, big meal of the day before work, at St Paul Shrine, after mass, a Rosary, and adoration. While eating, I have lately been having wonderful discussions with the zany nervous and obsessive mother of fourteen sons and daughters, the one whose beautiful daughter and grandchildren were so special for me the other week. During work today, thoughts occurred regarding the woman I knew I wanted to post. The woman confesses continually. She is so scrupulous it makes her sick. Scrupulosity is her greatest downfall she declares. Contemplating, I determined she is wrong. Without a doubt she is scrupulous, overly concerned about the tiniest details, overthinking every situation, however her scrupulosity is turned in upon herself. Her demands are interior, focused upon her perfection. She will stammer on and on about her faults, her failings troubling her greatly. She is sincere and authentic in her self-diagnosis, absolutely not utilizing dramatics driven by false humility. Her convictions are strong, lacking no ulterior hidden motives.

Here is an imitation of words she might spout: “Ohh, I am so prideful I should be ashamed to even be speaking to you. I spend the vast majority of my time running around for my grandchildren, and all I can do is think to myself how great I am for helping my children so much. There I go and do good things, only to ruin them with my nauseating pride. I’ll be walking to my car thinking about nothing but what a great person I am. That’s how I am. Give me any reason to be prideful and sure enough I will think I am the cat’s pajamas. Instead of thanking God for all the good things in my life, when I am alone: I worry, becoming anxious and crazy, filled with fear, thinking ohh God what is the matter with me, I am not grateful for anything, all I can do is worry and find fault in the world, trying to use all my devotion to You God as a wedge, trying to ply favor from You because I am sure I give more to You than others. I even ruin all my devotion to You, God, and my attending of daily mass by allowing my efforts to make me think I am something special. I do some religious reading, only to think I am the smartest person ever to breathe. That is how I am. I must make God so angry. I am a mess when I am home alone, fretting and worrying about everything—should I do this for this child, or that for the oldest child—completely discombobulated on what to do with myself, filled with fear and anxiety. Then I realize what I am doing, thinking all these terrible unholy thoughts, which then only makes me petrified by the fact I am so scrupulous, over-thinking everything about the spiritual life. When I should be joyful, I am only a nervous wreck. That’s about the time, I start pacing around my home understanding I am pretty crazy. Ohhh no, now look at me talking crazy to you. I can’t keep my mouth shut. I talk and talk and talk. I have to seek out father and see if he will grant me a confession for being unable to tame my tongue.” Then she might grow quiet, looking helpless, painfully stricken by her faults, more than a bit crazy in appearance, unequivocally adorable to me.

I have determined her scrupulosity is rare. Others suffering from the ailment focus their insight and attention upon others, criticizing brothers and sisters, the world and the Church. Their obsessive attention to detail, their overt concern with righteousness, is used to batter people, to rattle the Church, to be politically right, or war against the secular world. Their scrupulosity garners them control, personally empowering them to rule over even the hierarchy of the Church.  Being right means everything.  Exteriorly self-righteous, they scrutinize and judge the tiniest and largest infractions of the world, creating division and judgement, seeking the end of the world, not even granting immunity to the Church. They are obedient to none, or possibly a select few honoring their scrupulosity as holiness, creating superior circles of social interacting. A dialog line came to mind, the strangest of sources and situations, a line from the movie ‘Silence of the Lambs’, when Clarise Starling defends herself from the intensely personal attack by the insane Dr. Hannibal Lecter. She says to her imprisoned irrefutably confident antagonist: You see a lot don’t you doctor. Why don’t you turn that high-powered perception at yourself and tell us what you see, or, maybe you’re afraid to.

Anyway, I just wanted to present the idea that scrupulosity can be an interior or exterior shortcoming.  My friend from St Paul Shrine, I am convinced, is unique in being so interior with her harshness, while also being so kind to the world, never saying anything negative about anyone, never for a second would she dream of criticizing the Church.  I adore the mother of fourteen.  She never fails to bring a smile to my face.  Tomorrow, I will gift her my Teresa of Avila Spanish television mini-series.  I thoroughly enjoy listening to her ramble on and on, mostly informing me about her faults. I have also noticed something slightly odd. She has beautiful brown hair, granting the pleasant impression she was an attractive woman in her younger days.

I posted a new page of photos from a pleasant daytrip to Wellington, Ohio, visiting an elk farm, concluding the day with a surprisingly hospitable priest, Father James Reymann, showing me around the local parish St Patrick. Father was quite the character declaring I Had the privilege of enjoying the company of the oldest priest in the Cleveland diocese. He spoke knowingly of St Paul Shrine, familiar with the Poor Clares and Franciscans, telling me of younger years teaching at the Cleveland seminary. He knew intimate details of Sister Mary Thomas’ artistic endeavors, informing me he knew the parish in Pittsburg she was performing her latest painting for. Father told me a charming story about the St Patrick statue carved on the stump of an ash tree that was overcome with disease on their property grounds. The artist is a local man, a high school dropout who struggled through life before finding his calling as a chainsaw sculptor. He now does statues throughout the United States, a local celebrity. Father possessed a wonderful sense of humor, truly a people loving eccentric. At least three times, he asked me ‘how long will you be staying, I am getting really tired’. I said father I have been heading for the door for quite a while, you are the one who keeps starting new stories’. He laughed often and from the depths of his soul. His bulldog (fitting matters after viewing the bull elks) continued the jovial camaraderie by running at me and striking me with his paws. The large bulldog was quite strong, and though friendly, his playfulness was a bit rough. Father only laughed, informing me how much his dog liked me. It was the fifth bulldog he owned.

My silence is the Lord
I listen, His silence speaks at all times.
When I listen not, my hearing is filled with words
and my tongue takes to rambling

My resting place is the Lord
a hideaway on a mountain height.
The lonely seek and find Him.

My resting place is the Lord,
a low valley by the runlet.
All humble steps lead there.

“Turn in to my place and sit quietly.
Drink from my stream and my vintage.
Cast off your shoes, discard your hardships
and listen to my evening song:

“I seek a heart that is simple
With the peaceful I spread my tent.
I will wash your feet and dry them,
My silence will be their perfume.

“In your quiet steps I will follow
None will know whence we come and where we go.
To the world you will be my silence,
In your passing they will hear Me.

“In your absence I will be present.
Though you die, I who live am yours—
I live as yours forever”.

Paul Quenon, OCSO

The most difficult purifications for man are perhaps the purifications of the memory and imagination.  These dislodge him from the past and the future where he always has a tendency to take refuge as an escape from the sorrows of the present hour, and as a way of bursting out of his limits even while remaining still human.  Thus he seeks to expand his spiritual domain and to satisfy, at least by way of extension, his thirst for the infinite.  ‘Fire of Contemplation’

Father Thomas Philippe in his books ‘Fire of Contemplation’ and ‘The Contemplative Life’ expands and elevates.  I want to quickly touch on several thoughts this morning during reading.  The above quote is remarkably perceptive when applied to contemplatives with a creative and romantic nature.  The artist is one who tends to rend himself away from the moment, sentimentally and passionately divested in the past or immense possibilities fantasized within the future.  The current moment–living constantly before the gaze of God: simple, still and quiet—is unknown, while an intense bursting forth occurs.  The artist lives a life based upon the ideal that a creative effort reigns supreme over life itself.  An expression means more than the expresser; the artist envisions himself an eternal creator.  Moments are bombastic explosions of manifestation and experience.  Existentially struggling with the world, emotion, vices, and addictions of pride; the modern artist gravitates toward the dramatic and overwhelming.  The divinity within is granted absurd, often vile, yet magnificent glimpses of a supernatural reality which allows the surpassing of daily life, reality extinguished through demented usurping, all while drawing the artist away from the Godliness of the moment, entrenching him dependently about his past and what might come.  I am convinced it is why so many artist fall victim to substance abuse.  Spiritually trending, intensely attracted to the Divine, they force themselves ridiculously upon God. Virtue, behavior, and accountability mean nothing.  The deepest moments the modern artist accomplishes expresses a brutal honesty, a stripping of pride and ego, exposing the decrepit nature of themselves, establishing a self-knowledge of extreme human lacking.  However that self-knowledge is two-fold in Satanic nature.  First that self-knowledge can go no deeper, falling short of truth.  It is unable to reveal the truth of Christ.  His death and resurrection being a salvific act of love and mercy.  We are not just sinners.  We are true children of God, loved and forgiven.  The second existing wickedness is the fact that within the denouncing of one’s self through a powerful artistic expression, the creation itself, the artwork, addicts and becomes the focus of the artist’s attention.  The artist becomes addicted to his own work, pride rears its ugly head, demanding the artist observe himself as someone special, gifted beyond the normal realm, an individual of unique calling able to live beyond the conceptions of his brother and sisters.  No matter how well intended, the delusion draws the artist away from virtue.  The self-perceived genius, or artist of merit, accepts nothing exist greater than his own world vision.  The delusion, the forceful denying of truth, creates over-sensitivity, defensiveness, and self-absorption of various deranging kinds.  Few artist will possess the ability to live stable, emotionally mature lives, lives that are a source of faith, hope, and charity for those intimate in their lives.  Chaos and destruction, possibly suicide, result as consequence.

Continuing on with Father Thomas Philippe.

The great problem of spiritual persons, their constant and sometimes anguishing concern, is to keep their interior life intact, maintain its integrity and its unity in the midst of the most varied activities which will always continue in human life…..we shall then see the universality of action which must always enter into our lives as wayfarers….  It is not talents of mind nor even magnificent virtues that are the most necessary, but rather humility, obedience, mildness, patience, and all the Gospel virtues that the poor and the little ones practice (anawim) more easily then do the great and the rich of this world.  These virtues, by reason of the littleness and poverty of their objects are within reach of all…The interior life, being entirely the work of the Holy Spirit, can embrace the whole of reality….In the present moment, so poor and limited on its earthly side, but so rich with eternity on the side of Heaven, he (the contemplative) can join with all parts of time and all dimensions of space.