From Darkness To Light: My Life In Christ

on lust

2012-02-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

While at work today I noticed a small student newspaper sitting on a countertop with some strange yet revealing articles on the cover. One was about one, possibly two public masturbators running amok around town and the othwe was about what has come to be know simply as "the pill." Two articles right on the cover of a student newspaper and both had to deal in some way or another with this cultures obsession with venereal pleasure. I can't say I should be surprised but it was still sort of shocking.

The one that really got me thinking was the article article about the public masturbators. That is just downright bizarre and scary. It immediately made me think about lust and how powerful it is and how some people are really still in it's demonic grip so much that they literally can't help themselves. All I can imagine is this guy so overpowered by lust after being stimulated by the sexual imagery that is everywhere today and that is pretty much promoted as normal and a human right to indulge in today that he is literally turned into a zombie that is on autopilot whose mind is telling him one thing and one thing only--get the biggest sexual rush out of this as you can and do it quickly. As soon as it's over he feels shame, remorse and downright disgust with himself but the urges are so powerful he is soon enough doing it again and again and again, a prisoner to his urges and conflicted inside between the conditioning he has from the culture that says all sexual acts are good no matter what except for rape and his conscience which is telling him through shame and remorse that he is sick and needs help. This conflict runs deep and is tearing him apart inside, making him basically turn into two people on a certain level.

As a young man who grew up with little to no real guidance in this perverse culture of death and erotic filth I too fell into what is called "self abuse", pornography, gawking at young women etc for years. The only thing that has helped me make a break with all of this is frequent confession, attendance at Mass every Sunday and sometimes on weekdays, worthy reception of Holy Communion at least once a week provided I've confessed or have no mortal sins on my conscience, being properly enrolled in the Brown Scapular Confraternity, daily rosaries, much prayer and a serious attempt to keep custody of the eyes. What I've found is that these sins of lust are almost impossible to fight off if you are looking at women at all with anything but chaste intentions and even then with the completely immodest fashions most women wear today even that is dangerous. In short what I've learned is that you have to pray, fight, have recourse to the sacraments and really turn away from your environment in order to beat this. It is EXTREMELY difficult and if you do not fight with all your might and make use of all the graces God gives you failure is absolutely certain.

And honestly, if you are fighting this do not even allow yourself to entertain lustful thoughts or images in your heart for even a fraction of a second. Don't be scrupulous about it but don't indulge, ever. Call upon the Precious Blood, St. Michael, our Lady, St. Maria Goretti, etc. immediatly or start trying to bring into your mind images of our Lord's Passion to get your mind off these things. Lustful acts start out as thought or suggestions. Cut them off and you will be well on the way to being free of the acts themselves. Also call upon your guardian angel to purify your memory and guard the door to your thoughts and imagination. This is warfare for your soul here and must be taken seriously.

I have found that the more I really struggle in this turning away and trying to live chaste and celibate and act on the graces the Lord gives me I am happy and more in control of my life. I know what it feels like to be in the grip of lust and it is not fun. There is so much pain, guilt, disgust and remorse in it, not to mention mortal sin which kills the supernatural life in the soul and makes one worthy of eternal hellfire if not repented of in the confessional or by some stroke of extraordinary grace, in an act of perfect contrition which no Catholic would wish to presume upon.

All I can say is perhaps I should pray a full 15 decade rosary for whoever this public masturbator is. We can sit and laugh at it or brush it aside as just a punk kid acting his age but it is so much more than that. This kid could move on to rape and maybe even murder. You know Ted Bundy that serial killer said in his final interview that pornography eventually led to his horrific crimes. This guy is probably deeply suffering somewhere and literally can't control himself. And who in this culture, this sick culture of perversion and insatiable desire for venereal pleasure, will pray for him, will reach out to him? It is the grace of God that he needs to turn away from this frightening disease of lust. Heck this whole culture is in need of a massive dose of grace to turn away from this evil.

Finally, do not ever look down on people who suffer from this. The only reason you can abstain is because God has not withdrawn His grace from you. He could withdraw His hand and allow you to fall into these sins. So many people in this culture are without God, without the Church, without the sacraments, surrounded by the permissive filth in the media in in the culture at large and without any kind of hope. Those of us who know what it is like to deal with these things must never turn away from these others who are suffering. Our task is to pray as much as we can for them and keep reminding ourselves that we could always, should we get haughty about our own lives, fall back into them, perhaps deeper then we did in the past.

lately

2012-02-01T15:43:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been feeling really drawn to the priesthood for some reason. I have no real desire to offer the Novus Ordo Missae but to offer the Traditional Latin Mass and to be a spiritual father to a small parish somewhere. I have always wanted to be a monk but the priesthood had never really occured to me until recently but the more I think about it the more it starts to sound appealing. I have always been a quiet sensitive and hidden type of person so who knows if the priesthood is a wise choice for me, or perhaps it is what God wants for me and it will get me out of my own head. I actually do have a soft heart for others and wish to help them but I'm not the active type at all, I pray for them. It would be wonderful to be able to offer Holy Mass for a suffering world, to console and absolve sinners in the Confessional in the name of Christ and to visit the sick and the dying, bringing Holy Viaticum to dying Catholics and sending them off to purgatory, perhaps heaven if they have lived saintly lives. I can't see being a secular psychologist simply trying to bring people back to Freuds "ordinary misery" but a psychologist of the soul bringing the healing of Christ to souls starving for His grace and peace.

I know what it is like to be alone because of my personality and ever since entering the Church I have struggled greatly through much prayer and confession to live a life free from sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments so that part doesn't bother me either. I'm already 30 years old so time is ticking but lately I feel called to this, either to the priesthood or to the monastery, maybe even the priesthood in a monastery somewhere.
Like I said, I want to offer the Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and be a priest in a small parish that strives to live a Catholic life the way things were before Vatican II.

A priest doesn't seem like he could be a spiritual father in the Novus Ordo since the laity have been given so much power and authority and even stand in the sanctuary during Mass. I would never want to allow unconsecrated hands to touch the Holy Eucharist. It is sad that priests can no longer really be spiritual fathers and be the sole ones to feed their flock as long as modernism and feminism rock certain sectors of the Church. In the old days one could get a good solid orthodox seminary education in most diocesan seminaries but today it seems like that is not true. I have heard horror stories about what is taught in many diocesan seminaries these days and don't wish to brave them, much less to eventually gradutate, become ordained and find myself assigned to a parish church that looks like a barren puritan chapel with hordes of little old ladies and girls that demand to stand in the sanctuary and act like priests.

If you read this then say a rosary for me or have a priest offer Mass for me so that I may be granted the grace to know my path and to act when I find it.

drivel

2012-01-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

One of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is the ambiguous verbiage that comes out in the Church regarding Christian Unity. Today its as if churchmen can't simply say what the Church for almost 2000 years prior to Vatican II always said, namely, unity already exists in the Catholic Church and the goal of any so called "ecumenism" is really to bring all of those estranged from her safely back into her as well as to convert and baptize those who have never been members. The Catholic Church never taught that unity doesn't exist and that there is to be some ecumenical superchurch that will appear at the end up time. Unity ALREADY exists and those outside the Church do not share in it, period, close the book.

It is truly sad when these successors of the Apostles simply speak in the vague manner of politicians about, well, about nearly everything. Part of why the Church is in such disarray is because it seems like almost no one except for traditionalists are actually willing to speak freely and clearly about what the Church always taught about practically everything imaginable. These shepherds are failing their duty to uphold the teachings of the Church and to pass them on. It profits no one to give people vague sounding drivel in the name of human respect. There is no salvation outside the Church and even if you grant "baptism of desire" there is no way of knowing who if anyone actually receives it. To pretend that heresy and schism is OK today in the name of ecumenism is downright evil and a sin against Charity of the highest order.

The new "week of prayer for Christian Unity" is a joke. If you look at the old prayers for the octave of the Chair of St. Peter all you find are beautiful charitable prayers about the Churches desire for the return to the only ark of salvation all those--including lapsed Catholics--who for one reason or another are estranged from her. Mark my words the Church will continue to rot and fade into the dustbin of history as long as this post Vatican II charade of vague drivel continues. People laugh at the Church today because in so many ways she appears to no longer actually teach anything at all, especially when that teaching is coming from some Vatican prelate or bishop. Drivel, drivel and more drivel. No one, I repeat NO ONE is fooled by this charade who actually knows his faith. It's time to stop. We ought to pray earnestly, not just for the conversion of those outside the Church, but for the conversion for those inside the Church as well, especially those who hold high ranking positions who are failing miserably in their God given duties to teach and sanctify and bear witness to the Catholic Faith.

peace in remaining Catholic

2012-01-11T18:28:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve been trying to delve more into prayer and the reception of the sacraments. Between the Latin Mass, the Rosary and Confession I am kept sane. I really mean it. The Faith has become my life, my refuge, my safe harbor in a storm tossed sea of ambiguity and immorality in the culture at large. Despite the trials of faith in Rome our Lord has allowed me to undergo for His own glory and my own strengthening this journey has been one of much joy. The more I contemplate the various mysteries of the Faith and try to deepen my understanding the more I feel a sense of inner peace that anchors me below the waves that crash around me in my day to day life. There are anxieties and uncertainties and worries for the future, disappointments and the like, how could there not be? But despite all that there is something that anchors me, or should I say Someone.

Jesus Christ is real and so is our Lady, these things I really know on a deep level that I cannot explain. Christ is not a fairy tale and the promises of our Lady attached to the Rosary really work. You know when I was going through the motions of becoming an Eastern Schismatic I had actually booked tickets to visit a schismatic monastery to talk with the abbot but the night before I found myself before a statue of our Lady praying the Rosary and asking her to stop me if I shouldn’t leave the Catholic faith. Guess what? I missed my plane and I was not trying! The time before that I set up another appointment to talk with a schismatic abbot closer to home when, after praying the Rosary for the same intention, I was stood up by him and as a result never went back to that place. These stories are true and they simply help confirm me in my Catholic faith. I pray that I will never be tempted again to leave Rome.

Christmas, why I'm staying Catholic

2011-12-26T19:26:00.000-08:00

This Christmas Eve I drove the 40 miles to the Midnight Mass since I was going to be alone this year. I went to Confession at 3:30 at a local church in preparation for Holy Communion at the Mass later that night. There was a part of me that actually wanted to stay home and sleep but another part of me that prodded me to get up, get dressed up and make the trek down to the chapel. It was well worth it and reminded me again why I have never actually left the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy despite being tempted to do so many a time. For a guy like me there is nothing as beautiful as a Tridentine High Mass with Gregorian chant and the like. It was Gregorian chant that, so many years ago, became a catalyst for me actually becoming Catholic in the first place and so to kneel at the Communion rail with my eyes closed and a clean conscience listening to a schola chanting In Splendoribus while waiting to receive Holy Communion on the first Mass of Christmas is as close to heaven as I can get in this life.

Overall everything has been going well but mostly it has been because I have been assisted by grace to foster a daily regimen of prayer and frequent trips to the Blessed Sacrament. One serious reason I could never actually become Othodox is because they do not worship our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Quite literally the only churches in the world where Christ is truly present 24 hours a day, 7 days a week are Catholic churches. Since becoming Catholic I have tried to take seriously the truth of our Faith that our Lord is really present whole and entire in the Blessed Sacrament and so whenever I have found myself in an Orthodox church aside from the beautiful icons it feels dead inside. God is not present there the way He is in a Catholic Church. The feeling is literally palpable in a Catholic Church that our Lord is there. With the sixth sense of faith I just know it and feel it. That old nun I used to know told me when I first came to see her to discuss the Faith with her that one thing I must do is to make visits to the Blessed Sacrament and she was right.

You know when I was really seriously considering Orthodoxy one thing that really stopped me dead in my tracks was when I realized I couldn't go to a Catholic church and pray before a tabernacle anymore. I couldn't be one of those guys that says he's Orthodox but prays in a Catholic Church. I couldn't do it and I was unwilling to renounce what I believe--fully believe in my heart--that Christ is really present. I had to ask myself, if I believe all this, why should I become Orthodox? Icons? I can have icons and be Catholic, after all, there are Eastern Rite Catholics. Why do Orthodox not like the Eastern Rite churches? That's easy, because once they see that you can have an Eastern Divine Liturgy, icons, the Jesus Prayer, the traditional Eastern Fasts, etc and be in union with the Pope it makes Orthodoxy nothing more then a religion whose only real unique element is opposition to unity with the Roman Pontiff.

As far as my own research has shown there is no really convincing argument against the Papacy, none whatsoever. And when you add into the mix the infallible statement of Pope Boniface VIII in his bull Unam Sanctam about salvation hinging on being subject to the Roman Pontiff and Eugenius IV's Cantate Domino that explicitly says that no one at all is saved who refuses to be in union with the Roman See there is no reason at all for me to leave the Catholic Church. Sometimes I even ask myself this question, if I were to die today, would I want to die as a Catholic or as an Orthodox and hands down I do not want to die outside the Roman Catholic Church. I want Viaticum, a Requiem Mass and the assurance of knowing my own life was lived as a loyal subject of the Roman Pontiff per Unam Sanctam and was lived within the Roman Church per Cantate Domino. Don't get me wrong, I'm not personally judging individual Orthodox and casting them into hell--that isn't my job nor would I want it. What I am saying is that the more I pray and think about things I do not need to be Orthodox to pray the Jesus Prayer, have icons or even attend a Divine Liturgy if I want but as a Catholic I can also pray the Rosary or attend the Tridentine Mass and most importantly I can pray in front of our Lord who is really and truly present in the tabernacle of a Catholic Church.

thoughts on personal sin and social sin

2011-12-16T16:16:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads this will remember that a few posts ago I mentioned my desire to start regularly praying the psalter. Well, the other day I bought a book called Christ in the Psalms wherein the author goes through all the psalms and shows how they relate to our Lord, how the Churches (he touches upon both East and West) interpret them based on where they place them in respect to the canonical hours of prayer, the liturgy or feast days and thus opens up a whole new world for Christians who want to pray the Psalter and make sense of it in the light of Christ. It is VERY good and I highly reccommend it to anyone who reads this that might want to make sense of the Psalter and start using it for prayer the way the Church and the earliest Christians did.

Well, that's my pitch for the book but now I want to get down to the reason for this post. In the book under his exegesis of Psalm 57 (LXX numbering) there is a passage that I found striking:

"Christian struggle against evil in the world is not, in its first instance, political or social, but ascetical. It commences in the heart of man in the prayer of a warring faith." (page 114, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon. Christ in the Psalms.

The problem is that so many of us struggle against all the social ills of the world without reflecting on the fact that the reason there are social ills at all is because of personal sin. Social sin wouldn't exist if each of us as individuals warred against our sins and passions through ascetic struggle with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Father Reardon talks about a "warring faith" which conjures up images of battlefields, noise, chaos and swords clanking against the weapons of the enemy and of the exhaustion of battle. The battle has to commence within our own souls and the only way we can come out on top is to struggle against the evil in our own hearts first and foremost before we can go out and change the world.

Just look at how one saint can make such a difference in peoples lives that it is sometimes hard to believe. Just one man or woman filled up to overflowing with the light of the Holy Trinity changes the hearts and minds of many of those they come into contact with. Many of these saints had to leave the world for a time and battle with the forces of evil within their own souls with the weapons of the sacraments and prayer before they could return to civilization and help others.

Economic systems or political theories in and of themselves cannot create a better world when the hearts of all of us but the saints are divided between good and evil, sin and sanctity, humility and pride. Anytime we prematurely try to destroy social sin when we ourselves in our own sin are part of the cause of it we often make matters worse. It seems to go against the grain of things to retreat and commence the battle inside in order to help others but it makes sense if we think about it. Again, how can we help others and change the world if we are divided inside? The whole key to St. Seraphim of Sarov's comment that if we aquire the Holy Spirit then many thousands around us will be saved lies in this, at least that's the way I see it.

today

2011-12-07T18:17:00.001-08:00

Lately I've made it to church almost every day after getting done with work. I go there to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament, either praying the Jesus Prayer, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy or the Rosary. Yesterday I decided to bring a small New Testament with the Psalter and start praying the Psalms there in church as well. The reason for this is that in my study of the earliest saints and monks of the Church the psalter was used as a prayer almost all the time. It was even recited from memory throughout the course of the day and it was not just professed religious who had accomplished such a great feat but simple peasant layfolk as well. I figure that if the psalms were good enough for the earliest Christians then they ought to be good for me too, although I don't think I will memorize them anytime soon. The only one I am close to memorizing is Psalm 50 (Miserere) since it is prayed twice a day in my simple prayer rule in the morning and in the evening.

I feel closer to God now that I've really tried to make prayer a regular all day affair. Going to an empty church and sitting close to our Lord in the tabernacle really helps. By saying that I'm not implying that I'm closer to holiness; I'm just saying that in general God's presence in my life seems so much more palpable. I'm really trying to keep the channels of communication open and foster a real relationship with Jesus Christ, well, not just Jesus Christ but with the Trinity itself.

The whole Trinitarian thing has been on my mind after having spent so much time studying and reading about Orthodoxy and it's saints and prayers. The Orthodox had to live amongst a people that claimed to believe in the God of the Bible yet denied the Divinity of Christ as well as considered the Trinity a pagan fable. Because of this the Eastern Christians over the centuries were very aware that the God we worship is Trinitarian plain and simple and that the "god" the Mohammedans slaughter people in the name of is not the true God but a demonic counterfeit. Sadly this real Trinitarian emphasis has been largely lost in the West even though it isn't entirely lost. It seems to exist in some of the ancient Celtic Christian sources of the past but then again, much of the original Celtic Christianity was not Roman or Western at all but was derived from the desert Fathers who where pretty much Eastern Christians in practice and belief.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now.

symptoms of a crisis

2011-12-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I need a break at work and since I'm a mailman I can simply sit down and pick up a magazine when I want a little rest. The other day I did just that by getting as comfortable as I could on the hard wood table of an apartment complex mailroom and grabbed whatever magazine happened to be available to simply pass the time. It happened to be a video game mag of some sort and since I used to play video games, heck, I grew up on them, I thought it might be fun to see what is actually out there today. It turned out it was pretty disturbing overall. Why you might ask was it disturbing? All I noticed was that many--if not most--of these games today seem to be able demons, grotesque monsters, post apocalyptic worlds, crime and violence; and to add to that the graphics have become so realistic the on screen gore looks real. I know what you're thinking, namely "How didn't you notice this stuff before?" That's valid enough I suppose. I think that since my conversion I've been trying to turn away from so much of the darkness in the culture and after having been away from it it is like a culture shock to see it again in all it's full frontal gory glory.

What seeing this nihilistic violent filth really did for me was to make me think about the state of things in general, especially art, entertainment and the basic philosophy of life prevalant in our culture at large. It is violent, barbaric, pornographic and hopeless on many levels. It is a culture that decided a long time ago that God does not exist and that man is nothing but a hairless ape in a meaningless universe. That is the underlying assumption that permeates this culture today, that literally ooozes from it's pores. In a mad dash to try to find meaning and structure in a culture that denies any meaning or structure outside the arbitrary and the pragmatic many turn to shopping, sex, video games, music, drugs, alcohol, anything really, to try to numb the pain of living in a culture that pretty much teaches you that nothing is real, nothing is true and nothing means anything unless you say it does.

People's despair spills out into the forms of art, music, literature and yes, entertainment. The senseless violence of our city streets or on the fictional streets of Vice City in Grand Theft Auto; the formless monstrosities called "art" in our public squares and museums; the atonal grunting and jungle beats of much modern music with their lyrics of death, sex and despair; the androgyny in mens dress and the whole character of people like Marilyn Manson--all of this is symptomatic of a massive loss of faith in this culture; not just loss of faith the historic Calvinist Puritanism of the Pilgrims but of faith in anything at all. We see the existential sickness everywhere we go these days and in some ways it is hard not to imbibe some of it since it is literally in the air we breathe.
All this macabre, grotesque funhouse weirdness and satantic darkness is really a symptom of a very deep crisis of meaning in this culture today at large. You even see it in the Church, and by Church I mean specifically the Catholic Church since that is really the only one I know a great deal about. The success of Vatican II at quite literally destroying the face of Roman Catholicism in a matter of a scant 20 or 30 years was a sign that the faith of millions--including high level prelates--was nothing more than smoke and mirrors and dead empty ritual devoid of any real heartfelt faith. It's not that God was dead but rather man killed God in his heart even within the Church.

This existential wasteland today both inside and outside the Church makes it so difficult for people today who are really searching. We think we find it only to find out that the men that wear the roman collars and say the Mass don't really genuinly believe anymore, at least not in some circles. That makes some of us exiles in our own Church. The post Vatican II Catholic Church is a place where you can't even really trust your average diocesan bishop or expect the Pope himself to actually preach the whole faith.

Today some of us are hermits in the world and hermits in the Church without any real recognition at all. It's not that we want it anyway, in fact, it's better that we remain unknown to many. Today our refuge has to be in Christ and we have to learn to stand alone if need be because there are so few people today who can give us what we are looking for. I could not find it in the Novus Ordo at all and with the Latin Mass close to 40 miles one way once a week it was hardly enough to sustain me. There was no community overall. Maybe that's why I turned to Orthodoxy, because at least there is an Orthodox Church in town within a five or ten minute drive. I'm trying to find healing through Christ and the Church because I know I'm sick, wounded, broken. It's so hard when you feel like you are in this alone.

thoughts

2011-11-24T18:28:00.000-08:00

Theological studies are neither possible nor necessary for everyone; the study of philosophy is not accessible to everyone. Constant and special exercise in that inner attention that cleanses and gathers the mind towards its higher unity is also not possible for everyone. It is possible and necessary, however, for everyone to bind the direction of their life with their fundamental conviction of faith, to harmonize with it their main occupation and every particular matter, in order that every action might be an expression of the one striving, that every thought might seek a single foundation, every step lead to a single goal. Without this, human life will not have any meaning, the mind will be a counting machine, the heart a collection of soulless strings through which whistles an inadvertent wind; no action will have a moral character, and there will be no human beings, properly speaking. For human beings are their faith. - Ivan Kireevsky

I wish I actually read Russian so I could read Kireyevsky since very little of his works are translated but for now I'll have to do with whatever bits and pieces of his works are translated. How I found this quote I don't know but I'm glad it did. What he says is profound and commonsensical but hard to put into practice. What do I think he is saying?It sounds like he is saying that in a certain sense we are what we believe.
All that we do ultimately comes from a worldview that we hold either consciously or unconsiously even though most of us would balk at the idea or brush it aside. If we are men of faith then technically we should live our lives and view the world around us through the lens of our faith. Everything we do should be colored by our faith; it should be like a map for our lives or a compass to constantly head us in the right direction.

Kireyevsky studied in the West under some bizarre rationalist philosophers and saw that their knowledge was ultimately empty and theoretical while his association with the Optina monastery in Russia during it's heyday showed him that the holy Elders were teaching a whole philosophy of life based on the Ortthodox Patristic worldview and actually living it. They weren't academics stuck in their heads but men who lived their lives saturated with their faith. I can imagine Kireyevsky saw the difference it makes in peoples lives when they actually live based on a unified worldview and don't compartmentalize their lives into different categories, putting religion in a Sunday "slot" while forgetting God the rest of the week.

Today we can see this schizophrenic compartmentalization of life in the dogma of "pluralism" that is practically obligatory here in the United States. We are allowed to be religious, non religious or whatever to whatever level of intensity we want as long as we keep it to ourselves and do not allow it to color every aspect of our lives. We can profess Christ or preach "no salvation outside the Church" to the choir of our families or congregations but we cannot profess Christ or preach that doctrine with any seriousness in public, at work, etc. Pluralism renders all serious ideas impotent, making the only worldview allowable if we want to be considered normal or sane in the culture a bland "tolerance" and openness to anything and everything except for serious religious belief of serious philosophy..

This pluralist mentality today is so powerful it has rendered institutions like the Roman Catholic Church impotent in doing what Christ asked it's pastors to do and what it's own canons have proclaimed, namely, the baptism of every person in the world in order to save their souls. Today a vapid "ecumenism" has replaced evangelization and it would seem from some priests sermons that the narrow gate now means "whatever religion you follow. (I actually heard this once). We are asked by the Gospels and the Traditions of the Church to live our lives holding to a view of the world based on our Faith and all that it's dogmas proclaim but today many of us read about all of it but pretend that now, in this day and age, no one needs to convert; no one needs to get baptized; secular humanism and pluralism are the highest forms of philosophy; and the goal of the Church is to build up a "civilization of love" along with the atheistic United Nations. We say we believe one thing but we live as if there are always exceptions or extenuating circumstances.

I can be just as bad about this as anyone else so I'm not pointing any fingers here at any one specific person. Today we have almost no holy elders at all, no example except the examples we find in books and a society that positively militates against anyone who would dare try to be a serious Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, whatever outside the place of worship or the home. Just to take a Catholic example since that is what I know, just look at the so called "Catholic" politicians here in this country and the positions they hold that are objectively contrary to what the Church teaches, especially as regards abortion, homosexuality, etc. As much as I cringe at them I also realize that no real serious committed Roman Catholic could possibly make it in politics today. Who is going to stand for or tolerate any talk of the social reign of Christ the King, the idea that a State should be confessionally Catholic and not allow non Catholic teaching to be broadcast in public or the allowance of prayer in schools?

So what is the antidote to this utter madness today? I don't profess to have any easy answer but I think we can take a clue from what Ivan Kiryevsky says in the passage quoted at the top. We have to strive to live out our lives in every aspect based on the worldview that we have, the faith we believe in. The difficulty in this is that, as I said, we will be looked at as crazy in a culture that values "tolerance" of everything but serious thought as the lubrication that keeps society held together.

For some of us perhaps the only way we can do that is to take up the monastic life where we can get away and through grace be conformed to Christ no matter what the world thinks. In many respects I imagine this is easier since there are few temptations to compromise in such a radical sense such as are present within the framework of society. For others it will probably be a great struggle. All we can do is keep in mind the words of Kireyevsky and try to see what he really means by looking to where he ultimately got his inspirations--the saints and holy elders, men whose lives where unified by a single vision of faith and where there wasn't the notion that God is to be kept confined to Sunday for an hour and left in Church until the next week after that.

thoughts on Creation

2011-11-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

When I saw that St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood finally came out with a second edition of the late Father Seraphim Rose's book Genesis, Creation And Early Man I jumped at the chance to get it before it became sold out and hard to find. I've always wanted to read it but it has been out of print for several years and the copies I've seen for sale on places like Amazon.com have been way overpriced which meant I was unable to read it until now. All I can say is that it is a magnum opus of epic proportions that successfully teaches a Patristic view of Creation and points out all the various holes in the theory of evolution, even going so far as to trace the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the theory and just why even theistic evolution is--in the words of the late great Dr. William Marra--"just a halfway house to atheism."

The book strengthens my own convictions in Creation and leaves me in a state of wonder whenever I'm able to go for a prayerful stroll through the woods, fields or swamps around my North Florida home. Just listen to Saint Basil the Great on the creation of the plants:

"Let the earth bring forth herbs." And in the briefest moment of time the earth, beginning with germination in order that it might keep the laws of the Creator, passing through every form of increase, immediately brought the shoots to perfection. The meadows were deep with the abundant grass; the fertile plains, rippling with standing crops, presented the picture of a swelling sea with its moving heads of grain. And every herb and every kind of vegetable and whatever shrubs and legumes there were, rose from the earth at that time in all profusion... And the fruit tree, He said, that bears fruit contained seed of its own kind and of its own likeness on the earth. At this saying all the dense woods appeared; all the trees shot up, those which are wont to rise to the greatest height, the firs, cedars, cypresses, and pines; likewise, all the shrubs were immediately thick with leaf and bushy; and the so called garland plants--the rose bushes, myrtles, and laurels--all came into existence in a moment of time, although they were not previously upon the earth, each one with its own peculiar nature." (quoted in Genesis, Creation and Early Man page 166)

That is a beautiful image of how a few thousand years ago our Lord actually brought all the plants into existence in the course of the third day of Creation.
In another account of the creation of the world, this time given by a fairly modern day elder (Schema-Abbot John Alekseyev) from the Valaam monastery in Russia we hear this:

"An academy student and missionary said to me that by God's creation in days one must understand millions of years. You poor missionary--you represent the omnipotent Creator as being very weak and attribute millions of years to Him. That's how your reason speaks, but I believe that, as the Lord said, "And the evening and the morning were the first day" one must understand days and not millions of years. For the Lord said, "And it was so". With a word He divided the water from the land, and the water, with a noise, stood in its indicated places: there were seas, the rivers and streams began to flow, and across the whole earth there were warm waters and cold springs. The Lord said, "Let there be forests" and there were forests across the whole earth in perfect form--one kind in the north, and another kind in the south--and then they began to gradually grow. So also the birds were created by God's word: they immediately flew across the whole earth and were various kinds; and all the rest of creation, as it is said in the Bible. The more I consider nature, the more I am amazed and come to know the omnipotence of the Creator." (Genesis, Creation and Early Man page 807-808)

These are both beautiful accounts of Creation, especially the creation of the plants and trees. All my life I have loved the various plants and trees and have found that I can pray and get closer to God out amongst them. Reading this book has shown me that just to look at the various plants and trees is to see God's handiwork but also to feel sorrow for the fact that, thanks to Adam, right now the whole Creation is subject to corruption. We see that it isn't just us that is subject to sickness and death but all things. By studying the Fathers we see that it was Adam our ancestor who, through his original sin, brought corruption and mortality to the visible Creation. Everytime we spend time out in a forest, a field, a mountaintop or a seaside we are reminded of the beauty and majesty of our Lord but also--by seeing death and corruption--that we live in a fallen world and must not lose sight of Christ and a spiritual life. We are also reminded that eventually the entire Creation will put on incorruption onnce again and be transfigured in the light of the Holy Trinity.

Also according to the book the reason some of the saints are so close to animals is that grace has brought them closer to the state of Adam before the Fall when animals and men were not at war with each other. That seems to make a lot of sense if you accept the traditional view of Creation and the Fall which I do.

This book shows me just how vulgar the evolutionary worldview is compared to the view taught by the various Church Fathers. As Father Seraphim points out, evolution is not just a theory of origins but an entire philosophy and worldview utterly incompatible with Christianity. Either men fell from grace and is on his way to heaven with the help of Christ or he is higher order primate destined to rot in his coffin after a meaningless existence of suffering and struggle. There is no other choice.

A post from way back...

2011-11-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

(I'm in the process of getting rid of old posts that seem sort of stupid and aimless and in that process I found this one which I wrote back in 2009. What is amazing is that the sentiments I expressed in this post I still feel today)

The story of the Magi from Matthew's Gospel narrative is a story that keeps popping up in my mind and won't leave me alone. For one, it conjures up all the emotions and memories that I carry from Christmases long ago, but besides that it is a moving story that seems to parallel my own journey to the manger outside of Bethlehem. Three kings, representing the worlds peoples, set out on a journey through the dark of night to follow a star that they believed was the star that foretold of the coming of the Messiah.

In those days supernatural concepts were not considered to be borderline madness they way they are today but it is still significant that anyone should be moved by something and then follow it through the darkness of faith in order to find out whether the faith was well put or not. The wise men represent anyone of us who recognizes something greater then themselves and who then finds the strength of heart to leave the old world behind and follow the star in the desert to wherever it leads. When the wise men give the gifts they show that it is right and good to bow down to and give gifts and respect to that which is greater then yourself which in this case is a small child who is in fact God Himself, the Creator of everything seen and unseen.

Whether this story is true or not in the literal sense is irrelevant because it represents something that speaks to all of us if we really look at it for what it shows, namely that all of us, kings included, are not our own lords and masters but have something greater then ourselves that is worthy of respect and admiration. That is a tough pill to swallow in an age where neither parents, teachers or authority figures are respected anymore, much less the idea of God. The relativism of the age renders everything meaningless because by its very nature relativism denies any objective truth; even the idea of authority is to be questioned and discarded like refuse if it doesn't fit in with the ever shifting narrative of whoever has the loudest voice for the day.

This is precisely why Europe is rapidly losing its ability to maintain any semblance of culture or respect in the face of it's impending downfall at the hands of Muslims. The Muslims can't be entirely to blame for Europe's impotence, for they have something to live and to die for and they follow what, to them, is the objective truth of God. When two cultures clash and one believes and something and the other in nothing then the one that believes in something will come out on top. European secular humanism and its attendant relativism will perish and be blown away into the dustbin of history in the coming decades of the 21st century, you mark my words.

Objective truth scares relativists who are afraid of believing in something; but the very nature of relativism and unbelief makes it impossible for secular relativists in Europe to even believe enough in their cultures, customs, languages or laws to even craft an argument for just why they ought to be preserved. Meanwhile Islam marches on with confidence, watching as Europeans compromise their culture away bit by bit like pruning a tree of all of its leaves and branches until there is nothing left but a dessicated stump to rot in the fading twilight.

Is Christianity, or rather, a reclamation of it, the answer for Europe's nihilist aimlessness? This remains an open yet compelling question.

I wonder if Europe would have followed the same trajectory towards downfall had it not abandoned its pursuit of objective truth through religion. I can't be too hard on Europe, as she has seen two world wars and the sickness of fascism and communism infect her shores for close to a hundred years and is still recovering from it. The warped ideas of Hitler, Mussolini, Marx, Lenin and Stalin have poisoned the hearts of many and the cure seems light years away. Unfortunately Europe is like the sick person with a compromised immune system who, on the way to recovery, gets nailed with influenza and then has a future that is up in the air and on life support.

What happened to the Europe that built those breath taking cathedrals? Instead they build abortion clinics, head shops and red light districts and throw away their culture in piecemeal ways in order to chase the vague ideas of "tolerance" and "diversity", as if those buzzwords were the only thing worth living for. The biggest issue for Europe is a lack of respect. They don't believe in themselves anymore, they have lost any sense of self respect which means no one else respects them either. Muslims know this, and they are taking advantage of Europe's aimlessness and making it in their own image piece by piece.

What got me thinking about all this was reading the the book Nihilism by the late Russian Orthodox American monk Father Seraphim Rose. He lays out in excruciating detail just how the ideologies of liberalism and rationalism are really just nihilism in disguise, and how both ideologies leave people aimless and powerless. It seemed like a diagnosis for Europe and increasingly for us in the US as well. Father Seraphim's book is a must read for people who, like myself, are haunted by the nihilism that they see preached on every street corner. His book is quite short but it is full of a wealth of information that is enlightening in the fullest sense of the word. The amazing thing is that this book of his really makes sense. It's everything I ever wished to say about the topic but was never intelligent enough nor a good enough writer to say.

I realize that posting in such a frank and conservative way will probably not win me many sympathizers but, like in Dhamma Reflections, I refuse to bow down to political correctness and fakeness in order to be liked. I really feel the writing is on the wall for Europe if she doesn't wake up and drop the doctrines that tie her hands behind her back and confuse her people in completely throwing her to the dogs without even the decency of a debate with those who wish to remake her in their image.

Truth requires boldness and being willing to stand up for something, but if you believe in nothing or simply in vague ideas how can you stand up? We have to be like the wise men, who left their homeland and headed out into the dangers of the desert in search of their king and in search of Truth. If we find the truth, isn't it worth standing up for? If you believe in nothing you'll fall for everything.

decisions

2011-10-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard a great talk by Dr. John Rao where he asked rhetorically where all the men have gone in the Catholic Church that has really got me thinking. The talk went into some detail about this topic of a lack of manliness in today's Church but the one part that stuck out and grabbed a hold of me was when the good doctor spoke about just what qualities make a real man what he is supposed to be. He said that a real man is supposed to let Christ live in him and go out and "spend himself completely" doing something. That notion of completely spending oneself really struck a chord with me because it made me realize that now, at 30, after wasting years in indecsion, it is time to really give myself to something for real and to face the consequences for doing so. This means that if I'm truly interested in monastic life than I must really go for it and face the consequences of that vocation and be manly enough to not look back, to literally give all I have to it. That can also start right here, right now in terms of fighting against sin. Either I want to be a man and a real Catholic and manfully resist things like lust, sloth and anger or I give in to them, confessing the same sorry sins each week but making no real resolutions to fight "unto the shedding of blood" as the Holy Apostle says in his letter to the Hebrews.

personal update

2011-10-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been feeling the call not just to the religious life as a monastic but to the priesthood as well, but only to the priesthood within the walls of the monastery. I’d love to be able to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the rest of the community as well as in private for various intentions as well as to hear confessions and administer the various sacraments like Extreme Unction, etc. I just have no desire to be a parish priest because by and large I’m a solitary person.

This is the year I have to make my decision on whether to go live as a monk or not and so it has been on my mind quite a lot. I’m praying that everything falls into place so that it may come to pass.

Almost two years after my baptism have elapsed and I am very comfortable with the Catholic Faith so much that I can’t imagine being Orthodox anymore at all. I pray that I will never be tempted to it ever again. What has helped me more than anything is to simply believe what the Church has traditionally taught through the various non pastoral Councils (NOT Vatican II!), Saints, Fathers and Doctors of the Church. I notice I’m happiest when I don’t look for answers where I shouldn’t be asking questions. God said it, the Church has taught it, that settles it. All of a sudden the whole world opens up when viewed through the lens of the Incarnation and Redemption and the Church as the extension of Christ’s life in the world.

The Rosary has become my solace again, the one constant I have in my prayer life. By and large I don’t do much praying other then the Rosary, the Jesus Prayer, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the Our Father, the St. Michael Prayer and the prayer to my guardian angel. Occasionally I’ll say Compline from the Divine Office but by and large it is just a simple routine with the Rosary at its center. I figure that there are so many promises attached to the Rosary and that so many Saints have spoken well of it that there shouldn’t be much need for much else. In the Rosary is contained everything from Petition and Thanksgiving to the deepest depths of meditation and mental prayer. It just takes a lifetime to really pray well I suppose which means it is something worth spending a lifetime doing.
I’m certainly no saint by any stretch of the imagination but this Catholic life is good overall. Life in general is full of ups and downs but what keeps me going through it all is the Faith. This is the refuge the godless emptiness of Buddhism never was for me. I’m thankful for that.

a death, but peace

2011-09-30T19:46:00.000-07:00

Absolve, O Lord, the souls of all the faithful departed from every bond of sin. And by the help of Thy grace may they be enabled to escape the judgment of punishment. And enjoy the bliss of everlasting light. –Tract for the Mass for Dead

This morning my grandmother passed away after several years of slow deterioration that ended with her unable to speak or walk any longer. I got the call at about eight thirty this morning but didn’t talk to my mom about it until after work. I admit I had an idea that the early morning phone call was about her passing but I simply didn’t want to deal with a death on a mental level until after my workday so I put off talking to my mom until almost eight this evening. I said a Rosary for her during my workday in between driving to and from different work sites. I was a little choked up on the phone with mom and teary eyed saying the rosary but in all honesty I do not fear for her salvation in the slightest. She was given the Last Rites and had been a lifelong Catholic. Interestingly enough my mother said my grandma was crying last night while in the coma after having received the Last Rites and the absolution that it brings. I believe that what she saw was the lumen Christi, the light of Christ and realized that she was moments away from enjoying the Beatific Vision. What must that be like to receive Christ our Lord for the last time under the appearances of bread and wine as Viaticum only to see Him face to Face—to behold the Holy Trinity—only moments later? I cannot shed too many tears over a loved one who lived a Catholic and died a Catholic after having received Viaticum on her deathbed. As soon as I get out of the Confessional tomorrow I will pray for her more since, by then, I will be in the state of grace but for now I pray beseeching God to listen to my prayers, not because of me but because through them I desire the salvation of a loved one.

the end for now

2011-09-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

I moved to a new place back at the beginning of August and the company I have my internet service with was unable to get things set up and running until late last week. At first it was a big deal, as I’d been used to being online all the time when I wasn’t working but after a while it was a blessing, a relief. At first I felt like I had been forced to quit some sort of addictive substance as I found myself panicking that I wouldn’t be able to check e-mail, shop, blog, you know, all the usual stuff. Later on it was the stuff dreams are made of and gave me the opportunity to just live my life without the distraction of being caught up in virtual worlds 24 hours a day. Since I don’t have Television and since I do not follow the newspapers or re3ad magazines I was truly alone in a real sense from the start of August on. Whatever happened in the Church and the world or even in the community at large I simply didn’t know and it was strangely liberating. I can’t even begin to tell you how much reading I’ve been getting done without the internet and I don’t just mean books on the Saints or prayer either. I’ve gotten into the series called Warriors about a bunch of cats that live in the forest. I’d forgotten how nice it was just to read something that wasn’t so serious.

In terms of my spiritual life I have literally stopped going to the Novus Ordo Mass period. Occasionally I will go to confession on Saturday with a priest at a local Novus Ordo Church but aside from that I have been attending the traditional Latin Mass exclusively and not going to Mass at all when I can’t. I don’t even do it as a statement or anything I just don’t see it as being good for me spiritually. It’s spiritually empty and banal. I don’t even bother with thinking much about it anymore to be honest. As far as Catholics who do attend it and buy into the post Vatican II silliness all I can say is I will pray for them but I don’t look down on them. The leaders of the Church have peddled that nonsense for almost half a century ands old it as Catholicism and so many people haven’t learned anything else. May God have mercy on all of those folks.

I can’t say this is a goodbye post for me but I definitely will not be blogging much anymore, if at all. I think I will write if and when I feel like it. I honestly like not being online much and sort of not knowing what is going on outside my own life and the lives of my immediate friends and family. Anymore I realize there is nothing I can do about the world or the society other than to pray and do good works for those that come into my immediate circle. At 30 now I do not believe in the power of politics, economics or demonstrations to change a world already wrecked by original sin and its consequences. I’m even planning on shredding my voter card since honestly I don’t give a hoot about politics at all. Politicians are all lying scumbags and here in the US after the last big election I finally saw that campaigning has become sort of like a cheesy nationwide wrestlemania with cheating, lying, propaganda and mudslinging. When that circus comes to town next year I’m getting out of dodge.

One thing I noticed in my hiatus from the internet was that all the issues about bishop x or priest y and all the issues in the Church ceased to have any meaning for me at all. It’s not that they aren’t important in their own way but are they really doing anything for my spiritual life? What if all of us so called “trads” stopped caring about the issues in the Church and just lived our lives, perhaps even forming small traditionalist communities outside the mainstream. The society is crumbling anyway and there will be no changes in the Church till everyone associated with Vatican II are dead and gone. We are simply preaching to the choir online anyway, as most of todays prelates, seminaries and other Catholic luminaries are too far gone to matter anyway. We have to build up the Church starting with ourselves and our families. The mainstream institution is, in my personal opinion at least, a ship that is sinking, and fast, with little to no hope of staying afloat. The small trad chapels are the future of Catholicism in this country. I don’t really see Roman Catholicism as existing at all outside trad chapels. It may sound ridiculous to some but I can’t help it.

Finally I thank my loyal readers for putting up with all my rants and haphazard writing on this blog. May Christ lead you from darkness to light in His own good time.

First Friday thoughts

2011-08-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

Today is First Friday so there was supposed to be a Benediction service at the local Catholic Church but today, when I arrived, I was greeted with ugly folksy guitar music emanating from the chapel where our Lord was so beautifully ensconced within the sacred monstrance. It was revolting to say the least, but since I wanted to spend some time praying I did so but from a different room. I hadn’t been to that Church for so long I guess I missed the changes that had occurred on First Fridays. What started as a pretty nice Benediction service filled with traditional Latin hymns, incense and silence has, apparently, been replaced by a group of folk musicians strumming “Amazing Grace” on acoustic guitars. I wasn’t really that surprised, as since Vatican II there are two different religions vying for the name “Catholic”, one is an organic whole from the time of the Apostles and the other is a neo modernist hodgepodge of heresy, novelty and the bizarre that has sprung up in the wake of an ambiguous pastoral Council that, God willing, may eventually be abrogated and flushed down the toilet of history as being an abject disaster.

I love the traditional Catholic faith and I love Benediction but I could not actually participate in what was going on tonight from the same room. I simply said the Rosary in another room, made a spiritual Communion and went home. Perhaps I will not go back to that parish again unless no one is there. If it isn’t the Latin Mass I’m not going to participate plain and simple. I even asked a traditional priest if this was OK and while he had some reservations he said that if the Mass was truly irreverent and there were no options I could simply stay home and pray. Well, the “Mass” at this parish brought so much disgust to my faith I almost entered a schismatic Church that would have probably led to my eventual damnation so I think I’m justified in staying home when I cannot get to the traditional Mass.

Even though there is so much chaos in the Catholic Church today I feel at home here and I know with a supernatural intuition that I cannot be saved outside of this Church. Even though Orthodoxy is mysterious and beautiful in regards to liturgy and the monastic life I cannot and will not shake my faith in Catholicism. I couldn’t really do it even if I wanted to. I thank God for this because I know it is only His grace that sustains me. Orthodoxy is alluring but it is not saving. I believe that there is no salvation outside the Church and being a baptized confirmed Roman Catholic I cannot walk away without imperiling my salvation.

staying with Rome

2011-08-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

After two weeks of feeling like I was going to be Orthodox and not feeling like I could make a valid confession but needing one I finally went and did it and I confessed saying the Creed without the filioque, visiting schismatic (Orthodox) monastery and any and all sins I could think of. The crazy thing is that it felt good, very good. As soon as I had received sacramental absolution I felt ashamed for ever even considering leaving the Roman Catholic Church, almost as if my sins themselves were destroying the theological virtue of Faith and leading me on a wide path to hell outside the Church. One priest I know of said that one heresy, just one destroys the theological virtue of Faith, meaning that say, denying the filioque (which is a non negotiable de fide dogma of the Catholic faith) and holding to that with firm assent is enough to strip your soul of supernatural faith leaving you to nothing but opinion and unguarded from the attacks of Satan. After this experience I don’t doubt it at all, not at all.

On Sunday I even got in the car and drove 45 minutes south of here to attend the traditional Mass and it was like a homecoming. When I arrived I knelt in my pew and tried to make my peace with God, asking Him to forgive me for almost leaving the Church and begging Him to grant me the graces necessary to not go that wide and dangerous path again. Ever since I’ve been praying many Rosaries and Chaplets of Divine Mercy daily to keep me in the Church and never to even consider leaving again.

Now that I think about it I really think that the Mother of God was the one that made sure the schismatic monk stood me up when I went to visit the monastery. I remember driving there feeling excited and guilty at the same time and praying a decade of the Rosary while asking our Lady to make this meeting fruitful or not depending on whether it would better serve the salvation of my soul. I know feel convinced that it was the Rosary and our Lady that didn’t allow me to meet this monk when I was weak enough to probably become schismatic myself by asking to be made a catechumen in a Church that would not be able to lead me to heaven. I’m very serious about this too. Last time I was interested in Orthodoxy I thought it was the Rosary that led me away from it and I’m sure that this time it is the same.
Now I am thankful, profoundly thankful for being granted the grace to remain a Catholic. I still love praying in an Eastern fashion and I love the Jesus Prayer but I don’t think I need to separate myself from Rome to make use of either. The more I think about it the more I recognize that should I die today I would want a Catholic priest by my bedside and would even feel better having a New Rite priest giving me Viaticum than an Orthodox priest.

I tried to read the arguments against the papacy from Orthodox sources but really, none are convincing. Even the scandalous actions and words of certain recent popes has not totally shattered my faith in Rome. All I can say is that the more I think about it the more I think that the Faith I hold is truly supernatural. The whole world militates against it and many high ranking members of the Church militate against it and preach a false gospel but still I remain. A few hours after my baptism I remember sitting at home on the point of tears thinking about what just happened and picking up a copy of the Holy Scriptures and no joke, this is the passage I turned to right off the bat:

1 Timothy 6:11-12 “But as for you, man of God, shun all this; aim at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

It was clear as a bell what this meant, it meant that God was literally speaking to me in this passage and telling me that I must “fight the good fight of the faith” and that the faith I was called to was the one that I confessed in front of the congregation---the Roman Catholic faith.

I also realized in my quest to try to become Orthodox that when I started questioning things like the primacy of Peter and the filioque I fell headlong into sin. My sins of impurity multiplied and all I was doing was setting my self up over the Church. The holy simplicity I talked about became a joke since, after all, if I were truly simple I’d never dream of questioning something like the filioque even if I could find “reasons” to look askance at it. This arrogance and pride on my part led to a multiplication of evil sins and despondency. I cannot question the Catholic Faith if I am to be simple and what I have seen is that by doing so I fall headlong into error and darkness. I guess I now see that the safest path to Heaven is to just believe, don’t question, don’t think, just believe. I always knew this intuitively but in my desire to taste the forbidden fruit of Orthodoxy I set myself up against the Church. Don’t deny or even think about denying even one dogma or anything pertaining to a dogma. The Church is greater than me, you or anyone else. It is the sure infallible guide to salvation and it is we who dash ourselves against the jagged rocks below when we start to set ourselves up against it and in our arrogance try to justify heresy, schism or some novel way of looking at defined dogmas. They are there to safeguard us and guide us. I’m really starting to see this now. I saw myself perishing on the rocks below in my pride and it was scary. May God prserve me from myself, from my own arrogance and sins and keep me in the only ark of salvation!

on forgiveness and love

2011-07-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

“By means of the Way”, said the Ancient Sage,
“One is forgiven when one sins.”
When one loves, expecting nothing,
One has the power to forgive anyone anything.
Therefore the Way, Who is perfect love,
and loves perfectly
And who came to earth out of love,
Came with the power to forgive all people all crimes.
This was a gift He offered up,
But it can be received only by him who himself loves,
And thus forgives.
For when one loves, expecting nothing,
One will not only forgive everything---
One will be forgiven everything.
Of those who love much, said the Way,
Much will be forgiven.
But of those who love little,
Little will be forgiven.

This is the Way of Heaven. The spirit of forgiveness is the spirit of the Way.
The heart of the follower of the Way is distinguished by
its power to forgive.
But the heart cannot attain to perfect forgiveness
Until the Uncreated Breath enters into it
With the perfect love that He had with the Mind and the Word.
From pre-Eternity

-"Chapter 51" in Christ The Eternal Tao page 156-157

In this set of verse from Christ The Eternal Tao we come again to the theme of love and forgiveness and how they both work together, especially in the life and example of Jesus Christ. What is always striking to me is how we see that Christ in His Sacred Humanity suffered greatly even though he loved all and was willing to forgive all and yet we expect that our lives are supposed to be different. We cannot expect to get anything from loving others is what I take from reading this. The less expectations we have for our interactions with others and the less we expect to be rewarded for being kind to people or for forgiving them the more inner peace we will have even though on the outside and even on the level of feeling itself we may be suffering.

It seems like most of the interactions between people in the world are based on a sort of give and take, a “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” sort of thing and than when someone doesn’t meet our expectations we lose our temper or feel like we wasted our time with them. I see this in my own life sometimes too but over the years I’ve really tried to put my expectations aside. I still suffer greatly when someone hurts me or betrays me but the less I feel like the kindness I offered them means that I am somehow “owed” kindness in return the less the suffering cuts to the heart.

Even on the Cross Christ said to His Father “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” How many of us could do the same for our enemies? And don’t kid yourself we all have enemies, people that hate us because of how we look, what country we are from, what religion we practice or simply for some unknown reason. One big lie today is that we have no enemies, that everyone is a potential friend. It’s a load of bull as far as I’m concerned. If our Lord was despised than why shouldn’t we be despised? It’s a cop out to deny that we have enemies. The challenge is how we react to them. Christ asks us to love them and forgive them. We don’t have to like them and they don’t have to treat us well for that to happen but it does take an extraordinary amount of grace to do.

Christ in certain passages says that we will be forgiven by the measure of how much we forgive and how much we love. That is quite frightening to think about because as much as I can talk about this stuff, reflect on it and sometimes practice it I know that I have a long way to go. We have to be free of every kind of defilement if we wish to enter heaven and we can start by praying for the grace to really love and forgive others in the manner of Christ. Christ set an example for us.

Christ can love and forgive all everything but it comes at a price—we must be wiling to love and forgive all too.

I’ll end with a quote from some Russian Orthodox man named Elder Sampson Sievers on forgiveness:

…all of the salt of Christianity lies in this: to forgive, to excuse, to justify, not to know, not to remember evil.

thoughts

2011-07-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Despite my failing faith in Rome as being the True Church in the light of Vatican II and the general chaos and apostasy in the Church I have received such a cold reception by Orthodox that I might just stay in Rome. I was stood up by the abbott of a monastery and any e-mails of late to a local Orthodox priest have pretty much been ignored. I get the impression some Orthodox have no interest in converts and after trying to talk to folks for some time now I'm about ready to write off the Orthodox Church as a place with a country club mentality that cares little about actually saving souls. I'm very serious here. I'm so fed up with trying to get answers and talk to people and being given the run around or ignored altogether that I'm ready to just stay a Roman Catholic traditionalist and say "fuck off" to the Orthodox Church. Or perhaps God has arranged in His Providence to make it impossible for me to become Orthodox because Rome really IS the True Church and there really ISN'T any salvation outside of her.

more thoughts

2011-07-20T19:58:00.001-07:00

I’m immersing myself in the study of Orthodoxy again but trying not to allow myself to get carried away by it all. What I have always wanted and still want is simplicity, total simplicity and peace of heart that probably cannot come from any study of history or theology or with getting so caught up in externals I lose the light of Christ. I saw this attachment to externals in the traditionalist Catholic world that I have been a part of and just so you don’t think I’m pointing fingers I too have at times been caught up in it. There is this rigid attachment to certain theories of grace, certain theologians and certain ways of doing things and if you step out of bounds you are taken to task for it but through it all there is no love, no light from above. It is dry and without heart. I see this in Orthodoxy too among certain people but after having seen how empty and lifeless it is and the dead ends it leads to I pray for the grace to remain above it. Nothing can destroy faith faster than trying to read to much, rely to much on your own understanding and be a know it all. Sometimes I wonder if I just let go and trust Rome what that would be like but I do not have the grace for that right now. The easiest way to sanctity—of that I’m convinced—is holy simplicity, of literally just believing and living based on your faith in Christ and the Church, no more, no less.

Part of me feels like maybe I should stay Catholic but there few places close to me where I could really get the guidance I need. Perhaps I become Orthodox out of necessity since there are reliable places so close to me that are Orthodox but not Catholic. For some this journey might seem too foreign and in a way it is but some place along the line my ancestors were Orthodox. My mother’s family was from Belarus and Poland between my grandpas and grandmas family and my mom still has a Bible in Russian or Slavonic (I can’t tell the difference). The saints of the Orthodox East are part of my ancestral patrimony so this journey might bring me closer to the roots deep within my family line. I often wonder if my great grandparents became Catholic after the Union of Brest or something like that which means more than likely further down the line my family was Orthodox. All in all this is interesting. I’ll certainly write more as I feel like it.

some clarity

2011-07-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to do it and become Orthodox. I am trying to set up an appointment with a local Orthodox hieromonk to discuss the possibility of becoming a catechumen in the Orthodox Church. At this monastery I will probably have to be re-baptized and all that but at least I will get the full blown exorcisms that come with traditional baptism and at this monastery they pull no punches and accept no compromises of the Orthodox faith. I know I will be given a world class catechesis and a beautiful liturgy and will finally be able to leave the sick and dying Roman Catholic Church with all of it's contradictions and silliness behind.

Vatican II shattered the illusion of Rome being the True Church as far as I'm concerned. Even though it has been called a "pastoral council" by traditionalists the reality on the ground is far different. The Council as is it often called has been the blueprint for a new man centered religion and it has largely been the church leadership that has foisted novelty after novelty on us. I cannot take it any longer. I cannot make two plus two equal 5 just because Rome says so. Sorry folks, I'm done. Unless I receive a miracle of grace that helps me see that despite the seeming total apostasy of Rome since 1965 it is still the true church teaching the pure unadulterated apostolic faith I am washing my hands of Rome and becoming Orthodox.

thoughts of a book

2011-07-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

I read a book called The Age of Bede which is a collection of books and stories from the 6th and 7th centuries of Christianity in the British Isles. The books in the book are Life of Cuthbert and Lives of the Abbotts of Wearmouth and Jarrow by Saint Bede; Eddius Stephanus’ Life of Wilfrid and the anonymously penned The Voyage of St. Brendan. I picked this up as a collection on a whim at the local used book shop not really knowing what to expect or whether I’d ever actually sit down and crack it open. Sad to say I still have books I bought years ago that I have not so much as opened up. When I went out of town to Amelia Island I decided to bring this book with me to read on the beach and before going to bed at night. From the moment I opened it and started on Life of Cuthbert I was hooked. All the books are written in a style that is totally foreign to the modern man, a style that includes the miraculous as fact and looks on everything as being under the guidance of God’s Providential hand. God, Saints, angels and evil spirits as well as the primacy of the spiritual leap out at you from every page. This is a collection to help deepen your faith in a way that modern books—even modern books on saints—just cannot do, at least not for me.

St. Cuthbert was a man that was brought up by Irish monks who became a bishop for two years and aside from that was a beloved monk, hermit and miracle worker that lived and went to his reward in Northumbria in England. His story is really moving and beautiful, just full of miracles and mystery. Here is one snippet to whet your appetite.

When Christ, by whose grace the lives of the faithful are directed and guided, decided to call his servant to a higher and harder way of life, to earn a greater and more glorious reward, Cuthbert, at the time, happened to be looking after a flock of sheep committed to his charge, away up in the hills. One night when his companions had gone to sleep and he was keeping watch and praying as usual, he suddenly saw a light streaming from the skies, breaking the long nights darkness, and the choirs of the heavenly host coming down to earth. They quickly took into their ranks a human soul, marvelously bright, and returned to their home above. The youth was moved by this vision to give himself to spiritual discipline in order to gain eternal happiness with the mighty men of God. There and then he set about thanking God and exhorting his companions in a brotherly way to praise Him.
“What wretches we are, given up to sleep and sloth so that we never see the glory of those who watch with Christ unceasingly! After so short a vigil what marvels have I seen! The gate of Heaven opened anda band of angels led in the spirit of some holy man. While we are still in the deepest darkness, he has the happiness of looking forever on the halls of heaven and their King. I think he must have been some holy bishop or layman of great distinction since he was led in with such splendor and light by retinues of angels.”
In this way Cuthbert fired the hearts of the shepherds with the love and honour of God. Next day he was told that Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, a man of outstanding holiness, had passed into the Kingdom of Heaven at the time of his vision. He delivered the sheep back to their owners and decided to enter a monastery.

Chapter 4 of Life of Cuthbert by St. Bede, found in the Penguin Classics collection The Age of Bede page 47-48

I just love the beautiful piety and faith expressed in passages like that. In an age of excessive rationalism and unbelief books like the one mentioned above are like drinking from a cool stream on a hot day. I don’t have an ounce of Irish or British in me as far as I know but this “dark ages” stuff from the British Isles is really striking chord with me. I could write about the other stories in the collection but I’m too lazy and sick of sitting at the computer.

making the most of the time

2011-07-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been reading Holy Scripture almost more than anything else. Yesterday after glancing at the book of Ephesians this passage jumped out at me: Look carefully how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. (Eph 5:15) The part that really struck me was “making the most of the time” because death had been on my mind, as my best friend’s cousin just died of a stroke and he was pretty young. I‘ve been asking myself ever since seeing that passage just how can I “make the most of the time” that I have left? Truly we do not know when we will be called to account for our actions at the dread judgment seat of the Lord and so we must try to be ready at all times, and yet we—myself included—waste so much time on needless things. Even thoughts and ideas can be needless wasteful things. The more I turn away the happier I am. Politics, entertainment, debating and thinking to much just wear away at the soul and so I have tried to give them up as much as possible. As the great Apostle says “the days are evil” so why should we allow the evil of the days to maker inroads on our hearts?

My friend’s cousin had no idea that he would die that day and yet he is gone. We should really reflect on that and try to set our priorities. Elsewhere in Ephesians the great Apostle tells us “do not let the sun go down on your anger” (4:26) and I think it applies to this discussion. Once I heard someone say the last thing they said to their father was “I hate you”. Imagine that. In the light of death and judgment none of our grudges really seem to matter, they evaporate like smoke. Of course putting all this high minded spiritual stuff into practice is not easy but we must strive to do so as much as we can. We do not want to enter into Eternity hating others or having wasted our time.

God became man and suffered for our sakes. The infinite God did this on our behalf. What are we doing to show Him our gratitude? Since I don’t reckon God needs our gratitude to be happy I imagine He wants us to manifest His love and generosity to others, to our fellow men in this fallen world. Some of us cannot do this in a social setting so we become monks or lay hermits in practice and pray. Others are called to do it in the world but I imagine it is very hard to do. The world is so full of darkness and distress, anger and hatred and there are few interested in knowing Jesus Christ. Perhaps those of us who are solitaries are meant to work and pray even harder so that Christ will shed even more graces on those who must deal with the landmines of the world.

Sometimes I feel like my salvation is at stake if I do not become a monk. I do not know how I could live a truly godly life in the world when the world and the very culture itself are dead set against the religious ideal. Especially today here in the West we are on the verge of a persecution. I truly believe this to be the case. Just how soon or how vicious it will be is not for me to know but it is coming. I know I’m not the only one that shares this train of thought. We must be ready, those of us who profess Christ, to shed our blood if need be and I fear that within my lifetime—especially in Europe—this will come to pass for some of us. The Apostle in his letter to the Ephesians gives us the best way we can prepare for this inevitable slaughter: "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil."( 6:11)

Sunday

2011-07-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

“I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you” (St. John 14:18) Last night while sitting around really trying to figure out whether I should leave Catholicism in my past and take up Orthodoxy I turned to Holy Writ and saw this passage. I take it to mean that even in this time of limbo I will not be left without the grace of Christ leading me and that somehow if I am true to this path I will make the right decision, end up where I need to be. Right now I’m seriously on a path out of the Catholic Church to Orthodoxy. The more I pray in an Orthodox fashion and experience even a taste of it through the Divine Liturgy the less nervous I am to become Orthodox, the more it just feels right, natural even. And the more I casually study certain things about the Churches doctrine and history the less convinced I am of Rome’s claims, especially in light of Vatican II, the new Mass and the top down apostasy that the aforementioned Council inundated the Church with like a full scale tsunami.

With the Popes and the mainstream bishops leading the charge into the brave new world of insipid banal and secularized “Catholicism” in a post Vatican II world while all along telling us that nothing has changed, that the Church still teaches the faith of the Apostles some of us are not convinced. If the Roman Catholic Church is really the True Church why did it literally collapse like a house of cards in a matter of decades? I would be intellectually dishonest if I just took on faith that just because Rome says that the Novus Ordo is Catholic and Vatican II was a good thing and fully consonant with Tradition that it is true. Seriously, open your eyes.

Today I went to Mass and received Holy Communion. It was a Novus Ordo but I had no choice. I wasn’t there for anything but Christ, but the whole time I sat there thinking “get me out of here” since it was so insipid, trite, banal—revolting even. I wanted to get up and go, just go. I even prayed to Saint Michael my patron to give me a sign that I should go but by the time I felt like just hightailing it some guy sat down next to me blocking my exit. I stayed and sat through it, more than anything because, as I prayed before I went, I needed Holy Communion and the grace it gives as food for my journey. As I sat in the parking lot earlier I said to myself out loud “I need this (Communion), the devil is making too many inroads on my life right now.” I told our Lord before Communion that I am really confused at this point and that I do not wish to cause Him any offense, but that I was having immense trouble in the light of Vatican II and the recent popes to actually believe in the claims of Rome anymore but that I firmly believe that He is present in the most holy sacrament of the altar.

You see I believe in Christ as much as I ever have and my prayer life hasn’t really suffered but I just don’t believe in Rome anymore, not the way I wanted to. The thing is, a traditionalist lives in the past but is confronted with the present and has little hope for the future. Trent has been cast aside in practice even though in theory its decrees are still in effect and face it, the pope himself presided over the destruction of the Traditional Mass and what we are stuck doing is to try to pretend that Vatican II never happened, pretend that what we see really is still the unadulterated Catholic faith and bury our heads in the sand or we simply start to question whether the claims of Rome ever really had any substance in reality or not in the first place and look to Orthodoxy.

As I said in yesterdays reflection, having the traditional Mass at a small chapel with likeminded folks who live in the past and read books and dogmatic treatises that no one, not even today’s highest ranking clerics give the impression they give a hoot about anymore or even know of is not enough for me. The vineyard of the Roman Church has been absolutely ravaged like a Celtic settlement pillaged by Vikings during the time of Saint Cuthbert and there is little left to hold onto except for dreams and fantasies of a past that no one short of a handful believe in anymore. The worst part is, when you see that it would appear that not even the last few popes or almost the entire bishopric believes than why hold on? Vatican II could just be a blessing in disguise for some of us who are than able to pierce the veil and see that Orthodoxy a Church that has for centuries been quiet and persecuted and far less visible, is really the True Church, the Church of the Apostles. Whatever the case I’m reminded again that if I pray fervently and keep treading through this mess I can be confident that Christ will keep His promise to me and to all who walk with me: “I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you” St. John 14:18

today

2011-07-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Part of what has kept me Catholic is nothing more than the devotional life and certain aspects of the Faith itself. Eucharistic adoration, Benediction and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, the holy rosary, Gregorian chant, the High Mass—these things I love. The question I keep asking though is this—is it enough, the devotions and antique relics of post Vatican II Catholicism? That is a serious question that isn’t easily answered. I’ve been praying in an Orthodox fashion for the last few weeks—whole body praying, standing, in front of my icons, and it feels right. I said that before but I’ll reiterate it now, it feels right. I will have a real hard time letting go of Eucharistic adoration and the Latin Mass and some of the litanies if I should become Orthodox but maybe that is what will have to happen. I can’t see myself ever completely giving up the rosary though. Sometimes the devotional life and the insulated world of the traditionalist chapel is enough or it seems like it but at other times it isn’t. My biggest problem is that while the trad chapel might be a perfect remnant of post Vatican II Catholicism it is a thorn in the side of the official Church and no longer the norm.

If the Popes and bishops have pretty much abandoned the Faith why should any of us hold out? When the highest authorities in the Church keep peddling novelties and/or allowing them why should we care, why should we really want to obey them and why should we respect them? Those in charge are supposed to be stewards of the faith, passing it on to future generations intact, with nothing added or taken away. That hasn’t happened despite the insistence of neo Catholic apologists that “nothing really changed with Vatican II”. Everything changed, just look around. I can have my Mass, my devotions and live in my own little world as if Vatican II never happened but outside that bubble is a brave new world and it is no longer Catholic in any recognizable sense. If this is the True Church why doesn’t it feel like it, why are those in authority acting like it, preaching it and leading by example?

There are men like Michael Voris who have real zeal for the Catholic faith but will it be enough? I wonder if it will ultimately come down to the laity overthrowing the wolves with shepherds cloaks and mitres on calling them to accountability. Certainly it has been decades since Vatican II and it has been the same old story over and over again, the same old wolves laying waste to the flock and hacking away at the vineyard and next to none but a handful, many of them outside the diocesan structure, trying to do anything about it. My biggest disillusion is that I feel from the bottom of my heart like the leaders of the Church are to blame for this. They set it in motion, they’ve perpetuated this and they continue to appear to do nothing to stop it. Perhaps Rome really has lost the faith and if that is the case I have no choice except to become Orthodox. My faith in God, in Christ, remains, but my faith in Rome has practically fallen apart.

psalm 141 and thoughts

2011-06-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

I cried to the Lord with my voice: with my voice I made supplication to the Lord.
In his sight I pour out my prayer, and before him I declare my trouble:
When my spirit failed me, then thou newest my paths.
I looked on my right hand, and beheld, and there was no one that would know me. Flight hath failed me: and there is no one that hath regard to my soul.
I cried to thee, O Lord: I said: Thou art my hope, my portion in the land of the living.
Attend to my supplication: for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.
Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the just wait for me, until thou reward me.

I have this book called “Praying with Icons” that I have been using for morning and evening prayers and one of the Psalms that are used for the evening happens to be this one, Psalm 141. This psalm has become one of my favorites. As I stand before my icon corner and recite it I always pause after “In his sight I pour out my prayer, and before him I declare my trouble” and recall my sins and ask forgiveness as well as to air my concerns and needs for the day. It helps to pause and try to really get into the psalm and make it my own cry. It also helps immensely to have the icons before me as I pray so that I can gaze upon the face of Christ, the Theotokos, the Trinity icon or St. Michael the Archangel and enter into a timeless space.

Sacred images have always been something I was fond of and something I intuitively understood. I never understood why one wouldn’t want sacred images around, either in Church or in the home. They serve to remind me of the closeness of God, the Theotokos, the angels and the saints, the closeness of eternity and the reality of the unseen world. In a society where science and atheistic materialism has become the new religion, if not explicitly at least in an unspoken way, things like icons, chant, vigil lamps and incense can be like a lifeline and a connection to a deeper richer reality and worldview. I can see now why in that story Prince Vladimir or whoever it was witnessed an Orthodox Divine Liturgy in all its otherworldly glory and decided on the spot to make Russia an Orthodox nation.

I can’t speak for everyone, only for myself but I need images, ritual, symbols and something rooted in antiquity, something that has been passed on for generations to really feel in tune spiritually. I have always been like this, needing something more than white walls, a bare cross and a podium to keep the fire of faith burning in my heart. Certain people like me need to be reminded by images and rituals that we are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” and that we are linked to millions who have gone before us who have worshipped in the same manner. Having a prayer corner and getting to traditional Liturgy does this for me. For me a life in Christ is more about the heart than any rational argument and with this being the case I guess you can see why I’m still trending towards Orthodoxy.

To end let’s look at the last part of the psalm I started with:

Attend to my supplication: for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.
Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the just wait for me, until thou reward me.

Who are the persecutors mentioned? I have since taken to look at them as my sins, my weaknesses, my own bad habits because those things all act like persecutors in my life, making things difficult. By saying along with the holy prophet David “for they are stronger than I” I acknowledge that in many ways without the grace of Christ I am literally powerless to change or rise above my own weakness and sin that persecutes and hounds me. It is me telling the Lord that I know that I am weak and fallen and that I need His Divine help. My soul is in prison, a prison made of sin and weakness and guilt that I cannot overcome on my own. I guess you could also look at the last part of this psalm as referring to the righteous dead before the coming of Christ who where in the limbo of the Fathers before Christ entered there on Holy Saturday and brought them out.

still in limbo part 2

2011-06-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

As it stands I’m still in Limbo but leaning towards Orthodoxy but nothing is “official” yet in terms of me having become a formal Orthodox catechumen or anything. The hardest part of being in this limbo is that I’m not really Orthodox but I’m not Catholic enough in my convictions to feel confident to receive Holy Communion at a Catholic Mass and so I’ve been without the Eucharist for about 3 weeks and it is difficult. By convictions I mean I am very skeptical of the Catholic Church in light of Vatican II and the New Mass and a simple appeal to “the Church is indefectible”, “the gates of hell will not prevail…” etc just don’t cut it for me at the moment. How could the Pope and the bishops keep up this façade that there has been a “new springtime” in the Church and that the Novus Ordo is really part of the same lex orandi of the Church?

I’m very serious about this because it seems just beyond bizarre to me that after abundant evidence to the contrary the Pope and the bishops keep up this charade. In some ways the only logical conclusions I can come up with are that either Vatican II and the chaos in the Church in its aftermath proves at least on a gut level that Rome has been wrong all these years and Orthodoxy is the True Church or that groups like the SSPV are correct in that they cannot but come to the conclusion based on the evidence that the last few Popes and many of the Bishops may not actually be legitimate bishops or Popes but that they do not have the authority in the Church to say with full certainty. I cannot see it any other way.

I cannot attend the New Mass anymore in good conscience, I just cannot. I’m actually very comfortable with that decision now, as it was tearing apart my faith to go by making me doubt the Church because I could not and cannot fathom how the Pope and the bishops could allow such a mockery of Catholicism to continue throughout the world and call it the Mass. If I stay Catholic it will be with me attending the Latin Mass whenever I can go, even if it is just once or twice a month but I will not ever set foot in a Sunday Mass in the New Rite ever again. The saddest thing to me is that I love the Catholic faith, the traditional Catholic faith, but it just doesn’t seem like the Pope or the bishops (the ones considered in “full communion” whatever that means) are steering the Church in the direction it was headed before the Council. If the Papacy really had a charism of infallibility and some sort of power from the Holy Ghost than why have the last few Popes seemingly allowed this mess to continue?

My dilemma is still the fact that I love traditional Catholicism and if I had a traditional Mass in town and had never experienced the Novus Ordo or read about how utterly bizarre things are in every level of the Church I would have still had a soft spot for Orthodoxy but probably never would have even seriously considered leaving the Church but in light of Vatican II, the New Mass and the sometimes bizarre statements and actions of Popes and prelates in today’s Church I’m seriously questioning whether the Catholic Churches claims as the True Church are not founded in reality. After all, when you have Popes kissing the books of false religions and bishops allowing rampant heresy and heterodoxy in a diocese while persecuting those of us who wish to keep the traditional faith and the traditional sacraments than why in some ways wouldn’t one come to question the Church?

I have an Orthodox church and an Orthodox monastery right within a 15 mile radius of where I live where I know I could get good spiritual direction, reverent Liturgy and no funny business. The chaos in the Catholic Church seriously threatens to destroy my faith, not in God, not in Christ, not in heaven and hell, but in the Roman Catholic Church as the sole instrument of Christ’s saving action in the world.

thoughts

2011-06-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Every weekend I call my mother and talk to her for an hour or so. We usually talk about just about anything but the last few times we spoke the topic of the supernatural came up. She thinks that there might be ghosts at the house that I grew up in and we discussed that possibility along with many other “paranormal” things in the course of our conversation. It might sound strange but I can talk to my mother about that stuff and both of us believe it with conviction. I guess you could say I grew up in an environment where ghosts, fairies, angels, devils and all manner of politically incorrect invisible entity were not taboo subjects.

I’m thankful for that kind of openness to the unseen world that my mom fostered in me, not because I’m one of those paranormal junkies that goes out with infrared cameras and digital recorders to catch apparitions and disembodied voices but because her own openness to those things gave me a connection with the unseen that has helped me in my spiritual life, most especially regarding things like angels, God, Saints, etc. Having grown up in a house like that I never questioned the reality of God or His existence although in my teen years I tinkered with Wicca and fell into Buddhism. I was always up at midnight when Christmas Eve turned to Christmas Day to wish Jesus Christ a happy birthday. I did this stuff before I was even baptized. I wanted to believe and I did and I still do.

This openness to the unseen has been good to me because it has helped me keep my faith in God over the years despite the basic agnostic tenor of American culture. I see the world differently and I’m drawn to the monastic way of life. I feel quite literally suffocated under the materialism and godlessness of this culture. It is plastic, empty and yet so full of souls hungry for meaning and direction that are instead ravenously devouring the garbage handed to them by advertisers the media or the New Age movement. There are so many people out there searching for meaning in a secular society that denies that there is such thing as meaning at all. I always marvel at the arrogance of “modern man” that thinks he has everything all figured out and yet the society he has created is full of so many millions of people that are so unhappy.

It has now come to the point where I cannot really find anything in the Catholic Church that sustains me spiritually and it is not because of anything lacking in the traditional Mass, Gregorian chant, etc but in the general spirit of today’s Church. I love the old Mass, chant, visits to the tabernacle, etc but the spirit of the Church today is worldly, ecumenical and just banal really. The biggest bone I have to pick with the Catholic Church is that I can’t be a Catholic if I have no love for or trust in the Pope and the diocesan bishops and I really have no love or trust for them. The antics of the last few Popes have literally disgusted me, turned my stomach. They seem like betrayals, like the real life equivalent of Peter denying Christ in the Gospels.

I look to Orthodoxy to give me what I cannot find in today’s Catholic Church. I simply cannot be sustained in the spiritual wasteland of the Novus Ordo and I cannot make it to the Latin Mass each week. I was never comfortable as a Catholic with missing Mass since to do so—Novus Ordo or not—is to incur a mortal sin worthy of hell. Something was always laughable to me about the idea that some of the banal celebrations of the Novus Ordo were something I was bound under pain of mortal sin to attend. I won’t be laughing in God really does hide in the ugliness and irreverence of the Novus Ordo and tests the loyalty of His faithful by seeing if they will endure the banal desert full of outrages with Him for a lifetime.

Saturday

2011-06-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

Today there is a lot more peace within me on a certain level now that I have finally decided to become Orthodox and leave the Catholic Church behind but on another level there is a lot of restlessness and frenzied mental activity because there is so much to take in, so much to learn. I keep telling myself to try and remain simple, don’t get involved in all the debates within Orthodoxy and just try to pray, attend the Liturgy and live a holy life. This is so much easier said than done. I will need to pray to be granted the grace to cast off whatever Roman accretions I may have clinging to my understanding of God, grace, salvation, the meaning of the Liturgy etc so I can allow myself to be formed by Orthodoxy which is the way of the early Church Fathers from the first centuries of Christianity. I figure I’ll just tell an Orthodox priest that I’m coming in assuming nothing and willing to put myself under his guidance. I can’t bring my Roman ways with me on this journey but I must pray that I will have the strength to let go. It is exciting in some ways to be on this journey in the first place.

I feel like a weight has been taken off my shoulders now that I no longer have to sit and worry about what the Pope does or doesn’t do, or what his bishops do or don’t do. As a Catholic I felt estranged from the Papacy and the diocesan bishops. It seemed like ever since Vatican II Catholicism in the world as well as the US has been in decline and with the hierarchy themselves sometimes leading the charge headlong into novel and heterodox pastures. World Youth Day, the Charismatic Renewal, Communion in the hand, hordes of lay people—lay women—in the sanctuary, tables instead of altars, altar girls, “for all” instead of “for many” in the New Mass words of consecration, religious wearing sweat suits instead of habits, the papal tiara being given to the godless United Nations---I could go on and on but all these things contributed in some way to my final decision to leave.

Even the traditionalist movement seemed empty, full of lost souls pining away for something that had been dead and buried long ago that the Popes themselves thought embarrassing. To be a traditionalist was sort of like being a Civil War buff that goes out and puts on period costumes and pretends that Jefferson Davis still sat as head of the Confederate States of America and Robert E. Lee hadn’t given up yet, only the Catholic version is where Pius X stills sits on the papal throne and Vatican II never happened. A tragedy of Catholic traditionalism is that there is this sense of loyalty to the Pope and the Church but no one really wants to obey him because the Popes today don’t really seem to care about tradition. How can you remain a Catholic when you have no faith in the Pope or his bishops? I know I do not and so I stand at the door of the Orthodox Church and knock. Please Pray for me.

friday thoughts

2011-06-17T17:49:00.001-07:00

This week I’ve tried to start praying as if I was Orthodox including making the sign of the cross the way that they do and it definitely feels right. I think this year I’m actually ready to get off the fence so to speak and just plunge into Orthodoxy. The more I read about it, pray about it and try to get into it the more convinced I become that I must become an Orthodox Christian rather than just have an Eastern prayer style while remaining in union with Rome. Don’t get me wrong I love certain elements of Catholicism but I don’t think I can hold on any longer. I’m not going to get into big arguments over my decision or even really hash out all my reasons on this forum because I really don’t want to calumniate or cause undue offense to anyone but I will say that I’m planning on leaving the Roman Catholic Church as soon as I can be received into Orthodoxy.

I feel grateful to the Catholic Church for what she has given me but there is something missing in it, something I cannot really put my finger on but is there nonetheless. Perhaps had Vatican II never happened I may not have felt this way or maybe I would have, who knows? All I know is that I look around today and see that the Catholic Church doesn’t seem to be teaching the same doctrine she used teach prior to Vatican II and as a traditionalist I feel so cut off from the Pope, the bishops etc that I don’t know if I can call myself a Catholic anyway. A Catholic is someone who loves the Pope and the bishops and is obedient to them, not just obedient to Tradition. I cannot do that in good conscience which is also why I cannot be a sedevacantist.

It is with a heavy heart that I make this decision in some ways but I feel like it is something I must do. If I am wrong than may our Lady bring me back to the Church at the hour of my death so that I do not lose my soul.

todays prayer time

2011-06-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

I finished work early today and by early I mean by about two thirty and so I had hours to kill and no place to go except for a local Catholic Church with our Lord reserved in the tabernacle. When I got there I had the whole place to myself, the only sounds being the groaning of the wood in the old building, the soft rumbles of thunder in the distance and my own breathing. I’ve been so in my head the last week or so, obsessing about this whole Orthodox/Catholic thing during almost every moment that I just needed a break. Rather than pray the Rosary which often takes immense effort if you try to actually meditate on the Mysteries I simply decided to breathe and recite the Jesus Prayer, sometimes linking it up to my breathing and at other times just to repeat it silently to myself. I can’t say that I had any Divine Illumination or anything or that I was entirely at peace but I spent a good half hour, maybe more, leaned up against the wall next to the Tabernacle praying in this manner.

After awhile I found a little peace even in the midst of the usual anxieties of the day and when distraction came I just returned to the prayer. Having been a Buddhist for quite a while this sort of thing was familiar, this “mindfulness” and letting go thing although since leaving Buddhism meditation and mindfulness have not been regular practices for me. I can do without sitting meditation but perhaps the mindfulness, the watching the body and the breath and working through the tension and the stress are good things that I shouldn’t have let go of. Sometimes we just need to breathe and let go.

I’ve even started trying to do this while at work, right before I start sorting another properties worth of mail. I’ll sit in my office for a few minutes and finger my Rosary, usually just breathing and saying the Jesus Prayer and I will try not to get up and start my work until I’m calm. It’s so easy to make much ado about nothing, especially at a job like mine. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, solitude is not always peaceful. It can be very stressful and what makes it difficult is that there is no one but you and God to sort things out. I know I get stuck in my head a lot and the noise my thoughts create can pull me down and stress me out. We need space and little exercises like the one mentioned can help give it but like anything else they have to be fought for over the laziness and the desire to just not do it.

At the end of my stint in front of our Lord I started saying the Jesus prayer in another way that sort of came to me on a whim; instead of saying “have mercy on me, a sinner” I would say “have mercy on x” with “x” being friends, family, deceased ancestors, whoever really. That was kind of a nice twist. Sometimes when I say the Jesus Prayer over and over I can feel like I’m not really praying for others but this little change in the words got rid of that feeling.

still in limbo

2011-06-13T19:30:00.001-07:00

As it stands I’m still in ecclesiastical limbo for the time being. I wasn’t able to get to the Divine Liturgy this past Sunday but I plan on going this week and plan on trying to get to that traditional monastery in the next town as soon as possible too. It’s a very confusing and painful place to be right now but my faith in Christ remains intact and has not been dented in the slightest. It’s not the reality of God or the beauty of Jesus Christ that is the issue here—I’ve never been an atheist or an agnostic and could never be—ever—unless God actually withdrew so much grace from me that it happened. It’s never been my nature to doubt God but I have still been having doubts about the Catholic Church, most especially in light of Vatican II, the New Mass and what seems like top down apostasy that appears to have continued unabated since the reign of John XXIII.

As I said before the historical arguments seem to me pretty useless, as I can get as many perspectives as there are writers and historians and as is expected Catholic writers play up the Catholic view and look at the Orthodox as schismatic while Orthodox writers play up their own view while looking at Catholics as schismatic and this will not change and hasn’t really convinced many people since the fighting started. This historical difficulty makes history a place I refuse to turn any longer for my answers. I don’t want my faith in Christ to rest on what some historian says about what happened a thousand years ago either. When I look at the Novus Ordo and watch popes kissing korans and dancing at rock Masses it tells me all I need to know, or does it?

The problem is that as far as the Catholic Church is concerned there is a beautiful
tradition within it but is has been almost completely destroyed in the wake of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo or the bizarre antics of post Vatican II popes doesn’t really completely obscure that and make the Church as a whole wrong. The Catholic Church is full of great saints, Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions, beautiful devotions (Rosary), reverent liturgical music (Gregorian chant) and a magnificent liturgy (Tridentine Rite) and at some level this is not lost on me, after all, I consider myself a Roman Catholic traditionalist. It is hard to be a traditionalist because as Catholics we are supposed to have a lot of respect for the Pope and obey him and the last few Popes, including the current one, have not been beacons of Roman Catholic Orthodoxy which means we either bury our heads in the sand, keep telling ourselves that he isn’t speaking “ex cathedra” or somehow say he isn’t the Pope.

Some of us find ourselves feeling estranged not only from the Pope himself but from most of the hierarchy which makes us sort of in limbo in our own Church, living off of old encyclicals from the pre Vatican II era and being sustained by customs and a liturgy that is as far removed from what today pass as Catholicism in the mainstream Church as Alaska is from Florida. This makes you question whether the Popes themselves have simply gone along with the sweeping changes in the Church. Folks like me hang on the tattered threads of something that quite frankly doesn’t really seem to exist anymore except in dream and memory. If I didn’t have the Latin Mass and Gregorian chant and the old devotions and the tiny bit of hope that someday, somehow, we will get a Pope that will authoritatively reconcile Vatican Ii with Tradition with firm anathemas or scrap it altogether and apologize to the faithful for taking so long to do it I wouldn’t be Catholic, I really wouldn’t. The Novus Ordo, ecumenism, felt banners, Protestant pop tunes, altar girls, banal translations of scripture and agnostic rationalist commentary in the footnotes (NAB) don’t do it for me, they don’t seem to have any relation to Catholic Tradition whatsoever and once you’ve tasted Tradition and drunk from it’s well you cannot go back, cannot see the present Catholic Church with anything but tears and tragedy for literally selling Christ for the empty silver of human respect.

As for Orthodoxy it is hard for me to sit and condemn it outright the way some of my Catholic traditionalist confreres are so quick to do. Anyone who looks honestly at the Philokalia or reads men like St. Theophan the Recluse, St. Seraphim of Sarov or modern elders like Paisius of Mount Athos would have to be lying to themselves’ by saying there isn’t anything good or holy in them. If the Orthodox Church is truly graceless and schismatic than why have there been so many holy men and women that have come out of it? It is true that on the outside it doesn’t look like there is much unity in Orthodoxy but unlike the Catholic Church the Orthodox never had a Vatican II and with the way that the Orthodox Church is set up it could never have one. That has always intrigued me. The conversion of the Catholic hermit Father Gabriel Bunge to Russian Orthodoxy intrigued me too, as a man of such learning and practice in the spiritual life as him might be on to something.

At heart I want to be a simple person living a simple faith rooted in antiquity. I can see holy simplicity in the writings of Orthodox like the Optina Elders and in some of the men I mentioned. I don’t see this at all in the modern Catholic Church. I glimpse it sometimes in some of the traditionalist priests I know who really deeply care for their flock and for the traditions of the Catholic Church and who have little to do with Vatican II but the biggest problem is that it seems like the Vatican hierarchy itself, perhaps even the Pope is marching to a different drumbeat, one founded in 1965 at the close of Vatican II.
I haven’t broken with the Catholic Church right now, I may never actually do it, but I am really trying to get a feel for Orthodoxy while praying for an end to this current confusion.

more thoughts

2011-06-09T20:55:00.001-07:00

Having dealt with this sort of limbo last year around whether to stay Catholic or become Orthodox I’m not worrying about the outcome so much right now but simply try to pray through the crisis and let Christ lead me where He may. When I study the various arguments made in favor of both the Catholics and the Orthodox they both are quite compelling and to be honest, if it were really cut and dry than the divisions between the Churches would have been healed a long time ago but they are so subtle and so convincing on both sides that I really do not think reason alone can give the answer that I’m looking for. I never much put much stock in reason anyway. I’m like Pascal who said “the heart has reasons by which reason knows nothing”.

Truly what makes this so difficult is that, like I said last year, I have never felt inclined to deny the Immaculate Conception or Purgatory and to me the Filioque is too theologically subtle for me and so at heart I am a Catholic, I believe wholeheartedly in Catholic dogmas, I just feel on a certain level that the Church is dead, that even the Popes have sold Christ for Belial.

The weakest thing about Catholicism has been, ironically, the Papacy, as it was the Papacy that sanctioned and fostered the novelties of Vatican II and the New Mass on the faithful and the appeal to obedience that keeps the faithful buying into the lie that 2 plus 2 equals 5 just because the Pope or some Vatican prelate says so even when anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear like the SSPX isn’t fooled, not for one moment. Today the Church is in ruins, the Pope himself with his bishops presided over the destruction of the Roman Rite Mass and the Catholic Church and that is hard to stomach and now it would appear even the Pope wants some ungodly hybrid Mass, a bastard child of the fabricated Novus Ordo with the Mass of Ages. In the Catholic Church only the Pope can reign in the chaos and this one, like the last 3 before him, have done seemingly nothing to reign in nor to rule.

The sad thing is at heart I’m a Catholic. I love the traditional Mass, Gregorian chant, the Rosary, the Crusader spirit, etc. I even have no problem with Catholic dogmas that the Orthodox find distasteful because to me they make sense, even purgatory makes sense. I just feel like the Church is in ruins and that no one short of a handful of traditionalists really cares. This is why I suffer, because at heart I’m a Catholic and love the traditional faith but I feel like the Papacy itself has let the Church down and when the Popes themselves betray the Church what can one do other than bury ones head in the sand, become a sedevacantist or simply get up and leave?

All I can do is wait it out, explore Orthodoxy again, maybe attend a few Divine Liturgies at the local church and pray about the whole thing. Right now I’m very reluctant to leave the Church even though part of me wants to start fresh as an Orthodox.

ecclesiastical limbo

2011-06-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been really thinking about Orthodoxy again and about whether or not this time around I ought to just take the plunge so to speak and go for it and become Orthodox. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Catholic faith, I love the Rosary, Benediction and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass but truthfully I feel really drawn to the Eastern way of prayer and doing things. I started praying again in the Eastern way, standing, with prostrations, frequent signs of the Cross and the Jesus Prayer in front of my small prayer corner and it just feels more right that way. In addition to that when I read the writings of some of the Orthodox Saints on prayer and the spiritual life it really speaks to me in a way the Western Catholic way does not. Part of this I cannot put into words really, it is just something that I feel at a gut level that is unexplainable. For me to pray I really need lots of ritual, imagery and all that can really be found in abundance within the Orthodox Church, with its beautiful icons, incense, chants and prayer rules, things the New Rite Catholic Mass cannot supply whatsoever.

Catholicism today is barren, literally barren, especially in the New Rite and quite frankly it is very hard to get up Sunday after Sunday and go to a place with a table instead of an altar, goofy sentimental piano music and than to feel so alienated as a Traditionalist that you just don’t really care who is Bishop in your diocese because chances are he is probably just another Vatican II liberal. Anyone with eyes to see can look around and see that Vatican II has become the foundation for a new Church and that realistically Pius XII was the last Pope who actually seemed to do much of anything to stop the slide into church wide novelty and apostasy. I certainly can and do attend the Traditional Mass at traditional chapels when I can but is that enough or are us traditionalists just all burying our heads in the sand while the neo modernists at the top wait for us to just give up or die off so they can finally bulldoze the last vestiges of the traditional faith into dust? Sure we have our Mass, but in some ways so what? Those that Rome considers in “full communion” like the FSSP have to agree to Vatican II and the New Mass before they can have their chapels and carry on pretending that 1965 never happened.

Part of lasts years’ crisis was I felt that the Catholic Church has literally abandoned Tradition wholesale, from the top down. I still feel that way and quite frankly as far as I can see there is little evidence to the contrary. Don’t get me wrong the more I have studied Orthodoxy there are serious problems going on over on their side as well, including a sort of creeping Protestantism in American Orthodoxy, ecumania amongst some of their leaders and the bizarre idea (what I find bizarre at least) of having some churches re baptize converts while others don’t. For instance, last year the local Orthodox priest told me if I went and converted at his church I would be received through Chrismation and Confession but not baptism but that the local Greek Orthodox monks would not accept me as Orthodox because they don’t accept non Orthodox baptisms. Honestly this type of squabbling was one reason—a serious one actually—why I simply stayed Catholic despite the troubles in the Church and part of why I’m still hesitant.

As a Catholic I can go to any Catholic church in the world, Eastern or Western Rite, and receive Holy Communion. As an Orthodox I might not know if the church in the next town considers me Orthodox enough to receive Communion at their Church or not. Then there is the whole ethnic thing that I find a little off putting. I’ve heard some Orthodox churches are not very friendly to those not sharing whatever nationality the church has in the majority. Talk about uncomfortable to say the least. To be fair I’ve heard some Eastern Rite Catholic churches are the same though. Really what I’m looking for is a place where I can live an authentic life in Christ, where there is a reverent liturgy and where there are deep rooted traditions.

Orthodoxy seems like it could be the right place but I’m already a very skittish person as it is and quite frankly I get the impression Orthodoxy is not really friendly to outsiders which is one huge reason I have not taken that step. Should I simply stay a Catholic and pretend that Vatican II never happened, the pope never kissed the Koran, a Buddha statue was never put on top of a tabernacle at Assisi and that the New Mass is really Catholic or should I brave the possibly unfriendly waters of Orthodoxy? As I stand now I’m still a Catholic and don’t plan on being rash but right now I’m sort of on the edge of ecclesiastical limbo.

Sunday thoughts

2011-06-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

One of the many books I’ve been plugging through is the late Father John Hardon’s book History and Theology of Grace which, I must confess, is dense enough to be something used in Catholic seminaries but not so dense that with a repeated reading and careful reflection it can’t be made sense of, at least enough to get the basics. It’s my belief that unless you have a basic understanding of grace than there is no urgency to the Catholic spiritual life because without understanding what it means and how it actually makes you a “son of God and heir of eternal life” and that when you lose it through mortal sin you literally lose the indwelling Holy Ghost in your soul and become oriented to hell unless you repent, either through a perfect act of Charity (don’t bet on it) or the sacrament of Penance (Confession) we can just plug along taking things for granted. In my own understanding of things human dignity also has no meaning outside the arbitrary and pragmatic unless it is seen in light of our adoption as sons and daughters of God by being infused with sanctifying grace.

It is quite disturbing to me that outside traditionalist chapels one rarely hears grace being explained for what it really is—something that makes us partakers in the Divine Nature but something that, through our own fault, can be lost. We receive our dignity from God and God alone, it isn’t bequeathed to us by the United Nations or Congress and part of that dignity is to be raised up and share in God’s own life here and forever in Eternity but as I said it can be lost through mortal sin and today mortal sin is not only easy it is publicly sanctioned by the government, applauded by the media and entertainment and practically obligatory if we wish to fit in with our culture. To learn more about it is to be able to make a better choice, do we walk along the wide path to hell which is the easy way, or do we take the narrow road that leads to salvation? There are no third options.

Today at Mass I was thinking about all this stuff but what also came to my mind was how the majority of Catholics will probably never learn about grace much less do what needs to be done day in day out to get to heaven. I kept thinking that if that is so does it mean that the majority of folks go to hell? To me it would seem unthinkable that God would allow so many folks who probably don’t know any better due to human weakness, bad catechesis, etc to all be on the merry road to hell. It’s hard enough for me to keep on the straight and narrow and I sit and think about this stuff, read about it and pray every day so if I’m having difficulty than so are others.

Those of us that do know better however, must bear those burdens for those that don’t. As I said before, a soul in a state of grace is an instrument of Christ in the world and prayer becomes more efficacious, at least according to a good traditional priest I know and when you think about it for awhile makes sense. A soul filled up with grace is a soul that is literally an adopted son of God, a partaker of the Divine nature, dwelling in God’s friendship in ways that those who are in mortal sin or not baptized are not. When we look at many of the saints and see that their prayer was almost always answered, especially their prayers for others, we might be able to attribute it to the state of their soul. What sometimes helps me to think twice about giving into a temptation that would be mortally sinful is that to do so not only makes me spiritually dead but also makes my prayers less efficacious for others. We can bear burdens for others by praying and offering up our sufferings for their salvation while we are in a state of grace.

Interestingly enough at Fatima our Lady said to the shepherd children “many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and do penance for them”. Those of us that do know better should be making sure we frequent the Confessional so that we can pray and do some penance for the salvation of others while in a state of grace. As I said, just look around, the world today as it always has in times past, but more especially today, applauds mortal sin, legislates it and promotes it with the help of the media establishment. Mortal sin is easy today even for those of us who say we know our faith. How much easier it must be for those who don’t? The best thing we can do is to get in and stay in a state of grace and storm heaven with prayers and penances not just for our own salvation, but for the millions of souls who are in the same boat as us, living in a neo pagan culture that exalts sin and mocks and derides Christ every chance it gets which just makes living an authentic spiritual life that much more difficult.

friday thoughts

2011-06-03T19:24:00.000-07:00

This whole week I’ve been slowly reading through Christ The Eternal Tao again. I really can’t get enough of it. I think if I had that book along with St. Alphonsus Ligouri’s The Glories of Mary and a little pocket New Testament with Psalms I would be set, I wouldn’t need any other books. On the chapter called “Watchfulness” there is a quote from the late Elder Paisius of Mount Athos that is well worth putting down here:

“The devil does not hunt after those who are lost; he hunts after those who are aware, those who are close to God. He takes from them trust in God and begins to afflict them with self assurance, logic, thinking, criticism. Therefore we should not trust our logical minds. Never believe your thoughts.” (page 316)

He then is quoted as saying:

“Live simply and without thinking too much, like a child with his father. Faith without too much thinking works wonders. The logical mind hinders the grace of God and miracles. Practice patience without judging with the logical mind.” (page 316)

I will quote once more from the book but this one is from the author, Heiromonk Damascene:

“We take refuge in our thoughts, fantasies and emotions because they give us a deceptive sense of security. But Christ tells us to abandon that security and make ourselves vulnerable, relying wholly on our Creator.” (page 321)

The entire book is full of gems like these but like with real gems they are nothing more than nice trinkets and ornaments unless we make them useful. If we really stop and ponder these statements (I’ll take them one at a time here) they each could probably take a lifetime to really “get”.

The first one is actually quite scary, especially for the Western mind and for people that are sort of self absorbed introverts like me who live in and through thoughts more than anything else. The hardest thing for me is to get out of my head. I’m serious here. I really have no use for logic, science in my own life etc but I sure can think a lot about my own problems, what others might think of me, etc so much so that it probably hinders Grace acting within me and keeps me in a prison of my own mind most of the time. I’m sure every other extreme introvert knows what I’m talking about. I can never feel comfortable in a group because I’m selfishly analyzing my own thoughts and feelings and as a result am hyper sensitive to the slightest hint I might perceive as rejection, ridicule, whatever from someone else and usually if I can get out of there I will hightail it at the first perception (faulty or not) of possibly being maligned. As a result I just can’t be around people, can’t make friends, can’t really function normally outside a controlled environment with close family or when I’m totally alone with my cat. I’m not so inept I can’t fake it when I have to, but by and large it drains me emotionally and physically to be around people I don’t know for any length of time and I avoid social situations like Dracula avoids sunlight.

The advice of Elder Paisius is good because if I pray about it and work with it hopefully I will learn to be able to get outside of my own head more. I’m the classic melancholic temperament. Once I heard a good trad priest say that the best way to find balance as a melancholic person is to say the Litany of Humility everyday and to go out and do the corporal works of mercy, get outside yourself and do things for others rather than sit inside brooding all day.

The second quote about living simply is my favorite because to me the key to the spiritual life, the life of faith, is to keep it simple. This isn’t always easy though, especially when you are like me stuck in your head all the time. The one thing I am thankful for though is the simple faith I have always had. I grew up in a household with a mother who believed in miracles, fairies, etc and she fostered that in me from an early age. In my own upbringing I lived with a simple faith in God although I wasn’t a baptized Catholic yet. I never once doubted God’s existence and part of that was why I could never fully give myself over to Buddhism. It seemed like a big despise the world nihilism and nothing more than that and it nearly drove me to deep despair.

Part of my eventual turn towards Christ was the need to pray—to really pray—not just to send out merit into an empty mechanical universe ruled by impersonal karma, but to God, a personal God. The experience I had right before my final conversion and eventual baptism was one where I knew, just knew, that Jesus Christ was calling me and that God was not only real He was personal. You can’t go there rationally, reasonably, dissecting things like this with math, science and modern western tools. I really feel like it was a signal grace. After that moment Buddhism became utterly meaningless, ridiculous even. In spite of the ridicule I had to endure from a close friend I absolutely needed to become baptized and enter the Church. It was that powerful.

The last quote seems to touch on the idea of Providence. We who are still living in time cannot really wrap our heads around what that means but we should try to meditate on it. We are to rely wholly on our Creator, letting go of our own desire to always be in control. This is very difficult and probably impossible unless we are given the grace to really know it, live with radical faith and trust in it or do some serious mental prayer and reflect on it till we can let go and trust in Providence. The author is saying that our thoughts, ideas, fantasies, emotions, etc get in the way, they hinder grace. I have faith but I don’t have that radical trust just yet.

Well, it’s another long sort of winding sloppy post. One thing I really want to do is to start planning and writing these posts with more effort and skill. I usually just sit down and fire them off as I sit here with no plan at all. I feel like my writing will suffer if I keep being this sloppy. Oh well, if I get over my laziness it’ll happen. Hopefully the next post will be clearer. It will be on St. Cuthbert whose biography I just read written by the Church Father Saint Bede…

todays thoughts

2011-05-31T15:47:00.000-07:00

I’m not Orthodox nor can I really see myself becoming Orthodox at this point in time but I have been re reading Christ The Eternal Tao again and enjoying it. That is one of the books in my small library that I find myself returning to time and again. There is something about it that resonates with me that I can’t put my finger on. It’s profound spiritual reading on so many levels and full of quotes from various Fathers, Saints and modern mystics, mostly from the Christian East. Although I’m quite attached to my traditionalist Roman Catholic ways, devotions, etc there is something attractive to me in the East, especially in the East’s more “spiritual” and less “intellectual” understanding of the mysteries of Christ, prayer, etc. It might also have to do with the fact that I have the East in my blood in that my mom’s side of the family all came from parts of Poland and Russia and so I have affection for a way of looking at Christ that my ancestors on that side of the family more than likely practiced.

My favorite saints are the simpletons, the “holy fools” who just believed and lived their lives based on a sure faith in Christ and His Church. I don’t personally think that with the modern era’s myriad opinions, ideas, theories etc that presenting the Faith in a rational reasoned manner is going to convince anyone. Saints, simple saints, are the ones that make a real difference, not stuck in their head intellectuals who can explain systematically or explain away every dogma of the Faith. The West has enough intellectualism already and it has led to nothing more than the gradual full scale apostasy of the culture at large. Only the saints show people the reality of God and His Son Jesus Christ. We need more saints and we need to be simpler in our own spiritual lives.

I’ll leave by quoting St. Macarius of Egypt who I found quoted in Christ The Eternal Tao:

Eat as much bread as you find, and leave the wide earth to pursue its way; go to the brink of the river, and drink as much as you need, and pass on, and seek not to know whence it comes, or how it flows. Do your best to have your foot cured, or the disease of your eye, that you may see the light of the sun, but do not inquire how much light the sun has, or in what sign it rises. Take that which is given for your use. Why do you go off to the hills and try to discover how many wild asses and other beasts dwell there? The babe, when it comes to its mother’s breast, takes the milk and thrives; it does not search for the root and wellspring from which it flows so. It sucks the milk, and empties the whole measure; and another hour passes—the breasts fill up. The babe knows nothing of it, nor the mother either, although the supply proceeds from all her members.

It seems that this early desert father is telling us not to put our noses where they don’t belong, especially if we are serious about the spiritual life. If only all of us, along with the entire Church, took his advice.

prayer time and book reflection

2011-05-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

My summer workload is pretty light so today I got to spend about an hour in front of the tabernacle praying and just sitting there. Today Father was in the church blessing holy water so he had the air conditioner on which I was thankful for because oftentimes it is off when there is no Mass and it can get stifling in there. I remember once being soaked in sweat after praying, not due to any mystical experience but simply because this is Florida and the air conditioner was off. I decided to offer up a few Chaplets of Divine Mercy and at least one five decade Rosary for various intentions, most especially for the sick and the dying. I really can’t seem to let go that “devotion for the dying” that I heard about awhile back. I just think it is so important, especially now, in a world as sinful and spiritually empty as the one we live in today where even many in the Church have sold their souls to the city of man and traded Christ for Belial.

Before saying the Rosary mysteries I took the advice of a priest I read about who suggested we meditate on the mystery we are to pray for about three minutes prior to starting our “Hail Mary” prayers. Today, being Wednesday the Glorious Mysteries were the ones I prayed. What I found so interesting is that when I got to the Assumption my mind was focused on death. I saw that I should really think about death more often, I mean really think about it. I thought about how much of my life can be wasted and has been wasted in fears and inconsequential things and how death would come to me just like—in the opinion of some theologians including St. Alphonsus—even our Lady had to die. Death comes to the best and the worst of us and when all is said and done we hold by faith that we will have to face Christ in His Judgment seat, Christ as “Pantocrator” and make an account of our lives and we will have nothing that we can bring with us except our deeds and our souls.

After prayers I went to the used bookstore and settled down and read some book by a Greek guy who visits the Holy Mountain. It’s called “Mountain of Silence” or something like that. The monk, Father Maximos who gave a lot of the advice had some really great things to say. It read more like a story than anything else so it made you feel like you were there on this journey through Cyprus and Athos with these men. It made me really appreciate and hold in awe the wisdom of Eastern Christianity again. I really resonate with the father’s statement that reason and philosophy can not really know God only a person dedicated to following the wisdom of the Saints can know Him. He pretty much said that most Christians are believers but they don’t really know. Do I really know either? I feel like I’ve had some experiences where I lost my doubts about God and Christ but they have been fleeting. I know that I’m no saint and I have a long way to go. I also know that when I left Buddhism I knew, just really knew, that it was Jesus Christ who called me out of the darkness and that one small experience—perhaps a signal grace—is something that cannot really be put into words.

All throughout the book there were wonderful stories of people seeing Saints, angels, devils, our Lady and all sorts of other amazing things. If all that stuff is true it’s hard for me to believe that the Orthodox don’t have a path to heaven and there is a part of me that likes to think that of all the various Christians the Orthodox would since they haven’t really rejected anything of what the early Christians taught and somehow, despite the creeping modernism and the Protestant influence in some modern Orthodoxy as a whole the various Orthodox churches have never had anything as catastrophic as Vatican II nor the general grand scale apostasy from the top down that us Catholics have had since the 60’s.

What is wonderful throughout the book is how this priest, Father Maximos really seems to be pastor of souls who lives his faith and takes it and the people under his care seriously. He also tries to be above politics and all the worldly stuff. In fact, he makes a point to tell the author that if we are serious about prayer we really have to die to the world. He doesn’t mean a casting off of responsibility which would be insanity unless we are monks but it does mean we have to put God and our spiritual life first, always. I see the wisdom in this because after disgust over the media bias during the 2008 elections I pretty much flipped the bird at politics and all that stuff. I literally do not follow the news cycle at all. I still catch some Catholic news here and there and find my mind thinking about stuff that I shouldn’t be thinking about, stuff that makes me angry and destroys my peace, but it has gotten better the more I’ve turned away. I am more peaceful now but I could still do better.

What I take from the book is that the only peace of heart we will ever have is to know God, to really know Him, and to know Him we have to follow what Father Maximos calls “the science of the saints” which is the well worn path and tried and true methods of the spiritual masters who have gone before us in Christ. Outside of that we will never have peace. I also take from it what I intuitively knew all along, that philosophy, science and reason cannot know God and cannot save our souls or ultimately give people true peace. I’ve always been a faith person and I thank God for that. “Lord keep me simple, make me more simple.” That should be my prayer without ceasing.

Seven Sorrows, Mary, etc.

2011-05-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

Reflection 1
Last night I read a chapter of St. Alphonsus’ book The Glories of Mary and said the Seven Sorrows Rosary, something I had always heard about but never really investigated. Both the book and the Seven Sorrows Rosary were very pleasing to me. St. Alphonsus writes very well of our Lady, very well indeed; and he peppers his sermons with copious quotations of the various Saints and Fathers of the Church too. I really love how Scripture is seemingly inexhaustible in its mysteries. This really comes out in all the different ways that the good saints talks about the Mother of God. Scripture itself realistically says so little about her but the things that have been said about her by the Saints and all the devotions that have sprung up surrounding her are astounding. Only through a really simple faith, deep prayer life and lots of meditation could one really see the things in Holy Writ men like St. Alphonsus see.

As for the Seven Sorrows Rosary, well, I really enjoyed that too. I’ve often heard the Orthodox critique of us Catholics that we focus too much on the Sacred Humanity of Christ and His Passion and suffering at the expense of His Divinity and the joy of the Resurrection. I can’t say that the charge leveled at us is entirely unwarranted but I don’t think it is entirely accurate either. For my part I actually like focusing on the Passion and suffering of Christ. I found myself actually quite moved meditating on the Seven Sorrows last night by imagining what it really must have been like for our Lady to witness her own son treated the way He was treated and to have to watch Him die. Last time I saw the Passion film I found myself tearing up during the scene where Christ falls and the screen shot goes back in time to when He fell as a child and His mother came to pick him up and help Him in both cases.

A mother’s love for a son runs deep and it must have run really deep between the Mary and Christ, especially since that relationship was born under so much suffering, from the early flight into Egypt to the foot of the Cross. This mother son dynamic is also touching to me personally because I was raised by my mother. I have a good relationship with her to this day and so I find the whole mother son dynamic with the Blessed Mother and our Lord touching.

I think that I will make this Seven Sorrows Rosary part of my regular devotional life. I really like how you have to read the prayer describing the scene before the meditation, but since the words are there you can keep your eyes open and run them over the words as you meditate to stay focused. Sometimes the regular Rosary is hard to meditate well but I found this one fairly simple.

One thing I can say is that these devotions are for simple people overall. Without supernatural faith and simplicity they are just childish games or can seem so. One thing I love about the Catholic Faith is that it has a place for everyone, from intellectual giants like St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great and St. Augustine; solitaries like Denis the Carthusian and St. Bruno, misunderstood outcasts and holy fools like St. Benedict Joseph Labre; simple souls like St. Therese and St. Francis of Assisi and everyone in between.

Part 2
Part of today’s humdrum Catholicism is that there isn’t that evangelical passion and simplicity anymore in many places, instead we have people who have one foot in the world and one foot in the Church. All of us are like that to one degree or another, especially in an age like ours where truly the Church, if seen without the lens of faith in the promise of hells gates never being able to fully encroach upon her, has lost and continues to lose the culture wars. Truly if I had not the grace of a simple faith I would simply pack my bags and leave the Church because on all accounts the Church is losing or has lost already.

What keeps me going is a simple faith to know I am not God. Sometimes it is no more than knowing that an exorcist I know of says with 100 percent assurance that the demonic is real and if the demonic is real and exorcism is efficacious than the Catholic Faith is true. It's not a perfect logical proof but it's good enough for me. The priest in question is very well educated as well, he isn’t just speaking nonsense. If the demons fear a consecrated Host than at the very least Christ is who He says He is. He’s not the lying type either.Sometimes it is literally the thought of evil that keeps me where I am.

To me apologetic “proofs” for God and all that are sort of pointless to me. I always just believed for as long as I could remember. God will grant people the grace to be open to the Faith and I don’t think “proofs” are going to win souls. In my own situation the only thing I do is pray. I have not the intelligence, the skills, the information or the desire to combat all the arguments against the Church and the Faith. I simply pray and remain hidden, that is all. And I like it that way.

The Church, I’m convinced, will never win souls as long as it fights the battles with its hecklers in the realm of reason alone. The Church must be an example but an example of being completely on fire with faith, faith in Christ and unwilling to budge one inch with heretics, schismatics and those outside the Church on points of doctrine. The early Christians won through the witness of their lives and martyrdom and they didn’t compromise on doctrine either.

The Church must put aside ecumenism, stop dialoging with people and just live the Catholic faith without apology. No one respects the weakness of compromise in matters of religion, no one but those with shaky faith anyway. What has ecumenism or endless apologies or dialogue really done for the Church, for the salvation of souls? Surely Christian unity is urgent, but not at the expense of the truth.

Today to speak like this one hears the charge that folks like me have no charity, but today does charity mean we lie to people and promise them salvation in whatever religion or lack of one they choose or don't choose, to put aside what we have believed for centuries to work together to build up the City of Man? The dream of a one world government ruled by the principles of secular humanism and pragmatism where all religion is pushed aside in the name of "the common good" is nothing more than the building of a new tower of Babel. Interestingly enough a few years ago someone preached a papal retreat and supposedly he said of all things the antichrist would be an ecumenist.

grace, prayer, etc.

2011-05-21T21:37:00.001-07:00

To me the greatest thing about leaving the Confessional is trusting with a simple faith that my soul is cleansed of mortal sin and restored to grace and that now the prayers I say for others have a better chance at being heard. I once heard from a good priest that ones prayers do not really merit anything while one is in mortal sin. He said it didn’t mean that we couldn’t receive actual graces to get to confession or that He wouldn’t listen to us but that strictly speaking when we are in mortal sin we are outside the friendship of God and our prayers are not really all that efficacious. It seems pretty harsh overall but I do not make the rules. We should strive to stay in a state of grace anyway.

It sounds harsh but what it does for me is make me appreciate what it means to be in God’s friendship, to be in a state of grace. If we can merit graces for others when we are in a state of grace than we should want to stay in God’s friendship and pray for as many people as possible as much as we can. We can become an instrument in Christ’s hands for the salvation of souls. When I think about this stuff it makes me want to stay in a state of grace, it makes me really sit and feel the awesome weight of responsibility come crashing down on top of me that while my soul is full of the grace of God I can make a difference for others through my prayer. I like to sit and think that every time I say the Holy Rosary or the Chaplet of Divine Mercy while in a state of grace perhaps someone on their deathbed is being baptized or some dying Catholic is granted the grace of final penitence just in time to avoid hell.

The danger in all this is to think that we are special because we are in a state of grace. I suppose when we are in a state of grace we are instruments in God’s hands the same way a priest is an instrument in God’s hands. Ultimately all the glory has to go to God and not to us. We are here to do God’s work and that is all. Naturally speaking we cannot merit heaven for anyone, not even ourselves. One thing I like about Catholic teaching on grace and nature—at least my own understanding of it—is how radically different they are. In my own understanding there is a sharp divide between nature and grace and yet somehow they can intersect. Naturally speaking we cannot get one iota closer to heaven. Heaven is a gift; being in God’s friendship is a gift. Grace builds on nature but grace is different than nature.

Those of us who are not very social can sometimes feel like we have nothing to offer, especially since the world rewards action and people seem to like those that are “doers”. We can’t forget that in the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ there is a place for everyone regardless of disposition. If that weren’t true there wouldn’t be Carthusians hidden away in Charterhouses or desert dwelling hermits praying in little caves away from the burning sun who were recognized by the Church.

As solitaries we have a vocation to prayer, to pray for the salvation of souls. That is our hidden apostolate but it is an important one. It is an apostolate that even some within the Church fail to understand because they fail to look with the eyes of faith. We toil in obscurity and hope that our prayers bring souls to into the Church and eventually into heaven. This side of eternity we will most likely toil in darkness, not knowing who our prayers won graces for but that should be OK. We live by faith. Even as solitaries we are part of the Communion of Saints. The whole Church in all her three levels is connected across time and eternity, light and darkness. Christ uses us—especially those of us who are in a state of grace—to do His work on earth through our prayers, fasting, penance, almsgiving and other works. When we are in a state of grace we can even offer up our suffering for the salvation of others. We are never alone, not for a moment, but we have to live through the darkness of faith.

Meditate often on sanctifying grace and what it means to have it and what it means to lose it, not just in your own life but in the lives of others. Meditate on how your own prayer has a power from Christ when you are in a state of grace that it does not when you aren’t.Just don’t think too much, just pray, believe hold on with a simple faith. The Church in her wisdom is guiding me through my life by cutting away the questions and the things that just don’t matter. It simplifies my life and I love it.

friday rosary thoughts

2011-05-20T19:51:00.001-07:00

This afternoon I found myself sitting near the Tabernacle saying five decades of the Rosary, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries. All week I’ve been called to the Tabernacle to pray in the presence of our Lord but between laziness and work it has taken me until today to get there. It felt good to sit in a silent Church and pray, knowing with the heart of faith that Jesus Christ was present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament right around the corner in the Tabernacle. I love all the 15 mysteries of the Rosary but today I was more than happy to pray the Sorrowful Mysteries. The one that caught my mind today was the Crucifixion, the last of the Sorrowful mysteries. Before I said my Gloria and the Salve Regina I sat there for awhile meditating on the Crucifixion, turning over the scene in my mind and looking for clues as to what the good Lord was trying to teach me today. The thing that kept popping up for me was the image of Christ praying for the crowds surrounding Him, saying “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do” and thinking about how Christ died not just for the world in a collective sense but for each of us individually. I kept thinking of how to really understand the mystery of Christ who is both fully human and fully divine and what that means in terms of His passion and death on the Cross. Both as true God and true man He suffered and died for us. There is nothing in our own lives as men He didn’t have to deal with except sin. He even accepted the limitations of being a man with all that entails.

I also kept thinking about the idea of love again, about how the Church asks us to love our neighbors for the sake of God. Some people are unlovable but we try to love them because God loves them, Christ died for them, died to give them the chance at becoming His adopted sons and daughters and sharing life in heaven with Him forever. I kept thinking of how on the Cross Christ died for all of us, out of love for us, not just collectively but as individuals, with all our sins, all our infidelity and all our weakness. Even though He saw that many would end up rejecting Him altogether or that most of us would fail to live up to His standards most of the time He still gave His life for us. We should burn with a supernatural charity towards others and long for their entrance into the Church and eternal salvation for God’s sake. This is hard. I can’t say I have that charity yet, even an ounce of it. I pray for my friends and my family and often for the salvation of the sick and the dying but do I really love all men enough to want to love them like Christ loved them, to want to die for them even when they hate me and reject me, to want to suffer for their salvation?

When He said “forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do” shows the depths of love Christ had for men. How many of us could be abandoned by our closest friends, brutalized, spat upon, mocked and nailed to a Cross and still have that kind of charity, that kind of love for men, even for our persecutors? I sure have a lot to learn by meditating on these Sorrowful Mysteries.

stuff

2011-05-16T15:57:00.001-07:00

Last year I had a crisis of faith that was pretty serious. I wasn’t losing my faith in Christ or in danger of that—far from it—but I was losing my faith in the Catholic Church and veering towards Orthodoxy. Today I still feel drawn to certain elements in the various Orthodox churches and greatly admire how there has never been anything to ravage them the way Vatican II ravaged the Catholic Church. One thing that I liked about the way the Orthodox Church was set up is that it didn’t have such a clearly defined top down approach to governing with strict obedience being so much a part of the corporate culture that one would just blindly follow whatever the bishop said even if it was totally untraditional or heretical the way the Catholic Church has. It is undeniable that after Vatican II the Catholic Church collapsed, utterly, in almost everything from Liturgy and catechesis to pretty much anything else you could think of. Nothing was left untouched by the wreckovators and when the smoke cleared there was and still is the appearance of two churches living side by side and warring for the upper hand, the first Church being built on the first 1900 some odd years of Tradition and the other being built on Vatican II’s ambiguous language and the way it’s documents have been interpreted, in short a Church that is entirely built on a foundation not yet 60 years old.

Sometimes I still wake up and doubt whether the claims of the Catholic Church are true, not because I doubt the various dogmas but because by and large it still does feel like there are two churches with different beliefs and different goals and a hierarchy that seems hell bent on trying to make it seem like in fact all the bizarre iconoclasm and banal innovations done in the name of the Council are reconcilable and that it is folks like me who fail to see that two plus two equals five. Anyone who takes a hard look at traditional Catholicism and than looks at the contemporary scene who is honest will see that there are absolutely radical differences between the two. By and large it still looks like Rome has indeed lost the Faith even though a remnant remains.

Sometimes all I can do is think about how if the Church is Christ in the sense of being the Mystical Body than the Churches life will mimic that of Christ while in the flesh which means the Church will live through in a mystical manner each and every episode of the life of Christ, including the Passion and death on the Cross.

Now that I look back the number one reason I never became Orthodox is because of their lack of Eucharistic adoration. To me one of the most marvelous things about being a Catholic is to know that Christ is present in every tabernacle in every real Catholic Church in the world in a special manner so that when you enter a silent church you are truly in the presence of Christ hidden under the appearance of an unleavened wafer. To me the main reason I can’t become Orthodox despite all the chaos and irreverence and downright apostasy in the Church is because I love the Faith, the traditional faith. I pay no attention to Vatican II in my spiritual life. I don’t need to. There is nothing Vatican II said that the previous nearly 2000 years of Catholic Tradition didn’t say better and with less ambiguity. It is Tradition and a hope that sees light at the end of the neo modernist tunnel that keeps me in the Church, hope and faith in the Real Presence.

Sunday thoughts

2011-05-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I bought a vehicle from out of state and it finally arrived Saturday night, just in time for me to take it the 40 miles to the traditional Mass on Sunday. I actually have air conditioning now so it was a treat after 6 or 7 years of not having one to drive down to Mass without breaking a sweat. I even took my best friend with me since she is going through a rough patch and needs the graces that come from simply being present there. Not much to say other than it was a good, reverent Mass with beautiful chants and an amazing, Catholic sermon about making sure that we put our suffering into perspective because “we are only here a little while” and that once we die we are either going to heaven or hell and can no longer merit any grace. He teased out these ideas by speaking of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Peter Claver and St. Damien of Molokai and the suffering they underwent in the service of Christ. I’m glad that suffering was touched upon because my friend has been suffering lately. I hope she got something out of it.

This is sort of off topic but one reason I think some people don’t take Christianity seriously is because, in many places today, all you hear about is love, and peace and justice and never about the Cross. If all you hear about is how much God is love and than look around and see all the suffering in your own life and in the world around you than it can seem like a big joke. Christ came to suffer and die and to give us an example to follow. His suffering becomes ours and vice versa. Without gazing upon Christ on the Cross or contemplating His Passion nothing makes sense. God is love but a love that is willing to suffer and die and sacrifice for the beloved. Suffering is mysterious but it becomes less so when viewed through the prism of the Passion.

The Gospel reading for the day (John 16:16-22) really gives us cause for hope because in it our Lord tells us without sugar coating anything that we will suffer and weep while the world rejoices but that in the end “our sorrow shall be turned into joy” and that our “joy no one shall take from you”. The hope lies not in denying suffering but in knowing that as Catholics we are adopted sons of God and heirs of eternal life and that if we try to see our life as something that will be fulfilled in eternity we can put our suffering in perspective. In this season of the liturgical year we are still rejoicing at the fact that Christ rose from the dead. We still suffer but we look at our risen Lord’s triumph over death and hell and hope that with His grace we will one day be with Him in eternity.
We are realistic in knowing that we can expect suffering but we also know with supernatural faith that suffering here and now isn’t the end of the story and that moment to moment we are asked to see our lives with our hearts set on eternity and act accordingly. In my own life I’m trying to meditate more on such things so the sermon was timely.

thoughts on prayer, how to love etc.

2011-05-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Today I was inspired to try to sit for awhile and look upon every person in the world as loved by Christ. It doesn’t mean all are saved or all are in a relationship with Christ that is necessarily leading towards heaven but that Christ indeed died for all men and so I should learn to love them because He loves them. If God loved every man, woman and child that ever was and ever will be enough to take flesh and all its limitations, walk the hot desert country of Palestine, be mocked, scorned and rejected by the very people He created and finally ascend Calvary to be nailed to a Cross and die in order to give them the chance to share life with Him in eternity—eternal life—than I need to learn to love like Him. The problem is I’m not God. I can’t love like Him without grace. There are certain people I just cannot bring myself to love, or maybe it’s that my idea of love is different than God’s idea of love. God wills the highest good for all men which is that they enter the Catholic Church through the waters of baptism, persevere in a sacramental life within His only Church and enjoy the Beatific Vision forever. Human love is based sometimes on whether we actually like someone or not or whether they like us. It is clear from Scripture and Tradition that Christ was despised by men and rejected by His own people the Jews and yet He loved them enough to die for them. “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do” He said from the wood of the Cross. I can’t fathom that kind of love. Like most men I love those that love me and at best I am indifferent to those I know nothing of or who I don’t get along with.

What I really need is to do a lot of mental prayer about this particular problem of loving like Christ loves. The truth is many people from a human perspective are not loveable but to know that God loves them enough to will the highest good for them should make me want to love them, not for their sake, but for His, because He does. It’s so easy to simply write and think about superficially but to put it into practice, to really let that guide me, is hard, very hard.

One thing I have been doing is to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy each day for the specific intention of all those that are sick and dying but most especially for those that are either Catholic but in mortal sin or somehow estranged from the Church or for those who are outside the Church and treading on the razors edge of hell. I try to reflect that whether I know these people or not I’d be heartless to want to see them suffer in hell for eternity and so I pray for them and hopefully God will grant them the grace to save their souls by allowing them to live long enough to go to Confession or for the non Catholics to have a priest show up to baptize them last minute.

I have taken a great liking to Vn. Mother Mary Potters “Devotion to the Dying” since the sickbed or deathbed is really the final moment when a person has a chance to get in a state of grace of become a member of the Catholic Church. I’m not much of a people person but I can love through prayer. I get the impression that this devotion to the sick and the dying is where I can do my part for the Church Militant and where I can learn to love all men as Christ loves by praying for their deathbed conversion or their deathbed repentance. I think it’s a noble apostolate since it is really the moment when people are at their weakest and in most need of Divine Grace to either be reconciled with the Church or have a last minute deathbed conversion. My favorite intention is for the salvation of the sick and dying, whether it is in the Chaplet or the Rosary. So many sick and dying are abandoned and many millions are outside the Church. Perhaps I can learn to love through praying for them.

random thoughts

2011-05-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday for some reason I was just having a bad day emotionally. I don’t even know why really. To get out of it I actually just started making spiritual communions and having conversation with Christ as I went about my work as well as tried to say a decade of the Rosary to calm myself and than think and contemplate images from Holy Scripture. It sounds like a frantic and mad rush of activity but all this was spaced out over a period of several hours so I wasn’t leaping from one thing to the next the way it sounds. One thing that comforted me in my solitary hot work (I work outdoors in North Florida and do not have air conditioning in my vehicle) was to sort of contemplate the hidden life of Christ in Nazareth as well as St. Joseph, the fact that both toiled in the hot sun and worked hard without complaining. Somehow to imagine both our Lord and St. Joseph with calloused hands in a stifling hot work shop in Nazereth, or our Lord walking through the hot desert, really helped. We forget that Christ toiled in obscurity like a common laborer and that his foster father did the same. I’m not saying this in the way the neo modernist and liberal Marxists in the Church say it to justify some sort of workers paradise but in the sense that good hard work is something they did just like most of us do. It was comforting.

Another think I started contemplating was how much ingratitude Christ was shown and how by and large he was rejected by men and still is. The image of Gethsemane really highlights that sense of total dereliction and abandonment. As He walks towards this deserted desert garden late at night with his three most beloved disciples He is preparing for His passion and when He in his humanity most longs for the comfort of his closest friends they abandon Him and fall asleep. Christ is left alone sweating blood in the lonely Garden thinking about how many would be lost to hell despite His sacrifice on the Cross. He sees the ingratitude of men for all time for His infinite sacrifice and meanwhile his friends, Peter James and John, sleep in the distance. “Can you not watch with me one hour?” One hour is all He asked and even his best friends couldn’t do that much.

You see my job as a mailman is a thankless job. I can feel that sense of ingratitude and obscurity because it is always the same and I’m always alone, wading in a sea of other peoples’ letters, packages and junk advertisements, an invisible worker who, when someone wants to talk to me, it is usually a complaint or a question. I’m behind the scenes like St. Joseph, toiling in obscurity or suffering the ingratitude of men like Christ in the Garden although there is no comparison in reality to myself and our Lord. I love the solitude of it most of the time but it can get to me sometimes just like it can probably get to even the most pious Carthusian in his cell.

On the plus side the best part of my job is the time I can spend thinking about the Faith and praying. Sometimes like yesterday it is full of anguish and much prayer and others like today are filled with lots of distractions and hardly any prayer whiles till others are filled with a lot of peace and the prayer just flows. Today I couldn’t settle to save my life and probably a few seconds after I made a spiritual communion I was distracted thinking about some attractive bank teller I saw today that I felt had a connection with me and who I might even consider pursuing if I weren’t so wrapped up in other things. Banal stuff like that can really destroy prayer. Still other days can be so easy and quiet and peaceful. Days like that make me love my solitary job.

One thing I’ve noticed after all these years of working completely alone is that solitude does not guarantee peace. If you think that by being away from people you will just be in a state of bliss all the time you’re kidding yourself. I love the solitude of my job but the downside is that when you are down or something happens you have no one to prop you up or help lift your spirits.

Sometimes the mental states can be ugly. To talk of yesterday again I remember gazing at a Wall Street Journal I was delivering and seeing a snippet of some more Mohammedan terror against Christians in Egypt and it just set me off. I even told our Lord that I could not bring myself to pray for Muslims at all and that if that was what He wanted He would have to teach me to do it. I have a deep hatred of Islam, a very deep hatred and if it were up to me (I was thinking) I would rise up an army of Christians to defend and fight back against them everywhere they attack us. To me it wouldn’t matter if they were Copts or Protestants they were attacking, at least they believe in Christ. I’m sick of seeing Christians—children even—mowed down in cold blood by these vile and evil men who worship a vicious god that accepts such acts of brutality. These thoughts assailed me so much that I was clenching my teeth and not paying attention to what I was doing. Even now it makes me angry to think of it. We need to fight back as Christians. Where is the Crusader spirit today? I’m serious here.

Sadly the West has lost the Faith and by and large the Church has lost the Faith. Even many high ranking members of the Church preach indifferentist ecumenism today and speak of a brotherhood of man and the last Pope actually bent down to put his lips on a book that calls on its followers to kill and enslave Christians while mocking the Trinity as a pagan fable and deriding the idea of Christ as the Son of God! In short, there aren’t enough Catholics left in the ruins of Christendom to believe enough in the Truth of the Faith to defend our brothers in Christ from a vicious enemy that has been at our throats since the 7th century and has no intention of making peace even today.

As you can see, my mental states can run the gamut from peaceful and pious to fantasizing about raising up crusader armies to defend fellow Christians being slaughtered in cold blood by vicious Mohammedan fanatics.

prayer in distraction

2011-05-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

I’m still unable due to other commitments to get to the traditional Mass every Sunday but after some real serious thought and weighing the arguments against going to the Novus Ordo to fulfill my Sunday obligation out of necessity I can’t feel too comfortable not going. I go, get it over with and get out but sometimes despite the noise and the general bizarre irreverence of the whole thing I can really settle down in prayer. I’m being serious here. I’ve been finding that a Sunday Novus Ordo is a really good place to test how well you can focus in the midst of distraction.

The key for me is getting there early, closing my eyes and pretty much keeping them closed for the duration of the Mass aside from the moment where I have to walk up and receive Holy Communion. Keeping the eyes closed is absolutely key to turn away from distractions. Sometimes I will say the Rosary but I’ll do it by using my fingers as the beads. Other times I’ll just recite the Jesus Prayer inwardly or figure out what my personal prayer intentions will be for the prayer intentions part of the Novus Ordo when it comes along. I will formulate them during Mass or beforehand and make a spiritual contract, telling our Lord that when I tap my hand on my wrist I wish to offer all these intentions, etc. As an aside I have never been denied Communion on the tongue while kneeling at this particular parish so that is a plus. Usually I pick a mystery of the Rosary to meditate on during the Mass and I start when I get there or in the car on the way there so I am well along when the Mass starts. By keeping my eyes closed I can really go inside myself and focus on the prayer. Considering different aspects of whatever mystery I’m turning over in my mind helps keep the noise at bay too.

The bottom line is I’m trying to make the best of it. I get it when some Catholics will never set foot in any non traditional Mass but I cannot just neglect a precept of the Church simply because I don’t like the New Mass. If I had to go without Mass for months or years I might even lose the faith. If circumstances change and I have the opportunity to go exclusively to the traditional Mass I will in a heartbeat, but for now I just can’t do it even though I want to. With the opinion of an exorcist I know of saying that the demons react the same way to Hosts consecrated in either rite of Mass it is hard for me to not go. If you find yourself at the Novus Ordo just close your eyes and try to pray, try to really do some mental prayer or something. You see unless your faith is weak anyway the Novus Ordo cannot in itself destroy it. My faith is in some ways being strengthened by being there, not because of the Novus Ordo but because its football stadium raucousness gives me the opportunity to practice mental prayer in the midst of distractions.

...but you stand only through faith

2011-05-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

…but you stand faith only through faith. Rarely do I like to read a different translation of Holy Scripture besides the Douay Rheims version but in the case of this passage which is from Romans 11:20 I prefer the RSV-CE. Sometimes the more modern English captures what is being said in a more understandable way and in this passage it does, at least for me. That chapter is pretty much talking about the collective apostasy of the Jews and the Gentiles being grafted onto the olive tree of Israel but it is also a warning for Christians not to get haughty about the gift of being made partakers in something that at first was only given to the Jews. Of course I don’t sit there thinking about Jews and Gentiles much at all but I do think about my own faith and as I was sitting there today reading that passage that verse jumped out at me. …but you stand only through faith. It’s powerful and it shows that what we have been given as Catholics has been freely given and can be freely taken away. If we get to smug, too haughty or too lazy we can have the grace that helps us sustain our faith taken right out from under us like a pickpocket snatches our wallet right under our noses.

Yesterday I alluded to (or tried to) about how ultimately faith is more important than reason in the spiritual life for me and I think this passage touches on that again. We don’t stand by reason, we stand by faith. We use our reason but we start with faith. Everything becomes more simple when we start with faith first, with dogmas, with the Fathers, with the Saints, and than work from there. We literally stand by faith, or at least we are supposed to. I know I try to but than again, I am only successful if it comes from grace. Somehow it is a mystery how we are free and yet at the same time we are dependent on grace.

With faith we start to see the world through Catholic eyes and even suffering starts to make sense because we see it through the lens of the Passion, penance, atonement for sin and future beatitude. Without it suffering becomes a cruel joke, a sick tragedy in a meaningless universe. We stand through faith. We take our stand in the world illumined by the Faith. At this stage I can’t imagine doing it any other way. I still suffer and have the same problems much of the time but something is transfigured and there is a subtle joy even in the sorrows and the pains.

friday

2011-05-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

I can’t let go of the whole concept of “holy simplicity” and it keeps showing up in my thoughts throughout the day, giving me a whole lot to ponder and reflect on. I think today this concept is a key to any real renewal in the Church or in our individual lives within her. What could be more invincible than a simple, childlike faith in all the Church through Holy Scripture and tradition teaches us? What could help all of us walk with our hearts undefiled through such a morass of confusion, doubt and evil than a simple, childlike faith, the faith of the saints? I ask this in all honesty.

It seems like there are some people who have the mind to engage with others and debate and do apologetics and all that but by and large they are probably few and far between and if you do not have that mind than you might just get caught in the net of the worlds opinions and be swallowed up, losing your faith in the process. I’m not a Buddhist anymore but one thing a monk said about Westerners in particular has always stuck with me, he said that us westerners have made a veritable god out of our thinking and reasoning and that we should sometimes make it a practice to crucify it, to treat our excessive thinking and reasoning minds as defilements to be set aside.

In my own experience if you do not have faith than nothing in the Church makes any sense, nothing and if you do have faith everything makes sense. Anymore I ask each day for God to grant me the grace to just believe everything that the Church has set out for belief (traditionally of course, not the many novelties around in some circles today) and to help me stay on the straight and narrow and to live my life with as few complications as possible. I ask for the grace to keep eternity before my eyes and to be able to view the world through the clear lens of the whole of the Catholic faith, a world that God entered with the Incarnation and set about redeeming through the sacrifice of Calvary, a world where angels and saints and the Blessed Virgin can and do intercede for us and a world in which the supernatural destines of all men are being worked out moment by moment. There is real drama in a world like that and not only that, but meaning, a world like that is full of meaning. Today what is lacking in the world is a sense of meaning or purpose and the traditional Catholic worldview delivers what the secular mythology is powerless to give.

The saints were simple people who had simple faith. They didn’t need fancy degrees or the ability to know the latest in scientific research or need to know what was going on the other side of the world. They knew that what was going on moment to moment in their own hearts and with those around them was what was most important, where the drama of heaven or hell and eternal salvation was playing out for them. Our own lives—and that include the people and circumstances we are in—are the arena and the characters that make up our journey to heaven or hell. When Christ asks us whether we have fed, clothed or given drink to those around us I think He means those literally in our own circumstances. Today so many are focused on this whole one world thing but I think that misses the point. If everyone everywhere took care of themselves and those around them we wouldn’t need to look to the ends of the earth for anything. And by food and drink and clothes I think He also means things pertaining to the life of faith. We can feed, clothe and give drink to many and that is good and noble but the life of grace given to us by baptism and by the sacraments of the Church are something that never perishes.

The crazy thing is that as paradoxical as it sounds a simple faith takes some effort and a lot of grace. Pray often and think as little as possible. Don’t question the dogmas of the faith, read scripture with the guidance of the Fathers and the Saints, not modern scripture scholars. Stay away from modernist parishes. Turn off the TV. Don’t listen to bad music, don’t read newspapers or trashy magazines. If you can’t defend it in a debate with any level of skill leave it to someone else. If the chaos in the Church turns you away from the faith stop paying attention to it. If politics gets you down ignore it. What is more important, your soul or the state of some election? Seriously. Lastly, lots of prayer is needed. I haven’t been able to hold on to any shred of spiritual life without prayer. Don’t take on more than you can handle. Know your weaknesses and choose your battles. Treat your soul like the most precious possession you have and try not to get entangled with things that will destroy the life of grace within it or your peace of mind. These are some of the things I do but it all comes from grace, from trying and falling and trying again and imploring Christ for mercy, most especially in the confessional and in Holy Communion. I’m not a spiritual director so take anything I say here with a grain of salt.

seek the things that are above

2011-05-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God:
Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth. Col. 3:1-2

Each morning I say the office of Prime before going to work and during the last week a certain part of that hour has included the verse above from the Apostles letter to the Colossians. It’s helped me get through the usual barrage of temptations that can come up at almost any hour of the day. One of the things I’ve noticed about trying to keep a regular prayer rule of sorts has been that during the day certain passages from the psalms or the readings come back to me, sometimes when I need them most. If you are regular in praying and reading spiritual things and in turning away from all the non essential garbage your mind becomes filled up with a whole arsenal of holy armaments in which to battle temptations with during the course of any given day in the form of words, images and passages from prayer and scripture and the saints. I never realized in the past why it is essential to cut away from your life things that bring you down or incite your passions. Every time you listen to music—any music—or pick up a book or a magazine—any book or magazine—your mind stores those sounds, words or images and can throw them out during the course of a day and drag you down. No wonder monks spend years allowing their mind to leach out the toxins accumulated over a lifetime of careless abuse of the senses before they can really settle. I’m seeing it in my own life too.

For me it has been a journey of trying to let go of things that don’t matter or aren’t helpful and for me that means no newspapers, no TV shows and no music outside chant or classical or occasionally old country music from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. I certainly find that I cannot listen to death metal anymore. The lyrical content—while not understandable through the grunts and growls, is just evil plain and simple. There is nothing more damaging to a soul this side of pornography than sitting there and allowing the music filled with stories of demonic possession, rape, ritual murder, serial killers, brutal violence, deep hatred and despair to fill you up. You don’t understand the lyrics but the music itself is filled with the energy of evil and is probably somewhat inspired by Satan himself. I would have laughed at this assessment some years ago but now I believe it. My life is more peaceful now that I don’t imbibe that stuff and you have to wonder just what reason anyone would have for actually wanting to fill their minds with such vile stuff unless they were somehow influenced by the devil. Man doesn’t seem to have a natural fascination with the macabre and pure unadulterated evil and aggression and this is what death metal makes a culture out of.

I guess I better get back to the passage from Colossians… I like how St. Paul says “therefore if you be risen with Christ...” because it’s sort of like he is highlighting for us that we have a choice to make. We are either risen in Christ or we are not and that could mean either we are baptized children of God or we are not, or that we are in a state of grace or we are not. There is a clear choice to be made to actually rise up with Christ from the tomb of sin, either original or mortal. Maybe this would be a good passage to reflect upon after coming out of the confessional or right after receiving Holy Communion. To be risen with Christ is a choice we make by entering the Christian life and by striving to persevere in it and a choice we make day to day, moment to moment. Christ had to die before He was risen and so we must die moment to moment to that which would destroy the life of Christ in our soul, mortal sin.

What does it mean to seek the things that are above? Probably to always keep eternity before our eyes and to ask for the grace to see everything through the lens that sees only two destinations for all men—heaven and hell—and the things we must do to attain the one and avoid the other. Without raising our eyes to eternity and looking at our lives in that context we can, and do, easily fall into sin. It’s too easy. We forget that as baptized Catholics we are children of God, adopted children of God and that have been promised an inheritance that is beyond this world if we would struggle for it through prayer, contrition and the living of a sacramental life within the Church. We also risk turning the Church into nothing more than the social justice wing of the United Nations, thus obscuring the supernatural purpose of the Church. This has happened all throughout the Church since the close of Vatican II and extends all the way to the highest levels of the Church. People forget that Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world” and will never be a brotherhood of men or a civilization of love based on the principles of secular humanism, false ecumenism and wishful thinking. To mind the things that are above is to see the Church and man as having supernatural purposes that go beyond the building up of some sort of secular utopia.

One reason for this about face in the Church today is, in my opinion at least, stemming from a near universal acceptance in the Church of the heresy of universal salvation which pretty much says that all men are saved no matter what. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that once you accept this all the traditional Church teachings become meaningless, to say nothing of the sacraments, sin, etc. Now that Christ has redeemed all men whether they know it or not (which is what is implied in universal salvation) the Church now has no other goal but to build up the kingdom of man but even that with a deeper reflection is built on nothing but sentimentalism since if all men are saved it really doesn’t matter whether we help them build a heaven on earth or not. All actions become meaningless. It’s sort of nihilism with a happy ending. Universal salvation is also a convenient way to avoid confrontation about matters of dogma because, as I said, it renders dogma meaningless, all of it. This is the new ecumenism or the reason behind it.

In the end though we cannot really worry too much about what many in the Church are doing. We have to “mind the things that are above” in our own lives and leave the Church to God. The Church has a Divine promise that it will never completely fall away but we do not have that promise. We can’t neglect the things of the earth but we can’t make idols of them either. Somehow we have to balance our duties here on earth according to our state in life (We can’t expect a mom or a dad to live like monks and nuns or politicians to live like priests) with our duty to God through the Church. No matter what we do we can’t lose sight of the fact that every day, every moment is a struggle to balance the warring factions in our souls and in our lives. In the end we must try to beg for the grace to mind the things that are above more than the things of the earth even though we can’t neglect the things of the earth. Everyone can find time for something. In my own experience so far the best thing we can do is to remind ourselves each day that we are made for eternity and that we cannot ever give up no matter how much we fall. If we be risen with Christ…

today

2011-04-26T20:22:00.001-07:00

Today found me listening to another good and timely sermon by the same priest that I mentioned last time. This time it was about anxiety or it at least touched upon it. It was also about how God wants to make us saints and that He put us into the situation we are in, in the time we are in, just for that purpose and that His efforts at making us into saints can only be thwarted by our own lack of fidelity to grace. I guess anxiety factors into this whole discussion of sanctity and being where we are supposed to be in terms of the times because we can actually get really anxious about so much whether it is in our own life or the issues plaguing the Church or the world that we find ourselves in. Whether its car trouble, trouble at work or finding out that the rot of neo modernism has infected the highest levels of the Church and destroyed once excellent and orthodox religious orders like the Jesuits we can feel like “if only I were born while Trent was going on” or “If only have been alive in the 13th century” is a viable answer to our problems when it is just escaping from reality. If we take into account the Providence of God there is nothing that is accidental, even the suffering and the problems both here and in the Church. The God that created the world and the universe out of nothing and brought about the entire human race in all it’s varieties from two people—Adam and Eve-and who actually came to us to suffer and die on a Cross and found a visible Church, the God who gave us the sacraments and made us adopted sons by giving us sanctifying grace at our baptism, can certainly see what He is doing now.

All that is hard to swallow much of the time but if we can really delve into the Faith that we have been given and mind the words of the Apostle :

“And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.” Romans 8:23

than perhaps we will be more at ease, have more perspective. If we love God—and by that is probably meant we are Catholics striving to live a faithful sacramental life in the Church and at home, than everything in our lives “work together unto good.” We can offer up our suffering for the salvation of others, to merit graces for them. Even if it is just dealing with a headache, gridlock traffic or dealing with some necessary but distasteful task such as certain types of housework we can offer it up. When we put our suffering in perspective and look at things through the lens of eternity, with a simple faith, trusting that everything, every last iota of the traditional Catholic Faith, every dogma, is true, and if we offer up that suffering we do have to endure, bearing in mind that to those that love God “all things work together unto good” we will probably have less anxiety and be happier but it will be a true peace and a true happiness, or at least as true as they can be this side of eternity.

tonights thoughts

2011-04-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

As the clock struck midnight the chant CD I was listening to happened to hit a beautiful version of “Alleluia” which seemed Providential. I felt the desire to kneel, close my eyes and pray mentally about the resurrection of our Lord. Traditionally there are no “alleluias” through Lent until Easter so this was a big deal. As I sat there I thought about how the only thing that is going to save the faith of millions is to pray for holy simplicity. I really mean it. I think what the Church needs more than anything is not a scholarly Pope or scholarly bishops and priests but leaders and shepherds that are so in love with the Faith that they try to teach it as it was traditionally practiced with a simple heart. In an age that is literally obsessed with science and technology and factoids garnered from statistics and labs it would be refreshing to see leaders in the Church who are unabashedly simple and fundamentalist in their approach to teaching and leadership. I don’t mean fundamentalist in the sense of beating people over the head but in the sense that all that they say and do is said and done in the spirit of the traditional teachings and dogmas of the Church. Sadly since Vatican II the rule has been to judge the Church by the standards of the world and not the other way around. We are supposed to believe on the authority of God who canst neither deceive nor be deceived as it says in the traditional act of faith.

Honestly I believe the key to a real renewal in the Church is for the faithful and the leaders within her to live and die by a simple faith that would rather die than compromise with the world on points of dogma just to win false friendship. Many of the saints were simple all were simple in terms of faith. If we cannot accept the Catholic faith—the traditional Catholic faith—on its own terms and let it illuminate and guide everything we do we will end up being no better than the modernist heretics that have pretty much gutted the Church and her dogmas of all meaning since the close of Vatican II. We don’t need an engagement with the world and endless dialogue but millions of Catholics living and dying as Catholics with no compromise but it has to be done with real charity and come from grace. What if we really believed in what Easter means and let it guide us? I mean what if we REALLY believed it? With the eyes of faith we see that Christ has risen and that every dogma of the Catholic Faith is true and that should guide us in all we do. Pray for that grace as I pray for it in my own life. Simplicity, not sophistication, in my opinion at least, will save us from despair and apostasy.

prayer time

2011-04-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

This morning on my way to work I listened to a sermon about a young man who was possessed who had to forgive his parents before the exorcist could liberate him. The priest said that it might not sound like a big deal to forgive but in the case of the young man his parents were part of a satanic cult that did horrible things to him for years and years and after all that abuse the man was unable on his own efforts to forgive them but his holding on to all that anger was part of what allowed the demons to hold on to him. On his own efforts he could not forgive. It turns out what he was asked to do was to make a Spiritual Communion and after recollecting himself simply close his eyes and ask Christ to forgive where he could not, ask Christ to give him the grace to eventually get to the point where he could let go.

It reminded me of that passage from St. Matthews Gospel

“Come to Me all ye who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. Mt 11:28

The story was a good one because I know in my own life there are certain things that I probably have not let go of and that, because I carry those burdens my life is affected in ways that are unhealthy for me and those around me. Based on some bad experiences with others at a period in my life I simply do not make myself available to others at all and remain aloof and on the defensive everywhere I go. I haven’t really let go of that but it is a burden. At this point I have made a lifestyle of erecting barriers to others to the point where I am quite isolated and protected from others in my job and in my personal life. Part of me really does love the solitude but another part of me sees that even though I know I am an introvert I am carrying certain burdens that are probably unnecessary and that it isn’t particularly healthy for me to be so cold and defensive to practically everybody if I do not know them very well.

While I am not in the same dire straits as the man in the sermon I can certainly learn
something from it and then try to take to heart the passage from St. Matthew’s Gospel. After all, Christ is speaking directly to each one of us in that passage. When I was on the edge of deep personal darkness while a practicing Buddhist I remember reading Mt 11:28 and feeling like I was given a signal grace of sorts to see that unlike the cold empty nothingness of the godless Buddhist path to personal extinction God manifested through the God-man Christ was speaking personally to me. Not that I heard voices or anything but the passage jumped out at me and caught hold of me in a way that it was utterly apparent that I could no longer be a Buddhist. And yet I am still carrying certain burdens. Perhaps we all are. I guess Christ wants us to lay our burdens on Him the way He bore the weight of the world’s sin on the Cross but so often we don’t allow Him to.

One thing the priest in the sermon said was that Christ is gentle in that He doesn’t go where He isn’t invited. This is partly why although the Calvary sacrifice is efficacious enough to save all men for all time our own lack of cooperation with grace can damn us to hell, meaning those that do not take our Lord’s offer of salvation will not be given it against their will. Even when we aren’t talking about things like eternal salvation if He doesn’t go where He isn’t invited we carry our own burdens unless we come to Him and ask Him to help us carry our own cross the way Simon the Cyrene helped Him carry His.

Today after work I had hours to kill and nothing to do so I headed to the local parish Church to spend some time before our Lord in the tabernacle. Thankfully today there weren’t a bunch of construction workers banging around in there like the last time. I can tune out when I need to but it can still be annoying to be trying to spend time in silent prayer when a bunch of guys are bashing nails into the new choir stalls and cracking jokes in the sanctuary. In lieu of that sermon I decided to make a spiritual Communion and lay those personal burdens on Christ, not to mention ask for the grace to make it through Holy week and Easter without falling into mortal sin so I can actually receive Holy Communion sacramentally the rest of the week.

I was able to sit there for a good while, perhaps an hour or more, simply praying before the tabernacle and in the chapel. I never noticed before how the corpus on the crucifix in the chapel is so realistic and bloodied. I never noticed the blood on Christ on that crucifix before. I love that chapel overall. Rather than stained glass it has plain glass but the plain glass opens out onto a very nice wooded area with redbuds and crape myrtles draped with spanish moss and the back of the chapel has a little corner with a mosaic of our Lady of Perpetual Help with votives burning and creating a nice warm glow. I said four decades of the Rosary while gazing on the bloodied corpus, asking for various intentions, one being that my aunt stop dabbling in Wicca and hoping for money. It must be the fruit of desperation and post Vatican II catechesis or a little of both that has her chanting “so mote it be” and burning green candles while doing dishes.

Well, the sermon I’m talking about is on the audiosancto web site and is called “making spiritual contracts to beat sin” or something like that. The priest that gives it is a very good, very orthodox Catholic priest and worth listening to, whether in that sermon or many of the others he has on that site.

Mass

2011-04-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Grant, O Lord, that what we have taken with our mouth, we may receive with a pure mind; and that from a temporal gift it may become for us an everlasting remedy.

Yesterday at the Palm Sunday Mass this passage from the Ablutions at the end of Mass was on my mind after Holy Communion. I love receiving Communion at the Traditional Mass and going back to my place in the pews and kneeling and praying with my eyes closed as the choir fills the chapel with glorious chants. With the chants filling the air in the background my mind was on the passage above, especially since it points to Holy Communion and what it means.

It’s a plea for God to grant us the grace to allow the temporal gift of receiving the sacred Host to heal our soul for all eternity. I once heard that one Holy Communion is enough to make one a saint if the communicant has perfect fidelity to grace. It hasn’t happened in my case but than again, I’m sure that I am not being faithful to grace all the times that I should. Still, the prayer above awakens in me that desire to try to be more faithful. Holy Communion is a gift unlike any other that has the power to raise us up to eternal life if we allow it. It fortifies our souls against mortal sin and evil if we receive our Lord with the right state of soul.

The Offertory for Palm Sunday is the chant Improperium which speaks of the dereliction of Christ.

“Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak; I looked for sympathy, but there was none; for comforters, and I found none. Rather they put gall in my food and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”

It’s not a sentimental chant but there is something beautiful about it. I think we have all been in a place where we can identify with the words in the chant.
What I love about the traditional Mass is that everything teaches you the faith, everything. One could probably learn the Catholic faith simply by paying attention to the traditional liturgy throughout the year, by really trying to pray it and live it. Everything is contained within it.

friday

2011-04-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

In confidence of Thy goodness and great mercy, O Lord, I draw near, sick to the Healer, hungry and thirsty to the Fountain of life, needy to the King of Heaven, a servant to his Lord, a creature to the Creator, desolate to my own tender Comforter.

Book Four Chapter 2 The Imitation of Christ

I hadn’t picked up my copy of The Imitation of Christ for several years, in fact, I must confess after I bought it I sort of skimmed it and set it in my book case until today. I can see why it is such a classic and the fact that my copy has the archaic language in it makes it superb spiritual reading. I saw that passage and had to put it up here. I think I might memorize this passage and say it inwardly as I wait my turn at the Communion rail at Mass or perhaps say it after receiving Holy Communion as a sort of thanksgiving meditation.

I’ll have to start using it for spiritual reading more than I have. I used to have an mp3 version of it on my IPod narrated by Fr. Hugh Thwaites S.J. in his very reverent British accent but two weeks ago my Ipod simply gave out and I haven’t really made any moves to send it out to get it fixed. I hate to think how pricey it will be. Maybe it would be better to simply get a new one because I dropped water on the one I have and I fear it might cost as much to get it fixed as it would be for a new one.

I’ve finished a few books about the Carthusians and now I’m really trying to get into Dom Vital Lehodey’s Ways of Mental Prayer which has gotten such rave reviews by a particular trad priest I know of who has a website and who, although I don’t know him personally, credit him with having really helped me learn and love traditional Catholicism and not to utterly lose my faith when I was going through that dark period last year.. He says it’s the best manual on Mental Prayer available so I had to check it out. I trust his judgment on things.

The Carthusian books were really good, one was a book called First Initiation Into Carthusian Life written for postulants to the Charterhouse—I think the one in the UK—and the other was The Hermitage Within which is sort of a manual of reflections about the solitary life by a veteran hermit who is trying to pass on his advice to young monks. Both were excellent and actually make me seriously contemplate Carthusian life as a vocation option. From the looks of it you do get some time with the other monks and get spiritual counsel from your superiors so it isn’t totally isolated like some of the old desert ascetics like St. Anthony. I really long for a more solitary monastic path should I enter a monastery and perhaps the Carthusian way might be a fit for me. The eremitic or semi eremitic life seems like a good fit for me more than a large community life, even a large monastic community. I really need my solitude even though I don’t hate people.
The mental prayer book is quite good too but very technical and very precise. I think it will help me in my prayer because, to be honest, mental prayer is something that isn’t really explained these days even in many trad circles and yet the saints make a big deal out of it. Dom Vital Lehodey who wrote it was a Cistercian abbot who died sometime in the forties. In that book Entering the Silence, the Merton journal, there is a small piece about him that gives you a glimpse of his personality:

“Dom Vital Lehodey is still alive—ninety years old—very holy, talks about the Child Jesus all the time and says mass in a chair, reads Lives of the Saints all day and can’t talk about material things.”

-Part of a Journal entry from April 6, 1947, Easter Sunday

I’m still turning away as much as I can with the grace I have been given and my own poor habits playing a game of tug of war, the former trying to get me to be serious all the time the latter trying to get me to take it too easy and get involved in all sorts of stuff that doesn’t matter. One thing that good priest I mentioned said was that amongst traditionalists one thing seriously lacking in many of us is serious prayer and spiritual reading. We focus so much on what is wrong in the Church, the world, whatever and then wonder why we are still committing the same sins and getting so worked up. He said we need to turn away, seriously turn away. We don’t turn away out of hatred for our fellow Catholics or even for those outside the Church but for our own spiritual well being. He says that there is s lack of hope, a despair in many of us that is unhealthy. I agree and so I am trying to work on it.

The beauty of the Church is that there are so many spiritual riches within, so much beautiful tradition that turns the mind and heart to God which we can take refuge in rather than focus on all the bad that is going on. Our patrimony is there for the taking—which is another thing he said that was quite good. He’s right. The Traditions of the Church are right here for us at any moment and they aren’t just the ramblings of random people but the witnesses of the Saints stretching to the time of Christ.
As I’ve turned away from too many things that do not really concern me I’m feeling lighter and happier. It isn’t my job to fix the Church but to take hold of what the Church has passed on and live as a faithful Catholic amidst the ruins, trusting in Christ to right wrongs and bring things back on track.

today's thoughts

2011-04-13T15:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I sit and think about why humility is so highly valued in the spiritual life but I’m beginning to see or at least I think I’m beginning to see just a little bit about why that is so. Maybe it’s because we need to be humiliated and brought low by God through trials in order to see that we cannot save ourselves either collectively, through government, economic theories or social action nor in any kind of spiritual discipline like meditation or even prayer. Ultimately all we have is from God and we can do nothing without Him. Since we are fallen thanks to our first parents we languish under so much darkness and weakness that in some ways we are pretty pathetic and helpless. No matter how many efforts we make at trying to turn away from sins and fix our shortcomings without grace it isn’t happening, period, or if it does happen it doesn’t often last long. God brings us low in order to make us turn to Him since He is the only one that actually can lift us up. To be humble is, I suppose, to be willing to see ourselves as the fallen men that we are so as not to lose heart in this spiritual battle we are in the midst of. If we lose heart over our sins and give up with sin against Hope and if we just brush off the seriousness of sin and presume to be saved no matter what we also sin. Humility seems to be the middle path between the two extremes. We trust God, not ourselves, and when we fall, we aren’t surprised since we know that without Christ we can do nothing on our own.

Fidelity to grace is our only lifeline to sanctity and we can receive it through prayer and the sacraments. Without prayer or the sacraments no one can get to heaven, no one. In fact, one saint actually said that if we do not pray we cannot get to heaven, it’s as simple as that. Man by nature is a child of wrath, not a child of God and even when we do become children of God through baptism we can fall back into a natural state by mortal sin. Mortal sin kills the life in the soul. We need to live a supernatural life to get to heaven. Nature isn’t good enough.

But isn’t this all so negative? It sure sounds like it, but we can’t forget that God is merciful as well as just. But mercy is for the contrite, meaning we must be sorry for our sins and we must be willing to abase ourselves and get to confession regularly when we do fall. God rewards those who are sorry for their sins and who are willing to go and accuse themselves to Christ in the confessional. We can’t be too proud to admit our failings or to make excuses for them. We have to know where we stand before God and we can be sure that we will find mercy. God is all powerful and will not let us die in our sins if we are truly contrite and really want to make amends.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son the young man sins deeply and is welcomed back with open arms when he is willing to face his father in all his squalor and ask for forgiveness. He could have died in the filth of his pigsty and his father would have grieved but it would have been too late to be reconciled. It took humility for him to go back to his fathers house and come to him empty handed and wretched and with nothing but sin to show for himself in order to be forgiven. It took humility because the proud man wouldn’t have been willing to show up back at home after having wasted his inheritance like that.
God’s justice is real, but so is His mercy. Perhaps we should fear His Justice so as not to fall into presumption and perhaps we should also trust more in His Mercy. Maybe to be humble before God is to know our place, to know that we are nothing before Him and that our sins are not surprising, but also to know that we can, through the humiliation of regular confession, kneeling for Communion, etc, we can be granted mercy that bears fruit unto life everlasting.

sunday thoughts

2011-04-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

What a great Sunday. I actually did nothing except for go to Mass, pray and read. When you work six days a week like me you really appreciate having Sunday off for nothing but prayer, the Mass and turning off the mind. I even draw the blinds at my place so I feel like I’m in a little hermitage of my own and I don’t have to see the blazing sun or listen to the cars outside the window. I can also sit in the air conditioned apartment. When you work outside in Florida out of a vehicle that doesn’t have—has never had—air conditioning six days a week you get sick of heat and sunshine real quick. Outside of a few weeks, maybe a month a year, it is always hot and always sunny here, always. It’s nice to get out of it once a week.

Sunday has become my favorite day of the week since I really just let go and take care of myself. Since it is sinful to work or shop on Sundays I have an excuse not to do any unnecessary housework and I certainly try to avoid shopping as much as possible. There is infinite wisdom in the traditional keeping of Sunday as a total day of rest and prayer and it is quite tragic that it is hardly kept anywhere today. I guess I’ve been blessed with a job that makes me work the rest of the week and gives me Sunday off. Six days is hard to get used to but it really makes you appreciate the one day off you have and in my case it happens to be Sunday.

I hadn’t received Holy Communion in two weeks since last weekend found me in Miami and unable to get to Mass so it was a blessing. When you understand that you are really receiving Christ, not symbolically, but truly, body, blood, soul and divinity, than dragging yourself out of bed to get to Mass isn’t really all that hard at all.
Once at a reverent traditional Mass the priest gave a great sermon on the Domine non sum dignus that has always stuck with me before I go up to receive Holy Communion. He said that truly we are not worthy to receive Him at all, and yet He gives Himself to us but that we should always say an act of contrition prior to going up to the Communion Rail and to ask our guardian angel to accompany us and pray for us. After all, we are receiving the Christ, the Son of God under the mere appearance of a piece of unleavened bread so we must approach the priest who gives us the Holy Eucharist with a certain amount of awe and preparation. I have never forgotten that sermon.

After Mass I went to the parish library and got out The Hermitage Within by an anonymous monk, probably a Carthusian which is very good spiritual reading. It’s put out by Cistercian Publications and to be honest, after seeing the Cistercians fall into bizarre practices like Centering Prayer and Hindu Mysticism in the decades following Vatican II I wasn’t expecting much from the book but it is sound, orthodox and really good, really clear about the hermit’s life in the cell and what it’s all about. He really lays it all out in a scriptural way just what that life is all about and it sounds like heaven and hell wrapped into one. A piece of advice he gives is if you live the solitary eremitic life the discipline of the monastic rule will save you from falling to far into delusion. Routine and discipline will be your friends.

One other interesting thing he says which I always sort of believed intuitively is that you must take scripture and read it, not as just a bunch of myths and stories but as the real living word of God. He asks us to really familiarize ourselves with scripture, most especially St. Paul and the Gospels so that we really get to know Christ, to know Him in a way that He becomes very real to us so that even in the confines of the cell we are never alone. He also keeps returning to the theme of simplicity in having a simple faith and really allowing God to guide us in darkness. He quotes St. John of the Cross:

“Love does not consist in feeling great things but in knowing great deprivation and great suffering for the Beloved.”

He says that there is much suffering in the solitary life of a hermit because God is in darkness to us so much of the time but all the great masters of the Catholic Faith say the same. It would seem that there is no escaping suffering no matter what. In fact, if Christ came and suffered and He was and is God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, than why should we expect anything less for ourselves? We say we love Christ and we trust in Him but we recoil in the face of the slightest suffering starting with myself.

Well, overall the day has been a good, quiet, peaceful one. I long for that peace even though I work alone. I’ve realized that if you can’t find peace in your own heart than even if you’re alone there is turmoil. I’ve worked alone for six or so years now and still have yet to find that peace so I have no illusions that entering a Carthusian Charterhouse would instantly change that but I do realize that for a guy with my temperament it sounds very attractive.

quotes

2011-04-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

I practically live in my vehicle during the day since my job requires that I drive all the time so it can get pretty messy and so today, while going through some of the junk I have laying around, I found my old copy of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and decided to pick it up and sift through it for a while as I waiting around for something. Boy that book doesn’t disappoint at all and the most surprising thing a bout it is that the man was not a Catholic, in fact, I don’t even think he took his Protestantism seriously but he sure had some great insights. He pretty much diagnoses modern society with penetrating insights and a popular easy to read and understand philosophy that never comes off dry or boring. I could probably sit and quote the whole book since it is full of so many little “gems” but then I’d be caught plagiarizing or infringing on copyrights or something so I’ll just drop a few quotes here and let them whet your appetite to pick up the book if you haven’t already read it. “

"Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil." Page 11

“That it does not matter what a man believes is statement heard on every side today. That statement carries a fearful implication. If a man is a philosopher in the sense in which we started, what he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct?” That statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes as long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles." page 23

“The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testifies to mans loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom.” All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation. The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man. Behind the offense lies the repudiation of sentiment in favor of immediacy.” Page 29

“When the primordial sentiments of a people weaken, there invariably follows a decline in the belief in the hero. To see the significance of this, we must realize that the hero can never be a relativist.” Page 31

These are just some quotes from the Introduction and the first chapter but I could go on and on. It’s a book I could read cover to cover over and over again in a lifetime and probably pick up another gem each time I read it. Richard Weaver wasn’t a Catholic but he was on to something. He seems to really pinpoint some of the serious issues in today’s culture and he actually wrote this book in 1948! Honestly this is in my top ten list of books of all time. Weaver, Richard, Ideas Have Consequences, 1948 University of Chicago Press

as we pray

2011-04-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

I’m still learning the little truncated Officium Divinum I got from Angelus this week but so far so good. I even drag it to work with me so I can say Sext in one of the mail rooms that has been serving as my “office” for the last few months. It’s this dingy concrete and wood mess that has a broken air conditioner and cobwebs all over the place and in the past I’ve seen spiders as big as my fist in there but not lately. It is quiet and gives me a place to pray as well as work, like a little Carthusian cell that I spend an hour or so in each day. It’s going to take awhile to really get in the habit of saying Prime, Sext and Compline each day but I really want to get into it. I love the fact that the Divine Office is so full of the Psalms and that the little book sort of puts the ones used into the context of salvation history. You can really see Christ, the Church and the battle for your soul played out in the Psalms if you really stop and look. You can read them on many levels. Even Christ prayed the Psalms. Today at Sext this verse from Psalm 83 really grabbed hold of me:

Blessed is the man whose help is from thee: in his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps, in the vale of tears, in the place which he hath sat.

Ascend by steps, what does that mean? I don’t know but I liked the image. It seemed to mean that when a man looks to God for help he gets it but that the ascent to God is taken in steps “in the vale” of tears which is the world. The “vale of tears” also made me think of our Lady because that verse is in the Salve Regina , one of the beautiful hymns to the Mother of God that has seemingly disappeared since Vatican II in many places. Another set of verses from the same Psalm from the same hour that caught my eye is:

Behold, O God our protector: and look on the face of thy Christ: for better is one day in thy courts above thousands.

I can’t really tease out any special meaning in these verses but they caught my eye. I love the image of courts and how powerful the word “behold” seems to be. The face of thy Christ…. I just love the Douay Rheims translation with all the archaic English translations. I know it doesn’t work for everyone but when I am reading scripture or prayers I don’t want to read in banal and pedestrian modern English. The archaic language is like stained glass, statuary and the Tridentine Mass, it really lifts up my heart to God. Without those externals, without giving me the impression that you are entering sacred ground even the idea of God becomes sort of banal and ridiculous. Archaic language, like the Latin Mass and Gregorian Chant lifts the heart and mind to God, it serves as a launch pad for prayer in a way that modern English translations and the Novus Ordo just doesn’t do, at least not for me. As the saying goes Lex Orandi,Lex Credendi which means that the way we pray is the way we believe. The Catholic Faith of the saints is the faith nourished on the traditional Latin Mass and prayers born out of centuries of a lived faith. Today that doesn’t exist in many places in the Catholic Church outside SSPX, FSSP and ICK chapels and a few other places scattered across the desolate bone yard of Christendom but all of those prayers and all of those traditions are there for the taking if we show some initiative and act on the graces given us. Something like the Divine Office or the Rosary—the 15 decade one—or reading books by the Saints or traditional Catholic scripture commentary can put us in touch with our patrimony. If we pray with the saints and with our fathers in the Faith in the traditional ways we will start to really enter into the mystery of Catholicism even though we still are deeply sinful. As we pray, so shall we believe.

Friday thoughts

2011-04-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading a lot about Carthusian life these last few days. It sounds like it could be both joyful and terrifying at the same time. It’s a huge commitment to literally renounce everything—even friends and family—and live alone in a small cell with a garden and have minimal contact with your fellow monks outside of Holy Mass and the occasional walk or community meal. I can see where if one were not radically called by grace to the Charterhouse it could be a ticket to a mental hell and insanity. I have no illusions about that sort of life so any desire I have for it has to be taken with a grain of salt and serious discernment but I can’t say I don’t find it attractive.

Monastic life has always appealed to me, always, but just what level of solitude I am called to is something not to be considered rashly. Part of what I’m drawn to is stability, to be rooted in a place and in an environment that doesn’t change all that much and where the sine qua non of existence is the pursuit of perfection and to be remade in Christ. A monastic setting is one that hardly changes, the only real changes being the liturgical seasons, the colors of the vestments and the chant. Life is ideally rooted in Christ and the rhythm of the Church year. In a society that is rapidly spinning towards “Brave New World” and “1984” mixed into one this is very appealing. It always has been for me.

This culture is a desert so to speak, at least it is for me. It is empty, lifeless, not full of God but man, man drunk on himself and his science and technology, man headed for chaos and hell. When seen in this light the Charterhouse sounds like a gate to paradise, a place to turn away and allow grace to transform me from this prison of my own thoughts and imagination and a place where I can pray for others as well, especially those dear to me, both alive and those hopefully in purgatory and of course, for the Church and the Holy Father. Still though, I don’t know if I have what it takes to be a Carthusian…

thoughts on Merton

2011-04-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

Boy I forgot how much joy I used to get out of reading Thomas Merton’s early works but now that I am reading him again I’m brought back to that time in my early teens when I found so much consolation and wonder in him. The Sign of Jonas’ will always be on my “top ten” reads lists and I find it tragic that some conservative or traditionalist Catholics shy away from him after reading or hearing about his later works where he seemed to sort of go off the deep end spiritually, at least from a Catholic perspective. Oh well, it isn’t my place to force anyone to read Thomas Merton.

I’m getting through the journal collection “Entering the Silence” right now which is set in three parts, the first running from December 1941-April 1942, the second from October 1946-August 1948 and the last from December 1946-July 1952. It’s a sheer joy to read since you really feel like you’re getting into the inner world of a man who decided to enter a contemplative monastery and as the book progresses and you start to get a feel for his style you are drawn into a world and a place that is part of the past, that doesn’t exist and yet does exist in the heart and mind of anyone who seeks to find God’s will through the Catholic Church.

It is fascinating to be drawn into a world that is so remote from us as to be almost untouchable, especially the world of the Church. Back in the 40’s Pius XII, the last great Roman Pontiff of the 20th century, still reigned Gregorian Chant was still sung in every Latin Rite Church throughout the world and the Mass said at Gethsemani was the Mass of St. Pius V, the Tridentine Rite set out for perpetual use in the 1570 bull Quo Primum that hadn’t been touched in centuries. It certainly appears from reading this early journal that the Catholic Faith was alive and well in the USA.

It is only speculation now but I wonder if there would have been more Catholics today, if the Church would be flourishing, had that terrible Council never been called by John XXIII that pretty much washed every last vestige of the Faith Thomas Merton was attracted to like the tsunami washed away parts of Japan. Better yet, would Merton himself—the Merton you find in these early journals—even been attracted to the Faith had it been presented to him via Communion in the hand given out by lay people, altar girls, banal ICEL translations, the Novus Ordo, agnostic rationalist scripture translations and commentary like the new NAB and 70’s sentimental piano pop ditties instead of Gregorian chant? My guess is that his stint in Zen would have happened earlier and you’d probably never hear him talk about St. John of the Cross because he never would have entered the Church.

In these early journals you see the almost irresistible power of the Traditional Catholic faith just jump out on nearly every page. Merton is drunk on St. Bernard, St. John of the Cross, the Mass, St. Teresa of Avila, John Tauler and the monastic ideal. When he writes of spending time alone outside the monastery walls and bringing his mind to God it is something very powerful because I know what he means. I too have felt and still feel at times that exhilaration of being alone out in Creation when you can sense God in a sort of luminous darkness. When I was in my early teens this stuff made a real impression on me to the point where I really wanted, more than anything else, to be a monk. I will always be grateful to Merton along with Gregorian Chant for opening up the gateway to the Catholic Faith as it should be, as it was prior to the “Council” and the “cult of man” that it has ushered in.

Besides his love for Tradition and prayer you see Merton as a real man dealing with his own real pettiness and brokenness and distractions. You see him reading too much, writing too, much, getting too worked up about non essentials and than realizing that he is being led astray. You see him have a vocation crisis where he dreams of the Carthusian Charterhouse where he feels he might be better off but than he rights himself and realizes, through prayer, sometimes through the advice of confessors and superiors, that he needs to find time to rest in God through what he has been given in the common life of the Cistercian Tradition. Seeing him fall and than get up again and fall and than get up again over and over is endearing in that we see that Merton is a regular man like anyone else. He takes some of the mystique out of monastic life and shatters the rather naïve image many of us have that all monks are saints that have no faults and no distractions, that a life in the cloister is one of pure peace and contemplation.

Despite his sometimes bizarre foray into politics, eastern mysticism and world travel towards the end of his life I still like the man and feel a debt of gratitude to him and pray that Merton is at least in purgatory awaiting the moment when he will finally enter into the beatitude that he so longed for in his life. If I actually take that step this year to become a monk which as it stands it looks like it very well might happen, I believe I have Thomas Merton partially to thank for it.

weekend thoughts

2011-04-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

This last weekend found me without the internet, cell phone or any real serious distractions. It was well needed and it allowed my mind to sort of decompress from all the noise and the garbage that I usually allow in my mind. My prayer intention for myself has been nothing more than a plea for holy simplicity, for God to help me cut through all the false issues in my life in order that I my find more time to do my duty according to my state in life in a way where I can be at peace and I can not be constantly sinning in thought, word or deed. It’s been about a year or more since I have consciously picked up a newspaper or willingly sat and watched a news report and I can say my life is simpler and I’m happier. I am now going to cut away all Catholic News and stop following any of what is going on in the Church. Christ promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against her (the Church) so why should I be constantly imbibing all the trash news about what’s going on in the Church? Most of it is bad news anyway just like the secular news. I don’t want it, I don’t need it and I’m washing my hands of it the way a priest washes his hands at the Lavabo during the Mass. Christ will not let the Church completely fall apart and it is not my task to sit and despair over the way things appear to be.

It’s still apparent to me that my vocation—be it here or in a monastery—is going to be one
of prayer and solitude, not one of active service and social action. I don’t have what it takes to be a Carthusian although it does sound attractive at times. I don’t totally dislike people I just don’t really thrive on too much social contact. Perhaps the Carmelite vocation is more for me, one in which there is community but lots of time for prayer and silence in cloistered setting. That way I have a community with some socializing but it is kept to a minimum while the prayer and silence is most prominent. Either way I feel called to remain hidden in the alleyways and backwoods of the world and life in general. I don’t have the heart or the personality for all the competition, petty bickering and ups and downs of active social life or the heart for compromise that would seem so necessary for that state.

I got the truncated version of the Divine Office from Angelus Press today in the mail which I am thrilled to start using. It is in Latin and English and even came with a little print out on how to properly pronounce the Latin which will come in handy. I pray that I will be able to put it to use and really dive into that little book and make the Church’s official prayers my own. One interesting thing about the book is that in the intro it talks about the Psalter and just how important it was for the life of early Christians. Apparently during the time of Saint Jerome everyone who was serious about the Christian life—from farmers and housewives to aspiring priests and monastics—had to memorize the entire Psalter and many would pray it by heart out in the fields. I remember reading something about John Cassian once where one of the exercises of his monks was to recite the Psalter by heart till the prayers became the story of your own life. That’s really something.

I’m at that point now where I really want to turn away as much as grace allows from the things that don’t matter, that don’t lead to a life in Christ. It all sounds so high minded and difficult but what else should those of us who want to live serious Catholic lives and survive this world that is so hostile to Christ with our faith intact than to pray that we may be able to turn away from that which is of no consequence?

Look, we all have different roles to play and different states in life. A mother or a father, a priest or a doctor, all have different ways of life that they can ask for Christ to sanctify. What a doctor or a mother needs to cut away is not the same as what someone like me has to cut away but all of us could probably stand to cut out some things that simply lead us to more turmoil and distraction than they are worth. I say all this to convince myself of all this too. This turning away isn’t easy but with grace it is possible.

prayer time

2011-03-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

The last two days I’ve listened to Gregorian chant all day at work while praying and going about my duties and I’ve noticed a difference in my peace of mind. I’d gotten into the bad habit of listening to talks and sermons during work rather than chant or of not listening to anything and when I’m focusing on learning something I’m not really praying or paying attention to what I’m doing the way I should be but with chant or silence it’s different. At heart I’m a solitary contemplative although I cringe to use the word “contemplative” sometimes because it makes me seem like I’m someone special, someone set apart or something when I know I’m not. I find myself struggling with the same emotional rollercoaster and sins as everyone else and find myself at the foot of the Cross in the confessional at least once every two weeks, sometimes more. The only difference is that my personality and my job are such that I am alone most of the time and I like it that way.

I start the day with the Angelus and try to say it again at around noon and at six but sometimes I either forget or get lazy. I’ve even pretty much learned it in Latin and can chant it so wherever I find myself I can say it quietly. I then try to say a Chaplet of Divine Mercy and at least one five decade Rosary in but the last few days I usually get in at least two or three since, as I said, I’m not listening to any sermons or talks so I can focus. In between work sites I can say the Rosary or the Chaplet while driving. When I get to my job site I try to say one of the Precious Blood prayers I know for those who live or work at those places. In general I’m trying—with grace—to sanctify my day and simplify things.

I’m also trying to stay away even from Catholic news since most of it really isn’t all that better than the junk on the secular networks which I gave up after my total disillusion with the media bias leading up to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a man I have trouble even looking at without sensing evil. I’ve even considered taking a lighter to my voter registration card since it seems like elections are only ever between what is usually referred to as “the lesser of two evils”. Really, have we got to the point where the best chance we have is the lesser of two evils? Neither the democrats nor the republicans are serious about the social reign of Christ the King and the better of the two evils (at least in my opinion), the republicans, really aren't “conserving” anything even though they fancy themselves conservatives.

Pluralism is the name of the game and pluralism is really nothing more than a nationwide denial of objective truth and a denial that there is even an objective end for man, the Beatific Vision whereby the state should work with the Catholic Church to help lead all men to heaven and repress error that doesn’t lead there. In short I’m done with politics. I pray for people and take care of those God puts in my life the best I can even though I’m far from perfect and probably fall short of the mark most of the time. My prayer these days is for holy simplicity, not that the “holy” part means I think I’m holy, but that I long to be simple, pure of heart and child-like in the Faith the way our Lord asks us to be and the way some of the greatest Saints like the Little Flower are.

The biggest temptation for us traditional Catholics is the temptation to despair coupled with an inordinate attachment to fixating on all the problems in the Church. It’s so easy to do and I call no one out on this personally but simply state it because I too fall into this. Why can’t we just find a quiet corner, have our Mass and our little trad enclaves and try to rebuild Christendom from the ground up, trusting in the Providence of God and the promise He made to His only Church that hell would not prevail against it? It’s a lack of faith that we all fall into. We believe but yet we don’t believe enough to let the chips fall where they may and trust that Christ will calm the raging storm in His own good time.

What’s funny is that that passage in scripture took place in a boat—a figure for the barque of Peter and all the apostles—us—where terrified about the wind and the waves and yet Christ was there to still the chaos just the same. Right now Christ sleeps while His Church falls into ruins around us and the men whose ancestors built Christendom trample on the ruins and spit on images of our Lord while building new towers of Babel and being infatuated with “becoming like gods” the way Adam and Eve were after the Fall. It’s devastating for sure, but do we really have that little faith to see that in the end Christ will scatter His enemies and still the storms around us?

I pray that I will continue to be fed by the grace of Christ and remain close to Him in prayer and simplicity of life. I pray that wherever He leads me I will never lose the Faith and that I will learn to trust Him more. I long for a contemplative monastic life, a place hidden away in Christ and hidden away from the worldly way but here I find myself, in the world. I’m just grateful that God in His mercy knows my solitary heart and has given me a quiet corner where I can work out my salvation in fear and trembling.

Confession

2011-03-25T21:13:00.001-07:00

To prepare for tomorrows confession I went out for a jog and listened to Father Perricone talk about that sacrament. It was just what I needed to hear and more. Father P. is an eloquent speaker and when you hear him expound on the mystery of confession and the mercy of Christ you get the impression that he isn’t just pulling this stuff out of thin air or out of dry moral theology manuals but out of lived experience and deep personal reflection, both as a confessor himself, and as a penitent. One thing that has bothered me is the fact that it seems like I struggle with many of the same sins over and over again but what Father pointed out was that this life we live is truly one of spiritual warfare and that the only real mistake we can make is to give up in the battle. He exhorts us to leave the confessional with what used to be called a “purpose of amendment” which is pretty much the resolve to get back up, bloodied, bruised and with a concussion, and head into the ring for another round of spiritual warfare. He points out that even when we keep confessing the same things we get something out of it—humility—born of humiliation, and grace. I wonder how many lives would be changed if more priests spoke like him so candidly and so profoundly about what is sometimes called the sacrament of peace, mercy or medicine. All of them refer to the sacrament of Penance, Confession.

It’s great to think that when we fall we have a priest to go to and that in a way, behind that grille stands not really the priest at all but Christ Himself, willing to bathe us in His Precious Blood as we stand at the foot of the Cross. I try to think of that as I approach the Confessional, that Father stands in persona Christi in there. Where else but the Catholic Church can a soul dead in sin and weighed down with guilt have his burden lifted, his soul brought back to life, than in the Catholic Church? I find it sad to see that all throughout the Church today there is so little mention of sin or mention of the need for Confession. The Confessional is a place of healing, of rebirth, a place that our world sorely needs today. Perhaps one reason that the Church has fallen so far from grace today is because so many Catholics are in mortal sin, making sacrilegious Communions week after week after week, dead in sin, and not having recourse to Christ’s Precious Blood in the Confessional.

If I were a priest I would preach on frequent Confession at least a few times a month, maybe once a week. Jesus Christ founded one Church, a visible Church, and He did that so as to make it abundantly clear just where man had to go to get to heaven without any ambiguities whatsoever. He also instituted seven sacraments, all as a means help man get to heaven. He knew that we would continually fall that we are weak, burdened by the effects of Adams sin, which is why He instituted the sacrament of Penance. Confession is one of the most powerful and most important sacraments in our holy religion. Please, take advantage of it, and take advantage of it often.

no more for now

2011-03-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been giving some serious consideration to what I said about the Novus Ordo the other day, about me contemplating not attending it anymore and I have come to the decision that I can no longer attend it in good conscience, especially the Sunday Mass. Why have I come to this decision? Mostly because of all the gross irreverence that goes on at the local Novus Ordo, especially the altar girls and the hordes of “Extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion” which seem wholly unnecessary. A Sunday Novus Ordo has become a Protestantized hootenanny and nothing more and it might even be questionable whether it is even valid depending on who the priest is and what kind of antics go on. I don’t believe that the Novus Ordo is inherently invalid, which would mean that the Church herself promulgated an invalid rite, but that, based on the banal translations of ICEL, the abuse of the rubrics and the allowance of women and laity to serve at the altar and hand out Our Lord like Frito Lay at a Superbowl Party, some might actually not be valid. Also, just look at the fruit as it says in Holy Scripture. The fruit of the Novus Ordo and Vatican II has been worm eaten, bitter and rotten, stinking to high heaven like spoiled vinegar the way rotten apples do in an orchard in the autumn.

The way I see it, I will discuss this matter with a traditional priest to really sort it out, but as of now I believe I will only be attending the Tridentine Mass even if that means I have to drive an hour our two in any direction or miss Mass sometimes. I will simply stay home and make a spiritual Communion on days I cannot make it. Christ said that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church as a whole, not that the Catholic faith would survive in every nation and every city. I might attend the daily Mass at the local Novus Ordo since it is quiet and subdued and there is little chance of having to receive Holy Communion from unconsecrated hands but I will no longer have anything to do with the Sunday “High Mass” version of the Novus Ordo, the post Vatican II hootenanny. If a good traditional priest tells me to attend again I will certainly do so, but until then, my conscience says stay away.

todays thoughts

2011-03-17T21:33:00.000-07:00

I picked up Windswept House at the local parish library and boy it is a page turner. I have always been an admirer of the late Malachi Martin so naturally when I saw this book I swept it up, headed to the counter and started reading it as I was walking to my car. I’m not kidding either. So I’ve heard the late Father Martin claimed that much of this book was actually based on true events with real people and if so it is a combination of depressing and enlightening. It’s depressing because it shows that not only was Satan brought into the Vatican by way of a bizarre and sickening ritual presided over by priests, bishops and Cardinals, one of whom is very well known and popular among liberals but is now deceased, but it also shows just how many high ranking Vatican prelates are really in cahoots with Masons and globalists in an effort to radically change the beliefs of Catholics and undermine the Holy Father so as to make the Church an arm of the New World Order. It is enlightening because the only way a divine institution such as the Catholic Church could have literally fallen like a house of cards blown by a gust of wind in a matter of a few decades is if there was a diabolical hand in the mix, in short, it offers a reasonable explanation for why the Church is so ruined on so many levels.

One thing that sticks out at me is how in the book there are very few in the Vatican that really seem to care about the Faith at all and even the Holy Father (who is certainly JPII) is portrayed as a man of contradictions that no one can really get a handle on. On the one hand he is the legitimate Vicar of Christ and speaks out against a world gone mad with abortion, sodomy and greed, but on the other he praises the brotherhood of man, hobnobs with the members of false religions, giving the world the impression that Buddha and Mohammed teach valid paths to heaven and seemingly allows his underlings in the Vatican—most of who are faithless power hungry globalists and Satanists—to pretty much walk all over him and take advantage of him. If any of this stuff is true perhaps JPII really was a prisoner in the Vatican, but as one of the characters in the book says when a similar excuse is made by a colleague, “but he is the Pope!”

One thing I couldn’t understand and still can’t is why Paul VI rubberstamped the destruction of the Mass and the rest of the Catholic Faith and why JPII, rather than turn back and reign in the heretics and wreckovators, chose to tour the world, speak in ambiguous terms, seemingly ignore everything ever said by the Church pre 1965 and pretty much throw his hands up in the air when he—both—had full papal authority to staunch the flow of chaos pouring out from the open wounds in the Church punctured by the Second Vatican Council’s deliberately ambiguous documents.

Martin certainly raises a lot more questions than he answers in this book but I guess that is part of the mystery of it all. I have gotten to the point where I haven’t lost my faith in the Church as a sort of platonic ideal but I have almost no faith at all in any bishop or member of the curia, in fact, I do not even have faith in the Pope other than I believe that if he were to pronounce something related to faith and morals—in short—if he were to exercise his charism of infallibility—he wouldn’t be speaking error. I pray for the Pope, probably not as much as I should be I do, but aside from that I don’t put much weight on his every word which would be fatal since, quite frankly, the Popes in the last few decades have not always spoken Catholic truth or if they have some of the things they have said have been sufficiently ambiguous enough to allow for multiple, contradictory ways of looking at things.

Windswept House seems to be a window into Father Martin’s own mind and heart and what is seen is a deep sense of sadness at the state of both the world and the Church. He never seems to slide into the sedevacantist position but just like me, he seems to have little hope in the post Vatican II Catholic hierarchy, including the Pope. I can sense his anguish when reading through the book and since I feel similar it speaks to me.

For now, we can hope that Father Martin is in a better place and that his prayers for the Church will bear fruit in the near future. A real renewal will only take place—of that I’m firmly convinced—with a full on return to the Tridentine Mass, the abolition of the Novus Ordo and either the repudiation of the Second Vatican Council altogether or definitive, clear and forceful statements from the Pope including the return of the anathema clarifying for all time that the Council must be seen in the light of Tradition meaning whatever in the documents is not in line with it must be scrapped, period. If the Pope does this he will invite a media firestorm straight out of hell but such is the price that must be paid. Souls are being lost by continuing down the path of Vatican II.

Even if Satan is installed in the Vatican we know that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church and that as our Lady said at Fatima, “in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

thoughts on the Passion

2011-03-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading the narrative of the Passion from St. Matthew’s gospel and one thing that jumped out at me is how Simon of Cyrene “was forced” to carry the Cross of Our Lord. It’s been said by some that Simon of Cyrene represents Everyman and if this is true the notion that he “was forced” to carry the Cross is illuminating. Another thing I find illuminating is how all throughout the Passion Christ—True God, True Man—willingly undergoes the extreme torments of the Passion even unto death, even unto the giving up of His sacred humanity after crying out in the depths of human misery “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” On the one hand—when talking about Simon—we are shown that oftentimes we have to be almost coerced into taking up our Cross. I know it is like that for me. It doesn’t come naturally at all most of the time, and on the other, when talking about Christ’s willingness and His suffering, it is hard to break into the mystery of what it truly means to be both fully human and fully divine. Tonight while reading the Passion narrative all this was going through my mind.

It is no mystery that we have to be “compelled” or “forced” to carry the Cross along with Our Lord but what is a mystery are the dual natures of Christ and how that all fits together. I myself never tire of pondering it but fear that I will never really understand it. It is an inexhaustible mystery. What it shows is that somehow, even though Christ was and is True God He is also True Man and so His suffering—at least as far as my own speculation goes, were every bit as real as ours in terms of physical pain, mental anguish, etc, only they might have been worse in a sense because, being True God also, He could see how deep the evil of sin in man really was and would be until the “consummation of the world.” What makes all of this suffering noteworthy—and which also highlights the supreme humility of the Savior, is that He, being God, could have told off, destroyed, made a mockery of, everyone who mistreated Him during His Passion and yet He didn’t. You see this humble willingness to suffer in every moment of His Passion up until the last moment of His feelings of total abandonment and death upon the Cross.

How else can someone reconcile the suffering of man with a loving God if not by looking at the Passion? There are no easy pat answers, but for me the Passion of Christ, His death and finally His resurrection are answers even if mysterious ones. That God should become man and share in our sufferings, that God should allow His own creation to abuse Him, spit upon Him, mock Him and nail Him to a Cross, that God should even wish to show His face to us at all, is a mystery but a mystery that is worth pondering, especially with the eyes of supernatural Faith. Life involves suffering, involves the Cross, and like Simon even though oftentimes we are “compelled” or “forced” to deal with it we know, through faith, that God is with us, that God was there and shared in it freely for us, both to show His ultimate love for us and to prepare us for our redemption if we would but follow Him. This Lent ponder the Passion and enter into its mysteries. If you are like me, deep in sin and the struggle to stay out of it, it might prove fruitful.

should I?

2011-03-15T19:37:00.001-07:00

I wasn’t able to make it out to the Traditional Mass last Sunday but dutifully went to the local Novus Ordo instead. As usual it was terrible, not as bad as I’ve heard some get but bad nonetheless. Really the only thing “Catholic” about it is the fact that the Church herself deems it valid but other than that it has been stripped of anything remotely Catholic. This isn’t new, Catholics have dealt with this abomination for decades now but what is new for me is my real desire, not to leave the Church, but to simply stay home and pray the Mass on my own at home on Sundays I can’t get to the next county to go to the FSSP Latin Mass. I don’t feel like it is a danger to my faith to go to the local Novus Ordo but I have to just close my eyes and grin and bear it, kneel to receive Our Lord and get the hell out of dodge afterward. Between the banal piano tunes, the lousy singing, the bland mushy sermons, the altar girls, the atrocious banners and the sheer sentimentality of it all it is difficult to want to get out of bed and go. It feels like I am going to a service at Protestant church somewhere. Look, I don’t want to fall into mortal sin for not doing what needs to be done to fulfill my Sunday obligation but it is hard to tell, aside from the Church saying so, that the local Novus Ordo is really Catholic. Some say I need to go, others don’t. Believe me, I’m not a sede but I would rather go to the SSPV chapel in the next town than go to the local NO. This is really causing me some serious thought.

thoughts

2011-03-11T19:57:00.000-08:00

St. Bernard, in his work On Humility and Pride gives us 12 steps that deal with pride and 12 steps that deal with how to get back to humility. Here is the list. It is very good.
Pride
1. Curiosity about what is not ones proper concern
2. Light mindedness: chatter and exclamations about things which do not matter.
3. Laughing about nothing; foolish merriment
4. Boasting and talking too much.
5. Trying to be different: claiming special rights
6. Thinking oneself holier than others.
7. Interfering presumptuously with the affairs of others.
8. Self justification. Defending ones sinful actions.
9. Insincere confession.
10. Rebellion against superiors.
11. Feeling free to sin
12. Habitual sinning
Humility
12. Containment of ones interests, which shows itself in a humble bearing and lowered eyes.
11. Quiet and restrained speech
10. Reluctance to laugh
9. Keeping silence unless asked to speak.
8. Regarding oneself as having no special rights in the community.
7. Thinking oneself less holy than others.
6. Thinking oneself unworthy to take initiative.
5. Confessing one’s sins.
4. Patience in the face of accusation.
3. Submission to superiors.
2. Desiring no freedom to exercise one’s will.
1. Constant watchfulness against sin.

If you notice if you put these two lists side by side each step dealing with humility is the remedy for the step leading to pride, for instance, “insincere confession” is remedied by “confessing ones sins”.

The two that really stand out to me are the first two under “pride”. How many times do we
get involved with things that are not are concern and than get in trouble because of it? You can apply this to so much in life but here I specifically mean things that deal with the crisis in the Church, secular affairs that don’t concern us, attacks on the Faith by heretics and non believers, etc, that don’t concern us? I almost lost the Faith this last year due to spending too much time paying attention to the mass of scandal, apostasy, and chaos that has rocked the church like the Japanese tidal wave since the close of Vatican II. We can’t even trust the Pope to make an orthodox statement these days on some occasions, but than again, the Pope isn’t speaking ex cathedra every time he opens his mouth. We can sometimes get so caught up in all the rot in the Church that we completely neglect what is really important—prayer, penance, holy Mass, helping those around us, setting a good example. Maybe it’s best that we don’t pay too much attention to what is going on in the Church since, face it, things are bad, we already know that and dwelling on it can literally help undermine our faith. St. Bernard’s answer to the first problem that I have been talking about is “containment of ones interests, which shows itself in a humble bearing and lowered eyes”. By containment of ones interests I think he could mean just what I have been talking about, namely, not getting involved with what doesn’t concern us, what isn’t helpful to salvation. To be humble in that regard is to trust that Christ will clean up the problems in the Church in His own time. It is our task to do what we can to keep our faith in these days when it would almost appear as if Our Lady’s prophecy (at La Salette) has come true, that “Rome will lose the Faith.” By lowered eyes it could simply be a picture of what we have been talking about, an image of our interior turning away.

The second one, about “light mindedness and the “chatter” about things that don’t matter is pretty self explanatory but it could mean in the context of this reflection the same thing as the last one, namely, that we should try to refrain from talking about things that don’t concern us, that turn us away from salvation. Of course we have to talk about non faith related things in the course of our day, but generally we can spend a lot of our free time chewing the fat with others about stuff that really doesn’t matter, some of it even sinful. I still get in trouble sometimes, at least in terms of venial sins, when I get to chit chatting with folks on the job.

none

2011-03-08T15:13:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow starts the Lenten season and this year I am sort of dreading it because I am wondering if what I am giving up is either too much or not enough. I have to start with Confession and then go from there. It will be a real trial to see if Christ and His Church are really the center point of my life or if my piety is nothing more than words. That’s sort of scary. I have the hardest time staying in the state of grace for more than a week or two at a time. Can I stay in a state of grace through the whole Lenten season? Only with grace, but it has to start with Confession. I think part of my Lenten penance will be staying off of this blog for awhile, perhaps only posting one or two more times throughout Lent. I have pretty much run out of anything to say most of the time anyway. I like writing stuff but I just don’t want to write garbage just for the sake of writing. Even so, the blog is the least of my problems and the least of the hurdles to get over. When I look at what must be done in order to really get serious about my spiritual life fear is the only emotion that comes up, the only emotion that seems possible. It will really require a lot, but more than anything else, besides grace, it will take a serious and firm act of the will on my part to want to put Christ first. How many of us, if we are honest, brutally honest, have reached that point?

friday night ramble

2011-03-04T20:18:00.000-08:00

It’s strange I haven’t really felt like writing lately. I just don’t feel like there is much to say right now. So many former posts have been me sloppily firing off whatever comes to mind without any real effort, research or proofreading involved. I’m still thrilled to be Catholic, in fact, I thought maybe the enthusiasm would have worn off by now but it hasn’t. I never think of Buddhism anymore at all, in fact, it thoroughly repulses me anymore just thinking about it. I do not own any Buddhist books at all except a Dalai Lama book a friend gave me that I never read but keep around for the sentimental value in that it makes me think of the friend. I sold my entire Middle Length Discourses for chump change at a used book shop a month or two ago. I just didn’t really want any more Buddhist anything around. I’ve even gotten to the point where music just doesn’t do it for me anymore, not unless it is classical, opera or chant. Even with those genres it is only chant that I listen to with any frequency. Just today a friend was playing Nine Inch Nails and I found it just disgusting and grating to the ears, like running ones nails down a chalkboard. I suppose my old favorite “death metal” would probably do the same. The satantic negativity just oozes out of that ghastly music so much that I literally can’t stand it. Certain music is from hell, literally.

Lent approaches and I have yet to really sit and come up with any concrete resolutions. I best get going. I suppose I should give up my Kratom addiction but it still has a hold on me to the point where I am honest enough not to make any promises on that just yet. Who knows? I’ll think about it and make sure to do something that is just hard enough but not so hard that I will fail. Maybe daily Mass? No computer? At least 15 minutes—maybe 30 minutes—of Scripture reading daily? I’ll think about it.

I have already decided that I am going to work with Deitrich Von Hildebrands “Transformation in Christ” this Lent as my spiritual reading. It is 500 pages and full of a lot of serious well thought out stuff so it will keep me going for sure. I’ve already skimmed it some and I am very impressed with him. I read Trojan Horse in the City of God and loved it so this is no surprise. He has a unique style but it is very interesting. I heard Pope Pius XII called him “ a 20th century doctor of the Church” even though he has as of yet not actually received this title officially. You can tell just by skimming his stuff that he was a great thinker, a devout Catholic and had a formidable intellect and was not a modernist, although since he wasn’t a Thomist I know some traditionalists don’t like him. Oh well, while Thomism is and should be the norm in Catholic theology there is room for legitimate pluralism in the Church and I would say Von Hildebrand is more than welcome.

In my prayer life not much has gone on really. I have been doing daily chaplets of Divine Mercy, a daily Rosary and just keeping up my regular prayers overall. I even made it to visit Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament two or three times this week. It’s really a simple faith that keeps me going even if there are no feelings of consolation that come from my faith at times. I’ve heard it enough times that one shouldn’t look for consolation and I try not to. I can see that there would be danger in doing so since if you based your spiritual life on the good feelings you occasionally get in prayer, what happens when God withdraws them from you?

I’ve also started to really get drawn to St. Bernard after finding a book of collected works of his at the used book shop. I do not have a personality quite like his but there is something just majestic about his works and since I aspire to the monastic life I am in awe of him. He even preached a Crusade, something I wish we would do today sometimes. To me there seems to be nothing wrong with defending Christendom against infidel assaults or even in taking the Holy Land for Christ. There is something noble in it even if some crusaders were in it for the wrong reasons or acted badly. I for one am not ashamed of Catholic history, the least of all the Crusades. Sometimes I wish I was born in St. Bernard’s time, the 12th century, and that I was a Cistercian monk at one of his monasteries. I admire warriors but I don’t have the build nor the personality for a life of fighting so I would rather be a monk praying for, say, the success of the Crusade.

I feel lost in today’s world, the image I always used to use was that of a Native American who somehow walks through a time warp in the woods and finds himself on the outskirts of a large city somewhere, just standing there in his loin cloth and feathers, bow slung across his shoulders, staring at the bizarre spectacles of fast moving hunks of metal flying past on the freeways, massive buildings, billboards and nary a tree in sight. It is quite shocking to think that as a traditional Catholic not only is practically the whole world actively denying almost everything I believe in, be it God, Christ, objective truth, a literal interpretation of Genesis, modesty, traditional roles for men and women or whatever, but so is much of the Church. There is such an apostasy in the Church that a traditional Catholic is in a sense like Christ in that he has “nowhere to lay his head”. That is bewildering at times, just totally bewildering. It is comforting to really trust in something, to have faith in Christ and His Church and in all that such faith entails but it is alienating on a certain level.
To think that we don’t even have Popes anymore that really uphold all the Church has traditionally taught takes the alienation to a whole new level.

I am not personally a sedevacantist but I can certainly have sympathy for them and see just why they believe what they believe. Vatican II ambiguity and novelty created groups like the SSPV whom I do have sympathy for. Sometimes it does seem like the last few Popes have been more committed to Vatican II than to perennial Catholic teaching and to be honest, the fruit of the Council has been rotten to the core. The thing is, only the Pope can fix it, only him. He is the only one with supreme authority to bind and loose and to set things straight and until we get a Pope who has absolutely no personal connection to that pastoral Council things will keep going the way they are going.

Today I saw something about a so called “new evangelization” but I can almost bet that it will be a failure unless the Church reverses course and returns to her Traditions. She will never have success trying to bring people into a Church with barren tables instead of altars, social justice instead of sanctity, architectural iconoclasm instead of magnificent cathedrals, pedestrian pop hymns instead of Gregorian chant and dull mushy sermons about endless love and universal salvation instead of the reality of working out ones salvation with fear and trembling. John Paul II’s “new springtime” will paradoxically sprout only on the well tilled field of the 1960 years of Tradition preceding the “Council”, not on the barren rocky soil bequeathed to the Church after 1965.

I don’t try to worry too much because I know I will never see the so called “new springtime”. The Church sees the world in centuries not decades. Vatican II will be swept away into the dustbin of history or a definitive Papal pronouncement will finally and authoritatively bring whatever can be salvaged from the council into line with tradition or it will be scrapped. Once no one is alive anymore that had any stake in the Council it will fade away. Pride stands in the way today in the hearts of many for simply standing up, apologizing to Catholics and saying that Pope John XXIII made perhaps one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the Catholic Church. Seriously, there have been no positive fruits from Vatican II and the New Mass, none, and we are almost half a century into the so called “post conciliar” era.

Since the Church is of Divine origin I don’t sit and worry much about it, I just know that eventually it will be fixed. Right now the most pressing thing is trying to live an authentic Catholic life. That is hard enough in any age, but most especially in this one when the world and many members of the Church scoff at it.

as little children

2011-02-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

Amen I say unto you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. St. Matthew 18:3

On and off all week this verse was running through my mind and until today I hadn’t really either had the time or the desire to sit down and write about it but now I feel like I want to. This had been going through my mind this past week because I had been thinking more about the whole concept of “holy simplicity” and this passage seems to speak of just that. In a previous post I said that I am trying to really get away from all news sources but especially from thinking about all the chaos in the Church. One thing that seems to get us traditionalists down is that we focus so much on all the chaos in the Church we don’t leave any time for our spiritual life.

When I look at this passage I am reminded that what Christ really wants is for us to literally become “like little children”, i.e., simple, trusting, faithful, non sophisticated, when it comes to our life in Christ in the Church. Small children generally don’t know all the answers or even need to formulate the questions that adults ask about things. They don’t need to know because they know that Mom and Dad (provided they have a decent family) will be there to protect them, feed them, clothe them and make sure they have a nurturing environment. When I think of folks like St. Therese I am reminded that holy simplicity—becoming like a simple child—is really what is called for. As much as I am not a fan of the late John Paul II I can see why he would proclaim someone like St. Therese to the level of a Doctor of the Church, because in this era of ultra sophistication in terms of science, technology and other ultimately (from a salvation standpoint at least) useless and sometimes soul killing things, we are called to get back to basics if we want to get to heaven. We need to start trusting in Providence again, trusting in Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd that will protect us, nurture us and guide us no matter what. We need that simple faith that believes simply because God said it, the Church teaches it and that’s enough.

Jesus Christ says literally that we will not enter heaven unless we become like little children. Our return to simplicity is a requirement for our entrance into heaven and we can only do it with grace. Heaven knows we need grace. In this age perhaps we need more grace than ever just like we need to reflect on this passage of our Lord. It doesn’t take much to see just how sophistication and lack of simplicity in matters of faith can destroy us, leading us to apostasy, heresy and than eventually total despair and hell. There is no salvation outside the Church, none. If we lose our faith we will lose our soul. St. Therese and our Lord have something profound to teach us but it flies in the face of the world’s wisdom, in fact, it echoes what the Apostle said in 1 Corinthians 1:27 “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” Holy simplicity, childlikeness, faith in Jesus Christ, these things are pure folly in a world that values trivia, statistics and the endless pursuit of worldly power and technological prowess but if we are Catholic and we are serious about getting to heaven we should be willing to become foolish. We should also be willing to do our part to cut out the things from our lives that lead away from simplicity and that childhood that is a requirement to enter heaven. And in case you think I am getting haughty here I will tell you that this is a struggle for me like it is a struggle for anyone else. It takes grace. Pray for me as I will pray for you.

p.s. In his Catena Aurea, St. Thomas Aquinas takes the Gospels and collects commentary on them from many Saints and doctrors of the Church. Here is what St. Hilary has to say about the passage about children from the start of this post (from Catena Aurea) :

"He calls infants all who believe through the hearing of faith; for such follow their father, love their mother, know not to will that which is evil, do not bear hate, or speak lies, trust what is told them, and believe what they hear to be true. But the letter is thus interpreted."

turning off

2011-02-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

Lent approaches and I am starting to try to prune away even more of the nonessentials in my life. I already pruned away any and all newspapers, TV shows and secular magazines and now it is time to prune away even Catholic news sources from my life. I’ve found that the more I read Scripture and traditional Catholic books (Saints, prayer, history, etc) the more at peace I am. Who knows, perhaps I will even stop posting here for awhile and when I do it will simply be talk of prayer and the like without anything more about the mass of heresy and apostasy that has infected the very highest levels of the Catholic Church. What can I do when bishops or priests or even Popes sometimes say or do things that would have made jaws drop in previous centuries? The mystery of the crisis in the Church and the heresy and novelty being preached from the highest levels of the Vatican is beyond me. All I know is that if I sit and focus too much on the continuing apostasy and chaos in the world and the Church than I will probably end up becoming a sede or totally losing the Faith. The thing is, without grace anything is possible. Much prayer and spiritual reading is in order. These days I need to be saturated with it simply to survive, simply to not lose heart. Even Catholics news is disheartening and potentially damaging to ones faith in the Church, well, at least it is for me. With a true return to Tradition in the Church probably beyond the horizon of my lifetime there is little else that I can do.

Precious Blood reflection

2011-02-16T18:08:00.001-08:00

One thing I have been working on this week is the memorization of the Litany of the Precious Blood. For some reason I have become enamored with the Precious Blood and have sort of made contemplating it one of the hallmarks of my prayer life. When contemplating the Precious Blood one cannot help but think of Our Lady and just how linked she is with the Precious Blood. After all, it was her that gave both the human body and blood to our Lord when she was carrying him around in her womb for those nine months. He took his human body and all that is associated with it from his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. That means that both his body and blood in the human sense come from her but at some point (I’ll leave that to competent theologians) that human blood that flowed from her Immaculate Heart to His Sacred Heart became (perhaps at the moment it flowed through His heart) into the Precious Blood. That would mean that once His heart was beating and He was growing in her womb His Precious Blood flowed both through His body but also through hers. We only receive the Precious Blood when we receive Holy Communion but the BVM literally had it flow through her veins and through her heart from the moment Our Lord became present in her womb and her human blood flowed through His tiny heart, becoming the Precious Blood.

The other day at Mass I was saying a Rosary and contemplating the Visitation where John the Baptist kicks in Elizabeth’s womb when Our Lady came to the door of her home. Perhaps Mary was literally bathed with an uncreated light that we cannot hardly fathom, not just because she was Immaculately conceived, but because at that moment she was truly the mother of God and had the Precious Blood of Christ flowing through her veins. The sanctity that flowed out from her presence was enough to make John the Baptist actually jump in the womb.

When we contemplate the Precious Blood in the life of Mary we can see just how united is her Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Christ and Mary are inseparable in a certain sense. His human heart came from her as did his human blood but once they were united with His Divinity they became Sacred and her own veins became flooded with the Precious Blood, her womb a tabernacle with the body of the Word Incarnate.

Next time you recieve Holy Communion bear in mind that even though the Sacred Host looks like a small wafer of bread it is actually both the Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ. Take some time to think about what that means to be able to recieve the Precious Blood.

These are simply some things that I have been thinking about for a while now. I figured I change up the posts since so many have been about the problems in the Church. Why not write a few about something besides that?

slowly but surely

2011-02-13T20:28:00.000-08:00

I went to Saturday morning Mass followed by Confession and received Holy Communion because, thanks be to God, I was not conscious of any mortal sin on my soul since last week. One thing that impressed me about this Mass was that there were about 5 folks in front of me that were in their late teens, early twenties who all received Holy Communion on the tongue, made a thanksgiving after Mass and a few of them even went straight to confession. On an ever better note despite the mild Florida weather the girls were appropriately covered up. And to add an even better twist the priest, in speaking of Adam and Eve, actually said something to the effect of, “there are no other acceptable ways of looking at human origins" in his sermon which just made the Saturday Mass that much more special.

Change is slowly coming to the Catholic Church and it favors reverence and tradition. The novelties, experiments and heresies of the last several decades are dying a slow death and will probably go to the grave once the last people who were committed to the rot go to the judgment seat of Christ to answer for their lives. I’m convinced Pope Benedict XVI will be one of the last Pontiffs in history with any real serious stake in trying to make Vatican II look like anything more than the haphazard and ambiguous train wreck that it was and is. Ecumenism will fade into the dustbin of history and scandalous events like the Assisi gathering where a blasphemous Buddha statue was placed on top of a tabernacle housing Our Lord will be the stuff of legend for the Catholics of the future.

I realize that we cannot simply throw out the entire Council but I think once there is enough distance from it and people in charge who have no real stake in it who can look objectively at what it has wrought either it will be scrapped altogether or the good will somehow be reconciled to tradition, the novelties thrown out. There seemed to be an almost bizarre giddiness over the modern world and as Paul VI said “the cult of man” back in that era that seems almost demented and diabolical, especially considering that the “Council” started very shortly after the Nazi death camps and Stalin’s Gulags and the decades after were followed by Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the fall of Saigon and the passing of Roe Vs. Wade, the legalization of human sacrifice by the highest court of law in these neo pagan United States. How anyone in the Church could have thought that things were looking up is beyond me, which gets me thinking about original sin.

Today it would seem that there is a denial of original sin even by many high ranking members in the Church. Just ask yourself, how often have you heard a sermon about it or about the effects of it, namely, the inclination to evil and the darkening of the intellect that used to be mentioned in the old catechisms? In my own life it seems like original sin is the only answer for the depravity and disaster of so much in our world. Human nature doesn’t change. The sad thing is that without grace it is not fixable, period, close the book. The other sad thing is that unless one is taking advantage of the sacraments, especially Confession and Holy Communion (worthily received) than life is a deep struggle with the effects of the Fall we inherited from our first parents. In fact what is even sadder is that, as I said before, priests by and large (outside trad parishes) are not preaching about real repentance at all nor are they mentioning Confession or the need for sanctifying grace, the supernatural life. By neglecting this millions of Catholics are gaining NOTHING from Holy Communion, nothing but mortal sin that is. No wonder the Church is taking so long to recover.

You know today I knelt before Holy Communion and asked God to forgive those countless souls who were going up to receive Him who have probably never been taught that mortal sin is real and Confession is necessary. The crisis is more often than not a crisis within the Church, a deep crisis of faith in the ranks of the clergy from the highest levels of the Vatican on down. Many rank and file Catholics get their dose of the Faith from Sunday Mass and catechism classes, both of which, unless you are lucky, are more a bland feel good Protestantism with universal salvation and hugging and clapping at the end, nothing more, nothing less. The people, the simple faithful, by and large will believe what they are taught.

I believe that most Catholics, most especially the young ones that are discovering tradition through the net and little trad parishes popping up, are seeking for more and finding it. People smell phonies a mile away which is why so many are leaving the Church. Luckily the old heretics are dinosaurs who are soon going to have to answer for the rot they have inflicted while the younger more traditional minded folks are thirsting for the Truth and slowly building up a new yet old Cathedral on the ruins of the failed renewal. Seeing these folks younger than me so enthusiastic shows me that the true “new springtime” is coming and it will have little to do with Vatican II, clowns in the sanctuary or cowardice in the pulpit.

todays thoughts

2011-02-11T20:43:00.000-08:00

I don’t pay any attention to the news media in any capacity these days but I can’t help that every time I check my e-mail or turn on the internet some news story pops up. Right now it is this crisis in Egypt. In truth it might be sinful but I really personally have no interest in what is going on in Egypt, none whatsoever. I could care less. I’ll pray for the Copts over there because they need it but aside from our Christian brothers and sisters over there really I don’t care. In my own estimation there is always some violent protest going on in Mohammedan lands. What is new about this? To me globalization is disgusting. The world is getting smaller and we are simply moving towards a godless world government run by a power elite while once exotic cultures are being turned into playthings for advertisers who want to create a worldwide monoculture that looks like Mainstreet USA where everyone, everywhere can numb themselves with entertainments, get abortions on demand and in general live mindless debauched lives until they reach a certain age and are quietly dispatched by government agents that, in a godless society, have no grounds for keeping anyone alive that aren’t useful for society.

I dream of the days of old that I never really knew where one had to dispatch carrier pigeons with letters to the ends of the county to get information to someone or one had to take a boat across the ocean just to see someplace new. Now we can watch the events unfolding in Egypt on our computer screens or perhaps our phones depending on whether we have a fancy one or not. The world is getting closer and more chaotic and more godless. Sometimes I look with despair at the state of things. We now live in an age where you cannot go into most Catholic churches in the country and even get straight doctrine but you can go to any drugstore in America and buy condoms or morning after pills, perhaps even a Hustler magazine depending on what part of town you are in.

In an age when things are getting worse and a new dark age is upon us the Church has become impotent, powerless, from the top on down. Or so it seems. I think the Pope knows what is going on but if he were to shoot straight in terms of dogma and crack down hard on heretics in the Church there would quite literally be less than maybe a million Catholics left that would stand behind him. The Church is infested with heresy on every level. The Holy Father isn’t dumb but he knows, as perhaps did JPII, that any serious use of his God given authority to excommunicate and excoriate the legions of heretics with roman collars and bishops miters would lead to the biggest schism in the history of the Church and by all estimation it would look as if the Catholic Church simply became null and void overnight. So deep is the rot.

It is hard for me to come to terms with this stuff because my own personality sometimes just wants to see heads roll. I always think to myself, “if I were the Pope”…and then you can fill in the blank but I realize that in some ways the Holy Father is a politician in a sense. Just after hearing about JPII’s beatification and being dismayed by it I asked God in prayer to tell me “why” since in my own opinion JPII was not really that great, certainly not one of the better Popes of the 20th century. I couldn’t and still cannot get beyond World Youth Day, the false ecumenism of Assisi and the kissing of that blasphemous book that denies Our Lord’s Divinity the koran but after listening to Father Hardon I still don’t think he is a Saint by any means and still do not think those events I mention are good for the Catholic Faith or befitting of a Roman Pontiff by any stretch of the imagination but I see that things could have been a lot worse. John Paul II did plead with the American Bishops to start getting people to go to Confession, he fought hard for life and he did close the door forever on women’s ordination and never wavered in talking about the reality of sin. Does this make him a Saint? Well, in any other age of the Church no, but in the late 20th century post Vatican II era? Maybe. Maybe that prayer was answered. At any rate I would never become a sedevacantist even if I have trouble with some of the things the late Holy Father did. Once you believe there is no valid Pope where do you go, where does your hope lie? Thank God the Pope isn’t infallible every time he says or does something. In the era after Vatican II John Paul II looked like a traditionalist and that is saying something.

All I can do is to keep the Faith, to pray, to receive Holy Communion worthily (or else it profits nothing at all in terms of grace) and go to Confession every week or two. Sometimes I wonder why I have been given the Faith. I don’t have many skills to speak of, most especially people skills. What is it that God wants from me? Maybe it is just to pray and to quietly keep the Faith, perhaps quietly setting some sort of example to those around me who know that I am Catholic. I do talk about the Faith to my coworker regularly, although there is no indication that he is on his way to the Church. In the end only God knows. It isn’t my job to figure everything out. In a way that is why I love traditional Catholicism. You do not have to figure everything out. Certain things are set in stone. God said it; the Church teaches it; it is dogmatic; that settles it. Father Hardon once said in a talk that we should never, ever, allow any doubt about any teaching of the Church to settle in our minds and take root ever. Pray for it. Remain humble. Realize that God is God and man is a creature. In an age and increasingly a global culture that denies God, denies sin, denies dogma and denies the Church this is no small feat. It is a miracle of grace.

Sunday "Eucharistic Celebration"

2011-02-08T15:32:00.001-08:00

I couldn’t get to the Latin Mass on Sunday so I attended the local Novus Ordo and walked into perhaps the cheesiest Liturgy I have ever seen. Whenever I go to the Novus Ordo I make sure I get there early in order to get my mind right in order to cut out the banal and focus on the reality that no matter how lame and non Catholic almost every part of a Sunday “Eucharistic Celebration” (the post Vatican II term for Holy Mass) is I can hone in on the reality that Christ is really and truly present in the consecrated Host. In short I have to try really hard to pretty much shut off my senses and prepare for Holy Communion. At the Novus Ordo the church is usually really noisy on Sundays with people chattering in loud voices, the choir belting out cheesy pop tune with tambourines as a sort of choir “practice” and in general you’d think you were in a movie theater, the only thing missing being the popcorn and the big screen in front. I actually had to put on my mp3 player, turn up the Gregorian Chant really loud, close my eyes and say the Rosary a full two times (ten decades) before I could get my mind right.

This “Eucharistic Celebration” was worse than usual and I will start to tell you why in a moment. Let’s start with the sermon. The priest stood there and recalled that someone had e-mailed him and asked him just why there was all this talk about “social justice” when all he wanted to do was save his soul. Good question as far as I was concerned but by the tone of the priest’s voice he was not amused. He stood there and in a semi condescending tone rhetorically asked “I don’t know about saving ones soul, only God does that, but Jesus Christ and the prophets of the Old Testament were serious about loving your neighbor.” He then proceeded to quote scripture and talk about why social justice was necessary without ever talking about the issue of saving ones soul again. Ugh.

Now social justice is important, but it must be a well rounded social justice that takes into account the reality of heaven and hell and mans need for sanctifying grace, grace which only comes through the Catholic Church and the sacramental life found within her. I couldn’t help thinking that I would like to shake the hand of whoever posed the question to Father. Last I knew salvation was partially something that we, as Catholics, were to, “work out …with fear and trembling”, making use of prayer and the sacraments given by Christ to His Church. To say that “only God can save souls” is true but doesn’t give a full picture to it, in fact, it makes it sound like all we have to do is take care of our neighbor and God will do the rest. This is not Catholic at all. It is a half truth. Now I’m not saying that this particular priest was deliberately teaching half truths and omitting certain things but I am saying that he did not really present a clear picture of the situation.

I often wonder just how the Church could have fallen so low to the point where what was Catholic when my mom was a little girl is no longer even mentioned, either in catechesis classes or the pulpit. Today one never, ever…and I mean never, ever, hears about the clear difference between grace and nature and the need to live a supernatural life. The only law in the Church today amongst many is “love your neighbor” and “work for peace and justice” (both ambiguous terms in their own right). I can’t help feeling saddened and disillusioned each time I find myself out of necessity at a Sunday Novus Ordo. It isn’t Catholic. I will say it again it isn’t Catholic, none of it, except the Holy Communion and even that is marred by Communion in the hand and women in the sanctuary handing it out like a Frito Lay or a Ritz cracker into the hands of countless people in varying states of mortal sin. (I'm not judging everyone here but with the scant lines at the Confessional and the next to zero catechesis on mortal sin and Confession it is CERTAIN that many are in mortal sin albeit unkowingly.)

My prediction is that the Catholic Church will simply become smaller and smaller. There will always be a valid Pope and clergy that can offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as well as dedicated lay people but with the bland protestant nonsense in many Novus Ordo parishes across the nation everyone else will eventually lose numbers and be shut down. As Father John Hardon once said at the close of the last century :“In the 21st century only Catholics with heroic virtue will survive.” Much of the Church today has neither heroism nor virtue but is instead enamored with false ecumenism and human respect, two things that make it a laughingstock that no one I mean NO ONE, takes seriously.
False Catholicism will rot away and disappear and shepherds that try to peddle a false gospel will rot in hell for their leading the sheep astray. Of course we shouldn’t want this to happen, as we should wish hell on no one, not even the most pernicious heretic. We must pray earnestly for the false shepherds, some of whom are probably in invincible ignorance due to the shoddy seminary formation and dull and heretical catechesis in many parishes.

Now we return to the “Eucharistic Celebration” and after Holy Communion the priest calls up some layman to stand at the podium and give some slick spiel about a new youth group about “messy spirituality”—all while the Mass was still going on! To top it off after his Billy Mays (May God have mercy on his soul) sales pitch and mentioning the super bowl the congregation sits there and erupts in uproarious applause! Bizarre! This is a Church and Mass is going on, or at least I was under that impression. After that the priest gave the final blessing and proceeded to leave the church as usual but after the “exit hymn” was sung the congregation immediately erupted in applause again and started jabbering louder than before.

Every day I have to go to a Sunday Novus Ordo I end up leaving sort of angry and discouraged but would not dream of taking things into my own hands and not going the way some trads do. The Church has declared under pain of mortal sin that one must attend a Mass on Sunday and despite the banal, ridiculous non Catholic flavor of the Sunday Novus Ordo I still believe the Holy Eucharist is valid. I go simply to fulfill what I owe to God in Justice and to--provided I am worthy, receive Holy Communion. All I can say is I cannot wait until I can make it to a Tridentine Mass every Sunday.

chastity

2011-02-04T20:45:00.000-08:00

“In today’s climate, which I do not hesitate calling a venereal epidemic,
no amount of merely natural prudence or sheer will power can protect us from
this plague. If there is one virtue that is impossible without the grace of God,
it is chastity.” Father John Hardon S.J.
"Although they knew God, they did
not glorify Him as God or give Him thanks, but became vain in their reasonings
and their senseless minds have been darkened. While professing to be wise, they
have become fools.

Therefore, God has given them up to the lustful desires of their heart, to
uncleanness, so that they dishonor their own bodies among, themselves …for this
reason God has given them up to shameful lusts; for their women have exchanged
the natural use for that which is against nature. In like manner, the men also,
having abandoned the natural use of the woman, have burned in their lusts one
towards another (Romans 1:21-27). "

"I never tire repeating that without Holy Communion, it is impossible to
practice the charity which Christ demands of His followers. Plain logic tells us
that, if this is true, neither can we practice Christian chastity without the
frequent, even daily, reception of the Holy Eucharist. "-Father John Hardon S.J.

Like many others in our day and age I have struggled with lust in my life but the only time—and I repeat the only time—when it started to become manageable was when I made myself go to Confession weekly or biweekly, prayed as much as possible and received Holy Communion as many times as possible throughout the week. I write this because in my own life this has worked in a miraculous way and it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with my own efforts at all.

The first and last quotes above tell us what Father Hardon had to say about Confession, Communion and Chastity and the Apostle’s words are in between the two quotes telling us pretty much what has been going on in human society since the fall of our first parents but most especially in this porn drenched sex obsessed culture we are living in today.

I decided to write on this topic first because I have seen the truth of what is said here in my own life and also because I just recently saw someone seem to try to excuse the sad fact that most Catholics today are using contraception which means that many of them are fornicating and all of them are heaping up mortal sins. Human nature is weak and yet we have access to Confession and Holy Communion daily if we are blessed enough with the grace to be able to go to Mass daily and Confession weekly, so why aren’t more of us taking advantage of it? I would say because Confession, mortal sin and the grave evil of contraception is scarcely if ever mentioned today in many parish churches outside some trad chapels.

One of the gravest evils of the post Vatican II insanity are priests who simply do not preach the Faith when it comes to issues that would offend or disturb somebody. What this means in the present context is that there might be the token nod to the evils of abortion but never is there any connection made between the porn drenched culture, contraception and fornication with abortion. In fact not only that but Confession is never, ever mentioned from the pulpit and neither is mortal sin. We are all responsible for learning the Faith according to our own time based on our state in life but face it, many people are busy, many people can only get to Sunday Mass and if they are getting mushy drivel and than receiving Our Lord in Holy Communion with mortal sin than they are not receiving grace from it, which means they will not be able to stand against sins of impurity outside Church. It’s just that simple. Many of the shepherds have literally neglected to teach the Faith to the flock or worse yet some have poisoned the wells with heresy and left the fences broken and the flock exposed to the wolves that have always been more than eager to maul, mutilate and devour.

The thing is, one only receives grace from Holy Communion if one has the proper disposition. If Confession isn’t being pushed and preached than how can many rank and file Catholics be expected to go and be cleansed and made worthy to receive our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament? And if the grave moral evil of fornication and contraception is not squarely preached about at Mass, most especially Sunday Mass than people are getting the impression that everything is alright when it isn’t. If people were getting the right information and then taking advantage of both Confession and Holy Communion with the proper disposition than they would receive the grace necessary to stay chaste.

Of course a person would also have to seriously try to stop looking at things that excite lust and stop getting into occasions of sin but that grace would give them the strength to do it. It is utterly impossible without grace, without the sacraments properly received. This doesn’t come on my authority which is worthless but on the authority of a Holy priest like Father Hardon who spent fifty or so years seeing this stuff in his own life and in the lives of others.

The sacraments are a treasure house of grace but we must learn how to take advantage of them. It isn’t enough to go up each Sunday to receive Our Lord unless we have been cleansed of our sins by making a good Confession if we are conscious of a mortal sin. It literally does more harm than good to do so since it simply gives you another black stain on your already sooty soul. God does forgive anything and everything and He does grant us all the grace we need for our state in life but it is according to His own rules, not ours, His wishes, not our wishful thinking. I am convinced that the crisis of contraception and fornication in the Church is due to many factors such as a totally debauched culture, total lack of serious preaching on the matter by priests and people tragically not utilizing the healing of Confession and frequent Holy Communion with a clean soul.

Look, I’m just as liable to fall as anyone else so I’m not judging anyone here who is still struggling. You know I could fall tonight if not for the grace of Christ. I probably will fall someday before I die. All I’m saying is that based on my own experience what Father Hardon says is true, that it is impossible to be chaste without frequent Confession and frequent Holy Communion, that without both we will follow the tragic narrative spun by the Apostle in the quote at the top of this post, we will be “given up to our lusts” which will, if un repented, lead to hell. I really hope and pray that many priests will start doing their job and seriously preach the faith. They are not doing anyone any favors at all by sugar coating of remaining silent on serious salvation issues. Holy Communion merits nothing without the proper disrosition except a mortal sin. Why in the name of all that’s good and holy aren’t priests teaching this stuff, why are they allowing millions of sacrilegious Communions, silence on contraception and fornication and silence on the necessity of Confession?

todays thoughts

2011-02-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

This week has found me listening to a lot of the late Father Hardon’s talks on my mp3 player. I listen to them while at work or when I go for my evening runs around the neighborhood. I have some bones to pick with him in certain areas but by and large he was a man who worked for the Holy See and spent over 50 years in the priesthood so any of my own critiques should be exercised with a degree of caution. I don’t like how he constantly states that we are living in the worst crisis in the history of the Church and yet never once seems to make the connection between the Second Vatican Council and the present crisis. No one who has seriously looked at the documents of Vatican II can deny that the ambiguous language and almost giddy optimism about the modern world and modern man are unprecedented in the history of the Church, and no one who is honest can deny that after the Council the Church was sickened by rampant heresy, apostasy and lack of leadership that is also pretty much unprecedented in history.

One thing is clear, Father Hardon knew that there was a grave crisis in the Church and he fought tirelessly to teach and preach the Faith, all without being overly polemical and all while giving obedience to his superiors to the point where I have never heard him say anything, either in print or in audio talks, about wanting to return to the old Mass. I can not dislike the man, as it is clear that he really lived the Catholic Faith and fought valiantly for it even though in the eyes of some traditionalists he may seem like nothing more than a neo conservative who naively thought nothing the Church could ever do was wrong. There is no question that he was a man who really had a deep faith in the Church and especially in the Real Presence and fought his whole life to bring people into the Church and share with them the treasure within. He also had no illusions about the reality of Satan and evil in the world today.

How could he remain so rooted in the Faith despite the rampant heresy, apostasy and desacralization of practically every level of the Catholic Church? I think it is because despite his very sharp intellect he had a simple, childlike faith and he allowed himself to be formed by the Church and never wished to try to break out of what had been defined. He seems to be a man who allowed dogma to mold his own opinions rather than to make the Church and her dogmas change with the times which is what a Catholic should do, although I think he was perhaps blinded in a way to the ill effects of Vatican II and the seemingly total lack of leadership on the part of the post Vatican II Popes but according to him Paul VI and John Paul II were under no illusions as to the crisis in the Church. My question is this: why then didn’t they excommunicate heretic bishops, stop Communion in the hand or do more to enforce strict orthodoxy? The seeming total lack of leadership in the post
Vatican II era will remain a mystery that only God really knows.

Despite some of the things that I can’t say I agree with in Father Hardon’s words and ideas (I don’t disagree with anything except for his sort of silence about Vatican II) he helps me really want to step back and get serious about living a Catholic life. I have already been trying to go to Mass almost every morning and Confession at least every two weeks, sometimes every week, interspersed with a few trips to the Blessed Sacrament and prayer at home and those things have made a difference. I firmly believe in the Real Presence but I do so with a childlike faith. I also know in my own life just the difference that frequent reception of Holy Communion and Confession do for me in battling temptation. The Catholic Faith is true and I am so happy to have been granted the grace to enter into the Church. I fear my own weakness now very much so and really try to get to Church as much as possible. After seeing just how much I fall without Holy Communion almost daily I am afraid to not go to Mass as much as possible.

I have also completely cut out newspapers and news outlets except the occasional Catholic news piece from someone’s blog or Catholic news website. Satan controls the media or a large part of it and I know how much negativity I get in my life when I turn on a TV or pick up a toilet paper rag like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Nothing but agendas in either and the agendas have nothing to do with Christ or His Church but deal instead with secularism and a New World Order run by Satan and his tools.

When you live in a culture that militates against Christ, His Church and anything sacred sometimes it is better to simply find a quiet corner where you can learn and practice the Faith as an exile and get away from it all. If you get sucked in by the media, education, politics, etc and you have a weak faith you will get chewed up and spit out and perhaps lose your faith and your soul in the process. The culture is designed to strangle and squeeze out every last vestige of faith in God or the Church from your soul starting in Kindergarten on up to the workplace or entertainment.

The thing is I am blessed to be a solitary person that stays away from most people except for a few. I am not in a place where I have all that temptation and noise coming at me from all sides. I have no idea how I would fare out there if I was in a different situation. I can only chalk it up to grace. God wants me here for a reason. It makes me feel more compassion for those of you who have to be in the daily arena of neo pagan excess and deliberate blasphemy. I am sheltered here in my job and quiet life because of my weakness and God’s mercy for me. May all of you who have to be out there engaged be granted the grace to stand firm.

supernatural focus

2011-01-30T18:06:00.000-08:00

Today at the Novus Ordo the Gospel was the Beatitudes that Our Lord spoke so eloquently on. I am not about to try to break them down, as there have been many excellent commentaries on them by great Saints and theologians that it would seen almost arrogant for me to even try. What I do want to do is to look at them from a supernatural viewpoint, or better yet to get you, the reader, to pick them up, read them and try to see them from that supernatural view.

You know each time I go to Mass now one of the things that I pray for is “the return of the supernatural focus in the Church” since I believe that is sorely needed today. Somehow after Vatican II the Church—from the highest levels on down—simply stopped preaching about or even really writing about, anything above a “this world” almost secular focus with Christ as the great Marxist revolutionary, the Gospel being a call to awaken the physically poor to break the chains of their capitalist taskmasters. Even when there wasn’t an explicit Marxist message the supernatural message was drowned out, brushed off, and pushed aside with almost a total focus on the here and now. It is still like that in many ways, which is why I invite you to read the Beatitudes by thinking of what Our Lord talks about as referring, not to worldly things, but to otherworldly things.

All in all I would suggest trying to look at the Beatitudes as a call to live a supernatural life and to see life, its hardships and trials and its bitterness in the light of eternity, knowing that those who carry out what Our Lord is asking of us will inherit a place in Heaven. I just think that today there is almost zero focus on Heaven at all and this is reflected in the commentary one often gets in sermons or in reading things like the diocesan newspapers, magazines, etc. Face it, the Church will not return to any kind of prominence and will continue to lose members in droves, perhaps even disappearing in certain nations altogether, unless she returns to a supernatural focus, returns to teaching, preaching and witnessing that the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world. Christ promised that the Church would be indefectible but He never promised that it would survive in every nation or neighborhood. Catholicism in America today will not survive the secularist onslaught unless it breaks free from the shackles of the same secularism it pretends it stands against.

The Church—and I mean from the Pope on down—must return to a supernatural focus in the Church, must stop preaching about a “civilization of love” or a “brotherhood of men”, must cease false ecumenism and watered down dialogue, and return to the firm bedrock of Tradition, a large part of which is a focus on the supernatural life of the soul and the supernatural mission of the Church.

If this is really the age of the laity we can start trying to bring a supernatural focus back into the Church, not by yelling at the priest but by learning what we have been denied by the leaders in the Church and by living it and setting an example. One cannot survive as a Catholic—I’m convinced of that—without believing wholeheartedly in the supernatural element of the Faith, without believing in the reality of eternal heaven and hell, the life of grace, mortal sin, Confession and the power of prayer and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We can start by reading the Beatitudes or anything else our Lord said and seeing it through the lens the Church used to give us to look through—the supernatural. If the Church looks through any other lens than this she is no longer Catholic but something else and Christ never promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against something other than the Catholic Church.

the week

2011-01-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

The last two weeks has found me trying to get to Holy Mass as many days as possible, praying at least a five decade Rosary and in general attempting to live a decent Catholic life. This week I have not made it to daily Mass as much but two of those days was because, when I got to the church, funeral Masses were taking place and I, not being of the family, decided against attending since a funeral is sort of a private affair. Instead I would pray a five decade Rosary, make a spiritual Communion and head home to get ready to go to work. I realize how easy it is to fall into soul killing mortal sin and see just how dependent I am on the mercy of God through the sacraments of His only Church. While I do not get spiritual consolation out of Holy Communion or Confession or even prayer, and while I do not “feel” grace, I can see it working in my life by seeing how staying out of mortal sin is easier when I make the effort to get to Holy Mass, Confession and a try to pray more. I tell you prior to going to Mass during the week I could barely go a week without falling headlong into mortal sin, especially sins of impurity but after trying to frequent the sacraments more often I notice a difference.

One thing I do each day now is thank God that I was granted the grace to be Catholic and that I was given an introverted personality that finds most people to be too much which keeps me out of near occasions of sin, especially sexual sins which today are not only common but encouraged by almost every agency in our culture except for the Catholic Church in some places like traditionalist enclaves where sins against impurity and their gravity are still mentioned from the pulpit. Whenever I feel like I want to come down hard on someone I see or hear about I remind myself that really it is only the grace of God that has given me what I have and helped me in the ways that I have been helped. We are all fallen creatures with inclinations to sin and evil and intellects darkened by the Fall of our first parents. If I were more social or in a different environment I could—probably would—fall in matters of the 6th commandment quite frequently.

Lately I am almost fearful of God in a way because I know He has the power to make me suffer even though it is for my own good and his glory. I find myself asking Him to help me but to go easy on me in my weakness since I fear being able to handle his efforts at pruning me from my attachments. Many great saints went through a sort of hell on earth but it all led to Heaven in the end. I know I’m weak and fear that, fear being able to deal with it.

Life is becoming better now that I feel like I am becoming really comfortable with being a Catholic even though I still get angry, sad, worried, whatever. What has changed is that I try to hold onto the Faith in a simple manner, believing like a child all that the Church has traditionally held for belief. It gives purpose to my life overall and allows me to try to see people, places and events in the light of eternity and in the light of Catholic dogmas and principles. Some suffering comes from knowing I can never really be like most other people in the culture but I always keep things in perspective by meditating on the fact that Our Lord said that the path to salvation was “narrow” and that “few there are that find it.” Than I reflect on the lives of most people based on my own past in seeking for relationships, drugs, whatever and see that most people probably are not all that happy and in general our culture is dead with no real purpose except pleasure and the grave. The saddest thing is that youth today are brought into a culture that believes in nothing, nothing at all; at least nothing meaningful enough to live and die for. No wonder there is so much suffering and no wonder I have next to no interest in bringing kids into the world unless I could raise them in the Faith and home school them which, with my limited intelligence I surely could not be successful at.

Each day I am reminded of how thankful I am for having been made a Catholic, for being granted the grace to enter the Church and to have grown up in a household with a mother who believed in miracles, in angels and all that, making me just like her in that regard. I’m no skeptic at all and just as a skeptic probably looks at folks like me like we are crazy I just don’t get the skeptical attitude either. My world always was and still is a world where heaven and earth touch on a daily basis and where angels and demons really exists and battle it out for the souls of men even now in the 21st century. Thank God for this simple heart of mine but I can’t get haughty over it because it is a gift.

todays thoughts

2011-01-25T19:31:00.000-08:00

Now that a few weeks have passed since the spiritual crisis I was in has been resolved I am back to exploring the idea of holy simplicity again. There is just some part of me that believes that holy simplicity is going to be the safe harbor for us to rest in while the storms and hurricanes rage around us in the Church and the world. As Catholics—especially more tradition minded ones—we can get so caught up in scandal, crisis and all that is wrong with the Church and realize that somewhere between our fuming over the late Holy Father kissing a koran and the latest bizarre ecumenical gathering we either lost our Faith altogether, neglected our spiritual life of prayer or both. Now don’t get me wrong, there is much wrong in the Church today, from the highest levels on down but sometimes I wonder if focusing on all of it is really serving much of a purpose if it doesn’t lead to action or increased prayer.

We should be concerned with the welfare of others since salvation hinges on whether or not they enter the True Church and persevere in grace or not but how do we best help them? Maybe the answer is different for you based on your own different way of being able to deal with people, as in some might try to teach the Faith in a parish church or become a missionary, or some, like me, might simply try to get in and stay in a state of grace and pray frequently rather than do much talking. Or maybe all of us ought to do a little of both. Perhaps the greatest thing we can do is to really focus on our own spiritual life so that we are examples to others and we merit the grace necessary to help others get into the only fully equipped hospital to cure sick souls—the Catholic Church.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I have been thinking about the example of the late Father John Hardon, S.J. a holy priest who seemed to quietly set an example by his teaching, his prayers and his action. To my knowledge he never even fought for the Tridentine Mass after Vatican II (I could be wrong) but instead worked within the situation as it had become in many places. That meant he had to wear frumpy vestments, say the Novus Ordo in parish churches that looked more like the command center from the starship enterprise than a church and pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament in tabernacles that were far removed from the altar, and yet, this man was holy. He used what he had and made the best of it. The Faith was alive in him and so no matter what kind of frumpy and pedestrian parish church he may have had to deal with, no matter how cheesy the felt banners hanging where the statuary used to be, Father Hardon lived a life in Christ and he was authentic and because of that he brought countless souls to the Church, and not only that he brought countless souls to a real understanding of a Faith that was not—still isn’t—being passed on in so many places.

Now I’m not at all suggesting that the Tridentine Mass, reverent architecture, statuary and properly placed tabernacles are not important, simply that the reality on the ground right now all across former Christendom is that they are rare at best and so if we find ourselves in some place less than ideal we should follow the example of Father Hardon try to stay simple in our faith, holding firm to what we have learned from others without being so dependent on externals that we can’t pray if we are not in an ideal situation. And as hard as it is I pray that I may stop thinking about the garbage going on in the Church to the detriment of my spiritual life.

thoughts

2011-01-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

Wow, the High Mass yesterday was magnificent, including the sermon which was hard hitting and full of Catholic orthodoxy. I really feel like I can settle in and pray at the Tridentine Mass since everything—the chant, the incense, the prayers, the movements, the church architecture and statuary—is meant to raise the mind and heart to God. The sermon was about Holy Communion and how one should not receive it in a state of mortal sin because to do so would be to commit a mortal sin of sacrilege. He even mentioned how a soul in mortal sin is “spiritually dead.”

This stuff isn’t new to traditionalist Catholics but might be a shock if you are used to the ambiguous feel good mush coming out of many sermons at the Novus Ordo. It feels good to see a priest who is not afraid to use the words “Blessed Sacrament”, “Our Lady”, “Holy Communion” and “mortal sin” when speaking from the pulpit. Contrast this with the other day at the Novus Ordo when the priest (who is a good and decent man) talked about how sinful abortion is and how it is offensive—get this—to the dignity of the human person. No mention of being offensive to God at all, as if the only real sin is one committed against our fellow men. He also mentioned that all of us are responsible for abortion and the culture of death ( I don’t believe he used such a strong offensive statement as “culture of death)in our own way by not showing love for others. While that may be true to an extent, the abortion mentality is enabled by the contraceptive mentality, by illicit sex and by a culture of promiscuity and nihilism and a loss of the sense of God and His Commandments, not simply our failure as men to not “love one another.” He could have used the sermon to tell people that sex outside of marriage and contraception are mortally sinful, lead to hell if unrepented and also contribute to the culture of death of which abortion is a huge part.

I am not saying that the Novus Ordo Mass itself is invalid or that there is something within it that makes priests not speak the truths of the Faith but to this day I have never, ever, not once, heard any sermon at the Novus Ordo that even remotely touched upon almost anything specifically Catholic. Sometimes the sermons are ok such as a short one on St. Anthony of the desert and how we should imitate his life of prayer, but nothing hard hitting or nothing that I imagine would really stir anyone to be offended of perhaps really take a look at themselves afterwards. I find it tragic that I cannot make it down to the Tridentine Mass more than twice a month but when I do get down to it I am never left spiritually bereft.

As for the Novus Ordo, I must confess that I like the daily morning Mass with no obnoxious piano tunes and I can see in my own life that the Sacred Host is valid whether it is a Tridentine Mass or not. I can see the difference that daily Communion makes in my life and most of the time I have to receive at a weekly Novus Ordo. I once heard an exorcist say that he has no time with those who say that the Novus Ordo is invalid because he sees in his own practice that the demons react the same way to a Host consecrated in the new rite or the old. As he says, “Jesus is Jesus, there is no new rite Jesus or old rite Jesus He is just Jesus.” If you are striving to stay out of mortal sin and you receive frequent Communion and go to Confession and try to pray daily than you will see a difference in your life. You can’t see grace or measure it but you can see its effects.

I firmly believe that the Tridentine Mass should be the only Mass in the Latin Rite because it best expresses the Faith of the ages, period, close the book. There is no room for ambiguity and there is no doubt that the Mass is about God and not man, however the Novus Ordo based on my own life of grace, is certainly valid, although it is often not reverent and not a good reflection of the traditional Catholic Faith the way the Tridentine Mass is.

the last few days

2011-01-20T21:55:00.000-08:00

Just this week a friend of mine actually asked me to teach her the Rosary and prayed it with me twice. I was a little shocked considering I have known her for almost ten years and she is the strict science type leaning towards Buddhism with not a whole lot of interest in Jesus Christ or the Church. I know I have been praying for her by entrusting her to Our Lady, asking St. Michael and her guardian angel to pray for her and keeping her in my Rosary intentions but I hadn’t really expected anything so out of the blue, in fact, if anything I expected maybe a deathbed conversion some years down the road. I never lose an opportunity to turn a conversation with her into a religious one to the point where she has even said “that’s all you talk about” but there must be grace working in her.

In truth I don’t think she was ever presented with an authentic Christianity, I know I wasn’t even though I was given the grace to sort of intuit it at an early age to the point where I caught glimpses of it that acted like a light in the darkness to guide me into the Church. I think many people are presented with a false picture of Christ or the Church and they reject it, or they never stop to ponder eternal questions. Will she convert? Is she just attracted to the novelty of Latin prayers? Even if it starts out with her seemingly more interested in learning the Rosary in Latin, it can lead to the Faith, just like I suppose some people might go to the Tridentine Mass for the incense and the chant and the aesthetics of it all and than leave with the Faith. Who knows what is going on inside her soul but Christ Himself? I am not privy to her secret hopes and longings only I hope that somewhere her heart is stirred to enter the Church, to see that a life lived without Christ, without grace, is sort of a hopeless life and leads nowhere particular.

In fact she mentioned to me how she wished she was married with kids and all that and how her co-workers seem happy in their lives and I said just because they look happy doesn’t mean they are. I said look at the Hollywood set, or rock stars, or politicians. All you have to do is turn on Entertainment Tonight to see that money, fancy cars, designer clothes, a job at the White House or the Capitol or a gig for the NFL don’t necessarily lead to happiness. Than again, neither does entering the Church but the difference is that in the Church mans happiness is seen to be fulfilled in eternity, this world and this life is a trial, a “vale of tears”; mans life will be fulfilled either in the Beatific Vision with Christ in Heaven or in eternal and unremitting remorse and torment in hell. The Church teaches that at least man has a purpose and that no matter how successful you are in this life in terms of job, money, relationships, all that matters is that you followed Christ and died in a state of grace. Many Saints were nobodys to the world, hidden in Christ. The secular world has its happiness, but it is often ephemeral and ends when you rot in your coffin and the only lasting happiness the secular world talks about is your legacy since they don’t believe in the immortality of the soul.

When I see things like my friend actually picking up a Rosary and asking to say it, to learn it, a person who has never been catechized and for all intensive purposes has little to no interest in religion or God, than I see that prayer really does make a difference. The grace won by Catholics who labor alone in the devastated vineyard of the Church and the modern world can win back many souls to Christ.

todays thoughts

2011-01-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

This week has seen me at Holy Mass every morning and I can tell you right away that I notice the effects of grace working within me because of it. There is no doubt about it at all. Between weekly or bi-weekly Confession depending on the state of my soul and daily Mass there has been a big difference in my level of temptation, especially regarding sins of impurity and lust, although I realize that I could fall at any time and it is only the grace of Christ that keeps me free of them. As long as I am able I am going to continue to go to Holy Mass in the morning.

This afternoon I also went after work to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle, to finish a five decade Rosary I started after Mass and to simply sit there and really be in the presence of Christ. I find that the more I stay away from controversy and try to stay simple then things in my spiritual life go well. No doubt there is what is called a “diabolical disorientation“ in the Church from the highest levels of the Vatican all the way down to the level of the parish Church and yet, the Faith is always there for the taking even when the members of the Church are busy spinning a web of artful ambiguity about “peace” and a “civilization of love” and how “unity” will come about (with no mention of the Church of course).

Sad to say it the Catholic Church since the Council has bowed down at the altar of human respect and the world, the best symbol of this “diabolical disorientation” being the late Paul VI surrendering the Papal tiara, the symbol of the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, to the godless Masonic arm of the New World Order the U.N. That a Pope could debase himself and the Church, the Bride of Christ, in such a manner, is beyond the pale. How a Pope that could write something as magnificent as “The Credo of the People of God” could also be the one to symbolically surrender the Papacy to the New World Order will remain shrouded in mystery. So I hear he died in a hair shirt doing penance for his own role in the utter dismantling of the Church that occurred on his watch. God Bless him for it. At least he knew on some level that the “Council” was an utter and unprecedented disaster that, in his own words, let “the smoke of Satan” steal into the sanctuary precincts.

Sometimes I feel alone in this, like the Churches members simply don’t care. They don’t really teach the Catholic Faith anymore. They seem to have forgotten that the Churches first mission is to save souls and give the life of sanctifying grace to men, not build up a “civilization of love” built on the principles of secular humanism and the mandates of the UN or engage in endless “dialogue” with those outside the Church, many of which do not have any interest in becoming Catholic and who only laugh at our pathetic prelates and priests who water down the faith to garner their shallow approval.

If the Church would only return to her own roots, to her own historic Faith and her own historic Mass, not to mention preach and teach unapologetically Catholic doctrine whatever the consequences in terms of the loss of human respect than those of other religions or no religion who have been given the actual graces to come and be Catholic will do so. All this false ecumenism and bowing down at the altar of secular New World Orders are doing for us is making us the butt of jokes. I have heard Protestants say the Pope believes in a false God, not because of any anti Catholic propaganda, but because they could pull up actual quotes of JPII telling groups of Muslims that we worship the same God! And I can remember hearing of a woman who told her Muslim and Hindu colleagues that they should consider becoming Catholic to which they replied (about JPII) “but your Pope says we don’t need too, he prays with Muslims and Hindus”.

The fruit of false ecumenism is rotten and it has sort of replaced evangelization from the Popes on down to the parish. It isn’t the simple faithful that are utterly destroying the Church, it is the hierarchy. Well maybe its time that those of us laity who know better to start rebuilding the Church starting with ourselves and with those around us. We can really start by taking seriously the teachings of the Church and by really trying to ramp up our prayer life. I think there are three pillars that we should build our life on and those are, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Rosary, and Eucharistic Adoration. I think those three pillars could rebuild the Church, but since we are not in positions of power we have to start with ourselves and with those around us. Those three pillars will rebuild the Catholic Church but it will not happen in most of our lifetimes in any level that we will see. If we undertake this project we will be like the countless who toiled their whole lives to build a Gothic cathedral whom are nameless to history, and yet their work remains (or at least until the waves of Mohammedan infidels finally get a demographic majority and either bomb them out or desecrate them by turning them to mosques). Just don’t expect anything but scorn and the Cross in your home or your parish since the Truth is not popular. Christ suffered, why shouldn’t we?

Spiritual Communion

2011-01-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

“A spiritual Communion acts on the soul as blowing does on a cinder-covered fire
which was about to go out. Whenever you feel the love of God growing cold,
quickly make a spiritual Communion.
-Cure of Ars

I got out a book on Eucharistic Miracles today from the parish library and in the section on Spiritual Communion this quote popped out at me. I try to make Spiritual Communions sometimes but not as often as I should. I do it sometimes when I feel tempted or when I am at Holy Mass and cannot in good faith receive Our Lord in a sacramental way. How does one make a Spiritual Communion? I simply close my eyes, quiet myself, focus on my heart and interiorly say,

“Lord since I cannot receive you sacramentally I wish to receive you
spiritually. Please dwell within me; may thy Precious Blood flow throughout my
veins, washing away every evil and every stain of sin. “

And then I sort of just sit there and imagine that I am getting a “Divine transfusion” of blood, not in some bizarre sense where I become a god, but in the sense that for that moment the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ is coursing through my veins and making all the darkness and sin flee.
This is an approved version of the Spiritual Communion:

“My Jesus, I believe that You are in the Blessed Sacrament. I love You above all
things and I long for You in my soul. Since I cannot now receive You
sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. As though You have
already come, I embrace You and unite myself entirely to You, never permit me to
be separated from You.”

In my own life I have hardly scratched the surface of what it really means to make frequent spiritual Communions but after a negative post I felt like saying something a little lighter.

untimely

2011-01-14T19:18:00.001-08:00

I hate to be cynical about the news of the probably inevitable beatification of the late Pope John Paul II but it makes my heart sink in a way because it seems like it is happening so fast for one reason and one reason only—in order to stall the return of Tradition to the Church. Why would I say this? Because, whether Pope John Paul II intended the bad message that Assisi (false ecumenism, religious indifferentism) the koran kissing (just flat out scandal, period, and the notion that a religion that denies and reviles practically every dogma of the Faith is somehow ok and a valid path to Heaven) World Youth Day (the Novus Ordo and the “Woodstockificaton” of Catholicism, complete with condoms, free love and guitars) altar girls and Communion in the hand give to the people of the world and to Catholics steeped in Tradition the message will be clear: John Paul Ii is a saint and therefore all the abuses that occurred on his watch; all the post Vatican II banality and silliness, is now endorsed by a Saint. (For the record I'm not deigning to pass judgment on the state of his heart so I am not saying that he in fact personally endorsed the scandals) All the liberals in the Catholic world and the world at large will use this against any return to tradition and chide us by saying that, since JPII danced at rock Masses where teens were having sex and using condoms and since JPII kissed the Koran or prayed in common with Voodoo pin pushers, Hindu Kali worshippers and Protestants at Assisi where a Buddha statue was put on a Catholic altar than I guess all religions are valid paths to salvation and I guess we can simply throw out anything pre 1965. (which is something MANY within and outside the Church have been doing anyway for decades)

Even if JPII did not intend for all of this to happen and even if his heart was in the right place (a position that I must take if I wish to remain charitable and in good conscience) to raise him to the altars, at least at this time, can only serve one purpose—the stalling of the revival of Tradition when it was on the slow ascendency. I don’t doubt that he was a holy man in his personal life, I cannot lie and say that I think his pontificate, or some of his choices of things to do or say throughout it, were good for the Church or the faithful. Please, for the sake of the Church, lets hold off on this beatification process until a few more decades have passed by. Now is not the time. All it will do is rubber stamp the post Vatican II chaos. Perhaps in time we will see that he was a very holy man with a very important and significant pontificate and while I don't doubt his personal holiness and charisma I think his pontificate needs to pass the test of time.

we can do our part

2011-01-12T18:01:00.001-08:00

In my mind the crisis in the Church is at its heart a crisis of faith plain and simple. If many priests and prelates actually believed wholeheartedly in the Catholic Faith they would be teaching it, preaching it, standing up for it, and willing to die for it but since so many do not believe anymore they are simply sitting around and doing the bare minimum if that in some places. And just so you don’t think I’m picking on those that I don’t personally know we have to do a reality check in our own lives and look at where we stand in relation to the truths of our faith too. Think about it, if we really believed in the teachings of the Church and all that those truths entail for our lives and the life of the world, than how would we live and act?

The Church today has become a secularized “this world” philanthropy organization that cares more about nuclear disarmament, economic injustice and helping the UN create a New World Order and a “brotherhood of men” or a “civilization of love” than the supernatural City of God and embassy of Heaven that it used to be. Ever notice how in so many churches one never hears the word “grace”, “sin” or “salvation” at all anymore? Ever notice how there is absolutely no urgency on the part of almost anyone in the Church today to evangelize or baptize people? Why is that? It’s because of a total lack of faith. If you don’t believe in God, don’t believe in Jesus Christ and don’t believe in Original Sin, than why would baptism or evangelizing matter? Heaven, if it is mentioned at all, has become a sort of human right for everyone, God a great big Barney the dinosaur in the sky crooning “I love You, You love me, we’re a happy family” and than we wonder why people have no reverence in Church, the liturgy is in shambles, and people don’t take things seriously.

The thing is we only have ourselves to blame. The Church itself still teaches what it has always taught, only many of those entrusted to teach those saving, life giving truths have neglected to pass them on to the faithful. We can’t blame the Church itself, but we can lay the blame squarely on many of its members, including priests and bishops and others whose sacred duty it is to preach the unadulterated Catholic Faith. And we can also look at ourselves. Just what have we done to help teach ourselves the faith, or just what have we done when presented an opportunity to talk about the faith with someone? You see we cannot just blame the bishops and some of the renegade priests. In today’s internet age we have access to more documents and more catechetical materials than probably any other Catholics in the history of the Church. All of us can surely make some time out to learn what hasn’t been passed down to us, to pray often, and to help do our part. Some of us have more time or talent than others but all of us can do our part. The truth is out there if you want to look and God will always give the graces necessary for our state in life.

In an age like this—the so called “age of the laity”—it is our time to take charge and rebuild the Church by starting with ourselves and those around us. Everything we need is at our fingertips.

thou hast the words of eternal life

2011-01-07T20:50:00.000-08:00

After work if I have the time and if I am not lazy I will take the extra time to drive a little out of the way to get to a local Church in order to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament housed in the tabernacle. I must confess, one of the reasons that I just couldn’t leave the Church was because of Eucharistic Adoration. To hold with a simple faith that encased in the tabernacle is Jesus Christ, Whole and Entire, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, is to want to be there close to Him and enter into that mystery. Every other Church, regardless of its beautiful architecture, iconography, whatever, seems empty, lifeless and cold without a sacred and consecrated Host housed within it in a tabernacle. God may be present in spirit in some other church I suppose but not in the same way as He is in a Catholic Church.

Somehow I ended up there after work today when I remembered that it was First Friday today which meant that in the evening the Sacred Species would be ensconced in a monstrance for Adoration and Benediction. Had I not stopped by in the early afternoon I would have totally forgotten. At any rate I went and stayed from seven thirty to almost ten when it ended. I almost forgot how much I love First Fridays and the silent hours spent praying with and communing with Our Lord seated in the Throne of the monstrance on the Altar surrounded by candles and bathed in sweet Frankincense. I always get in a few decades of the rosary, a chaplet of Divine Mercy and some silent personal prayer. What I love is to see so many people shuffle in and out and pay their respects and yet it is done in pure silence. The only thing palpable in the chapel is the presence of Christ and the silence.

How could I have ever have thought of leaving the Church? I’m thankful that the grace of Christ kept me here but humbled at the thought that it is only His grace that keeps me here, meaning it can always be taken away. In truth it wasn’t doctrines, dogmas or any other expression of Catholicism that at one time made me think of leaving but the utter scandal and lack of leadership in the Church. Nothing has changed in that department, only the grace of Christ had allowed me to try and take my own advice and stay simple. I have reverent Mass as much as I want a safe quiet place to live and all the time in the world to grow in grace. Christ promised that hell wouldn’t completely demolish His Holy Church and so the simple way to handle things is to just take Him at His word.

There is one thing present in the Catholic Church that makes me never want to leave and that is Christ. When you receive Holy Communion with the simple light of faith in your heart or you spend time in front the tabernacle or the monstrance on a first Friday it is easy to see that God is really there, really in the Catholic Church. Heresy and scandal have laid siege to the Church since the beginning and right now, like the time of the Arian crisis, the whole Church from the top down is riddled with the cancer of modernism but the Church is God’s and as such it will prevail; the heretics will be crushed and defeated eventually. How and when this ultimate triumph will come about is only speculation.

We as Catholics must think about and put ourselves in the place of St. Peter : And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. (John 6:69) There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church so we must make the words of the holy apostle our own and when you really stop to think about the splendor of the Faith, and when you immerse yourself in it, giving yourself to the devotions, the prayers and keeping it simple, what else can we do but echo his words?

hasten to the Confessional

2011-01-02T17:46:00.000-08:00

“And even today we rightly regard as happy all those whom we see leading a good and holy life in the hope of future immortality, untroubled in conscience and with easy access to God’s forgiveness for the sins which are due to the frailty of human nature.
These saints, however, although certain of their reward if they persevere, can never be sure of their perseverance. For, no man can be sure that he will continue to the end to act and advance in grace unless this fact is revealed to him by God. In His just and secret counsel, God, although He never deceives anyone, gives but few assurances in this matter.”- St. Augustine City of God book XI Chapter 12

I have had a copy of an abridged version of St. Augustine’s book City of God for a good year or so now but it is so full of information and very deep, sometimes difficult points and reflections that I have to take it out, read a few pages, think about it, and put it aside for awhile before picking it up again but every time I pick it up there is something that catches my eye which is a testimony to the greatness of St. Augustine and gives an idea as to just why he is a Doctor of the Church and such a giant in Catholic thought and tradition.

This passage is worthy of thinking about since it shows that although we have a hospital for the sickness in our souls in the sacraments of the Catholic Church—most especially in the indispensible Sacrament of Penance—the Confessional—where Christ comes to us and asks us nothing more than that we accuse ourselves before Him and make the solemn resolution to stay away from whatever caused us to hurt our souls in the first place, we can never presume to be saved. He is truly a kindly Doctor of souls but just like many real physicians He does not often seek the sick but waits patiently until they come knocking at the door to His clinic, the Confessional. And unlike human doctors and human hospitals that erect barriers to care in the form of high costs and insurance issues the Divine Physician asks for nothing except our own contrition.

In my own life I love Confession and feel that, aside from the Holy Eucharist, it is the most marvelous Sacrament of the Church for baptized Catholics since it is really the only sure way to be restored to the state of sanctifying grace so essential to live the supernatural life and get to heaven. In fact a tragedy in the Church today is that there is almost no mention of sin or the radical difference between a natural and a supernal life and the fact that one cannot get to heaven unless one is in the state of grace. Heaven is NOT a human right and man is naturally born without sanctifying grace and hence every human being prior to baptism is hardwired for hell and a “child of wrath.” We are all made in the image and likeness of God whether Catholic or not but thanks to Adam none of us are born with the supernatural life that, from the traditional Catholic perspective, is absolutely and utterly essential to live the life of heaven. Sanctifying grace is the wedding garment in the Gospel and the one that is not admitted into the banquet (The Beatific Vision) is not wearing one (meaning is without sanctifying grace). To see this necessity to live above the level of mere nature is to see just why Confession is a marvelous sacrament and just why it’s almost total disappearance is a tragedy of the highest order.

The second part of the passage of our great saint and doctor of the Church shows us that all of us are ultimately unsure of where we stand in the sight of God unless He lets us know explicitly which is something we can’t be sure of and is why we are asked to heed the words of the Apostle and “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” We also have to bear in mind that we are totally dependent on God in so many ways through His grace. If He didn’t give us the actual graces to prick our conscience to want to, say, go to Confession than we wouldn’t go. It is a mystery how grace works but as Catholics we have to take on faith that it does work and that we are more dependent on it than we realize.

To realize that we are dependent on it and that we can lose the Faith should make us not want to look down on others regardless of their situation or how far they have fallen. In my own near schism with Rome to Orthodoxy I can see just how much our Faith is a “small flame” that needs to be guarded and that cannot really be guarded unless we constantly petition Our Lord and His Blessed Mother to guide us. We can lose the Faith really easily and so when we see others that have, perhaps we should see ourselves in them and pray for their conversion or return to the Faith.

A most sober warning was given to the children at Fatima by Our Lady when she said “many souls go to hell because they do not have anyone to pray and do penance for them.” How much of our own conversions or our own faith is partly due to either God’s totally free gift of grace or because of the graces won for us by someone else’s prayers or penances? How much have we done to pray and sacrifice for others? There is a reason that there is a Communion of Saints which in some ways extends all the way from earth to heaven and down into the depths of the flames of Purgatory. All Catholics in a state of grace are in some ways part of that Communion and so we can through our prayers reach across time and space and even into eternity to help one another. I suppose even Catholics not in a state of grace are being reached each day by actual graces merited by the prayers of those within the Communion of Saints and so even than we are never totally an exile or alone. This is something majestic and mysterious and nothing in Buddhism ever came close to this sort of thing.

As the good saint says we can be assured that we will get to Heaven if we persevere we cannot know whether we will persevere and act upon those graces given to us. Hence we cannot presume anything special about ourselves or look down upon others. As Catholic's we should be thankful for what we have been given and never take them for granted, whether it is our membership in the only ark of salvation or our own Faith. Be thankful for what you have and use the sacraments that have been given. Pray, sacrifice not just for yourself but for others and do not neglect the Confessional, especially don’t neglect the Confessional, and don’t hold back due to embarrassment or fear. The priest is “in persona Christi” and when you close your eyes and kneel imagine that it is the Good Doctor Himself behind there who “knocks and waits for you to open the door” and let Him in. In a real sense when you open the door of your heart and confess your sins you are restored to grace and the Trinity once again enters into your soul, allowing you to live in a state above mere nature. Think about it and than hasten to the Confessional.

Confession woes

2011-01-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

The priest at the local Novus Ordo Church that I find myself at when I can’t get to the Latin Mass announced that there would be no Confessions on Christmas Day and it disturbed me a little but at the time I didn’t really need to go. Now today, another Saturday and a secular holiday, I needed to go and when I got to Church it was locked. Apparently at this Church there were no regular Confession times for the last two weeks! If I were the priest I would want to offer Confession before every Mass regardless of whether it was Christmas or a secular “New Years” day. Now I will have to call around and find a priest or wait till Saturday.

It’s as if sin has disappeared in the Church today, like no longer is it taken seriously that mortal sin leads to hell and that the Confessional is the only sure place to have your soul healed and your soul restored to Sanctifying grace. The beauty of the Confessional is that it teaches humility because you HAVE to own up to your sins since to omit anything willingly is to render it invalid and incur an extra mortal sin of sacrilege; it teaches vigilance because you know that you don’t want to have to keep coming back week after week confessing the same thing which is sort of embarrassing and finally, it is set up so that you do not have to have perfect contrition when you go since perfect contrition is something that is very difficult and probably rare.

My heart literally sunk when I saw the doors locked and realized that I would have to go probably a week without my soul being healed. I even had a piece of paper with all my sins written on it that I planned to use so as to not forget anything. I ended up dejectedly sulking over to the back of the Church to be close to the tabernacle with the Sacred Host in it in order to pray and try to make an act of contrition and beg for the grace to be really sorry for my sins, the grace to persevere in not committing them again, and most importantly, the grace to live long enough to make it to Confession by Saturday since hell is the result of un confessed mortal sins. I sat there and said 10 decades of the Rosary using some of them for those intentions. I than made a spiritual Communion and meditated on the Incarnation for a while before heading home.

I guess tomorrow I will have to make another Spiritual Communion at Holy Mass because I am not fit to receive Communion in a sacramental way until I am absolved unless I can catch Father tomorrow before Mass. If I could get to the Latin Mass tomorrow I would be fine because at the Latin Mass there are Confessions before it starts but I have to take a friend to work and cannot make it out there until next Sunday.

thoughts

2010-12-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

Ever since making my final decision to remain a Catholic I have been making peace with my status as a sort of exile within it. As a fellow blogger friend once put it (and I paraphrase off the top of my head) “maybe today we have to become like the Benedictine monks during the collapse of the Roman Empire and learn and preserve the faith in small enclaves.” He is right, that is exactly what some of us will have to do. When the faithful in the Church have pretty much been abandoned by many priests and even bishops it falls upon them to do what they can to keep the small flame alive within themselves and their families and friends who share the faith. This might mean learning Latin, learning to chant and poring over Papal Encyclicals, old catechism and theology texts alone or in small groups, but so be it. God has appointed that we were born and live as Catholics in this time, this place, with these tasks to do. We have to be strong in the faith not just for ourselves but for those around us.

Tradition is coming back into the Church and the New Order is on its way out but it will likely not happen in our lifetimes, probably not even in the lifetimes of our kids or grandkids and maybe longer if a vicious persecution follows in the wake of the West’s demise. Or maybe a vicious persecution is what we need to regain the Faith in its fullness. When a persecution hits and we are asked to become apostates or go to prison or die than the wheat will be separated from the chaff. Those that really have the faith—and in this I include priests, bishops and lay faithful—will be put to the test. Sell out to the zeitgeist and save your life while probably losing your soul or lose your life and save your soul. And by the way in saying this I make no claim to being immune from the temptation to become apostate in the face of suffering and death. All of us, my self included, need to pray that we be granted the grace to die rather than willfully renounce Jesus Christ.

The Faith will be strengthened when we have to literally risk our lives for it. I read a story once about some lay faithful in Siberian prison camps that would work 14 plus hours a day in the cold with no meal in order to meet in secret to attend a Holy mass and receive Holy Communion. In those days one had to fast for 12 hours or more to receive Holy Communion. What faith!

I am secure in my staying Catholic and very happy about it. As I had said on numerous occasions, it was never doctrinal or dogmatic issues that made me question the Church but a seeming impotence on the part of the Church in combating heresy, evangelizing and a general decay of devotional life and the liturgy. Even Purgatory is something I readily embrace which turns many people off. I can’t deny it even if I wanted too, as it not only makes perfect sense and is taught in some of the Fathers of the Church, it is also attested to in many approved private revelations and is a de Fide dogma of the Faith that cannot be cast aside to remain a Catholic in good standing. The book Fundamentals of catholic Dogma by Dr. Ludwig Ott has been a great source for some of this information. I can’t recommend it enough to the Catholic that wants a sort of handbook on all the dogmas of the faith along with scriptural citations, quotes from the Fathers and general information, including the status of something that is either a dogma or a theological opinion. In this era of ambiguity it is a clear and sure guide.

Puer Natus In Bethleem

2010-12-23T19:28:00.000-08:00

Puer natus in Bethleem, Alleluia: unde gaudet Jerusalem, Alleluia.

R./ In cordis jubilo Christum natum adoremus, cum novo cantico.

Assumpsit carnem filius, Alleluia, Dei Patris altissimus, Alleluia, Alleluia.

R./ In cordis jubilo Christum natum adoremus, cum novo cantico.

In hoc natali gaudio, Alleluia. Benedicamus Domino, Alleluia, Alleluia.

R./ In cordis jubilo Christum natum adoremus, cum novo cantico.

Laudetur sancta Trinitas, Alleluia. Deo dicamus gratias, Alleluia, Alleluia.

R./ In cordis jubilo Christum natum adoremus, cum novo cantico.

In English it is:

A child has been born in Bethehem, Alleluia. For that reason it is full of joy Jerusalem.Alleluia .

R./Let we adore with an exultant heart, with a new song, to Christ that has been born.

The Son of God Father has taken the flesh. Alleluia.

R./Let we adore with an exultant heart, with a new song, to Christ that has been born.

In this joy of Christmas, let us bless to the Lord, Alleluia.

R./Let we adore with an exultant heart, with a new song, to Christ that has been born.

Praised be the Holy Trinity, Alleluia. Let us Give thanks to God, Alleluia .

R./Let we adore with an exultant heart, with a new song, to Christ that has been born.

Last year I did Veni Redemptor Gentium so this year it is Puer Natus in Bethleem. I love Gregorian Chant so what better thing to do than to post up a chant with it's words in both Latin and English for my readers, to showcase what Christmas music in the Catholic Church is like in Latin Mass circles. I have listened to this since I first heard it on that CD Chant that came out in the early 90's. This music probably helped me eventually become Catholic not only do I still have the original CD ( with many scratches and no case) I still have yet to find any music that moves me in the way that Gregorian Chant does. I have gone through many music phases so to speak but I have never left Gregorian Chant. Imagine how I must have felt the first time I attended a High Mass where Gregorian Chant and Polyphony is the norm! Truly there is no music more beautiful on earth and as far as I am concerned Gregorian Chant itself is evidence enough that Christ is with the Catholic Church. I'm off to Miami tomorrow to spend Christmas with my friend and her family and I will not return to North Florida and my Internet till Monday so I wish my readers a Merry Christmas in the meantime.