St. Augustine, insisting upon the message whether it be welcome or not, wrote:
“If I am straying,” he says, “if I am lost, why do you want me?” You are straying, that is why I wish to recall you. You have been lost, I wish to find you. “But I wish to stray,” he says: “I wish to be lost.”
So you wish to stray and be lost? How much better that I do not also wish this.
Image via Wikipedia
I offer You the straw of my life, O Lord of my redemption. Send Your angels,day by day, to glean my field, to fuel the fire of Your Love. Did You not say “Learn from Me, for I meek and humble of heart.” You do not need my riches. You seek my poverty, my emptiness. Your Fire penetrates my stubble. I become like You, all aglow as light and heat testify to Your Presence in the flame that shoots to the heavens. I am surrender and trust in welcome transformation. I am lost and yet eternal. In You, straw by straw, as kindling, I am become the Flame.
By Joann Nelander
From a sermon by Blessed Isaac of Stella, abbot
Christ will forgive no sin without the Church
The prerogative of receiving the confession of sin and the power to forgive sin are two things that belong properly to God alone. We must confess our sins to him and look to him for forgiveness. Since only he has the power to forgive sins, it is to him that we must make our confession. But when the Almighty, the Most High, wedded a bride who was weak and of low estate, he made that maid-servant a queen. He took her from her place behind him, at his feet, and enthroned her at his side. She had been born from his side, and therefore he betrothed her to himself. And as all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son because by nature they are one, so also the bridegroom gave all he had to the bride and he shared in all that was hers. He made her one both with himself and with the Father. Praying for his bride, the Son said to the Father: I want them to be one with us, even as you and I are one.
And so the bridegroom is one with the Father and one with the bride. Whatever he found in his bride alien to her own nature he took from her and nailed to his cross when he bore her sins and destroyed them on the tree. He received from her and clothed himself in what was hers by nature and gave her what belonged to him as God. He destroyed what was diabolical, took to himself what was human, and conferred on her what was divine. So all that belonged to the bride was shared in by the bridegroom, and he who had done no wrong and on whose lips was found no deceit could say: Have pity on me, Lord, for I am weak. Thus, sharing as he did in the bride’s weakness, the bridegroom made his own her cries of distress, and gave his bride all that was his. Therefore, she too has the prerogative of receiving the confession of sin and the power to forgive sin, which is the reason for the command: Go, show yourself to the priest.
The Church is incapable of forgiving any sin without Christ, and Christ is unwilling to forgive any sin without the Church. The Church cannot forgive the sin of one who has not repented, who has not been touched by Christ; Christ will not forgive the sin of one who despises the Church. What God has joined together, man must not separate. This is a great mystery, but I understand it as referring to Christ and the Church.
Do not destroy the whole Christ by separating head from body, for Christ is not complete without the Church, nor is the Church complete without Christ. The whole and complete Christ is head and body. This is why he said: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the Son of Man whose home is in heaven. He is the only man who can forgive sin.
Sometimes the blindness of those who forgo God leaves me speechless. There is simply too much to say about God, Life and Eternity that silence and prayer must suffice, especially when you know that no one is actually asking the questions that might turn on the lights and light up their life.
Here is an email I received that begs God’s grace and an answer:
“By the way, besides my atheist status I am a full out Liberal ready to take everyone’s extra money to feed hungry children so watch out! 😉 I get in as much trouble for my Liberal Democrat status as my non faith in mainstream religion. I am spiritual and giving but don’t recognize religion as something that works for me. That’s the difference. So many people proclaim their loyalty and belief in a god but are not good people, I try to be good without the need of a god’s blessing or promise of eternal life. In other words, I try to be good for nothing…… joke here.”
I thought I would answer by bringing in the Big Guns for the really Big Picture:
From Jesus of Nazareth by ‘Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI:
“At the heart of all temptations… is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive Him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives, constructing a world by our own lights without reference to God, building on our own foundation, refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion that is the temptation the threatens us in many varied forms. Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation. It does not invite us directly to do evil; no, that would be far to blatant. It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and threw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims moreover to speak for true realism; what’s real is what’s right there in front of us, power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs.
God is the issue. Is He real, reality Itself or isn’t He? Is He good or do we have to invent the good ourselves? The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence. What must the Savior of the world do, or not do that is the question the temptations of Jesus are about.”
Alfred Delp, a German theologian, executed by the Nazi’s said:
“Bread is important. Freedom is more important, but what is most important of all is unbroken fidelity and faithful adoration.”
Benedict XVI continues:
“When this ordering of goods is no longer respected, but turned on its head, the result is not justice or concern for human suffering the result is rather ruin and destruction even of material good themselves. When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily, or permanently, on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things, that come to nothing. It is not just the negative outcome of a Marxist experiment that proves this, the aid given by the West to developing countries has been purely technically and materially based. It has not only left God out of the picture but has driven men away from God. and this aid proudly claiming to know better is itself what first turned the Third World into what we now mean today by that term.It has thrust aside indigenous religious , ethical and social structures and filled the resulting vacuum with its technocratic mindset. The idea was that we can turn stones into bread; instead our aide has only given stones in place of bread. The issue is the primacy of God.”
I read these lines from the 33 Day of Total Consecration to Jesus by St. Louis Marie de Montfort:
Our Blessed Lady is the true terrestrial paradise of the New Adam, and the ancient paradise was but a figure of her. In this earthly paradise we have riches, beauties, rarities and inexplicable sweetness, which Jesus Christ, the New Adam has left here; it was in this paradise that He took His complacence for nine months, worked His wonders and displayed His riches with the magnificence of a God. It is in this earthly paradise that there is the true tree of life, which has borne Jesus Christ, the Fruit of Life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which has given light unto the world. There are, in this divine place, trees planted by the hand of God, and watered by His Divine Unction, which have borne and daily bear fruit of divine taste. It is only the Holy Ghost, Who can make us know the hidden truth of these figures of material things. The Holy Ghost, by the mouth of the Fathers, also styles the Blessed Virgin the Eastern Gate, by which the High-Priest, Jesus Christ, enters the world, and leaves it. By it, He came the first time, He will come the second, by it.
They inspired these thoughts, though I haven’t touched on Mary yet:
Where on this Earth has Jesus passed that flowers failed to bloom?
What on Earth has Jesus passed that succumbed to Adam’s doom.
When on this sad Earth did Jesus pass and desert’s dust remain.
Only if our fallen wills prevail, can Jesus come in vain.When Jesus passed did flowers bloom and birds begin to sing?
When Jesus passed did children run to jump into his arms?
When Jesus passed did fallen men find strength to rise again?
When Jesus passed and left this world, once worst for Adam’s Sin,
Did Gates fling wide at Sin’s stemmed tide and Paradise begin again?Joann Nelander
Mary, the Mother of God, revealed herself as the Lady of the Rosary. This is akin to saying “I Am the Woman of the Book.” The Rosary is prayer alive on the lips and in the heart of Mary’s children. In the Rosary, we pray the Scriptures which speak of Jesus. They foretell and tell forth the story of Salvation. Mary in effect says pray the story of your salvation. Tuck it in your heart and you will become the womb of Jesus who in gladsome labor births My Son, the Son of God, into the world.
Fr. Groeschel speaks of the Rosary as a place. He calls it a”chapel.” For me, it is that and more. It is my cocoon in the Womb of Mary, centered in the Heart of the Lamb of God. I am formed as I live and as I pray.
The promise of the Rosary lives on the lips of Jesus. As I pray I can hear His Spirit whispering, consoling, proclaiming to me personally, “I am in the Father and the Father is in Me.” “I will come in and eat with you, and you with me. “
Be Holy! 