Tag Archives: Culture

Love’s Little Way

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For those of us who are small at heart, ill equipped for great undertakings, yet desiring to fulfill in perfection the Will of God in our little lives simply to please Him, take heart.  There is a Little Way.

From Story of a Soul by St. Theresa of Lisieux – Manuscript B, Chapter IX – MY VOCATION IS LOVE:

St. Theresa of Lisieux, “I feel the vocation of the WARRIOR, THE PRIEST, THE APOSTLE, THE DOCTOR, THE MARTYR.  finally I feel the need and the desire of carrying out the most heroic deeds for You, O Jesus. I feel within my  the courage of the crusader, the Papal Guard, and I would want to die on the field of battle in defense of the Church………….

At prayer these desires made me suffer a true martydom. I opened the Epistles of St. Paul to seek some relief. The 12th and 13th chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians fell before my eyes. I read, in the first, that not all can be apostles, prophets, and doctors, etc., that the Church is composed of different members, and that the eye cannot also be at the same time the hand.

The answer was clear, but it did not satisfy my desires, it did not give me peace…. Without being discouraged I continued my reading, and this phrase comforted me: “Earnestly desire the more perfect gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31). And the Apostle explains how all gifts, even the most perfect, are nothing without Love… that charity is the excellent way that leads surely to God. At last I had found rest…. Considering the mystical Body of the Church, I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by St. Paul, or rather, I wanted to recognize myself in all… Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church has a body composed of different members, the noblest and most necessary of all the members would not be lacking to her. I understood that the Church has a heart, and that this heart burns with Love. I understood that Love alone makes its members act, that if this Love were to be extinguished, the Apostles would no longer preach the Gospel, the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood… I understood that Love embraces all vocations, that Love is all things, that it embraces all times and all places… in a word, that it is eternal!

Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: “O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation, my vocation is Love!… Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place… in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love!…. Thus I shall be all things: thus my dream shall be realized!!!”

I am a child… It is not riches or glory (not even the glory of Heaven) that this child asks for… No, she asks for Love. She knows but one desire: to love you, Jesus. Glorious deeds are forbidden her; she cannot preach the Gospel or shed her blood… But what does that matter, her brothers work in her place, and she, a little child, stays close to the throne of the King and Queen, and loves for her brothers who are in the combat… But how shall she show her love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! the little child will strew flowers, she will embalm the royal throne with their fragrance, she will sing with a silver voice the canticle of Love.

Yes, my Beloved, I wish to spend my life thus… I have no other means of proving my love except by strewing flowers, that is to say, letting no little sacrifice pass, no look, no word–profiting by the littlest actions, and doing them out of love. I wish to suffer out of love and to rejoice out of love; thus I shall strew flowers before your throne. I shall not find one without scattering its petals before you… and in strewing my flowers I will sing (can one weep in doing so joyous an action?) I will sing, even if my roses must be gathered from among thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song.

Begin today with a desire and a prayer, looking not at yourself  but at the generous Heart of Jesus.

Do I hear an, “Amen” ?

Work of God and Prayer

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The Anchoress writes in Not believing is even worse of her conversation with a Muslim cab driver in Brooklyn:

“God is merciful,” he said. “Many people, all kinds of people, try to live in this way. My people, some Christian people, some Jewish people, they all try, but it is not always easy, as some think it is.”

“No, but we try.” I mused. “We people of faith all try to live it, and we all believe, and yet we have no peace between us.”

He shrugged. I got the impression that this was a conversation neither of us would be having, if one of us did not have our back to the other. “Faith is good,” he mused. “But peace…is difficult. We all believe different things.”

Ah, the eternal struggle – the mobius upon which we all ride and cannot escape. Why can’t believers simply allow other believers their beliefs? Because they believe.

I teased the driver, “maybe, then, we believers should just stop believing, and that would solve everything.”

“No, no,” he answered very seriously. “Not believing is even worse.”

Alisyn Camerota  wrote of a conversation with an Iraqi Colonel over dinner at his home in Baghdad:

“One day, while he and his oldest son (His four sons were named after the followers of the Prophet Mohammed.) worked his shop, three armed men came in and kidnapped them.  For three days COL M. was beaten and tortured and when he wasn’t being tortured, he listened to the screams of his teenage son in the next room receiving the same treatment.
I told him I was sorry for the loss of his family members and hoped that this was not the future of Iraq.  I said good night and left.  As we walked to the Humvee, I felt a little uneasy about showing him my family pictures.  Had I made that cultural flaw that would ruin our relationship? In the back ground, an Iraqi Jundi called to us.  My interpreter ran back inside the building.  When he returned, he handed me a plastic bag with some photographs, “the Colonel wants you to see these and bring them back tomorrow.”
We drove the bumpy ride home and by midnight I was looking at my secret plastic bag with the white label in English on the outside.  It was about a dozen photographs of him and his son whipped across their backs, arms, legs and heads;  facial expressions of broken men.  His wounds had the consistency of being whipped by a piece of cane, the skin exploding with each strike swelling from the inside as the blood rushed to the surface.  COL Ms upper left arm severely bruised and bloodied from different techniques of punching, pulling, twisting and whipping.  The left side of his back split open and bruised as well from three days worth of continued beatings.  He and his son tortured over a name and religion, beaten because his son was named after the follower of a Prophet.”

We all suffer for believing;  not believing is even worse.  Our coming together will be a work of God, Who hears the prayers of all who believe.  Those who don’t believe do not escape suffering, but here there is no prayer.

Power Hungry and Out of Balance

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Ace of Spades calls it a good piece:

Charles Krauthammer can’t write fast enough to keep up with all the crap he can’t believe is happening. “We are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside.” Seizing every opportunity to seize, seize, seize power for the government from the people, Geithner “seeks yet broader powers.”

Obama’s goal, writes Krauthammer,

“is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Our President seems naive about the goodness and fairness of Big Government.  Our founders  were not so naive about the weakness of men and statesmen, hence checks and balances.  The present disproportionate numbers in the Congress of Republicans to Democrats cripples that system.  We are off kilter and in trouble.

While Capitalism needs corrective checks and balances, with a heavy dose of scrutiny, to cure it’s ills, Big Government isn’t the one to take over for the patient. Share holders are more invested and intuitive than this generation of gobbling government bureaucrats.  We can’t trust our lawmakers to steer clear of side line profit-making or taking as the scandalous last years have shown. (You know the names.)

President Obama’s medicine is to level field by cutting the growth producers in this nation off at the knees.  Good luck Mr. President a crippled America will not fill your coffers for the Big Dole.

Tax Day Tea Party Doings

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InstaPundit directs tax day party-goers to google maps via FreedomWorks and more

Tea Party Protests gives you the video low down on the doings.

Anti-Abortion Online Success

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As the liberal media and liberal government close ranks, and embed abortion and anti-life laws and philosophies into American Culture, hope springs eternal. On-line you can find the alternative to the Culture of Death, as Pope John Paul II dubbed it.

For pro-life bloggers, and the likes of Priests for Life, Catholic Vote.org, Jill Stanek, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter.  The demons press on, indoctrinating our children in the classroom, and all strata of our citizenry in higher education, from Hollywood to the doctors office and health department, through glossy magazines, pop-culture etc. Light, however, finds a way! It’s the candle in the darkness thing at work. I’m new to blogging but those who’ve been doing this for a while like the Anchoress writing about miracles and little Faith and Brutally Honest declaring God alive, delight me with the persistent signs of hope I need to see.

Today is a good day for that kind of hope.  The Wall Street Journal had good news for pro-life advocates and all those asking questions about life and wanting the truth.

Stephanie Simon reports:

“Mr. Obama supports legal abortion. Yet this video by CatholicVote.org — viewed nearly 1.8 million times on YouTube since it was posted in January — has turned his life story into an advertisement for the antiabortion movement.”

“The White House declined to comment. The producers describe their 40-second video as a strategic triumph that can help chart a new course for their movement as abortion opponents face a hostile climate in Washington, with Democrats controlling Congress and the White House.”

“So CatholicVote.org plans a series of biographical videos along the lines of the Obama video. The goal is to get people thinking about what the world would be missing if musicians, athletes and other luminaries with hard-luck life stories had been aborted.”

“Ms. Doan said ultrasound images circulating online have been especially helpful to abortion opponents, because they humanize the fetus. “I’ve seen a marked change in how people talk about abortion,” especially young adults, Ms. Doan said. “It’s much more favorable to the pro-life movement.”

“We’re able to reach people directly,” said Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life. He stars in a series of matter-of-fact videos that explain how abortions are performed, with a plastic model of a fetus as a prop. The clip describing a first-trimester abortion has been viewed more than 680,000 times on YouTube. “TV networks would never show this type of video,” Father Pavone said, “but now that doesn’t matter.”

Magical Aura? – G 20 Dream

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The G 20 Summit gathers the nations (a group of 20: Argentina, Australia,Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia,Saudi Arabia,South Africa, Korea, Turkey,the United States, and European Union. The world will make a fuss and then the world will little note, nor long remember what they do there.  Or, is that just wishful thinking?

Our President will grace them with his presence, but will they recognize the Messiah?  The magical aura of campaign America is gone.  Billions of dollars are gone! The post of ”whipping boy” is still open.” That may be all Obama needs to get his foot in the door.  Obama can cry: “Mea culpa! Mea culpa! I will take the blame—My Country did it! But that was then, and this is now— I have a vision!”

Back in America, we are getting the picture.  We grasp the dream, the vision, the mania. My guess is more than half the country rejects it.  Some are too proud to admit their mistake, especially those of the mainstream media who paved his way. This is not a man who represents the people, all the people.  He represent himself and an agenda.  He is selling his vague vision wrapped in high sounding words, and smiles, and flash.

Poor America! Without a free, inquisitive, thinking press, the vision grows, under-investigated, and unchecked, and America’s dream will be signed away on foreign shores.