On Not Judging the Man-Just the Record

August 31, 2009 by Be Holy

For the record: judging, discerning, and choosing are part and parcel of life. From day one, our senses present the world to us and we’re off on the grand adventure. All is recorded in the Book of Life from cradle to grave. “Known but to God” can be recorded on every tombstone. And so, now we come to the death of the “great man”, Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy. What constitutes this greatness matters. Of late, we have seen idols and iconic figures come to their respective ends. To judge, to discern, to choose is human, wisdom depends on it. Society learns and survives by it.

Let a merciful and just God judge the disposition of a soul. I’m okay with that for myself and others. What to make though, of hours and days and in some cases eons of public pronouncements and near cult worship. Senator Ted Kennedy died and now the myth begins, or has it been spun like a cocoon about him throughout life? For the butterfly to emerge, the cocoon must be broken.

I’m of the opinion that God isn’t wowed by the Kennedy legacy and I’m certain all spin stops before His throne. A face to face with God isn’t like Facebook, Twitter or even “Meet the Press”. Men may flatter us, but the truth is that pride goes before a fall. Before the Almighty, humility is the better garb.

For my part, I see that Edward Moore “Ted” Kenned, had it all; life lived to the full. He got the chance as the youngest of nine children born to a Catholic mother who practiced her faith, not birth control, to experience family, faith, power, love, fun, sin and foolishness. He got to make mistakes, ask forgiveness, build bonds of kinship and friendship. He got to roar like a lion and cry like a baby. I see, too, that this gifted and blessed man, failed to find it in his heart or philosophy to support the unborn, the un-named also conceived by the will of God, failed to grant them protection or welcome into the same life he so abundantly lived. May these, the Holy Innocents, now pray for him, their brother, offering the purest Innocent, the Lamb of God, to a loving Father who even Now, stoops to the lowly when they cry out for mercy. Lord have mercy!

Ignatius Press sticks to the facts and leaves the funeral fuss, fantasy, and lionization to press, popular myth romantics, and political agendas.

Into the Hands of Foreigners

May 23, 2009 by Be Holy

Save us, Lord, collect us together from among the nations. Alleluia.

Psalm 105 (106)

They mingled themselves with the peoples,

and learned to do as they did.

They served the same idols

until it became their undoing.

They sacrificed their own sons

and their daughters to demons.

They poured out innocent blood.

The blood of their own sons and daughters

was sacrificed to the idols of Canaan.

Their blood polluted the land,

and their actions defiled them.

They devoted themselves to whoring.

The Lord blazed out in anger against his own people,

He detested his own chosen race.

He gave them into the hands of foreigners.

They were conquered by those who hated them.

These words from today’s Office of Readings, I find frightening in light of our society. We are blessed by the knowledge that God, who is near to us, has blessed us, giving us His Son and sending us His Holy Spirit. Sinners get to live as saints should they so desire. What does our society reveal about our desires.

What does our society testify about us as a people? Gifts, even gifts of God, can be squandered by prodigal sons and daughters. His greatest gift, life, we subject to pluralistic debate and countermand by man-made law. ‘Choice’ is elevated above conscience and morality and enshrined as a god to be fed by money-making mills. Is this license the best we can do with the gift of life in a land of freedom and liberty?

Facts about fetal pain.

More facts about fetal pain.

Facts about maternal pain.

Just the facts

Musing on Spengler Unmasked and Interesting

May 6, 2009 by Be Holy

Spengler unmasks and allows a peek at the inner workings that he wrapped in the pseudonym. It’s all very interesting and I’m just beginning to digest it. At first read, I respond to the klunk on my musing surface to a piece of Spengler’s journey to open identity.

Spengler writes of his time in a cult, “The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.” In part, he answers, “There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.” and more, Larouche claimed to trace a tradition of secret knowledge across the ages, from Plato and Plotinus, through the Renaissance, and down to the German scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Of course, that raises a question: If there exists this kind of knowledge, then why isn’t it universally shared? The reverse side of the gnostic page is paranoia: There must be a cabal of evil people who prevent the dissemination of the truth.”

It reads like gripping fiction, reminding me, with my fully accepted Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Gen 3: 4-5, “You certainly will not die! No God knows well that the moment you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad.”

I would tend to run afraid for my soul. The scenario would rouse a voice that speaks to me, that I know would say, “At first blush, you will blush and then you will no longer blush, as headlong you pursue a dream or call it temptation. With heady glee, forbidden pleasure will be recast for the ‘good’ it promises. Soon you will become like gods in your private reveries or privy little worlds; not only knowing what is good and what is bad, but you will have known good and bad in that intimate way of knowing that spoils the good like food gone bad. Throwing your whole self into pursuit of what might be tasty and alluring, knowledge itself will be your cavorting and you ravenous. You will run after experience so as to judge by your own proclivities what delights, what titillates and what requires more of your self than you can give or share. What a god, indeed!

Have I gone too far? I tend to jump to conclusions and without input, I get stuck there. I’m still listening and will dive in again. “Confessions of a Coward” by Davis P. Goldman is a must read.

It touches me because for three years I trained at Mt. Sinai Hospital School of Nursing and it was formation ground for me. My friends during those years were all Jewish. Their Jewishness was different from my Catholicism. An encounter with Thomas Merton’s “the Seven Storey Mountain,” began me on the life long practice of daily Mass and prayer. That set me in a direction in which I continue still today.

The Jewishness of my friends was expressed with more subtlety. There identity as Jews was perceptible, solid and unwavering. It raised a sense of admiration in me. I, however, can’t recall a single religious conversation.

Even today, in my prayers for them, I don’t know how to pray. Their faith is precious to me. I want to see it lived to the full. I guess I know they are a peculiar people whom God, not only cherishes, but for whom He plans providentially a future full of hope and abundant blessing. There seems to be in me a sense that God planted this seed, continues to water it and will bring it to marvelous fruition in His time. I pray for them wordlessly.

As for Spengler, my favorite part is:

Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: “Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread.” For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva—of return.

The truth is that I did not think my way into praying. I prayed my way into thinking.

Inner Life vs Distraction

May 4, 2009 by Be Holy

“Cell phones, Blackberries, e-mail, laptops allowing people to bring their work anywhere, news arriving in perfectly condensed and filtered snippets via the Internet and TV, never before has communication been so instantaneous and information distributed so quickly. Never before have people been so connected.”

“One would assume that this preponderance of advanced communication technology would promote a well-informed and close-knit society. While this is true to some extent and there are many benefits to be gained from these technologies, award-winning author and journalist Maggie Jackson surprisingly has found that compared to past generations, we are in fact less capable of quality analytical thinking, more ignorant about many issues, and more fragmented as a community. Never before have we been so disconnected.” Source:Medical News Today

The subject caught my attention, so I guess I still am capable of attention. However, it caught my attention simply because it seems something is always vying for my attention. There’s that nagging feeling, I’m forgetting something; worse still, that I’m forgetting Someone.

I can’t complain because things are rather simple around here. Kids are off being mature adults. Only a husband and dog – neither demanding – have a real claim on my time. I’m not even as plugged in as the rest of society seems to be. I don’t walk around talking into space with a thing in my ear. Why, I’ve even got the computer under control. (Husband might seriously ???) So, I ask myself, “Why self? What’s our problem?”

Enter Maggie Jackson, who wrote, DISTRACTED: THE EROSION OF ATTENTION AND THE COMING DARK AGE (Prometheus Books). Medical News today writes:

Jackson’s definition of “attention” stems from studies in neuroscience that have identified a cognitive system comprised of three networks – awareness, focus, and executive attention (planning and decision making) – that work together to act as the “brain’s conductor, leading the orchestration of our minds.” The awareness and focus networks are systems responsible for gathering information about the environment, and the executive attention network is responsible for making decisions based on that information. Sustained attention is necessary for learning, deep thinking, emotional development, building relationships, and many other essential tasks. Attention is the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Without it, it would be impossible to function in any meaningful way. In today’s world, this altered perspective has been greatly accelerated. Cell phones, e-mails, and numerous other devices compete for our attention. Because of this constant nagging, it becomes nearly impossible to utilize our capacity for sustained attention, and the implications are felt in business, the home, and society at large.

Jackson notes that the average worker switches tasks every three minutes and once interrupted takes nearly half an hour to go back to the original task. Families and friends find it increasingly difficult to meet face-to-face and even more difficult to do so without interruption or willful multitasking. News segments bombard us with superficially simple pieces of information. We have essentially been ushered into a world of constant distraction in which reflective thinking and undivided attention (single-tasking) has become exceedingly rare.

Jackson further laments: “The erosion of attention is largely equivalent to the erosion of our society.”

Not to worry, forewarned is forearmed. Awareness is half the battle. Bewareness is the other half. The world is a little ditsy in its quest for self-awareness and I think, goes off the deep end into navel-gazing and self-absorption. Inner strength, on the other hand, stems from an inner joy. That’s what I don’t want to lose. The acronym JOY still works for me. When you’re frazzled, check your priorities: Jesus, Others, Yourself.

Unarguably Founded On Christian Principles

April 27, 2009 by Be Holy

I needed solid footing and balance after the bombardment of an aberrant President and press. Stephen Prothero writing for USA Today says:

Now comes President Obama, who in January in his inaugural address spoke of this country as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.” On April 6 in Turkey, Obama added that the United States “does not consider itself a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation” but “a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

It was just such that drove me in search of visual confirmation in Washington D.C. Now home from our Nation’s capital, I feel again on the cutting edge of a clandestine warfare coming of age and to light. Washington D.C. did indeed confirm that the United States of America was unarguably founded as a Nation established on Christian principals as document after document, monument of monument, Statesmen and heroes alike, testify to, in stone, and marble,valor and blood, recorded there for posterity, dramatically and historically. Homecoming, however, is returning to the fray. It is waking up each day to being unceremoniously attacked by the daily news of the madness that is Obama.

However, it not just Obama, that drives me to distraction, it’s the incessant kowtowing menagerie of his Orwellian Animal Farm. George Orwell, to his chagrin, aside from being proved right, can now see his book lived out in the American experiment. Eric Blair’s (George Orwell’s) satire is on parade for all to see and most of the animals are oblivious to the part they are playing in the threatening demise of our Nation as a Republic” of the People, by the People and for the People.

Americans are not perfect people. We are like all people, flawed; and, as foreseen by the Founding Fathers, we need our checks and balances to curtail our greed and self- centeredness, to keep an eye open and watch our backs as a People. Our checks and balances are gone. Our press is the servant of the President, our Congress is the servant of our President and our people seem content to worship at his feet. So much for balance.

Our weaknesses as individual’s who are capable of resenting one group or another within the American system are being used against us. We are being set against imagined “masters” despite the fact that our nation is the free-est on earth. All the “animals” set free by Obama’s Hope Machine, with childish idealistic and idyllic dreams can now High Five one another in the name of justice and progress, oblivious to the new chains being forged for their piggy hands and feet. Yes, power-hungry pigs, like Orwell’s, Napoleon, are on the prowl ready to become their new totalitarian dictators. The little happy piggies will some learn on their Animal Farm that “All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Oppression, call it what you will, even “the Audacity of Hope” is no less oppression. Martin Luther Jr.’s “I have a dream.” is being replaced by Obama’s dream which it best described as, “I have a nightmare.”

Pro-Choice Isn’t Pretty

April 21, 2009 by Be Holy

It was a good day for Life at the Capitol today. It wasn’t that Congress did anything to protect the human life growing in a mother’s womb. Congress it seems is insensitive to Truth these days. However, ordinary Americans continue to demonstrate for Life. Young and old found their voice and pleaded with those who listened to hear the cries of the unborn. Children distributed life calling-cards proclaiming the truth of abortion and pro-choice. Someone dies and it isn’t pretty. The consequence of pro-choice is blood and tears. A banner photograph of the aborted infant offended some who is seems aren’t offended by the act of abortion. Strange sensitivities that allow the actual infant to die but want to spare their consciences, I must think.