Tag Archives: Thoughts from the Quiet

Dark Days Ahead

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The Lenten readings are growing darker as Jesus approaches His hour

In Wisdom 2, we read:

The wicked said among themselves,
thinking not aright…
“Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us;
he sets himself against our doings,
Reproaches us for transgressions of the law
and charges us with violations of our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God
and styles himself a child of the LORD.

The Gospel of John, too, sounds an ominous note:

“Jesus moved about within Galilee; he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him. But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near…But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.” John 7:1,10

Why did things have to go this way.  Why the rejection?  Why the Cross?  And while we’re questioning; why do they sour for us?

Today, Fr. Michael, faced with these questions, asked one of his own (I’m paraphrasing.) Who made us judge and jury?  Who confirmed us in our righteousness; which is, if honest, our self-righteousness?”

The Gospel of Light treads a path through every darkness and Darkness, itself.  Without the stuff of darkness, weakness, war, tragedy and desperate dilemma, we  go unchallenged, self-satisfied.  We pursue our dreams and go willy-nilly, perhaps, even, to our own dissolution, seeing only the darkness around us, and none within.  What we don’t like of Gospel or Church, we ignore or eliminate from our daily lives. “Let us condemn him to a shameful death.”

Until the unthinkable forces itself upon us and our decisions, we are content not to think but to ride the fence. The problems remain out there with “them.”  If we do take a stand and speak the Gospel truth, we find what Jesus found: rejection and betrayal, even from within our families, the cruelest blow.  It might not be explicit.  It may be that no one has time to visit.  Perhaps, the grand-kids are withheld and holidays less joyful.  How doesn’t matter so much as that it happens. We are left on our Cross.

What to do?  Look first to yourself.  Question your ways and your motives.  Repent, is the Gospel word for it.  Then pray and wait.  Wait upon God; first of all with praise and adoration, thanksgiving, and finally with petition.  Place all the rest, loves ones and world, in the Tabernacle with the Lamb who was Slain and still lives.  Then go on; “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” This is the Way until the end of the world and the coming of the Day.

From the Office of Readings – for Friday of fourth week of Lent from Easter Letter of Athanasias:

How fine a thing it is to move from festival to festival, from prayer to prayer, from holy day to holy day. The time is now at hand when we enter on a new beginning: the proclamation of the blessed Passover, in which the Lord was sacrificed.

Glance of Heaven

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vladimir1

Virgin of Vladimir copyright J.Nelander

We are flesh and blood not angels.  We need to see, and touch and feel in-order to experience and learn.  The writers of Icons recognize that we need a bit of Heaven in the  here and now.

St. James Pray For Me gives some insight and a bit of history and tradition.

Morning – A Time for Prayer

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Psalm 143: 8-11

In the morning let me know your love
For I put my trust in you.
Make me know the way I should walk;
To you I lift up my soul.

Rescue me, Lord, from my enemies;
I have fled to you for refuge.
Teach me to do your will
For you, O Lord, are my God.
Let your good spirit guide me
In ways that are level and smooth.

For you name’s sake, Lord, save my like;
In your justice save my soul from distress.

The Borg: Master, Meister, Mind

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Is he Borg? He is the Borg Master, and the Borg is on the move. It is hungry and ambitious, and knows no benevolent God of love and limits. By edict, it steals the inclination to Virtue, usurping the role of conscience. Borg Master, and no other, proclaims right limits and no limits. He declares who has a right to being and how to be. He looses the license of pride and greed into his pot of promises. He stirs his brew with class hatred and malcontention. Where there was the reign of virtue, decency, morality, there is enthroned a sceptered Specter; the One, the Borg Mind ruling a “no people – no voice.”  The Borg Meister feeding on our fears, our frenzy and our fetuses.

The Borg Master contemplating and worshiping himself along with the adoring, mindless, masses. Everything becomes his; his hope, his audaciousness, his government, his plan! Your life is his to manipulate, as are your morals and your dreams. What you have will be his in the end. He covets your freedom and your laughter. He is building a State of being and a state of living in which you are a nobody, a number. Have no doubt; you, my dear cog, will be assimilated into the Borg.

Borg Mind Master wants your soul. He can taste it. He nibbles at your conscience. Resistance stirs his rhetoric, as word upon word, worms beneath your reason, reconstructing the underpinning of your logic, and your creed. Winning your vote, he has procured your serfdom. Licking his fingers, how delicious your servitude!

Meditation from Carmel

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God does not ask a great deal from us.  A brief remembrance from time to time. A brief act of adoration occasionally to ask Him for his grace,or offer Him your sufferings.  At other times to thank him for the graces He has given you and is giving you. In the midst of your work find consolation in Him as often as possible. During your meals and conversations occasionally lift up your heart to Him The least little remembrance of Him will always be most agreeable.  You need not shout out.  He is closer to us than we may think.

A meditation by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (Letter 9 –  page 69)

The Whole Truth – Make it Plain, Brother!

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You don’t usually get to hear a Lutheran congregation holler an, “Amen” or “Preach it, Brother. ” Today was no  different, but the minister seemed to want one.  I was visiting with the Lutherans and the minister confessed that the one time he could remember that someone called out, “Amen, Brother”, it caught him so by surprise that it totally threw him into confusion.  Now, however, Jesus was talking plain in the Gospel and the minister felt he could use a reminder from the pews to, “Make it plain; make it plain!” He was preaching John 3:16, “the Bible in a nutshell.”

The evening before, I heard a priest of the Roman Catholic Church preach it.  He truly kept it simple.  He said,
“Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!”  He sat down.  That was it! Talk about nutshells.

My Lutheran friend said a bit more, before remembering his injunction to himself, “Make it plain!”  The plain fact was that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” The minister said that the love He bore us was not the stuff of  “warm fuzzies” but “agape”, that  to die for love that willing died for all mankind; sparing not a drop of blood, or leaving a breathe unspent.

The sermon in my head reminded me, Jesus plainly and emphatically proclaimed that verse, now made famous by placards at football games and  verse17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” However, not many people finish the message.  Jesus’ “make it plain” message,  was also recorded by John in chapter 3:18-19.

No “warm fuzzies” here, either, only the uncomfortable part of the Truth, John 3:18-19.

“Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”

Jesus spoke the whole Truth and so should we because:  “Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!”