Holy Saturday

Though my body sleeps, my heart keeps vigil. - Songs 5:2

Good Friday

 

Passion Sunday aka Palm Sunday

John XXIII: Out For A Ride - T. Nelson

Unknown private collection

 

A blessed Holy Week to all.

Pray for the Holy Father

 

News coming in from the Vatican this evening has revealed that Pope Francis has been kept in hospital after being rushed back to hospital following routine tests earlier in the day.

Corriere have written:

From the hospital it is known that the pontiff, who arrived by ambulance following an illness, had heart problems and respiratory fatigue in the late morning, after the general audience held in St. Peter's Square, while he was already in his residence at Casa Santa Marta; For safety he was taken to the cardiology department for checks.

They also said that it is likely that

A hospitalization at this point is almost certain: the staff - starting with Bergoglio's personal nurse, Massimiliano Strappetti - and the security men were alerted to spend the night at the Policlinico. Certainly a hospitalization was not planned, on the eve of Palm Sunday and the celebrations of Holy Week of Easter, the most important time of the year.

Francis had been brought in for routine tests, but was later rushed by ambulance to the hospital once more.

Please pray for the Holy Father at this time. - CatholicArena

An update.

 

I've deliberately stopped commenting or posting on developments in the Church and the world.  It's my wait and see attitude.  I've avoided a lot of commentary by not clicking on clickbait headlines and avoiding the usual voices of dissension.  

It's interesting to note how many old Trump supporters are learning that FOX News had been feeding them misinformation all along.  I wonder if they will 'wake up' now.  Probably not because they are so afraid of 'woke'.  

It seems to me Vigano may still have his followers, but I think many now consider him a crack pot - I could be wrong.

Like reading private revelations and locutions discussing all the problems in the Church and the world, news aggregates dispense the same dire warnings.  I avoid those as well.  It's sometimes difficult to discern what is a private revelation from a private opinion and ideological bias, proving the axiom,  "whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver."

I think of those 'holy' souls who pour over scriptures and private revelations, looking for signs to explain world events and politics, often esteeming their findings over the Holy Father and the Teaching Magisterium.  Same old, same old.

I'll probably continue to post though.

Long time gone.

Just an update.  

I've been trying to limit my time on social media and so I haven't kept up with the blog or comments.  I'm sorry.  Trying to break my FB habit as well.  

So much has happened, I couldn't even begin to comment.  

I'm disappointed in all the blowback after Pope Benedict's death - especially the books and articles concerning the relationship between the 2 popes and the opposition to Pope Francis.  Needless to say I'm not reading very much of it.

It appears today the war is escalating and may soon include Europe.  

I will continue to post here though.

"As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts...

I came across this on Twitter. It is Collier Gwin, the owner of San Francisco art gallery Foster Gwin. Hosing down a homeless women in the cold. The video is disturbing on several levels - the poor woman struggles under the spray - I imagine she is calling for him to stop, as well as calling for help. Mr. Gwin's nonchalant pose is chilling in itself. From Saint Matthew’s Gospel—"as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."

"Take care, brothers and sisters,
that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart,
so as to forsake the living God.
Encourage yourselves daily while it is still “today,”
so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin." - Hebrews 3

Hardened by the deceit of sin.

A thought

 

Christopher Robin

I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. 'Old bear,' he answered. 'I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called in for an afternoon snack.' - Czeslaw Milosz 

Benedict XVI

 

Benedict XVI

 

Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI

Benedict’s death, at the age of 95, was announced in Rome on Dec. 31. His body will lie in state in St. Peter’s Basilica from the morning of Monday, Jan. 2, 2023.

In a written statement on the morning of Dec. 31, Bruni said: “With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican.”

St. Toribio Romo Gonzalez

 

St. Toribio Romo Gonzalez. Acrylic on panel. 16" x 20"

I finished my painting of the saint.  The photos are not the best, but I wanted to share the work - I spent Advent painting him.

Short biography of St. Toribio.

Born in Santa Ana de Guadalupe, which belongs to the parish of Jalostotitlán, Jal. (Diocese of San Juan de los Lagos), 16 April 1900. Vicar functions pastor in Tequila, Jalisco., (Archdiocese of Guadalajara). Priest sensitive heart, assiduous prayer. Passionate about the Eucharist asked many times: "Lord, let me not a single day of my life without saying Mass without Communion hold in'. In a First Communion, to take the Sacred Host in his hands, said: "And would accept my blood, Lord, I offer you the peace of the Church? 'While in Aguascalientes, a location near Tequila that served as refuge and center of his ministry, he wanted to acquaint the parish. Worked on Friday all day and all night. At five in the morning of Saturday February 25, 1928, wanted to celebrate the Eucharist but, feeling very tired and sleepy preferred to celebrate a little sleep better. He had hardly fallen asleep when a group of agrarians and soldiers entered the room and when one of them pointed, saying, "That's the priest, kill him"Father Toribio woke up scared, stood up and received a discharge. Wounded and walked a little hesitant, a new download, in the back, cut the life of the martyr and his generous blood that reddened the land of Jalisco Canyon. - Vatican website

Prayer

Holy Father, you who sent your Son to proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven to us, and He, obedient to your will, carried out the mission you gave Him to do, we pray that through the intercession of St. Toribio:
.
You care for and guide members of our families that have had to leave their homes for distant lands to improve their lives and those of their families. Keep them safe from harm and help them to stay firm in their Faith so that they can soon return to their homes strengthened in soul and body.
.
Through Christ our Lord, Amen
(St. Toribio Romo Shrine)

Merry Christmas!

Il presepe di Cuciniello - Museo della Certosa di San Martino a Napoli.

FMR Magazine, Dicembre 1982. Photo by Massimo Listri

Wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas!  
 

The Meaning of Advent

 

Shaken and Stirred

I will reprint something from Alfred Delp, S.J.  For me it explains everything.  The war, the atrocities, the ideological madness, the schism, the apostasy, the civil unrest, the suicides and murders - even the Pope and his 'make a mess' call to conversion.  I found this on Tumblr.

The Shaking Reality of Advent:

"There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it.

We may ask why God has sent us into this time, why he has sent this whirlwind over the earth, why he keeps us in this chaos where all appears hopeless and dark and why there seems to be no end to this in sight. The answer to this question is perhaps that we were living on earth in an utterly false and counterfelt security. And now God strikes the earth 'til it resounds, now he shakes and shatters; not to pound us with fear, but to teach us one thing-the spirit's innermost moving and being moved.

Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been living in that movement and disquiet of heart which results when we are faced with God, the Lord, and when we look clearly at things as they really are. If we had done this, God would have withheld his hand from many things that have stirred up and shaken and crushed our lives. We would have seen and judged the limits of our own competence.

But we have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security; in our spiritual insanity we really believed we could, with the power of our own hand and arm, bring the stars down from heaven and kindle flames of eternity in the world. We believed that with our own forces we could avert the dangers and banish night, switch off and halt the internal quaking of the universe. We believed we could harness everything and fit it into a final order that would stand.

Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things. It is time to say, "All right, it was night; but let that be over and let us be ready for the day." We must do this with a decision that comes out of these very horrors we have experienced, and all that is connected with them; and because of this our decision will be unshakable even in uncertainty.

If we want to transform life again, if Advent is truly to come again-the Advent of home and of hearts, the Advent of the people and the nations, a coming of the Lord in all this-the great Advent question for us is whether we come out of these convulsion with this determination: yes, arise! It is time to awaken from sleep. It is time for a waking up to begin somewhere. It is time to put things back where God the Lord put them. It is time for each of us to go to work, with the same unshakable sureness that the Lord will come, to set our life in God's order wherever we can. Where God's word is heard, he will not cheat our life of the message; where our life rebels before our own eyes he will reprimand it.

The world today needs people who have been shaken by ultimate calamities and emerged from them with the knowledge and awareness that those who look to the Lord will still be preserved by him, even if they are hounded from the earth.

The Advent message comes out of an encounter of man with the absolute, the final, the gospel. It is thus the message that shakes-so that in the end the world shall be shaken. The fact that then the Son of man shall come is more than a historic prophecy; it is also a decree, that God's coming and the shaking up of humanity are somehow connected. If we are inwardly unshaken, inwardly incapable of being genuinely shaken, if we become obstinate and hard and superficial and cheap, then God will himself intervene in world events and teach us what it means to be placed in this agitation and be stirred inwardly. Then the great question to us is whether we are still capable of being truly shocked or whether it is to remain so that we see thousands of things and know that they should not be and must not be, and that we get hardened to them. How many things have we become used to in the course of the years, of the weeks and months, so that we stand unshocked, unstirred, inwardly unmoved.

Advent is time when we ought to be shaken and brought to a realization of ourselves. The necessary condition for the fulfillment of Advent is the renunciation of the presumptuous attitudes and alluring dreams in which and by means of which we always build ourselves imaginary worlds. In this way we force reality to take us to itself by force-by force, in much pain and suffering.

The shocked awakening is definitely part of experiencing Advent. But at the same time there is much more that belongs to it. Advent is blessed with God's promises, which constitute the hidden happiness of this time. These promises kindle the inner light in our hearts. Being shattered, being awakened-only with these is life made capable of Advent. In the bitterness of awakening, in the helplessness of "coming to," in the wretchedness of realizing our limitations, the golden threads that pass between heaven and earth in the times reach us. These golden threads give the world a taste of the abundance it can have.

We must not shy away from Advent thoughts of this kind. We must let our inner eye see and let our hearts range far. We will encounter the earnestness of Advent and the blessing of Advent in a different way. We will see characters, completed and whole personalities, that belong to these days and to all days-characters in whom the Advent message and the Advent blessing simply exist and live, calling out to us and touching us to cheer and shake us, to console and to uplift us."

(Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J.)

Just a thought

 

Anticipating heaven.

Pray, pray, pray.  However you know how, wherever you are.  Never give up prayer, no matter what state you are in.  The rosary is a sure way of ceaseless prayer.  The morning offering ensures that everything we do is a prayer and a sacrifice throughout the day, as the Catechism states:  "He "prays without ceasing" who unites prayer to works and good works to prayer. Only in this way can we consider as realizable the principle of praying without ceasing."  And, "It is possible to offer fervent prayer even while walking in public or strolling alone, or seated in your shop, . . . while buying or selling, . . . or even while cooking."

I would suggest that frequent spiritual communion throughout the day sustains us in the presence of God and teaches us how to be recollected in our occupations.  These things I recommend to those who do not go to daily Mass, and even those who may be caught in the habit of sin. "Prayer is the trap door out of sin."  Never give up prayer.

Artists like to quote Dostoevsky, or is it Solzhenitsyn, who wrote, "beauty will save the world".  What few realize is that the true beauty, the essential beauty, or the 'love of beauty' is what the monastic fathers called prayer.  As the Catechism affirms: "Still others exalt sensuality and comfort as the criteria of the true, the good, and the beautiful; whereas prayer, the "love of beauty" (philokalia), is caught up in the glory of the living and true God. Finally, some see prayer as a flight from the world in reaction against activism; but in fact, Christian prayer is neither an escape from reality nor a divorce from life."

Prayer is our heaven on earth.

Everything is different

I woke up thinking that - thanking God for this new day, praying immediately for an online acquaintance who is most likely dying.  

Everything must change, expectations of how things must be, or should be must be allowed to crumble.  

O my God!  I thank you for Pope Francis who has overturned the tables of our idolatry and ideology.  He has lifted burdens too hard to carry and called down the Holy Spirit to stir up the love of God in the hearts of the faithful, though our sins impede the grace of mercy which so longs to save us - the Lord comes to our help with his mighty strength.

Thank you Lord.  Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas Minneapolis Dayton's 1967.

For years I lied to people - Darold did too - telling them we were going to my sister's for Thanksgiving. People just couldn't bear the idea two guys wouldn't be with family for Thanksgiving.

This year I really will be going to my sister's for Thanksgiving.

Being alone for the holidays was never a big deal for me, and here is why.

My reputation for hating the holidays was not true. My withdrawal at from social affairs over Thanksgiving and Christmastime was a result of my work at Dayton’s and had nothing to do with the family or hating the season. For weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, it was constant work getting store interiors and windows done for Christmas – lots of overtime and some all-nighters - the night before Thanksgiving could be a nightmare. Animated windows, synched with the auditorium could make things miserable - it was like a Broadway opening. (Darold did the same work, when we first met he never liked Christmas because of it.)

Thanksgiving was a day to sleep-in since we often worked all night. Likewise in Senior year, my 1st Christmas was watchman for animated windows and getting backgrounds for Spring done. I worked until Midnight through Christmas.

Later, after entering the monastery, Christmas became a more spiritual, solitary event. Then when I worked at the Cancer Home, I worked weekends and holidays so people with families could have those days off – for nearly 16 years. Mid-week I did my artwork. Long story short, not being around was never about avoiding family or a rejection of family. To be sure, sometimes I avoided my parents on the holidays because they were trouble makers – but they never caused me to hate Christmas.

Together, Darold and I reinvented our holiday observance. It began on S. Nicholas Eve and went through Christmas, Russian Christmas and 12th Night. His mom and dad were our 'immediate family' and they loved all the celebration and food and being together. It was magical and unrepeatable.

This year I'm grateful to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her awesome family, and Christmas with my little brother.

Happy Thanksgiving - and remember those who serve and protect.

Just some thoughts about that.

I spend too much time online.

Now that family follows me on FB, along with others who actually know me, I can no longer be quite as candid as I used to be - which was always too much.

If I say something about what I'm feeling, reflecting upon what that means to me - I get reactions I was never expecting nor looking for.  If I mention heath concerns I get offers to help - which again, wasn't what I was looking for.  Then I get post links - whatever you call being flagged in a post and I don't know how to respond, but if I don't, I'm afraid the other person will be offended.  (This is not a complaint - I'm simply reflecting on how my experience online has changed.)

I scroll looking for something funny or distracting to post as a diversion, only to run out of stuff that interests me or even make me laugh.  In the meantime I keep scrolling by people I follow or link to and sooner or later I see how mundane everything is - and sometimes downright insane.  The crazy things people post - it dawned on me, that is how I must look to others online.

The negativity and cynicism - not to mention the gossip and disparagement of others, be it political or ecclesial really is toxic.  It's contagious.  I never understood that more clearly than when I engaged in discussions - commenting with personal anecdotes regarding a couple of contemplative religious foundations.  In part I believed I was contributing positively as well a supporting some directives from the Vatican.  Long story short, I saw my good intentions were no better than a former religious' intention in exposing the problems associated with the founder and foundation of a Carmelite group out west.  I was so taken aback by the accuser's inclusion of anecdotes, videos and photos, from her former community, apparently using them to establish her credibility and provide evidence to support her report. I had to examine my own part in the brew and realized it was not good.  

I went through my archives as well as posts on Church Militant and removed all my commentary - quite ashamed I had engaged myself so imprudently and without being asked to do so.  I very much doubt my commentary made any difference and was simply anecdotal and personal opinion - yet my involvement amounted to gossip and meddling - something I've censured others for - especially in the case of the former nun in the interview.  I so want to avoid doing things like that, from now on.  

The past couple of days, others I follow online, whom conservatives call 'leftist-Catholics' have taken issue with the elections of a new President and Chairmen of the USCCB.  I looked up some of the concerns they expressed, one or two statements made by the Bishop-elect seemed just fine to me.  Yet other points the critics made - that the election was a clear message of rejection to Pope Francis, if true, is simply very discouraging.  

I don't usually follow the 'politics' of the USCCB and I'm not a bishop-watcher.  From the early days of my conversion until now, the bishops have always simply been on the periphery of my spiritual life.  I've know a couple personally, did some painting for one or two, but that's about it.  I've lived through Bernadine, Roach and others - and none of that threatened my faith or devotion.  If the pendulum has swung the other way, I'll live through this as well.  It's just sad that Catholics are so divided and that so many appear to reject the Holy Father - of course others before them have as well.  So many lay-Catholics regard the Church as a political entity and seem to take sides in the same way they do in American politics.  Taking sides and fighting and defending ones' cause to the point of detraction and calumny is a great evil.  That certainly comes out in com-boxes across social media platforms.

I hope I can learn from my mistakes and the mistakes I discover in others - which only mirror my own - especially if I want to correct or report on them.  Discretion and discernment must be my companion and teacher.

  

In the Father's Hands

Machado de Castro National Museum, Coimbra Photo: Manuel Mira Godinho (2014).*

When I feel quite lost and alone, I remember that I am not out of the Father's hands.  This image reminded me of paintings of the Father holding the dead Christ, and today it suddenly became for me my assurance and my peace.  Although all seems lost and things seem to be collapsing around me and I feel utterly alone, this image reminds me that I - we - are held (together) in the Father's embrace.  "...and the gates of the nether world shall not prevail against it." (Mt 16:18)

God is our refuge and our strength,

an ever present help in distress, 

Therefore, we fear not, though the earth be shaken

and mountains plunge into the depths of the sea. - Ps 46

*The image is actually a detail of a Pieta - the Mother of Sorrows holding her Son. When I first viewed this particular image, my mind immediately went to the image of the Father receiving the Body of Jesus which is often portrayed in images of the Blessed Trinity. 

Servant of God, Dorothy Day