Sharing

 Thursday is the day before Friday, and the day of Our Lord's last supper before He was betrayed and abandoned Himself to His enemies. The apostles ate well and fell asleep just when Jesus began to confront the savgery that was about to engulf Him.

As such, it is a day before crucifixion which He encountered the night of His last supper, and so rightly, deserves to be commemoratedby Christians as the day He began the cylce that will save the Church and the faithful of Christ. 

I have grown accustomed to Fridays being days I encounter suffering for Jesus in my daily life, more so than on other days. I had long prayed to share His passion with Him by manifesting His wounds in me, an unbelievable arrogance on my part. The Lord's love forgive a multitude of sins, but something is demanded in return. I have perceived it not only as physical suffering, but the other kinds of deprivation which manifest themselves as degrees ofun pleasant miseries, always alone. Jesus might have been on a different planet; He saw what He was accepting as loving us enough to endure to erase the suffering of encountering our sins. It is bad enough not to care enough to recall His suffering but not to care if He is near or not, when He wishes us to be filled with light and love at a time when darkness and and sorrow engulfed HIm without relief.

He always ends what He begins. He began accepting rejection and loneiness along with blowd and scourging and nails. St. Padre Pio finally encountered the end of his own participation oin the passion of Jesus, effectively offering his own personal experience of the passion alongside with the fullness of His own passion suffering so that a potent remedy might be brought to bear on the reality of our sins.

The world is teeming in billions of people, all of which must reconcile with God for our sins. We must atone for what we acknowledge, and we should always be ready to encounter the terrible deprivation that is caused by sin. My prayer to share in His passion was not ignored; to the contrary, the fact that my body is intact and not bleeding is proof enough of the way He would share it with me and I might confront my selfishness in even desiring it. One way or another the present human race will encounter catastrophes that are so terrible in their import. People still betray one another and condemne each other to catastrophic anihilation, feel in their rage that they are justified.They will confront the end of such thinking when He reveals His love after civilization is impoverished and ceases to exist.

His love is what He offers and that which He desires us to acknowledge. He is not counting so much the depth of our sins but the greatness of the greatness of His love in forgiving us and asking to little in return.

He sees the unspeakble ways human beings are assaulted by evil and the consequences of human lack of concern. He comes for everyone, for each individual man woman or child. In the end, He  reckons with us and we are welcomed if we wish His welcome. The tragedy that exists is that so many do not care and are not moved for even a moment. He alons knows fully what that means, and He alone has dealt with it for each individual. He can deal with a million as easilly as with a billion. He knows how to provide for them and how to care for each individually even while we struggle to be reconciled with Him. 

I live alone and He dwells with me, and I try not to trouble Him unduly in His work, to care for me in my misery. He has not asked much, mostly that I recognise my sins and selfishness and try tosurpass these things and receive His love, overcome as I am, with my sins.

Do not be put off with the evident pain of my passion. I feel your poverty and wish to fill you up with my love.

After

I have noticed that after prayer, I see reality in a new light, permeated with peace and filled with joy. It is a very subtle, gentle joy, not at all boisterous. I have also noticed events more clearly without the oppression of fear or dissatistion. If you find yourself lacking in any of these essentials, you might try prayer to see if God might have a surprise in store for you. It remains true that the world is full of evil and fear and anger and unrelenting lust or hunger, thet acn be surpassed and transfigured by the Lord, and the cost is littel; a little time and a little unselfishness are all that are required.

Not everyone is sut out to be a monk nor is everyone destined for sanctity, but if you find satisfaction in the midst of it all, what have you lost?

St. Padre Pio pray for us to learn to love the Lord.

 

Discouragement

It is often very discouraging to put one foot in front of the other only to discover that you have not moved at all.  Do not be discouraged. You are where you need to be. Continue doing what you need to do, which is to do the will of God without hesitation. Although it may seem nothing has changed, don't listen to the voices that defy the Lord or betray His love by believing He has abndoned you. If the throne of His passion and the nails in your body seem only to hurt worse than the day before, the voice of God which utters in your being please Him for your steadfast love. Many will be saved because you did. You do not need great miracles or spiritual prodigies to stun the world. Love the Lord and His people. That will please Him most. The day of rest and peace which His light gives you so abundantly cannot be dismissed but will be proven true because He speaks truth.

Burdens

 If we stay in the light of the Lord, no politician or political party can prevail against us. So it fol;lows, that if we reserve our rights within ourselves iand stay in His presence, our enemies can do nothing. Their limbs are weighed down as if encased in concrete. It is amazing the way the Lord frees His people and bogs down His enemies. If God has enemies, you know you have enemies too, but those who belong to the Lord are free and their burdens light because God carries them Himself.

Choice

She rose to please God, and it will please God that our democracy should prevail.

God has the final word, and His word is that He loves the human race, the united states and those who love Him. The final word on the Voting Rights act is therefore in His hands, and we may rest securely in His Will in the matter.

The idea that the idea of laws being necessary is an important one. Where everything is governed by a madman's desires there is a lot of care given to laws written to permit illegal things. In truth, it doesn't matter because those who oppose the will of the government are killed off lest anyone be nfected with the notion that freedom is a good thing. The ide that it is alright to refuse to allow voting was overturned in our time in Poland, and subsequently many other nations in the grip of the soviet regime found themselves in a position to take back their freedom, and persist in the idea of freedom to this day.

If the soviet government could pass away, so could other governments without wars. The illegal version of the voting rights acts should be buried and forgotten in place of democracy and freedom which have permitted incredible wealth under freedom. The idea that that should be abolished because one man does not like it is absurd. Indeed, the one who cherishes enslavement is the lackey of the evil one, and Jesus waits to receive our love and gratitude

August 10th my Baptism in the Holy Spirit 1970. 

Reality

 

We are, after all, all in this together :) +

We cannot pick and choose our reality, in spite of what some people think. Trying to pretend a cancer is not burrowing in our bones is insane. We must acknowledge what is real. It is often nearly impossible to endure, but our grasp of what is is shaped by His presence where we are. Wishing to be somewhere else or to experience what we wish is often pointless. In such times, we must really love Him and desire Him. If one does not exercise his will to submit to His Will one does not grow, and since the future is indeterminate, we have no choice but to accept what is. That does not mean that anything becomes easier, necesarilly. Often it does, and we realize what was asked was not that much to give and we might be disappointed with ourselve.

So long as we are not overcome, we still have a better future availalbe, because God is in the moment.

I wish you peace in which to come to know the Lord.

Prayer of Endurance

 

Prayer in such a place; imagine !

It is summertime in Seattle, and yesterday was very hot, by our standards. Occasionally we hit 90 or above, fahrenheit, but usually the air flow shifts and ocean air flows in with its characteristic cool temperatures and normal moisture content. I remember years when I had to walk through snow that had accumulated to my hips, and it was treacherous going. Getting on or off a bus was a challenge; the snow had piled up, the bus is abnormally far away from the curb and you had to struggle to get on the bus. It doesn't generally stick around for long, and the snow pack in the mountains is prodigious, making for merry hearts for skiiers. This year might be one of those years when the skiirers are ecstatic and everyone else either hunkers down at or sets in for a siege against the snow and ice until the weather changes and the ice and snow are melted by warmer air

You might think that it ought not to matter to a hermit or a monk, but winter can be a challenge. Some ot the old eremitical orders had wood stoves and piles of wood for heating the cell. Whether it is cold or hot, weather is undeniable. A wool habit is fine for winter, but innappropriate for summer. If the abbot decides it is too hot to work and wear the habit at a certain point, he can call for removing part of the habit to relieve the struggle in the heat.

Father Lewis of the Kentuckey Trappists related such occaisions as being noteworthy. Very little things can become significant in a monk's life or the life of a hermit. Whlle penance is beneficial in a spiritual life, after a certain point, it becomes more than intrusive, and tends to be a distraction; hence removing part of the habit to relieve the heat becomes a moment of grace.

enduring the attitude of the political climate in the world becomes a spiritual matter when I intrudes in our attitude to God and fellow human beings. 

There are millions in the world, after all, who endure exactly the same heat or worse in Saia Europe, from time to time, and one might questions what happens to the merit collected in enduring the unendurable. There are people in the world who live without food or water, and no one recognizes their merit for enduring to the bitter end; people die of thirst and hunger, and their brothers in the world think nothing about it as they trudge through the shimmering desert trying to reach water and food. Women and children are caught up in the fury of the weather with no escape, and life goes on.

Prayer is like the fragrance of a rose. It is there for a moment, then fades from sight, and the monk or hermit who markes its passage is carried on the wind of its passing. One might remember such occasions for a long time. A person enduting many such days reaches a point when the question arises, how long, O Lord?