Beginnings

 

It is so soon gone, but it is only one word in the endless stream of His Heart.

It is quiet; not entirely silent, because of all the automobile traffic in the distance. I live alone, except for the fact that I live in a room surrounded everywhree with rooms just like mine, where people live their daily lives, surrounded themsleves by other people in the same reality.

So it doesn't, or shouldn't, take long to ascertain that in the noise and surrounded by people, I live in a very small quantum of silence, neverltheless surrounded by silence and solitude. The combat and the issues of life take place in the midst of these illusions. When you take up the hermit life, you immediately are immersed in an opaque nuance of meaning. However well He has hidden Himself, God is already there in the circumastances of reality as you perceive it or it surrounds you in matter of fact reality.

The opportunity to gree Him is immediately present, regardless of how He chooses to announce Himslef, He will nevertheless announce Himself in the silence and the solitude.

If all the cars and freeways disappeared in an instant, the bare reality of truth would be immediately available and  impinge on the senses without hesitation, and reality of being in yourself in the immensity of the real is immediately apparent, though the simplicity apparent may be deceiving.

You need not sria dn inch, or set out on a treks in the desert to find yourself or reality. They are already there and immediately available.

One might mistake the starkness for the totality of reality. Encountering it over time places you immediately present to them and they to you. Your heart continues to beat, and you continue to breath.

The beginning comes when you are confronted with needing to define what you should do, and what you should think. It is for this moment you wrote you rule and began to do what nothingness should be doing.

Great saints may have already inhabited your place, and you might wonder if they might address you where you are, or if they would announce themselves demanding your plan for your life.

Trust that you will be deported as you should be and that you will be inspired to payer. You must at some early moment announce yourself by praying and listening. You should learn to be silent when you pray, and your thoughts corralled and subordinated to God by your will. THe love in His Heart will either respond immediately, or He may defer His announcement. Whether you see Him or not is determined by His own Will, and if you never perceive the announcement of His presence, does not mean He has not spoken nor that He has never been present. You are where you are by His Will and you should set your heart to acknowledge Him affectionately. You may wonder if there is any way in which to present yourself or array yourself to Him, but do not take too long, because He may have severl lifetimes worth of things to say to you if you are available and aligned to Him.

The greatest sin of modern time is that none of what I have already said happens, and the Lord is disapointed. In the midst of turmoil and chaos, He is still present and still disposed to lsiten to you and act immediately to offer Himself to you and you to Him in being which is contemplative prayer.

One may or may not find contemplation or experience it in his walk. Just do not dail to realize that you are walking, next to Him. Be avaialbe to Him and He will be availalbe to you. Do not worry about the kind of attention you elicit, or that you will elicit from Him. One word has seven meanings so you can never exhaust His Heart. It will always be there.

You may encounter Him on the cross, or you may encounter Him ascending into heaven. I can only encount a tiny amount of His pain, but I have grown attached to it so that it must be in some encounter or I fret. He always creates space into which He might pour encounters and meanings and realities you could not have imagined, but if it is from Him, it will always lift you up and for even an instant, you will be aware, and it will be sufficient to fill eternity if He leads you.

Peace

 Regardless of the ease it represents, giving Microsoft exactly what they want simply makes no sense, any more than giving in to any bully thief or pervert. They all represent occasions to let them take what they have nor ight to.

People have no right to complain if they give away their trust without complaint or objection thinking something good will spring up from the dung heap of their plans.

Having a virulently narcissisitc president into whom government  pours money is siomply obscene, especially when the largesse involved is inevitably stolen from the people to support those who make the bombs and technology with which to carry out predatory policies of warfare.

The result of the grossity of the theft incurred is the tragedy of lost lives, both of our citizens or the citizens of countries suffering the oblitteration of their society.

Peace is never the result of threats and insinuations. It is the result of good faith and the acknowledgement that people are human beings, entitled to live in safety and safety. In a real sense, peace is the result of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and in those societies where that is recognised, there is peace and safety, but not otherwise. Those peoples who respect one another and support one another welcome diversity and the creativity. Where there is neither, there is only violence, destruction and death. We must make it true in our hearts so that they unite to Christ's Sacred Heart and the sacrifice of His Mother in giving Herself to Christ for our sake. There can be no peace where it is not requested of the Mother of God. One of the hallmarks of Her presence in peace. It is quiet around Her, and around Jesus so that if you crave peace and quiet, you turn to Mary and Jesus together as advocates of the fulfillment of ourselves, because fulfillment is the natural and abundant outcome of encounters with God.

Willingness

 

The accidents of reality inexorably point to the truth.

One of the hall marks of maturity, spiritually or otherwise, is accepting reality. A man who has visions and spiritual prodigies occurring in his life would be suspect if he refused to do the will of God when it is unambiguously known.

A man who will not immediately accept the will of God is not holy nor in any way special despite prophesies and spiritual occurrences. The enemy knows how to make a man float in the air, but God knows how to reward an obedient soul. Insisting on having one's own way in spiritual matters is not sign of holiness, but of selfishness.

That is why penances help to clarify, by revealing that a correction is needed in one's path. If a man can't alter the course of his life, but stubbornly hangs on to his own notions of what God wants, knows very little of the will of God. The Lord accepted the Father's plan and the Father's will, and went to the cross to die, so we would have hope in the depths of despair, and light in the deepest night.

How can a man so cling to his own judgement and will if he sees God and His Will but will not admit he is wrong? It is possible everyone else is wrong and the individual is right, but the Will of God is always clarified because He is the truth.

God loves His people, each one, individually as well as corporately. He will tolerate stubbornness and respect the individual will, but He must safeguard everyone at the same time, and that may mean that reality falls on everyone in the midst of catastrophe. That is the explanation for why catastrophes happen to good people in spite of the consequences.  Civilizations have been swallowed in annihilation despite the decency of their lives. We know that His love motivates all He does, but He will cleave to His Will when we would wish otherwise, but to defy Him because of His will is a dangerous circumstance.

Hundreds of thousands died in the cataclysm at Krakatoa, and the mountain is being reborn by the same processes of nature, and other places show signs of volcanic eruptions imminent shortly, and undoubtedly, many people will die again because of such things. We must offer prayers for people that they will be found honest and decent on the day they stand before God, having left behind this life.

The desire to belong to Jesus must be stronger than your own will, and stronger than the desire to be safeguarded and preserved against destruction. Therefore one's prayer must be toward submission to His will. We are not owed any explanation, because we do not have the same view by which to judge. 

Dictators throughout history have insisted doggedly on having their own will, even when it was pointed out that it was not in people's best interest. Their arrogance insisted on their own will, and they had to watch as everything was destroyed. Our prayers should be to ask for the grace to accept God's will regardless of what anyone else wants. Our prayers for our sisters and brothers must be for the grace to do God's will. 

 

Sweetness of Repentance

With love, we become a word of love,
more than a symbol of love.

I never got to the point of studying Theology beyond a rudimentary beginning phase, and I had not considered that a problem until I began to realize some things the Lord has done.

One thing He has done on many occasions is heal me when I was either in very great pain or was very sick and frightened. But it simplified life by spelling out exactly what sin was, what sins I had committed and my obligations to God as a result of His healing interventions.

On the other hand, there were things, and still are things, I wish could be done for me but which do not happen. St. Padre Pio is a great guide. He never tolerated lies or deceptions in the confession box, and was rightly angry when someone did not recognize the seriousness of the confessional and the seriousness of the forgiveness of sins.

I do not take the Lord or His saints lightly. I don't make assumptions that are too easy for people in general assume about God and their relationship to Him. Many a person has come very close to death and were in grave peril of being lost and condemned when the lord spewed them out as the whale that swallowed Jonah did. I tell anyone who will listen, not to take God for granted or make assumptions about eternity. 

Hardship in life has a great ability to clarify and simplify life and our relationship with God. 

Hardship in life reveals our total reliance on God, and our obligation to love Him as He deserves. The lack of appreciation of the gravity of that obligation should be always before our eyes, and readily available to be seen throughout our days and our lives.

If we have taken Him for granted, a moment will come when we are taken from our comfortable reality and placed where God is to stand before Him to be judged or to be accepted with His customary totality of love. Even if we neglected Him, He has never neglected us, and anyone who thinks He neglected us might respond to Him with an apology for assuming what we have not the right to assume.

The Church has required that we examine our lives and adjust our thinking so we may set aside whatever might try to take God's place. That is something we should find in the confessional. And if we are prevented from getting to Mass or from going to confess our sins in the sacrament of penance, we should pray that He regard us with great love less we fail to see His love and respond appropriately.

What is appropriate ? God is above all things, and there is nothing better than Him or more deserving than anything else, including us. You may be angry, hurt, sad or burdened by unspeakable things, but those very things are not greater than He, and if we realize that with a revelation of how great is His love, we will forget ourselves in Him.

St. Francis of Assisi realized these things, and it grew to be of such importance to him that he formed his Order around those principles and His Rule by which people could reorganize their lives with great benefit because it was redolent of repentance and great affection for Christ.

How great must be the flames of grace to make us turn to Jesus with the realization of how great is His love for us that we should apprehend in our hearts with all our hearts to the point of being completely engulfing the heart.

For someone with nothing, who is nothing and is fully aware that he is nothing, Jesus can scarcely escape notice, and the gravity of our obligation to love Him should reach across whatever gulf still remains to separate us from Jesus. We are given life as an opportunity to practice our life and the way we live it. The saints knew and were very aware that God is perfect and we are imperfect, as is obvious to anyone with introspection who stands very near to Him. The closer we are to Him the more deeply we feel the need of Him and His salvation, the reaching out of Him to grasp us fully and rescue us from where we do not want to be. I do not want to be outside of Him or excluded from Him or without the affection that will save me, and I will pray for sinners who so much need Him, and I will offer my sufferings for them to obtain the grace that saves.

We don't need to look very far to see the emptiness and despair and grief in the world, the violence, selfishness and greed which struggle so hard to cut us off from God and desiccating us, attempt to pry us apart from His Heart.

I can only desire to be what He wants, and try to do what I can. But my desire has in it the seeds of realization of actual grace that effects salvation and makes us happy when we realize we have been placed by Him in His Heart and in His love so we might please Him in such a way, that salvation does not depend on any faulty thing of earth.

Today, let us begin to strip away anything less than Him or unworthy of His love. Let us cherish Him as much as we know Him in this moment, and pray that He advance us to a greater apprehension of His love so as to please Him in all things.

Amen, amn you are happy if you achieve His love and stand in Him in His light.

Solace

 Lord have mercy on us, forgive us our sins and bring us home to you on our last day in your great mercy.

Lord have mercy on him, forgive him his sins and bring him home to you in your mercy.

Lord have mercy on her, forgive her her sins and bring her home to you in your mercy.

A prayer the Lord gave me to say for the salvation of souls. It can be recited for a man or woman who is dying or has died, alone and forsaken. There are untold millions who will die unknown and unaided. We can change the way such people pass from life, with peace and dignity. Especially people who have died in times of war and violence or disasters. The crescendo of violence grows with each passing day, relating the warnings given us to reform and repent, to return to the truth God has told us. A moment is coming when everything will be loosed, and earth will lay down the mighty and the weak, the helpless and defenseless, for God will be the only safety and refuge.

The effort to draw close to God by focusing our thoughts on Jesus and on His people will be rewarded greatly, contributing to peace on our last day. We have the opportunity now and should not turn away from Him during our day, but offering to appreciate His intercession.

Remember that intercession means to take someone's place and spare them the trial. He who turns his attention to Jesus in an idle moment will not be punished for it.

Sounding

I keep my vigil, waiting for the Lord to move. He is waiting to see which hearts will move , overflowing with tears of gladness. The end of days will be more than we can imagine; the end of wars will be more than we can bear, but the Lord is waiting to show us where we are headed, so we may be at peace. Those who lie and deceive want us to believe they are supreme, but the truth has been sounded so that all may hear, the Lord is God and all things bow before Him.

Do not listen to lies, nor fear shadows in the night. God has moved between us and them to defend and protect us, until end  has come and the trumpet  may be sounded calling His children home. 

lIGHT

 When I observe the world and its inhabitants acting as strangely as they do, I wonder if the three days of darkness is more like 3 years, and all the demons of hell are rruning around screaming, people are being killed and civilization is being overcome by the tidal

wave of hell wahing over us. I can't think of anything worse than what I see, and wonder what three days worse than today are possible?

St. Padre Pio had 50 years of the Stigmata to live with 24/7/365. When he did finally actually die for good, he was completley spent. there was nothing else he could give or submit to.

THe only thing I can think of that would be worse would be that He was hanging from nails in His hand and feet for three hours, followed by having alnce shoved up under His rib cage to pierce His Heart. Some Scriptures say it happened while He was yet alive, and others say it happened afterward to satisfy the Romans to be assured HE was really dead.

Christians live a life with Christ, and the best of them swere close enough to being on the cross with Him that if they had not been as totally spent as Padre Pio, would certainly have seen thier passing as the ultimate test.

In a cuclear war, a city assaulted by a nuclear explosion would vaporise anyone close enough, and those at a further distance would suffer incomprhensibly.

In my lifetime of, so far, 79 years, I have seen enough to be stunned into silence. The tsunami on Boxing Day comes to mind, followed by the tsunami in Japan that ultimately also yeilded the horror of the nuclear explosion in the Fukushima explosion.

One cannot survive for long without a sourde of hope, and no one whould be willing to endure anything without it. Neither should anyone wish a lack of hope's light on anyone else, regardless of what they have committed. Otherwise, the avsolute resolution of Christ in telling us to forgive one another would be insensible. But He insists that we forgive one another, and those who have endured the incalculable should not have to endure anything more.

That being said, how shall there be light without His light? It must be here already streaming in deluges powerful enough to illuminate the whole universe let alone our own errant little planet.

We have seen the wiles and the wickedness of the enemy, and he is surpassingly clever and intelligent. But Jesus Christ surpasses him, and he shall be forgotten, while men who were saved will enjoy Him in eternity. That is a very great and powerful hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9Rc7yOSj0&t=4045s