Spanning the Proverbial Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts
-(the weekly feature where I become instantly unpopular with those not quoted herein)
I won't say that I'm going to stop blogging during lent. I tried that once, and ended up as SecretAgentMan. But that's my goal, and anyhow I'm going to blog a lot less than I have been until Easter. -Secret Agent Man
...a natural conversational pattern applies as much to God as to your spouse or co-worker....But of course stream-of-consciousness monologues are not conversations. A few seconds to center myself, two minutes of headline news, three minutes of listening to God's silent whispers. That sounds like a schedule I could stick to. - Tom of Disputations
Remember the admonition is not "Listen Lord, your servant is speaking," but rather, "Speak Lord, your servant is listening." -Steven Riddle
This sounds dramatic, but this is the first time in my life that I have smiled in the middle of a desire or a craving and said "I join my puny little suffering with Your enormous pain, done in love for me, my Lord!" And I don't even feel self-congratulatory about it (except maybe now, since I'm typing it out). This is a RADICAL change for me.... A new place, a new desert, has opened before me, a place for real change, real purification. And that darn movie did it for me, that is, God's Grace working through that movie. I'm pretty excited, because I know for sure that growing in virtue means growing in prayer, and I just plain can't wait. -Therese Z. of Santificarnos
When I was in the queue for ashes, I heard Fr. O'Brien saying two different things, depending on whom he was giving the ashes. To grown ups was he said, "Turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel." To the little ones he was saying, "Try to be good for Jesus." When my turn came, however, Fr. O'Brien said something different. He took one look at me, smiled in his understated Irish way, and said, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." There is no way to say how much that meant to me...the theme of [Dietrich von Hildebrand's "The New Tower of Babel"] is that we must never forget that we are creatures--that is, we must never forget that we are dust and that we shall return to dust. When we forget our condition as creatures--and the necessity of the attitude of religion --we curse ourselves. - Enbrethiel of Sanctis
As I have always understood it, the practice of Lenten abstention is "the mortification of the flesh". That is, giving something--anything--up during Lent is good to the extent that it is difficult, because giving up something difficult helps kill the earthly desires for that thing, and those desires, even for dessert, are perilous to the extent that our appetites for them distract us from the One True Appetite. -Kairos Guy
I don't even look for the GIdeons anymore, since there is also often a Book of Mormon in the same place and position of honor. Maybe we need to have a campaign to place the CCC in every hotel room! - Alicia of Fructris Ventris
"An ounce of morning is worth a pound of afternoon."....the more I do around the house, the more I care. In homemaking, as in marriage, feelings follow actions. -Kathy of GospelMineField
Evangelicals know that there is "Power in the Blood". So do Catholics. After all, the blood, the selfsame blood that is splattered all over the scourgers at the Pillar, is the blood that we drink on the altar. We say in earnest, what the mob said in unconscious irony: "May his blood be on us and on our children." I pray that prayer will be granted me and my children all the days of our lives. So do Evangelicals.... [Gibson] has no trouble with that identification between the blood on the floor of the guardroom and the blood in the chalice. So we are shown the scene in which Mary blots up the blood of Christ with towels just as a Catholic would blot the spilled Precious Blood with a purificator...Don't feel too smug about the Sullivans of the world recoiling in horror from [the Cross]. If you don't recoil, you haven't thought about the implications of the gospel. I *hope* that, should it be necessary, I can someday be willing to endure what the gospel has cost some of our brothers and sisters--and supremely, our Lord. But I don't know if I could. I fervently pray I shall never have to find out. - Mark Shea
The violence inflicted on Jesus is horrendous, and I found it numbing. Why is that? Is it because the critics are right, and my conscience is reacting to the prurient sadism behind what Jim Cork's critic of choice, Michael Coren, calls a "pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic blood cult"? I thought Coren's line was silly on several levels, the most obvious one being that none of the documents of Vatican II preach that Jesus' crucifixion was a decorous, bloodless affair that could only be viewed from a distance and was all over in five minutes. I also had to shake my head because cult means "the service expressly offered to God through sacred signs and inward dispositions of adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and petition for forgiveness, salvation, and earthly well-being which acknowledge God's supreme power." (K. Rahner). So yeah, you could say we're a blood cult. I for one am proud of it. I'm sorry it scandalizes weak sisters like Michael Coren. I'm sorry it's too much for a lot of people. But we're a blood cult. We worship Holy Blood. We drink Holy Blood. We adore Holy Blood which is glorious, not only for its other mystical and magnificent divinity, but for the fact that it was shed in torture for our sins and our redemption. As far as I'm concerned anyone who -- like the Romans who crucified Jesus -- is shocked at the gruesome cannibalistic atmosphere they find in all that can go soak themselves in oh-so-spiritual readings of John Chapter 6 and imaginary depictions of Jesus as a cartoon character whose feet never touched the earth. Let them squirm at the idea of God's chest hair matted with sweat, dirt under His nails, rubbing gritty sleep from his eyes. Let them stop their ears at the thought of Him screaming in pain and gasping for breath. We love the God-Man entire. His divinity, His humanity, and everything they did and underwent. We even love His blood, especially His blood. - Secret Agent Man
I'm excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don't do that kind of stuff around here. I don't own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don't even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.) Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. "We" meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do. - Terry Teachout of About Last Night
flesh covers/ the bone and the/ flesh searches/ for more than/ flesh. - Charles Bukowski, via Lee Ann of Spinisters
You can divide Christians by what aspect of Jesus they focus on: life/teachings, death, and resurrection. Those in the first group are nearly all liberal, those in the second nearly all conservative, the third can go either way. At least, that's my anecdotal, highly unproven observation... - Camassia
First, I’m glad [The Passion of the Christ] exists, for a lot of reasons. It reinvents and reinvigorates the genre of the Biblically-based film and gives new life to films that seek to take spirituality seriously. Why? First of all, because it’s fearless. That, of course, is what drains the life of any potential treatment of faith-related issues on film: fear. Fear of bad box office, fear of offending the wrong people. Drains the life out of any film, any work of art, as a matter of fact. - Amy Welborn
No comments:
Post a Comment