Lord,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Particularly today.
Most sincerely,
Meaghan
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
My Mother's Wisdom
This is what my mom sent to me and my sisters this morning. I want to share because it is beautiful and so incredibly encouraging. This applies to all three of us! So wise:
"I am so very proud of you for choosing to be women of dignity who require a man to respect you and be worthy of the precious jewels that you are. Remain always in God's grace and ask your Guardian angel to watch over you.
I know these times are so difficult.....I know you have to work hard to be women of God. You are doing a great job!
I love you so very much.
Mom
AMDG
Elizabeth
"I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me." Phil 4:13"
Daily Meditations with Fr. Alfonse
Lk 1:5-25 God Believes In Me!
The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph…and the virgins name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace!”…but she was greatly troubled at what was said.
Last night I spent almost five hours listening to confessions at St. Ann. We were far too few priests for the over six hundred “sinners” that were gathered together for the penance service. I was pleased to be there. It was nice to see so many beautiful people!
I laugh at those who think a priest knows nothing about love, romance or dating. We know a lot! Far too much! We also know a lot about God’s love, God’s romance and God’s constant pursuit of us!
Young girls are in desperate need of faith. Grandparents and parents have such a wonderful role to play in a young teenager’s life! Unfortunately, they give up too quickly. I am here to tell you today that, although you may be past the age of romance or dating or love, you can bring much needed peace and understanding to a teenager’s life and the turmoil that surrounds their ever changing emotions.
Mary was greatly troubled. Maybe it was because she had a hard time believing that she was so loved, so beautiful, and so special. How many of our granddaughters, grandsons, daughters and sons feel the same way? Too often they settle for less than what they are worth. Far too often, they do what they should never do in order to gain much needed attention, affection and affirmation.
The Lord has something to say to you, my child, my daughter. He says to you, “You are a princess!” You say, “I am not.” He says, “You are a treasure!” You say, “I am no treasure!” The Lord says to you, “Keep your dignity, your morals and your values high, very high!” You say, “If I do, then I will never be loved.”
This is what happens to a young soul when they distance themselves from the Lord: they stop believing in the truth; in greater things! They allow their roommates, friends and boyfriends to qualify them; to lower their dignity. They allow themselves to be deceived.
We must educate our girls in the fact that the Lord is one of just a handful of men in the world that will never lower their dignity. In fact, just like a father or big brother, He sets the bar so high, seats them on a throne so big and sets them on a mountain top so high, that these poor girls are filled with the fear of never being loved! But the angel tells Mary, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God…for nothing will be impossible for God.” Why do our girls flee from the Church, from the Sacraments, from God? Because they fear that the bar in their life has been set too high for anyone to jump over! God reaches out to Mary and to us because He believes in Mary and in his children! He believes in us because He knows us better than we know ourselves. He believes in me more than I believe in myself!
These are the rules: take it or leave it. Young souls are afraid to have rules. They are afraid that they will be left alone. But rules help to distinguish between deceivers and believers; they help to set the record straight. “You say you love me. These are the rules. Take it or leave it.” The young man who is in love will say, “I will take it.”
May all our girls have the courage and strength to pray Mary’s prayer: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” By know we should all know that God’s word is better than a chest of gold or thirty pieces of silver!
"I am so very proud of you for choosing to be women of dignity who require a man to respect you and be worthy of the precious jewels that you are. Remain always in God's grace and ask your Guardian angel to watch over you.
I know these times are so difficult.....I know you have to work hard to be women of God. You are doing a great job!
I love you so very much.
Mom
AMDG
Elizabeth
"I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me." Phil 4:13"
Daily Meditations with Fr. Alfonse
Lk 1:5-25 God Believes In Me!
The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph…and the virgins name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace!”…but she was greatly troubled at what was said.
Last night I spent almost five hours listening to confessions at St. Ann. We were far too few priests for the over six hundred “sinners” that were gathered together for the penance service. I was pleased to be there. It was nice to see so many beautiful people!
I laugh at those who think a priest knows nothing about love, romance or dating. We know a lot! Far too much! We also know a lot about God’s love, God’s romance and God’s constant pursuit of us!
Young girls are in desperate need of faith. Grandparents and parents have such a wonderful role to play in a young teenager’s life! Unfortunately, they give up too quickly. I am here to tell you today that, although you may be past the age of romance or dating or love, you can bring much needed peace and understanding to a teenager’s life and the turmoil that surrounds their ever changing emotions.
Mary was greatly troubled. Maybe it was because she had a hard time believing that she was so loved, so beautiful, and so special. How many of our granddaughters, grandsons, daughters and sons feel the same way? Too often they settle for less than what they are worth. Far too often, they do what they should never do in order to gain much needed attention, affection and affirmation.
The Lord has something to say to you, my child, my daughter. He says to you, “You are a princess!” You say, “I am not.” He says, “You are a treasure!” You say, “I am no treasure!” The Lord says to you, “Keep your dignity, your morals and your values high, very high!” You say, “If I do, then I will never be loved.”
This is what happens to a young soul when they distance themselves from the Lord: they stop believing in the truth; in greater things! They allow their roommates, friends and boyfriends to qualify them; to lower their dignity. They allow themselves to be deceived.
We must educate our girls in the fact that the Lord is one of just a handful of men in the world that will never lower their dignity. In fact, just like a father or big brother, He sets the bar so high, seats them on a throne so big and sets them on a mountain top so high, that these poor girls are filled with the fear of never being loved! But the angel tells Mary, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God…for nothing will be impossible for God.” Why do our girls flee from the Church, from the Sacraments, from God? Because they fear that the bar in their life has been set too high for anyone to jump over! God reaches out to Mary and to us because He believes in Mary and in his children! He believes in us because He knows us better than we know ourselves. He believes in me more than I believe in myself!
These are the rules: take it or leave it. Young souls are afraid to have rules. They are afraid that they will be left alone. But rules help to distinguish between deceivers and believers; they help to set the record straight. “You say you love me. These are the rules. Take it or leave it.” The young man who is in love will say, “I will take it.”
May all our girls have the courage and strength to pray Mary’s prayer: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” By know we should all know that God’s word is better than a chest of gold or thirty pieces of silver!
Discernment: How Can I Learn God's Will For Me
Does God have one right choice for me in each decision I make?
When we pray for wisdom to discern God’s will when it comes to choosing a mate, a career, a job change, a move, a home, a school, a friend, a vacation, how to spend money, or any other choice, big or little, whenever there are two or more different paths opening up before us and we have to choose, does God always will one of those paths for us? If so, how do we discern it?
Many Christians who struggle with this question today are unaware that Christians of the past can help them from their own experience. Christian wisdom embodied in the lives and teachings of the saints tells us two things that are relevant to this question.
First, they tell us that God not only knows and loves us in general but that he cares about every detail of our lives, and we are to seek to walk in his will in all things, big and little. Second, they tell us that he has given us free will and reason because he wants us to use it to make decisions. This tradition is exemplified in Saint Augustine’s famous motto “Love God and [then] do what you will.” In other words, if you truly love God and his will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.
Do these two pieces of advice pull us in opposite directions, or do they only seem to? Since there is obviously a great truth embodied in both of them, which do we emphasize the most to resolve our question of whether God has one right way for us?
I think the first and most obvious answer to this question is that it depends on which people are asking it. We have a tendency to emphasize one half of the truth at the expense of the other half, and we can do that in either of the two ways. Every heresy in the history of theology fits this pattern: for instance, emphasizing Christ’s divinity at the expense of his humanity or his humanity at the expense of his divinity; or emphasizing divine sovereignty at the expense of free will or free will at the expense of divine sovereignty.
Five general principles of discernment of God’s will that apply to all questions about it, and therefore to our question too, are the following:
Always begin with data, with what we know for sure. Judge the unknown by the known, the uncertain by the certain. Adam and Eve neglected that principle in Eden and ignored God’s clear command and warning for the devil’s promised pig in a poke.
Let your heart educate your mind. Let your love of God educate your reason in discerning his will. Jesus teaches this principle in John 7:17 to the Pharisees. (Would that certain Scripture scholars today would heed it!) They were asking how they could interpret his words, and he gave them the first principle of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation): “If your will were to do the will of my Father, you would understand my teaching.” The saints understand the Bible better than the theologians, because they understand its primary author, God, by loving him with their whole heart and their whole mind.
Have a soft heart but a hard head. We should be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” sharp as a fox in thought but loyal as a dog in will and deed. Soft-heartedness does not excuse soft-headedness, and hard-headedness does not excuse hard-heartedness. In our hearts we should be “bleeding-heart liberals” and in our heads “stuck-in-the-mud conservatives.”
All God’s signs should line up, by a kind of trigonometry. There are at least seven such signs: (1) Scripture, (2) church teaching, (3) human reason (which God created), (4) the appropriate situation, or circumstances (which he controls by his providence), (5) conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, (6) our individual personal bent or desire or instincts, and (7) prayer. Test your choice by holding it up before God’s face. If one of these seven voices says no, don’t do it. If none say no, do it.
Look for the fruits of the spirit, especially the first three: love, joy, and peace. If we are angry and anxious and worried, loveless and joyless and peaceless, we have no right to say we are sure of being securely in God’s will. Discernment itself should not be a stiff, brittle, anxious thing, but—since it too is part of God’s will for our lives—loving and joyful and peace-filled, more like a game than a war, more like writing love letters than taking final exams.
Now to our question. Does God have just one right choice for me to make each time? If so, I must find it. If not, I should relax more and be a little looser. Here are some clues to the answer.
The answer depends on what kind of person you are. I assume that many readers of this page are (1) Catholic, (2) orthodox and faithful to the teachings of the church, (3) conservative, and (4) charismatic. I have had many friends—casual, close, and very close—of this description for many years. In fact, I fit the description myself. So I speak from some experience when I say that people of this type have a strong tendency toward a certain character or personality type—which is in itself neither good nor bad—which needs to be nourished by one of these emphases more than the other. The opposite personality type would require the opposite emphasis.
My first clue, based on my purely personal observation of this kind of people, is that we often get bent out of human shape by our desire—in itself a very good desire—to find God’s perfect will for us. We give a terrible testimony to non-Christians; we seem unable to relax, to stop and smell God’s roses, to enjoy life as God gives it to us. We often seem fearful, fretful, terribly serious, humorless, and brittle—in short, the kind of people that don’t make a very good advertisement for our faith.
I am not suggesting that we compromise one iota of our faith to appeal to unbelievers. I am simply suggesting that we be human. Go watch a ball game. Enjoy a drink—just one—unless you’re at risk for alcoholism. Be a little silly once in a while. Tickle your kids—and your wife. Learn how to tell a good joke. Read Frank Schaeffer’s funny novel Portofino. Go live in Italy for a while.
Here’s a second clue. Most Christians, including many of the saints, don’t, in fact, have the discernment we are asking about, the knowledge of what God wills in every single choice. It’s rare. Could something as important as this be so rare? Could God have left almost all of us so clueless?
A third clue is Scripture. It records some examples—most of them miraculous, many of them spectacular—of God revealing his particular will. But these are reported in the same vein as miracles: as something remarkable, not as general policy. The “electronic gospel” of health and wealth, “name it and claim it,” is unscriptural, and so is the notion that we must find the one right answer to every practical problem, for the same reason: we are simply never assured such a blanket promise.
Darkness and uncertainty are as common in the lives of the saints, in Scripture as well as afterwards, as pain and poverty are. The only thing common to all humanity that the gospel guarantees to free us from is sin (and its consequences, death, guilt, and fear), not suffering and not uncertainties. If God had wanted us to know the clear, infallible way, he surely would have told us clearly and infallibly.
A fourth clue is something God did in fact give us: free will. Why? There are a number of good reasons—for instance, so that our love could be infinitely more valuable than instinctive, unfree animal affection. But I think I see another reason. As a teacher, I know that I sometimes should withhold answers from my students so that they find them themselves, and thus appreciate and remember them better—and also learn how to exercise their own judgment in finding answers themselves. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” God gave us some big fish, but he also gave us the freedom to fish for a lot of little ones (and some big ones) ourselves.
Reason and free will always go together. God created both in us as part of his image. He gives supernatural revelation to both: dogmas to our reason and commandments to our will. But just as he didn’t give us all the answers, even in theology, in applying the dogmas or drawing out the consequences of them, so he didn’t give us all the answers in morality or practical guidance, in applying the commandments and drawing out their consequences. He gave us the mental and moral equipment with which to do that, and he is not pleased when we bury our talent in the ground instead of investing it so that he will see how much it has grown in us when he returns.
In education, I know there are always two extremes. You can be too modern, too experimental, too Deweyan, too structureless. But you can also be too classical, too rigid. Students need initiative and creativity and originality too. God’s law is short. He gave us ten commandments, not ten thousand. Why? Why not a more complete list of specifics? Because he wanted freedom and variety. Why do you think he created so many persons? Why not just one? Because he loves different personalities. He wants his chorus to sing in harmony, but not in unison.
I know Christians who are cultivating ingrown eyeballs trying to know themselves so well—often by questionable techniques like the enneagram, or Oriental modes of prayer—so that they can make the decision that is exactly what God wants for them every time. I think it is much healthier to think about God and your neighbor more and yourself less, to forget yourself—follow your instincts without demanding to know everything about them. As long as you love God and act within his law, I think he wants you to play around a bit.
I’m happily haunted by Chesterton’s image of the playground fence erected around the children on top of the mountain so that they could play without fear of falling off the side. That’s why God gave us his law: not to make us worried but to keep us safe so that we could play the great games of life and love and joy.
Each of us has a different set of instincts and desires. Sin infects them, of course. But sin infects our reason and our bodies too; yet we are supposed to follow our bodily instincts (for example, hunger and self-preservation) and our mind’s instincts (for example, curiosity and logic). I think he wants us to follow our hearts. Surely, if John loves Mary more than Susan, he has more reason to think God is leading him to marry Mary than Susan. Why not treat all other choices by the same principle?
I am not suggesting, of course, that our hearts are infallible, or that following them justifies sinful behavior. Nor am I suggesting that the heart is the only thing to follow. I mentioned seven guidelines earlier. But surely it is God who designed our hearts—the spiritual heart with desire and will as much as the physical heart with aorta and valves. Our parents are sinful and fallible guides too, but God gave them to us to follow. So our hearts can be worth following too even though they are sinful and fallible. If your heart loves God, it is worth following. If it doesn’t, then you’re not interested in the problem of discernment of his will anyway.
Here is a fifth clue. When we do follow Augustine’s advice to “love God and then do what you will,” we usually experience great relief and peace. Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.
I know a few people who have abandoned Christianity altogether because they lacked that peace. They tried to be super-Christians in everything, and the pressure was just unendurable. They should have read Galatians.
Here is a sixth clue. If God has one right choice in everything you do, then you can’t draw any line. That means that God wants you to know which room to clean first, the kitchen or the bedroom, and which dish to pick up first, the plate or the saucer. You see, if you carry out this principle’s logical implications, it shows itself to be ridiculous, unlivable, and certainly not the kind of life God wants for us—the kind described in the Bible and the lives of the saints.
Clue number six is the principle that many diverse things are good; that good is plural. Even for the same person, there are often two or more choices that are both good. Good is kaleidoscopic. Many roads are right. The road to the beach is right and the road to the mountains is right, for God awaits us in both places. Goodness is multicolored. Only pure evil lacks color and variety. In hell there is no color, no individuality. Souls are melted down like lead, or chewed up together in Satan’s mouth. The two most uniform places on earth are prisons and armies, not the church.
Take a specific instance where different choices are both equally good. Take married sex. As long as you stay within God’s law—no adultery, no cruelty, no egotism, no unnatural acts, as, for example, contraception—anything goes. Use your imagination. Is there one and only one way God wants you to make love to your spouse? What a silly question! Yet making love to your spouse is a great good, and God’s will. He wants you to decide to be tender or wild, moving or still, loud or quiet, so that your spouse knows it’s you, not anyone else, not some book who’s deciding.
Clue number seven is an example from my own present experience. I am writing a novel for the first time, and learning how to do it. First, I placed it in God’s hands, told him I wanted to do it for his kingdom, and trusted him to lead me. Then, I simply followed my own interests, instincts, and unconscious. I let the story tell itself and the characters become themselves. God doesn’t stop me or start me. He doesn’t do my homework for me. But he’s there, like a good parent.
I think living is like writing a novel. It’s writing the story of your own life and even your own self (for you shape your self by all your choices, like a statue that is its own sculptor). God is the primary author, of course, the primary sculptor. But he uses different human means to get different human results. He is the primary author of each book in the Bible too, but the personality of each human author is no less clear there than in secular literature.
God is the universal storyteller. He wants many different stories. And he wants you to thank him for the unique story that comes from your free will and your choices too. Because your free will and his eternal plan are not two competing things, but two sides of one thing. We cannot fully understand this great mystery in this life, because we see only the underside of the tapestry. But in heaven, I think, one of the things we will praise and thank God the most for is how wildly and wonderfully and dangerously he put the driving wheel of our life into our hands—like a parent teaching a young child to drive.
You see, we have to learn that, because the cars are much bigger in heaven. There, we will rule angels and kingdoms.
God, in giving us all free will, said to us: “Your will be done.” Some of us turn back to him and say: “My will is that your will be done.” That is obedience to the first and greatest commandment. Then, when we do that, he turns to us and says: “And now, your will be done.” And then he writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices. ~Dr. Peter Kreeft
***The most eloquently written article on God's will. The relation between faith and reason, divine providence and free will, give a perfectly rational and hopeful explanation of what it means to live God's will... I think. There is much to be said for finding peace and joy - there's no better testament to God's goodness. There's something centrifugal in that it draws others to us and us to God. Love you ladies!
When we pray for wisdom to discern God’s will when it comes to choosing a mate, a career, a job change, a move, a home, a school, a friend, a vacation, how to spend money, or any other choice, big or little, whenever there are two or more different paths opening up before us and we have to choose, does God always will one of those paths for us? If so, how do we discern it?
Many Christians who struggle with this question today are unaware that Christians of the past can help them from their own experience. Christian wisdom embodied in the lives and teachings of the saints tells us two things that are relevant to this question.
First, they tell us that God not only knows and loves us in general but that he cares about every detail of our lives, and we are to seek to walk in his will in all things, big and little. Second, they tell us that he has given us free will and reason because he wants us to use it to make decisions. This tradition is exemplified in Saint Augustine’s famous motto “Love God and [then] do what you will.” In other words, if you truly love God and his will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.
Do these two pieces of advice pull us in opposite directions, or do they only seem to? Since there is obviously a great truth embodied in both of them, which do we emphasize the most to resolve our question of whether God has one right way for us?
I think the first and most obvious answer to this question is that it depends on which people are asking it. We have a tendency to emphasize one half of the truth at the expense of the other half, and we can do that in either of the two ways. Every heresy in the history of theology fits this pattern: for instance, emphasizing Christ’s divinity at the expense of his humanity or his humanity at the expense of his divinity; or emphasizing divine sovereignty at the expense of free will or free will at the expense of divine sovereignty.
Five general principles of discernment of God’s will that apply to all questions about it, and therefore to our question too, are the following:
Always begin with data, with what we know for sure. Judge the unknown by the known, the uncertain by the certain. Adam and Eve neglected that principle in Eden and ignored God’s clear command and warning for the devil’s promised pig in a poke.
Let your heart educate your mind. Let your love of God educate your reason in discerning his will. Jesus teaches this principle in John 7:17 to the Pharisees. (Would that certain Scripture scholars today would heed it!) They were asking how they could interpret his words, and he gave them the first principle of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation): “If your will were to do the will of my Father, you would understand my teaching.” The saints understand the Bible better than the theologians, because they understand its primary author, God, by loving him with their whole heart and their whole mind.
Have a soft heart but a hard head. We should be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” sharp as a fox in thought but loyal as a dog in will and deed. Soft-heartedness does not excuse soft-headedness, and hard-headedness does not excuse hard-heartedness. In our hearts we should be “bleeding-heart liberals” and in our heads “stuck-in-the-mud conservatives.”
All God’s signs should line up, by a kind of trigonometry. There are at least seven such signs: (1) Scripture, (2) church teaching, (3) human reason (which God created), (4) the appropriate situation, or circumstances (which he controls by his providence), (5) conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, (6) our individual personal bent or desire or instincts, and (7) prayer. Test your choice by holding it up before God’s face. If one of these seven voices says no, don’t do it. If none say no, do it.
Look for the fruits of the spirit, especially the first three: love, joy, and peace. If we are angry and anxious and worried, loveless and joyless and peaceless, we have no right to say we are sure of being securely in God’s will. Discernment itself should not be a stiff, brittle, anxious thing, but—since it too is part of God’s will for our lives—loving and joyful and peace-filled, more like a game than a war, more like writing love letters than taking final exams.
Now to our question. Does God have just one right choice for me to make each time? If so, I must find it. If not, I should relax more and be a little looser. Here are some clues to the answer.
The answer depends on what kind of person you are. I assume that many readers of this page are (1) Catholic, (2) orthodox and faithful to the teachings of the church, (3) conservative, and (4) charismatic. I have had many friends—casual, close, and very close—of this description for many years. In fact, I fit the description myself. So I speak from some experience when I say that people of this type have a strong tendency toward a certain character or personality type—which is in itself neither good nor bad—which needs to be nourished by one of these emphases more than the other. The opposite personality type would require the opposite emphasis.
My first clue, based on my purely personal observation of this kind of people, is that we often get bent out of human shape by our desire—in itself a very good desire—to find God’s perfect will for us. We give a terrible testimony to non-Christians; we seem unable to relax, to stop and smell God’s roses, to enjoy life as God gives it to us. We often seem fearful, fretful, terribly serious, humorless, and brittle—in short, the kind of people that don’t make a very good advertisement for our faith.
I am not suggesting that we compromise one iota of our faith to appeal to unbelievers. I am simply suggesting that we be human. Go watch a ball game. Enjoy a drink—just one—unless you’re at risk for alcoholism. Be a little silly once in a while. Tickle your kids—and your wife. Learn how to tell a good joke. Read Frank Schaeffer’s funny novel Portofino. Go live in Italy for a while.
Here’s a second clue. Most Christians, including many of the saints, don’t, in fact, have the discernment we are asking about, the knowledge of what God wills in every single choice. It’s rare. Could something as important as this be so rare? Could God have left almost all of us so clueless?
A third clue is Scripture. It records some examples—most of them miraculous, many of them spectacular—of God revealing his particular will. But these are reported in the same vein as miracles: as something remarkable, not as general policy. The “electronic gospel” of health and wealth, “name it and claim it,” is unscriptural, and so is the notion that we must find the one right answer to every practical problem, for the same reason: we are simply never assured such a blanket promise.
Darkness and uncertainty are as common in the lives of the saints, in Scripture as well as afterwards, as pain and poverty are. The only thing common to all humanity that the gospel guarantees to free us from is sin (and its consequences, death, guilt, and fear), not suffering and not uncertainties. If God had wanted us to know the clear, infallible way, he surely would have told us clearly and infallibly.
A fourth clue is something God did in fact give us: free will. Why? There are a number of good reasons—for instance, so that our love could be infinitely more valuable than instinctive, unfree animal affection. But I think I see another reason. As a teacher, I know that I sometimes should withhold answers from my students so that they find them themselves, and thus appreciate and remember them better—and also learn how to exercise their own judgment in finding answers themselves. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” God gave us some big fish, but he also gave us the freedom to fish for a lot of little ones (and some big ones) ourselves.
Reason and free will always go together. God created both in us as part of his image. He gives supernatural revelation to both: dogmas to our reason and commandments to our will. But just as he didn’t give us all the answers, even in theology, in applying the dogmas or drawing out the consequences of them, so he didn’t give us all the answers in morality or practical guidance, in applying the commandments and drawing out their consequences. He gave us the mental and moral equipment with which to do that, and he is not pleased when we bury our talent in the ground instead of investing it so that he will see how much it has grown in us when he returns.
In education, I know there are always two extremes. You can be too modern, too experimental, too Deweyan, too structureless. But you can also be too classical, too rigid. Students need initiative and creativity and originality too. God’s law is short. He gave us ten commandments, not ten thousand. Why? Why not a more complete list of specifics? Because he wanted freedom and variety. Why do you think he created so many persons? Why not just one? Because he loves different personalities. He wants his chorus to sing in harmony, but not in unison.
I know Christians who are cultivating ingrown eyeballs trying to know themselves so well—often by questionable techniques like the enneagram, or Oriental modes of prayer—so that they can make the decision that is exactly what God wants for them every time. I think it is much healthier to think about God and your neighbor more and yourself less, to forget yourself—follow your instincts without demanding to know everything about them. As long as you love God and act within his law, I think he wants you to play around a bit.
I’m happily haunted by Chesterton’s image of the playground fence erected around the children on top of the mountain so that they could play without fear of falling off the side. That’s why God gave us his law: not to make us worried but to keep us safe so that we could play the great games of life and love and joy.
Each of us has a different set of instincts and desires. Sin infects them, of course. But sin infects our reason and our bodies too; yet we are supposed to follow our bodily instincts (for example, hunger and self-preservation) and our mind’s instincts (for example, curiosity and logic). I think he wants us to follow our hearts. Surely, if John loves Mary more than Susan, he has more reason to think God is leading him to marry Mary than Susan. Why not treat all other choices by the same principle?
I am not suggesting, of course, that our hearts are infallible, or that following them justifies sinful behavior. Nor am I suggesting that the heart is the only thing to follow. I mentioned seven guidelines earlier. But surely it is God who designed our hearts—the spiritual heart with desire and will as much as the physical heart with aorta and valves. Our parents are sinful and fallible guides too, but God gave them to us to follow. So our hearts can be worth following too even though they are sinful and fallible. If your heart loves God, it is worth following. If it doesn’t, then you’re not interested in the problem of discernment of his will anyway.
Here is a fifth clue. When we do follow Augustine’s advice to “love God and then do what you will,” we usually experience great relief and peace. Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.
I know a few people who have abandoned Christianity altogether because they lacked that peace. They tried to be super-Christians in everything, and the pressure was just unendurable. They should have read Galatians.
Here is a sixth clue. If God has one right choice in everything you do, then you can’t draw any line. That means that God wants you to know which room to clean first, the kitchen or the bedroom, and which dish to pick up first, the plate or the saucer. You see, if you carry out this principle’s logical implications, it shows itself to be ridiculous, unlivable, and certainly not the kind of life God wants for us—the kind described in the Bible and the lives of the saints.
Clue number six is the principle that many diverse things are good; that good is plural. Even for the same person, there are often two or more choices that are both good. Good is kaleidoscopic. Many roads are right. The road to the beach is right and the road to the mountains is right, for God awaits us in both places. Goodness is multicolored. Only pure evil lacks color and variety. In hell there is no color, no individuality. Souls are melted down like lead, or chewed up together in Satan’s mouth. The two most uniform places on earth are prisons and armies, not the church.
Take a specific instance where different choices are both equally good. Take married sex. As long as you stay within God’s law—no adultery, no cruelty, no egotism, no unnatural acts, as, for example, contraception—anything goes. Use your imagination. Is there one and only one way God wants you to make love to your spouse? What a silly question! Yet making love to your spouse is a great good, and God’s will. He wants you to decide to be tender or wild, moving or still, loud or quiet, so that your spouse knows it’s you, not anyone else, not some book who’s deciding.
Clue number seven is an example from my own present experience. I am writing a novel for the first time, and learning how to do it. First, I placed it in God’s hands, told him I wanted to do it for his kingdom, and trusted him to lead me. Then, I simply followed my own interests, instincts, and unconscious. I let the story tell itself and the characters become themselves. God doesn’t stop me or start me. He doesn’t do my homework for me. But he’s there, like a good parent.
I think living is like writing a novel. It’s writing the story of your own life and even your own self (for you shape your self by all your choices, like a statue that is its own sculptor). God is the primary author, of course, the primary sculptor. But he uses different human means to get different human results. He is the primary author of each book in the Bible too, but the personality of each human author is no less clear there than in secular literature.
God is the universal storyteller. He wants many different stories. And he wants you to thank him for the unique story that comes from your free will and your choices too. Because your free will and his eternal plan are not two competing things, but two sides of one thing. We cannot fully understand this great mystery in this life, because we see only the underside of the tapestry. But in heaven, I think, one of the things we will praise and thank God the most for is how wildly and wonderfully and dangerously he put the driving wheel of our life into our hands—like a parent teaching a young child to drive.
You see, we have to learn that, because the cars are much bigger in heaven. There, we will rule angels and kingdoms.
God, in giving us all free will, said to us: “Your will be done.” Some of us turn back to him and say: “My will is that your will be done.” That is obedience to the first and greatest commandment. Then, when we do that, he turns to us and says: “And now, your will be done.” And then he writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices. ~Dr. Peter Kreeft
***The most eloquently written article on God's will. The relation between faith and reason, divine providence and free will, give a perfectly rational and hopeful explanation of what it means to live God's will... I think. There is much to be said for finding peace and joy - there's no better testament to God's goodness. There's something centrifugal in that it draws others to us and us to God. Love you ladies!
Friday, December 16, 2011
3rd Week of Advent: JOY!
Froeliche Weinachten
Joyeux Noel
Feliz Navidad
Buon Natale
Merry Christmas!!!!
Thank you Lord for the thoughtful people who have done little things for me today, just because. I so needed the encouragement and reminder of goodness.
Joyeux Noel
Feliz Navidad
Buon Natale
Merry Christmas!!!!
Thank you Lord for the thoughtful people who have done little things for me today, just because. I so needed the encouragement and reminder of goodness.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
An Email Forward
An Email Forward
SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.
COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.
NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.
BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.
SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.
A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.
A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.
A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.
AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.
AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.
A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
So im going on my first fully blind date...
a friend of a friend thinks he has a great catch for me.. and enjoys setting people up, so i said im down.. here is the preview:
Hey Maryanne,
Hey Maryanne,
I'll get back to you on the location for Saturday night... I still have to setup a location and the reservation will be under my name. As a heads up, this will be a blind date. You won't know his name, see his pic... etc. (so you can't google him) Same goes with him... he won't know your name or see your pic. I will tell just him a bit about you through email.
So here's the info on the dude:
1. He is assertive, yet shy.
2. He is getting back into fitness.
3. He is in the finance field or something like that. I believe he manages over 10 million dollars. (the money isn't his) He makes more than the average American, yet he still is not satisfied with his career. He constantly is looking for more even though he has accomplished more than the average person does in their lifetime when it comes to their career.
4. He is really book smart. I don't know if he graduated college, but he got almost a perfect on his SAT (don't worry he isn't too nerdy).
5. He is chill, and is looking for a long term relationship/is wanting to settle down.
6. He is young, my guess is 26 to 28 years old.
7. He looks like an average joe... doesn't show off, nor does he pressure women to do anything they don't want to do. He just wants to get to know someone on a personal level.
8. He is either Catholic or his parents are. I think that is the same religion as you.
9. Not sure what he does for fun other than hang out with friends... he works a lot.
Let me know what you think.
for your procrastinating pleasure..
These guys do videography for weddings... their videos are so great. Im a web wedding stalker, thanks Meaghan. I think i want someone to do this at my wedding..
http://www.artexproductions.com/se/portfolio/
http://www.artexproductions.com/se/portfolio/
Friday, December 2, 2011
Courage
Someone put this on facebook. It really affected me. I have never heard such eloquence with regard to homosexuality and Catholicism. What a strong person.
Fact: The Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality is anything but popular.
It’s something we as Catholics shy away from talking about. Maybe that’s because it makes others uncomfortable, or maybe because often we don’t truly understand it ourselves. The fact is that I can sit here all day and tell you that my stance against same-sex marriage is not born out of hatred, bigotry, or ignorance, but the majority of people would probably not believe me. When it comes down to it, this issue isn’t going to be solved in political debates. It’s far too personal.
So rather than getting into a lesson on Catholic moral teaching (though feel free to contact me if you want me to cover that later), or talking about homosexuality in the abstract (creating hypothetical people and hypothetical situations), I thought I’d refer you to an article written by someone who understands the Church’s teaching on homosexuality far better than I do, because as a Catholic who happens to be gay, he is choosing to live it.
[I have never met this man. I found the following post on the blog, Little Catholic Bubble. Apparently, though, he recently went public with his own blog, as well.]
Fact: The Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality is anything but popular.
It’s something we as Catholics shy away from talking about. Maybe that’s because it makes others uncomfortable, or maybe because often we don’t truly understand it ourselves. The fact is that I can sit here all day and tell you that my stance against same-sex marriage is not born out of hatred, bigotry, or ignorance, but the majority of people would probably not believe me. When it comes down to it, this issue isn’t going to be solved in political debates. It’s far too personal.
So rather than getting into a lesson on Catholic moral teaching (though feel free to contact me if you want me to cover that later), or talking about homosexuality in the abstract (creating hypothetical people and hypothetical situations), I thought I’d refer you to an article written by someone who understands the Church’s teaching on homosexuality far better than I do, because as a Catholic who happens to be gay, he is choosing to live it.
[I have never met this man. I found the following post on the blog, Little Catholic Bubble. Apparently, though, he recently went public with his own blog, as well.]
I have heard a lot about how mean the Church is, and how bigoted, because she opposes gay marriage. How badly she misunderstands gay people, and how hostile she is towards us. My gut reaction to such things is: Are you freaking kidding me? Are we even talking about the same church?(Me again) – I don’t know about you, but I am pretty blown away by that kind of courage. …Thoughts?
When I go to Confession, I sometimes mention the fact that I’m gay, to give the priest some context. (And to spare him some confusion: Did you say ‘locker room’? What were you doing in the women’s…oh.) I’ve always gotten one of two responses: either compassion, encouragement, and admiration, because the celibate life is difficult and profoundly counter-cultural; or nothing at all, not even a ripple, as if I had confessed eating too much on Thanksgiving.
Of the two responses, my ego prefers the first — who doesn’t like thinking of themselves as some kind of hero? — but the second might make more sense. Being gay doesn’t mean I’m special or extraordinary. It just means that my life is not always easy. (Surprise!) And as my friend J. said when I told him recently about my homosexuality, “I guess if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.” Meaning that nobody lives without a burden of one kind or another. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said: “The man who has not suffered, what can he possibly know, anyway?”
Where are all these bigoted Catholics I keep hearing about? When I told my family a year ago, not one of them responded with anything but love and understanding. Nobody acted like I had a disease. Nobody started treating me differently or looking at me funny. The same is true of every one of the Catholic friends that I’ve told. They love me for who I am.
Actually, the only time I get shock or disgust or disbelief, the only time I’ve noticed people treating me differently after I tell them, is when I tell someone who supports the gay lifestyle. Celibacy?? You must be some kind of freak.
Hooray for tolerance of different viewpoints. I’m grateful to gay activists for some things — making people people more aware of the prevalence of homosexuality, making homophobia less socially acceptable — but they also make it more difficult for me to be understood, to be accepted for who I am and what I believe. If I want open-mindedness, acceptance, and understanding, I look to Catholics.
Is it hard to be gay and Catholic? Yes, because like everybody, I sometimes want things that are not good for me. The Church doesn’t let me have those things, not because she’s mean, but because she’s a good mother. If my son or daughter wanted to eat sand I’d tell them: that’s not what eating is for; it won’t nourish you; it will hurt you. Maybe my daughter has some kind of condition that makes her like sand better than food, but I still wouldn’t let her eat it. Actually, if she was young or stubborn enough, I might not be able to reason with her — I might just have to make a rule against eating sand. Even if she thought I was mean.
So the Church doesn’t oppose gay marriage because it’s wrong; she opposes it because it’s impossible, just as impossible as living on sand. The Church believes, and I believe, in a universe that means something, and in a God who made the universe — made men and women, designed sex and marriage from the ground up. In that universe, gay marriage doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the picture, and we’re not about to throw out the rest of the picture.
If you don’t believe in these things, if you believe that men and women and sex and marriage are pretty much whatever we say they are, then okay: we don’t have much left to talk about. That’s not the world I live in.
So, yes, it’s hard to be gay and Catholic — it’s hard to be anything and Catholic — because I don’t always get to do what I want. Show me a religion where you always get to do what you want and I’ll show you a pretty shabby, lazy religion. Something not worth living or dying for, or even getting up in the morning for. That might be the kind of world John Lennon wanted, but John Lennon was kind of an idiot.
Would I trade in my Catholicism for a worldview where I get to marry a man? Would I trade in the Eucharist and the Mass and the rest of it? Being a Catholic means believing in a God who literally waits in the chapel for me, hoping I’ll stop by just for ten minutes so he can pour out love and healing on my heart. Which is worth more — all this, or getting to have sex with who I want? I wish everybody, straight or gay, had as beautiful a life as I have.
I know this isn’t a satisfactory answer. I don’t think any words could be. I try to make my life a satisfactory answer, to this question and to others: What are people for? What is love, and what does it look like? How do we get past our own selfishness so we can love God and our neighbors and ourselves?
It’s a work in progress.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
I hate feeling anxious! I’ll be in such a good place and still am in a good place, but I freak myself out about the future.
Why do I do that? And how do I make it stop? I just want to live in the moment. It will be the most random ridiculous things that make me flip out too.
I was on facebook and one of the guys that people back home went to school with died yesterday. He was probably about 28 or so and had some chronic random disease. No idea who this guy is but I just started thinking about the future and how you never know what’s going to happen. And I really don’t know that I care what happens. I mean I do care, but I’m excited for it. It’s like I freak out that God has it out for me and I’m going to wake up one morning with cancer or die in a freak accident or not be able to have kids or never meet a guy or I will have to be a nun. And God will just look at me and say tough tuna. But that’s not normally how I think. And that’s surely not a God that I want to believe in. But it does get hard at times to see what’s so providential in death, disease, war, etc…
Sometimes I think I'm afraid of losing control. I really struggle with acceptance. I know by my nature that I am such a perfectionist and things that aren't perfect by nature just throw me for a loop. I think I lack trust. Trust in God, His goodness and mercy and trust in myself. Hope, trust and peace... Those are my grown-up Christmas wishes.
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