Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Sunday ADD Irregulars, Refugees, Phamily. Triggeratti, Dawn Patrol, Day Walkers, Early Birds, Later Dayers, Supporters, Members, Conversants, Lurkers, Fascinating People and Beautiful Bigots! I hope you have a beautiful day ahead of you and your weekend has been a good one.
Today in Cath-O-land we celebrate the Solemn Feast of Corpus Christi. At one point in Catholic history it was celebrated on the Thursday after Pentecost, but has since been transferred to the Sunday after Holy Trinity. Today our parish will celebrate the feast with a procession on our parish grounds. We will visit the cemetery to pray for the dead, the chapel to celebrate the beginnings of our community and finally return to the church with the final Benediction.
As a priest the Eucharist and Reconciliation define my life. The Eucharist is the most amazing thing I do on a daily basis. To honestly believe that bread & wine become the Body & Blood of Jesus Christ is either miraculously amazing and sheer nut-baggery. I obviously tend to favor the amazing side of this binary choice rather than the nutty side, but I can easily see why some outside of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and a few other believers in Presence might think so. Something, Someone so amazing is meant to change our lives, but God does not work magic, He works grace. Grace is like water, it only changes seeds into plants, it can never make a rock spout life. Every soul has that choice to be a seed for grace or a rock of resistance.
The sprouting, growing and blossoming of the soul will all depend upon the recipient's desire, interest and effort to know God through Scripture, prayer and other sources of study and formation. No Christian can proudly proclaim their flawless discipleship in following the Master. We all sadly continue to struggle against sin and often fall on the path of following Jesus. The key is to rise in sincere repentance and follow Him again. The real struggle is the sincere repentance, real change against addictive or repetitive habits is hard. Saying you are sorry, with the Divine or humans and making no effort to address the wrong, remedy the injury or really change your behavior is empty. God is patient with slow change, but has no time for games of deception.
This whole last bit is why I so enjoy celebrating Reconciliation aka Confession. It is not meant to be a rinse and repeat process of habitual sins that never change, but a sincere effort to acknowledge sins, seek repentance and open ones heart to transforming grace. I know many outside of the circus of Catholicism wonder about it. It is never meant to be a do what you want and then be sorry, any god worth His/Her/Its salt ought to see through such games. The God of Israel certainly does, and His Son seems pretty sharp on the upkeep as well. Games of deception do not sit well with Them.
Eucharist is the most amazing thing I celebrate and Reconciliation is the most humbling thing I celebrate. I am after all just another Disciple trying to help others discover the Master. For Catholics, faith is both personal and communal, directly to God and also within the community. I am saved by God within the community of the church. I encounter God personally and in the company of others in worship and other expressions of faith. It is never a either or type of choice, but rather a both and. Well enough rambling about the faith I love, I hope whatever defines your life, faith or otherwise, you love and try your best to follow. (Unless it is Communism, Fascism, Socialism or another flavors of oppressive ideologies, in which case wake the hell up!) Some may think that about Christians, but they are probably just closet commies or sofa king totalitarians who thankfully don't possess any real authority, just opinions. Everyone has a faith in the end, some are just more readily discernible because they have a community and creed. Happy Sunday my friends!
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
