Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Monday ADD Irregulars, WSN Vagabonds, Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversants, Lurkers, PHAM & Dawn Patrol, Triggeratti, Fascinating People and Bestie Bigots and Seekers of Sanity and Civility! (The Quarterlings generally don't get this post that I circulate at Rubin Report, Phetasy, Triggernometry, Tulsi and at Padre's.)
In Cath-O-land we are celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is another Marian feast day to the same person, The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ, True God & True Man. Not all subscribe to such realities, so your interest in this post may vary. The long a short of such a celebration is a miraculous occurrence to an individual that is shared with the rest of the Church. There are various processes that vet occurrences of the miraculous and depending on the century and location were done with honest research or ignorant acceptance.
I do believe in miracles (que the song, you sexy thing) but I am ever a skeptic about such things. I prefer stories of martyrs and scholars rather than miracle workers, mystics or other occurrences of the supernatural. Remember the St. Nicholas post - I have questions about the dismembered children being reassembled and returned to life. Possible, sure. But I have a lot of questions and doubts. If you believe in a God who can create from nothing, a God who is all powerful, such a Divine Person is capable of doing anything. Miracles by nature break the rules of understood science or reality. I don't see them as a contradiction as much as an abstention of one's understanding of the experience. Some miracles are not miracles at all, but realities not properly understood. One can reasonably question reported miracles as an incomplete understanding of the science or realities of the experience. For those who are profound skeptics, there are no miracles just human ignorance, superstition and religious poppycock (such a fun word!).
Images like Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Shroud of Turin prompt questions and discussions. That such things are real is indisputable, but are the authentic? Are they examples of hoaxes and pranks for the imbecilic? I think not, but some think so. Even people of faith can have questions about such things. Every community has the freedom to say we believe and practice X and if you do, you are one of us, and if you don't, you aren't part of us. It often brings terrible divisions and reactions when such rifts develop, it is the story of broken humanity.
In the better chapters of humanity, individuals are free to decide if such miraculous things deepen their faith or unnecessarily complicate it, in worse days the powers compel and outliers are made to suffer. For myself, miraculous things like the Shroud and the Juan's Mantle invite me to humility of faith. The Mysterium Tremendem & Mysterium Fascinans acts in humble ways to keep me off-balance and questions things I want to take as a given. Blessed Feast day to all Disciples and Happy Monday to all of you.
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.”
