Serve

Prepare yourself to serve the Lord. There is always work to be done. We must always be ready to volunteer. Make time to serve the God by working on a committee at your church. Find something which interests you. Find something which might help you learn something new about your faith. May you find a way to serve God. May you learn the beauty of humility, charity, compassion, and mercy. May your faith be strengthened by your effort.

A Quick Thought

Beloved: Please remember that as Christians we are part of the living, growing, hoping, loving visible Church; let this give peace; please remember that the foundation was made by Our Lord Jesus Christ with his supreme sacrifice; may this provide guidance and comfort. The death of Our Lord Jesus Christ gives each of us eternal life. We believe that we are members of the apostolic Church; allow this to give you hope. We believe the Sacraments connect us with God, are both opportunity and obligation for service to God; allow this to teach you how to love.

Peace Be With You

In modern times there has been a lamentable acceleration in self-consciousness on the part of being Christian publicly, a fearful progress of acceptable doubt and hypocrisy, and a notable development of the estimation and valuation of the status quo which mutes the true meanings and lessons of Holy Scriptures. Christians continually face all types of criticisms which aim to narrow the scope of our belief in God and his importance to all people. That Christ lived is accepted as historical fact; that Christ is the son sparks all types of debates and conflicts.

As individuals, we, the faithful followers of Jesus Christ, must do more than attend church routinely, scheduled between a manicure and your car’s wheel realignment. Our lives must be filled with and display our passionate love for the Church universal; for Christ who lived among men and preached love and fairness; for God who only asks for our sincere love and respect and who offers love, mercy, and forgiveness; and for the Holy Spirit who is there guiding us toward goodness, holiness. Our devotion must be true. Our devotion must be filled with humility, charity, reverence, and mercy. Our devotion must be natural, reflecting all that we believe, encouraging us to increase our good works and to share our love with all who are in need of it.

The “lamentable acceleration in self-consciousness” concerns each Christian. The one truth that all Christians should accept is that God loved us so much that he sent his son to save us from sin. This act of love should never be forgotten. As Christian’s our lives should be dedicated to the application of love extended beyond ourselves, extended to our neighbors. Our secular world encourages us to limit this love and creates barriers to easily, gently expressing it. We are encouraged to remember ourselves and our comfort first, encouraged to utilize resources first for personal gain and enjoyment and then for public good, encouraged to be sceptical and suspicious of our neighbors and all that which is unseen by us. This self-conscious leads to selfishness, greed, envy, lust. This self-consciousness leads us away from the Church, away from God, away from salvation.

How easy it is for us to forget or discount the goodness and holiness that we encounter in our daily lives. How easy it is for us to forget “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” We must take time to consider these words individually both in context and out of context. We must find a way to breathe hope, a way to breathe life, and a way to breathe love into these words, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

We live in a time dependent upon expert testimony, eyewitness testimony, and all types raw data both explained and unexplained, computer generated models, scientific tests, scientific models. We are constantly searching for signs, reading signs, avoiding signs. As Christians we are asked to believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As humans we sometimes doubt this. Pop culture and the secular world prey on our insecurities, looking for ways to cast doubt and suspension on the religion. This is not new, it has been occurring for the last two thousand years. It will continue into the future. We must open our hearts, souls, and minds to God. Demanding signs from God is not the answer. Living all life of love, hope, and peace is the answer. Our goodness needs to start within us simply because we love God and want to please him. Our goodness needs to start within us simply because we know that the things that Christ said will make us better human beings filled with empathy and compassion. Our goodness needs to start within us simply because the Holy Trinity leads us toward salvation.

Being Christian presents each of us with the obligation to love our neighbor. Jesus did not say be fearful of your neighbor, be sceptical of your neighbor, be suspicious of your neighbor. Jesus said love your neighbor.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

Being Christian presents each of us with the obligation to love our neighbor. Jesus did not say be fearful of your neighbor, be sceptical of your neighbor, be suspicious of your neighbor. Jesus said love your neighbor. Human beings are by nature inquisitive, filled with all types of questions, filled with doubt. In the right context doubt is good; but there are some events, some parts of our lives of Christians where we must blindly, lovingly proceed based upon faith, hope, and love; proceed with no visible signs or evidence beyond the goodness and holiness within our hearts and the lessons from the Holy Scripture. We must always remember that Christ said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

It is our obligation, our responsibility to find and develop our own way to apply this to our lives. We first must take the time to understand and acknowledge the request. Then, we must allow ourselves time to create our own application of the request as individuals and as members of the universal Church. Is God asking for a warm, loving, hopeful passion or a cool passivity? We must always remember that we live and exist within multiple communities in need of our empathy, compassion, and prayers. Please do not limit your kindness, your goodness, your hopefulness to simply one community. Never fear love, never fear the pain of love. Remember the pain and suffering and sacrifice of Christ.

Being Christian will always be risky, will always be radical. But remember to meet doubt with love, confront doubt with love.

Words

dilettante
distraught
perseverance
preserve
soapbox derby
didactic
kinetic energy
religion
palatable
palate
palletize
pall
erudite

The list are some of the words that I have included in my entries. Some I had trouble spelling correctly, others I just like how the word looks and sounds. Some have vivid memories. There are other words not included but important also. Everything in life builds toward a new moment, new experience. As I am thinking about my vocation I am seeking out words, new and ancient, from different civilizations, with a freshness, a boldness of hope, love, and human dignity.

I must continue learning about fairness, social justice, freedom, human dignity. I must remember to apply the Beatitudes to my daily life.

How do I fit into this parish? into the Universal Church? What can I offer? I must always be reminded of the sacrifice, suffering, and love of other Catholics who found the courage to do the right thing, who found the courage to follow in the footsteps of Christ.

“THE CHURCH, LIKE JESUS, HAS TO GO on denouncing sin in our own day. It has to denounce the selfishness that is hidden in everyone's heart, the sin that dehumanizes persons, destroys families, and turns money, possessions, profit, and power into the ultimate ends for which persons strive.” (Archbishop Oscar Romero, August 6, 1977)

Message of Love

We live in a time of institutionalized sin. We accept all types of deceptions, falsifications, and temptations. Our secular cultures abuses us with all types of scandals and rumors which encourage and nourish all types of vices and sins to fester and grow within our hearts with greed, selfishness, and other undesirable, unloving traits promoted as beneficial and natural.

As Christians we accept that we are sinners and try to avoid sinning. The Church reminds us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to worship only God.

Still the sinning and temptation continue, but we have the lessons from the Gospels leading us to the power and glory of God.

Sinfulness causes our hearts and souls to feel fatigued, confuses us. The glamor of evil is a serpentine road which crosses itself several times; it is a harsh course full of discontent, anxiety, selfishness of heartlessness, of fear, of destructive inquisitiveness to the poor decaying clamor of indecision and deception. Our secular culture deliberately challenges and ridicules all that was good, decent, and noble within our lives, and now we constantly have to assert what is sacred, what is essential.

How beautiful is the kingdom of God, which encourages goodness in the world, where all that which is divine waits, all love, all mercy, all forgiveness, all hope—a kingdom of charity, humility, obedience. How wonderful to live in peace, to live with God’s love for eternity!

We all have been tempted by the secular culture; we all have learned ways to resist it.

Our secular culture does not want our sincerity or our respect; it provides enough stimulation to make each of us a conversational diletante, with only trivial information and its derivatives to guide us away from seeking God’s forgiveness and mercy.

We must learn to pray to God in humble, honest, loving words. We must praise God for each breath we take, each mountain we see. We must thank God for the entirety of our lives, the good, the bad, the misspelled, the ungrammatical, the typographical errors, the beauty, his goodness and kindness to us. We must always thank God for all the priests, the clergy. For it is in our Church that Christ’s lessons of love continue to be shared, to be taught, to be lived every day.

The mission of the Church remains one of love, education, and preparation. The message of the Church is love.

“The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.” Archbishop Oscar Romero

Truth asks us to find Meaning

through the righteousness that comes from faith. Romans 4:13


Being Catholic affords us many opportunities for a continuing education in the mercifulness and love of God. We have daily Masses, we have the Liturgy of the Word, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we have the sacraments. The aim of the Church is to provide the tools necessary for us to live simply, lovingly as Christ lived and as Christ wants us to live with fairness and social justice. We have the opportunity and responsibility to encounter and learn how to become better Christians every day. Our education in being Christian is not finite; new things are being added every day. The teachings and dogma of the Church are constant, lasting for thousands of years in some cases. How we apply the teachings and ideas of the Church does change.

We live in a time of white lies, coverups, statements, and declarations. So many words bombard us constantly. Politicians misleading voters, celebrities being unfaithful to their spouses, athletes having controlled substance problems. We hear these things every day. We read about them in newspapers and magazine. We wait for the next person, the next story, the next white line, the next denial, the next press conference with a short apology and some statement of regret.

Saying that we are sinners is easy; our society teaches us to admit this when we are caught with our hands in the cookie jar without a plausible explanation. We live in a time when every sin can be downgraded. The concept of sin is difficult for some people to accept. There are choices, good and bad. Sin surrounds us. We are in a guerilla war with sin and many of us do not know it. Our society now desensitizes us to sin, encourages us to sin, to act immorally.

As Christians we must always remember God. We must always remember that our lives are not simply for us but for him; we have the responsibility to be humble loving servants for God.

It is not enough to admit that we are sinners; we must understand what it means to be a sinner. The words are meaningless without knowledge and understanding. We live in a time of over-stimulation and meaninglessness. So much information is available to us in all types of formats, amounts, places. We can not process it all. We can not understand it all.

Sometimes, it is easier to focus on one thing, to try and learn about that one thing. Let everything else fall to sides temporarily. The Beatitudes are great for this. The Lord’s Prayer is also great.

As an example the Lord’s Prayer provides a great place for us to focus briefly. The Lord’s prayer appears in two of the Gospels. It’s structure is similar to the Ten Commandments. The first part relates to God, the second relates to us. The Lord’s prayer presents Christ’s idea about community to us. Notice the complete absence of the word “I”. Notice the use of the word “our”.

As Christians we must remember to seek out goodness. Being good is not a weakness; it is a sign of strength. As goodness grows within us, our knowledge of God also grows.

Truth waits for us. God waits for us. Words are transient. God presents each us with many opportunities to observe goodness, to learn about holiness. We have the Holy Scriptures, the lives of the Saints, prayers, the Liturgy of the Word, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the Sacraments, and we have each other. At some point in time when even we ourselves neither know or realize it we are by our actions teaching someone about our faith; about goodness, fairness, love; about God. It happens quietly, it provides hope to someone in need.

With patience and hope allow yourself time for a relaxed period of discernment, seek only Truth, listen only for God’s voice. Let your personal conceits and judgments fade into the background. Lead your thoughts toward the Light, do not worry or fret about dark, shadowy ideas. Concentrate on finding ways to be pleasing to God. Allow yourself to avoid any thoughts which would encourage you to neglect loving God. Simply believe and accept that being lovingly obedient and humble before God is necessary and profitable for our souls.Only direct our minds toward goodness, hope, forgiveness, mercy, love; the connection with God will grow. With patience, prayer and hope our eyes will see the Truth, our ears will hear the Truth.

Wisdom

The Church provides many opportunities for us to learn about ourselves and our religion. In fact being Christian is in reality being a professional student without the chance of parole or commencement ceremony. As Christians we are expected to learn about the virtues and then apply them to our lives. As Christians we are expected to learn about how to avoid sin, and then apply that to our lives. As Christians we are expected to always be seeking the Wisdom of God. We must read and reflect upon the Word.

As Christians we must nurture and encourage an enthusiasm for the Wisdom of God. Our lives should reflect our belief that everything in our lives is related to the Wisdom of the Creator.

In our own private ways we should try to help others discover the honest, loving, compassionate face of God. The more we learn and share, the deeper our own faith can become.

Erudition is needed as we journey toward God. We must learn and understand the true meaning of the Nativity, Jesus’ teachings, Jesus’ preaching, and the Crucifixion. Our faith asks us to be passionate believers of God, to champion social justice and peace, and to bear witness of the goodness of God.

Advent

I sometimes like to describe the world in which I live as a boisterous donnybrook filled with double entendres, dark horses and other delusions. Everyone enjoys talking decadence and hiding behind diplomatic immunity. We create conflicts and explanations; we destroy peace and hope.

If only our sins were naturally deciduous like leaves on many autumn trees, then our natural goodness and love could flourish.

Advent provides an opportunity for each one of us to examine ourselves, our hearts, our minds, and our souls as we prepare for the arrival of our Lord. The Church encourages us to examine our lives and to put things in the right spot as we move toward Christmas.

I like to think of faith as a covalent bond. Some people like to imagine faith as a coup de théâtre. Some need to look at any belief in God in the broadest, most extreme and exaggerated terms. Humility, charity, dignity, mercy, and love are seen as weaknesses. Nihilism is easy for some adults to accept as magazines, television, and other instruments of the media create a complacent world of ever changing adultery, ever accepting idolatry. Faith in God allows us to desire peaceful coexistence. Faith in God is the one efficient renewable resource.

We live in a world concerned with saturated fatty acids and sacred cows. We allow ourselves to be selfish, to live lives with minimal compassion, mercy, sacrifice. Life is a satire and we all know one or two satyrs.

As Christians we need to develop the skills to examine our lives and make adjustments to correct our lives, to move toward goodness and holiness. As Christians we must remember to love all mankind, to believe and promote social justice for everyone. As Christians we must acknowledge that our lives contain many unexpected tangent moments.

Everyone knows about the Ten Commandments; we have to follow them. We must find ways to incorporate the Beatitudes in our daily lives. As Christians we are called to be evangelistic about and for our faith and our God.

We are all called to be more, to do more, to pray more, to learn more, to hope more, and to help more.

Our faith needs to be an active and assertive part of our lives. A life of holiness encourages hope and joy.

So Long The Silence Remains

I watched too much television once. At least I learned about forensics and asking questions. Television is all about asking questions and sharing suspicions. Television is just heat lightning on the horizon. It flashes occasionally, but there’s no thunder, no rain. My friends say that television is not good for our minds and causes typographical errors. Someone suggested that we should read books.

I read a book once. At least I tried. I don’t know if it counts if the book is never discussed or used in conversation. But I tried to read a book and contemplate life and other things. Most of the time my friends and I just talk about each other and people in the news and familiar people we see around town. And my friends say that I have good manners but bad mannerisms. And my friends say that my mannerisms are so stylized and playful, that sometimes it is hard for them to know when I am bored with other people from around town. The only topic this summer is sex. Only two reminders forgiveness and mercy. And everyone has an opinion on the church’s opinion on abortion and someone wrote something about homelessness and poverty and the death penalty. But in this town there is always day chasing night, wrong teasing right.

There is always talk of vacation plans with lemonade, there is always talk of vocation plans in prayers at church. I wonder if is anyone listening. Is anyone carefully putting the words from the sermons into nice genuine suitcases in the lobby of a patient mind, ready to be unpacked later, unpacked and studied later? Will the words be neat or squished? And the words will be words with meaning, some of my friends try to explain to me when they speak of love, faith and God. And the words will be more than words for those who have a desire or longing for a true vocation.

Some folks are lucky to be freckled with hope and love and understanding all over their faces and all through their hearts! And vocation is really a nice word, really nice. So nice to me and some of my friends. Something in the word makes me smile. I sometimes hear “welcome” and “thank you” and “you are loved” when I hear the word vocation.

Sometimes just mumbling the word under my breath, makes me smile. There is some type of power in vocation. Thinking about the word makes me smile. I like thinking about words that make me smile. I always like to remember them or to talk about them with or without my friends around.

And one Sunday when my friends were out of town I went to church all by myself. And I arrived early before the organist even touched the keyboard. Then I glanced at the other faces in the other pews and thought about vocation all by myself. Thought about my responsibilities, my being humble, my job. I just stared and stared until I had to close my eyes and think of the sacraments and the virtues and prayers and folks freckled with God’s hope and love.

Then, as the choir began to sing, my heart felt something beyond the melody, beyond the words. My heart hummed “Yes.”

And then I grabbed vocation and looked at it with a silence infused by Saint Paul’s writings!

That was my first truly adult thought. It was the most romantic, selfless moment of my life.

Until I remembered “So long the silence remains, So long the prayers begin”

Twilight Thoughts, July 24

Being Catholic is both perfectly natural and perfectly reasonable for me. There is an abundance of literature on the history and traditions of the Church. My faith is both reasonable and challenging.

Books have always entertained me. Books require patience and scheduling. A good book is always a private pleasure.

My adventures in reading serious Catholic books has reminded me of one quiet, understated truth. Reading is interactive. The entire brain and maybe even the soul has to be turned on. The entire being has to be willing to immerse itself in the text, willing to trust the text, willing to reflect on the text impartially.

How books and articles are chosen is not important. How the text is approached is very important. The basic questions that we are dealing with today were asked one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. They will be asked again one hundred years, two hundred years into the future.

The nature of God has not changed. The nature of man has not changed. Books teach us that fact. There is nothing original. Originality is a great concept or idea casually placed in movie reviews and on dust jackets.

My faith helps me to be a reasonable, intelligent person. Literature pleases me.
Faith challenges me, gives me compassion, helps me understand duty and sacrifice.

The danger in modern life is to much emphasis being placed on the individual and too much emphasis being placed on material things. There is the understated steady downbeat of weakness, vulnerability which can be prevented or avoided if something is purchased. Faith tells us to resist this. This is a time when abstinence should be applied to all areas of modern life. Visits to coffee shops, visits to gyms, extended internet surfing, watching television all these should be reduced, and more time be devoted to performing good works, serving God. There are too many diversions. Modern life easily prioritizes diversions.

For many people faith is like any spectator sport. They know their roles. They show up, watch, and leave. Attending church is added to their calendar before brunch or shopping.

Faith allows us to experience something divine and beautiful.

more alive

So, then people do go to church to pray; I sometimes feel more alive during Mass than at any other point during the day.

I like being away from the hurly-burly, free from the insanity of the pervasive profanity. There are times that I like being quiet, avoiding speaking, responding to this statement, editing that sentence. A good conversation can be very stressful.

Being in the stillness of a church, I realized that the church is not ever still. Someone is always entering or leaving a church. Someone is always sitting down or standing up. Prayer is always going on.

Sweet prayers are made of more than words, more than feelings. How we pray can be very individual!

Prayers can be the soundtrack of a person's life.

Being

I enjoyed the languor of this Sunday morning as I prepared for Mass. How peaceful this day began. I remained in bed trying to make sense of a dream. Then, I tried to formulate an answer to a question about how I feel about life after baptism, how I feel about the Church after one year. The question had been asked halfway through a telephone conversation.

When I reached for an answer, initially, I immediately responded with a short list of current actions and deeds. My response was a few sentences and then the conversation turned to something else. This morning, I paused and reflected on the emptiness of my response. I had created a mist of polite babble instead of shining a light directly onto my feelings.

The Church is very important to me. My Baptism on March 22, 2008 is my life's most cherished event. I had thought about it off and on for years. Actually, going through the RCIA process provided me with some very important answers about the essential, vulnerable me. The RCIA process, also, simultaneously, revived and nurtured a desire to do service for the Lord.

There is nothing unique about my conversion. I am pleased that my fervor is still growing. My heart is filled with hope and praise. Being baptized presented more responsibilities, more things and people to pray for and about. There is a greater need to practice social justice, to live simply.

I have been exposed to such goodness and compassion which encourages me to act similarly. Being Baptized is the best thing that has happened to me. I am learning to love, universally and unconditionally. That is a great thing.

I feel more youthful, more alert, more alive, more happy. There have been one or two moments of frustration but even that has led to a little more knowledge.

I like being Catholic.