Like Jesus we are asked to journey from neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town proclaiming and sharing the news of salvation, the news of the Kingdom of God, the news of the Kingdom of heaven.
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
Friday, September 16, 2011
Thought of Today
Preparing
The Kingdom of heaven somehow creates different images in my mind depending upon my mood. Sometimes it is purely high tech, gleaming, shiny cinematic science fiction science fantasy place of extreme cleanliness and order. Other times it is lush and tropical. Other times it is a majestic place of great statues, great temples, and people wearing robes.
The abundance of images is a product of a fertile imagination.
Blessed the poor in spirit creates an equal number of images, equal number of opportunities to praise and serve the Lord.
As Christians we are asked to trust in goodness, holiness, kindness.
Preparing our spirit is important, preparing our spirit to love, honor, and serve God is important.
As Christians we seek to be like the blessed poor in spirit. We seek God’s mercy, God’s compassion, God’s love.
We seek salvation, we seek eternal life.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Assemble and listen - December 17, 2010
There is but one thing necessary thing in life. That is to know and love God; to have God within your heart, mind, and soul; to have the benefits of God within your entire being.
It is essential that we learn how to approach and how to adore God, both during Mass and outside of Mass, inside of a church and outside of a church. Personal resources will have to be developed to seek and to experience divinity. We must learn how to detach ourselves from our possessions, from our thoughts, from all things which might be taken, all things which might be lost. It is important, absolutely essential to understand and believe what is eternal. Everything in life which is not eternal is temporary, simply borrowed. All those things which help us gain admittance to heaven are real, are beautiful when they are used appropriately for the glory and love of God. As Christians we are asked to learn, to adore, to understand, to accept, to experience, to share, to teach about God, about his love and mercy for each of us, about loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. This is a responsibility. This is our duty. This is God’s law, God’s plan. When we follow it, we experience happiness, we move closer to God, closer to heaven. When we truly, honestly, deeply love and serve God nothing can stop us, not even death. The purpose of our Christian life is to develop a peaceful mind, to discover and extoll the presence of God, to discern how to better serve God. Being in communion with God, listening to and following his instruction is the goal. There is no reason to have fear. Let the love for God give you strength. Let it teach you to sacrifice, teach you to pray, teach you to love, teach you to live with the beauty and peace of the principles of fairness and social justice as taught by Jesus Christ. All moral thought and ethics will begin with love and loyalty to God. Let his will act as your guide. All greatness exists for those who do his work patiently, lovingly, gently. Being Christian means allowing and wanting God to dwell within our beings, our complete beings and wanting this completely and consciously. The potential for goodness, kindness, and holiness waits to expand within each Christian, waits for moral fairness, moral decency, moral superiority to flourish. A superiority of spirit, a kind of purity which is obtained and maintained by prayer and discernment is necessary when doing God’s work.
All of this begins with love; all is nurtured by love.
It is essential that we learn how to approach and how to adore God, both during Mass and outside of Mass, inside of a church and outside of a church. Personal resources will have to be developed to seek and to experience divinity. We must learn how to detach ourselves from our possessions, from our thoughts, from all things which might be taken, all things which might be lost. It is important, absolutely essential to understand and believe what is eternal. Everything in life which is not eternal is temporary, simply borrowed. All those things which help us gain admittance to heaven are real, are beautiful when they are used appropriately for the glory and love of God. As Christians we are asked to learn, to adore, to understand, to accept, to experience, to share, to teach about God, about his love and mercy for each of us, about loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. This is a responsibility. This is our duty. This is God’s law, God’s plan. When we follow it, we experience happiness, we move closer to God, closer to heaven. When we truly, honestly, deeply love and serve God nothing can stop us, not even death. The purpose of our Christian life is to develop a peaceful mind, to discover and extoll the presence of God, to discern how to better serve God. Being in communion with God, listening to and following his instruction is the goal. There is no reason to have fear. Let the love for God give you strength. Let it teach you to sacrifice, teach you to pray, teach you to love, teach you to live with the beauty and peace of the principles of fairness and social justice as taught by Jesus Christ. All moral thought and ethics will begin with love and loyalty to God. Let his will act as your guide. All greatness exists for those who do his work patiently, lovingly, gently. Being Christian means allowing and wanting God to dwell within our beings, our complete beings and wanting this completely and consciously. The potential for goodness, kindness, and holiness waits to expand within each Christian, waits for moral fairness, moral decency, moral superiority to flourish. A superiority of spirit, a kind of purity which is obtained and maintained by prayer and discernment is necessary when doing God’s work.
All of this begins with love; all is nurtured by love.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Learned Men and Women Always Require Evidence, not Truth
The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus continues in varying degrees today within all of us. At one time or another there is doubt. At one time or another we all want something concrete, something definite and visible to our eyes. We live in a time of information overload. We live in a time of outrageous claims and scary warning labels providing a litany of possible harmful side effects. We want to believe in Heaven, we really do! We want to believe in God, his love and mercy for us! Our secular world tries to convince us that there is no God, asks us to consider other ideas about creation, other ideas about the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The reasons often cited is that there is no scientific evidence to support these theories. The secular world likes to provoke and promote this warfare between science and our Faith. We accept scientific evidence only because some learned men and women write learned documents contained multisyllabic words which other learned men and women read and pronounce true because the claims sound true and are temporarily demystifying. We must remember that neither science nor our religion are enemies. We must remember that the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus will continue within ourselves, within our world forever.
Our lives have purpose and meaning when we believe. Our lives inspire goodness, holiness, love when we are obedient to God. When guided by humility, charity, and obedience our intellectual activity leads us toward God. We do not need to see volumes of raw data, we do not need to see petrie dish samples. We simply need to look within our hearts and souls to feel the presence of God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, God’s love.
Non-believers will continue to present their opinions, their evidence challenging our beliefs. As Christians we must continue with our prayers, our fasting, our almsgiving. We must continue being humble, loving, obedient servants for God. That is our evidence, our good works, our love for our neighbors. We live in a time where opinion masquerades as fact. Truth is often distorted. Everyone challenges everything that they dislike or do not want to accept. Authority is routinely challenged. Traditions and rituals are ridiculed and criticized. So irrational is the realm of the secular world, that extremism falls in and out of favor quickly. There will always be learned people, so enamored with themselves and their predetermined theories about God, Jesus Christ, Christians, that they miss the truth, the reality and beauty of believing.“If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”
The truth is that there is evidence of God that can be readily, easily studied. It is right in front of all of the learned people. The evidence is also right in front of each of us, right next to each of us. Look around and see the evidence of God’s love and mercy. Look around and see the evidence of Jesus Christ’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection. We are all evidence. As Christians, we are believers in something which we can not see with our eyes but which we can feel and accept with our hearts and souls. Our good deeds, our words can inspire and encourage goodness, holiness, and love in others. We are not trapped within a petrie dish of tradition and ritual. We are God’s living, breathing, praying children who allow our free will to guide us toward heaven.
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
The learned men and women will always require new evidence, not truth. This is neither good nor bad. For our Faith to continue to grow there must always be debate, dissent, communication. Science simply creates a series of questions, a series of possibilities for us to consider. As Christians we are always asking ourselves questions about love, fairness, social justice. Following in the footsteps of Christ present us with many possibilities to experience and share goodness, holiness, and love. Each day, our choices should reflect and renew our baptismal promises. Our lives should present our love and reverence for God. Through all of our good works, all of our conversations Jesus Christ should be seen. The splendor of our love for God and our love for all mankind should always be felt. Our lives must have the splendid order of humility, charity, obedience to God, to God’s will, directing us, guiding us, protecting us.
“You must be born from above.”
Our lives have purpose and meaning when we believe. Our lives inspire goodness, holiness, love when we are obedient to God. When guided by humility, charity, and obedience our intellectual activity leads us toward God. We do not need to see volumes of raw data, we do not need to see petrie dish samples. We simply need to look within our hearts and souls to feel the presence of God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, God’s love.
Non-believers will continue to present their opinions, their evidence challenging our beliefs. As Christians we must continue with our prayers, our fasting, our almsgiving. We must continue being humble, loving, obedient servants for God. That is our evidence, our good works, our love for our neighbors. We live in a time where opinion masquerades as fact. Truth is often distorted. Everyone challenges everything that they dislike or do not want to accept. Authority is routinely challenged. Traditions and rituals are ridiculed and criticized. So irrational is the realm of the secular world, that extremism falls in and out of favor quickly. There will always be learned people, so enamored with themselves and their predetermined theories about God, Jesus Christ, Christians, that they miss the truth, the reality and beauty of believing.“If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”
The truth is that there is evidence of God that can be readily, easily studied. It is right in front of all of the learned people. The evidence is also right in front of each of us, right next to each of us. Look around and see the evidence of God’s love and mercy. Look around and see the evidence of Jesus Christ’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection. We are all evidence. As Christians, we are believers in something which we can not see with our eyes but which we can feel and accept with our hearts and souls. Our good deeds, our words can inspire and encourage goodness, holiness, and love in others. We are not trapped within a petrie dish of tradition and ritual. We are God’s living, breathing, praying children who allow our free will to guide us toward heaven.
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
The learned men and women will always require new evidence, not truth. This is neither good nor bad. For our Faith to continue to grow there must always be debate, dissent, communication. Science simply creates a series of questions, a series of possibilities for us to consider. As Christians we are always asking ourselves questions about love, fairness, social justice. Following in the footsteps of Christ present us with many possibilities to experience and share goodness, holiness, and love. Each day, our choices should reflect and renew our baptismal promises. Our lives should present our love and reverence for God. Through all of our good works, all of our conversations Jesus Christ should be seen. The splendor of our love for God and our love for all mankind should always be felt. Our lives must have the splendid order of humility, charity, obedience to God, to God’s will, directing us, guiding us, protecting us.
“You must be born from above.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Faith
Faith exists beyond either time or space while encouraging and evoking both my hope and my love. In the early morning light, Holy Scriptures should lead us toward God. I read the Bible for both education and inspiration. I sometimes imagine myself as a hobo silently walking down a crowded street in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood, nowhere distinct yet somewhere closer to Heaven. There are candlesticks, picnic baskets, tumbleweeds, lilies and carnations surrounding my path. There is a forecast of thunder storms. The circumstance of my life can make me feel vulnerable, alone. There is a fragility in my existence; this fragility is universal. My life, like every person’s life, begins with birth, ends with death. In between will be many hopes, prayers, mistakes, trying to move me toward God sometimes, trying to move me away from God sometimes. When my faith is strong, I can keep moving toward God. Urban living allows us to anonymous but it can underscore our loneliness and desire for something to believe in. We need something to believe, a presence that is constant and merciful. I must always remember that I am a traveler on foot. God offers comfort, compassion, love. There is often something unsettled in our lives, something left unsaid, undone. There can be something ironic in our approach and discussion of God. We all want to believe; we must work to believe in God; we must work to have clean hearts and pure minds in our daily lives and when we pray to God. We can not intimidate God. We can only approach God with charity, humility, and compassion in our hearts. At times I am a tumbleweed being blown around by a fierce wind. At times I am a hobo looking for compassion and a shelter. Faith allows us to encapsulate the very essence of our humanity; our hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses are displayed for us. Both the future and the past can be viewed as mirages as we try to live Christian lives based upon love, hope, and social justice. Our goodness and our kindness can be glimmers of compassion. We must always keep our lives focused on serving God, our destination must always be following Jesus Christ, journeying to the kingdom of heaven.
Our day to day lives might be prosaic, lacking any poetry or movement but we must always remember to pray and to live our lives based upon the Word.
I am sometimes the hobo searching for a meal as a tumbleweed bounces near my feet as I silently as God for mercy and forgiveness.
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