Other Saints: January 2007 Archives

I don't know how many times I may have heard something like this; however, this is the time it finally made sense.

from Hammer and Fire
Fr. Raphael Simon OCSO

The angelic intelligence, superior to the human, sees in one glance the alternatives of choice and their consequences. The angelic will is then fixed in its election. When the rebellious angels preferred disobedience they knew that they had made their final choice. It is not so with us, and to us alone God gave a redeemer.

How awful. How terrible to be able to look upon the magnificence of God and choose something else. How inconceivable. We at least have the story of being persuaded to our doom--a poor excuse, but none the less the effort of a tempter. The Angels had no such persuasion; moreover, they could look upon the Glory of God Himself and see it clearly. Simply incomprehensible.

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Bowled Over Aagin

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How many times in a day must I be slapped upside the head with something. This from lunchtime reading:

from Hammer and Fire
Fr. Raphael Simon OCSO

He has given us means. . .to overcome this weakness and to strengthen our wills. These means include the sacraments, the infused virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit--and self-denial. In self-denial in particular, we have the means to overcome the obstacles to happiness; by self-denial our wills are given power over our temperaments and faults; we are made capable of change, we are made free.

Ironically, it is called self-denial, and yet it is nothing of the sort; rather, it is denial of the illusion of self that we live. Until we live completely in the image and context of God, we don't even know self, so it is impossible to deny self. Self-denial is actually the embrace of the real self as manifested in God's image of us. We discover that when we have found our identities in Christ self-denial is impossible because we finally have the properly oriented self that does not see self-denial but Christ-embracing.

We so dread depriving ourselves of anything that we have even a remote notion we might want or need that we cannot see the real efficacy of self-denial--breaking the illusion of Maya and embracing the reality of who we are in the Reality of Him Who Is.

You see how language descends to the utterly inarticulate trying even to explain the joyous discovery that we need not succumb to every vagrant thought and idle want. Today has been a good day indeed.

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Piety and Sacrifice

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In Union with God, in a paragraph introducing other instruction, this remarkable insight:

Piety without the spirit of sacrifice. . . is like an organism without a backbone.
--Blessed Columba Marmion

Now, I, for one, am very fond of organisms lacking backbones; however, I do not read this to be a slam of the invertebrate world, but rather the statement that such a situation is akin to a vertebrate lacking a backbone--and that observation is very sobering indeed.

Note: When I first typed and published this entry, I discovered that in the course of typing the quotation above, I had misspelled sacrifice as sacrafice. As anyone can tell, this is an obviously Freudian reference to the sacrum, an important part of any spine.

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A Word for the Day

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from Union with God
Blessed Columba Marmion

Be faithful in little things, not out of meticulousness, but out of love. Do this to prove to Our Lord that you have the love of a spouse for Him.

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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Other Saints category from January 2007.

Other Saints: December 2006 is the previous archive.

Other Saints: February 2007 is the next archive.

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