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Finishing Finals

7/22/2015

For more about the nature of such messages from God see this blog 12/18/14 when I started putting up segments.

July 30, 2008
“Finishing School”
Holy Spirit:

In your culture in the past awkward and sometimes wild girls used to be sent to a finishing school to be trained in proper deportment. They would graduate ready to come out in society as proper and elegant young ladies.

By analogy We try to train up immature and sometimes sinful followers to come out into the world as true soldiers of Christ. What we wish for, however, is not outward show but true conversion of heart from self-centered ways to the way of love.

As your “final examination” in your “God Alone” training we present you with this test:
For a whole week be so close to Us through prayer and intention so that your words and gestures will reflect love.
Don’t be afraid this would destroy your free personality and make you a mere puppet. That is not what We want at all. No. If you give yourself to Us in this way We will use all your natural gifts and God-created individuality in an even stronger way. Our grace will make a tentative melody into a symphony. Courage!

“Not I, but Christ lives in me.”

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freshening foretastes

7/21/2015

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July 29, 2008
Freshness
Holy Spirit:
Bombardments of the consequences of sin can make you feel trapped and constrained. Even when there is nothing immediately dangerous to you in your environment, there can be a staleness from repeated unwholesome patterns.

Reach in and reach up to find cool freshness. “In” is the place within where We dwell, a pure stream of grace. ”Up” is from your crouched position of fear to lift your arms and hands to greet the good, small and big that We are sending you each day as fresh air.

Can you interrupt the stale round of your worries and unhealed memories to let in the new? Are you so afraid that, if life isn’t heaven it is really hell, that you are not savoring the foretastes of heaven, Our gifts for you each day?

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Different types of community

7/20/2015

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July 28, 2008
(This locution followed a conversation with someone involved in a religious community of women with different emphases than my Dedicated Widows of the Holy Family.)

Following Jesus
Holy Spirit:

You become perturbed when your ideas of how to follow Jesus clash with the ideas of others. You seek justification for your ideas through Scripture and Tradition. In this way you try to make what is a way of life into something as absolute as dogma and doctrine.

There is strength in common rules and practice but what is maybe more needed in your times now is a way of the heart in response to the reality of Jesus. Your Jesus wants to permeate the world with faith, hope and love. Different types of community can grow around this experience. You can learn from what you try. Do you see the wisdom of the Church in looking not for rules and plans but rather for signs of good Christian living together in one form or another? Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. When you encounter those with inspired plans look not so much at the plan; that can be nothing but a fantasy. Look instead as the hearts of those involved and cherish the fruits of their works of love.

Let Us show you what We want of you in relationship to the ways of life you encounter: sometimes affirmation, sometimes that you are there to make suggestions; sometimes joining in. You cannot know which response is right in advance. Sense Our guidance in the encounter.

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From God Alone

7/18/2015

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July 27, 2008

“Out of the Depths I Cry…. " (Psalm130:1)

Holy Spirit:

A baby wails out of need for milk. There is a victory yell in sport. The lament for lost love is another kind of cry. There are cries of joy in song.
The words of prayers you may mumble usually become a cry when your need is deep.

Self-control is a virtue when it keeps you from trying to fulfill your passions through bad choices. But self-control becomes distorted when it covers weakness by a show of invulnerability.

The Devil wants you to suppress the cry from the depth. He wants you to see crying from the depth as weakness. He also wants you to cast aside discipline in letting wild passions free. Or, in fear of debilitating weakness or wildness, he would have you become tight-lipped and emotionless.

Out of the depth I cry….to You I lift up my soul.” “Deep cries unto deep.” (Psalm 42:7) The way out of the impasse is up. We promise to assuage your deepest needs in ways you cannot foresee. In faith, cry out from the depth of your need.

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Lines Lifted from Letters

7/15/2015

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I am reading letters by a wonderful Sacred Heart Nun, a Scotswoman, who wrote in 1917 about the lives of the saints. Her name was Mother F. A. Forbes Here is an excerpt:

"Mr. W. has written me several letters, very disheartened with the scanty sale of Catholic books. He says that 'one would gather that catechisms, prayer-books and penny pamphlets seem to suffice for the needs of our Catholic reading public."”

Letter to a middle-aged friend:
“Someday when you are my age, 78, you may remember that I like to say that whereas I imagined intellectual eros would diminish with bodily infirmity, in fact, it is now voracious, as I am even more eager than before to have more of a God's eye view of reality, before moving to my eternal home!!!!”

I plucked off the library shelf a book about General Sherman's son who became a Jesuit. He is advising his younger brother, who was studying at Yale:
"Never let your A Kempis get covered with dust, or your Beads grow rusty. We've got more wisdom than Yale knows and we must not be robbed while being enriched."

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Essential Self

7/11/2015

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I had an interesting visit to a convalescent home to give a tiny talk in the midst of Catholic Praise and Worship on this topic. I took it from an old out of print book of mine entitled Victory Over Death (St. Bede's Press):

“Think of your essential self, the “me” which persisted from conception to the present. What is this self? It cannot just be the body, for biologists tell us that over a seven-year period, every cell in our bodies has been replaced. Yet you are the same person. If not, how explain memory, culpability, praise? You do not say that the “you” of 1989 remembers a different “you” of 1979. You do not refuse to pay a traffic fine on the grounds that you are no longer the same person, or refuse an award because you have changed completely? But all such continuity of the self means that an immaterial (non-physical) self persists amidst change. This essential self could, then, in principle, continue to exist, even after the physical change we call death.

“A further proof that we have a part of us that is not physical is that we cannot measure the soul. (A philosopher does not have a five-pound soul and a truck-driver a one pound soul?) A thought in your mind is immaterial-a serious one weighs no more than a trivial one, a truth no more than a lie.

“What cannot be measured because it has no parts cannot fall apart as does the measurable body of many parts. In death the measurable physical part of us comes to pieces. And the soul? By nature, what is not matter cannot be destroyed by matter. That spirit is different from body and therefore capable of surviving death can also be shown by examining the soul's tenacity in the face of physical suffering.”

The following is excerpted from the book Sermons in Solitary Confinement by Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Lutheran pastor tortured by the Communists for witnessing to his faith and put in solitary confinement for three years when it was realized what “harm” he was doing by converting the other prisoners. Wurmbrand writes about that time:

The body needs few things in order to be fully satisfied, simple food, warmth, exercise, rest and a partner of the opposite sex. My body had all these things (before conversion) but, notwithstanding this, I was not happy. My body sighed for something more. Who was this ‘I,’ dissatisfied when the body had plenty of all I needed? It was you, my soul. It was you who wished to know, out of purely scientific interest about galaxies far away, and about facts of prehistory which have absolutely no influence on my bodily state. It was you who took delight in art and philosophy, but also in exaggerations and refinements of bodily needs, even when these do harm to the body.

Don't you see, my soul, how right Jesus was in saying that 'man does not live by bread alone?' (Now in prison) I get one slice of bread every Tuesday. And what bread? But I do not just vegetate. I live. I sometimes laugh heartily at jokes which I tell myself, being alone in my cell. I think about politics, about how nations which I have never seen should be ruled. I remember works of art. I lead a life of worship. All this is you. Say, my soul, “I am.” You saw me dancing with heavy chains around my ankles. Who was that one who exuberantly rejoiced? It was not my body. My body had no reason to dance. There was no music to incite it to do so. It was you, my soul.

Take knowledge of yourself, my soul, and take knowledge of your incomparable value. The body will die. Around me prisoners are dying because of the great hunger, the cold, and the tortures, but who has ever seen a soul die? I have lost everything I had in the world, but if you are saved, I shall have kept the pearl of greatest price.

Wurmbrand's stunning argument links logic and experience. Others base their belief on interior experience alone or on exterior facts. For example, reports of patients pronounced clinically dead but later resuscitated tell of a journey toward a divine light or toward hellish darkness. Patients say they were given a choice to return to the world for a last chance.

Unraveling my Father’s Suicide is a book that just came out by Kathleen Laplante detailing her experience of her alcoholic father’s suicide and how it impacted her emotionally as a child and as an adult. It would be an excellent book to read or give to someone with suicide in the family.
As the mother of a son who committed suicide I found it helpful and healing. It opened up to me a new area for the need of Catholic healing for anyone with a parent who committed suicide, which is, of course, quite a different type of experience.

I recently reread the famous book Father Elijah by Michael O’Brien. Even though this was written originally with the year 2000 in mind as a possible “watershed year” – it has a new relevance for our times which have even gotten worse. The depth of the spirituality in the book, as in all of Michael O’Brien’s books was greatly inspiring to me and full of hope.

July 4th, such an ambiguous day!
I got a card saying that we are still the greatest country in the world.
I understand how important the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are, but given the horrible legalized crimes of abortion in our country now, wouldn’t Malta is better?

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Cor ad Cor

7/6/2015

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On the very different theme from the last blogs,
I had such a beautiful experience.
I was at, off all places, Starbucks, where some students of mine like to take me to talk “off the record.” I was carefully watching an older student who is extremely spiritual. Looking at his eyes which were focused not on me but on another person,

I had this mystical sense that we were somehow in his heart; not just metaphorically, but in some more biological sense.

In a rush of metaphors I saw that when someone takes us into his or her heart, then what they tell us of truth has readier access past our usual defenses. And that this is why in the Legion of Mary groups that go door to door they say first make friends if you can before trying to refute their erroneous ideas about our Church.

Then I seemed to see, not just think, that if someone’s heart is truly surrendered to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, being taken into the little heart of that human brings us in contact with the supernatural hearts.

It came out as this prose-poem:

“Hide me in Your Heart”

“Make me an instrument of Your love…”

From mantra-like repetition

These phrases can seem no more than a tranquilizer.

Until suddenly You, our Jesus

seize and throw us into Your heart

then, the abandoned,

drawn to our small hearts,

are led into Your heart…

finally safe and sound.

Hope in the Darkness: From Hell’s Gate to Heavens Door is a remarkable book you will want to read and give to others. It is written by Thomas R. Eades, III a man who used to be part of a Christian Writing group that such notables belonged to as your web-master Jim Ridley, my fellow writer Al Hughes, Dr. Michael Meaney and others when were together at Our Lady of Corpus Christi in Texas.
Tom was a big time bad-guy into every sin you can imagine, but prayed for incessantly by holy family members. They brought him to the apparition site at Conyers, GA. where, suddenly the whole world went grey and allegedly Mary’s voice told him to convert immediately or he was going to hell. He did convert that went on to minister to street people, gang people, and even to Russians in Siberia.
You will love this story. Go to Google www.hopeinthedarkness.org to see how to order it.

I was feeling very, very anxious about my daughter, Carla’s medical condition. You have been praying for healing of her T-cell cancer, now in remission, but leaving her with other just as bad problems! Here is what I wrote in my journal:

Ronda: Tell me more about my anxiety, My Jesus?

Jesus: In your language it is the shadow side of maternal instinct to be anxious for your children. Would you rather not have had those incredible children and not have anxiety? But still I want you to keep enfolding them in My heart. It wouldn’t be bad at all to right now spend the rest of your time with Me in quiet prayer, enfolding each one in My heart. “When you’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining in the sun” will you regret the pangs of empathy for them?” I am using this empathetic pain to open your heart to be more like Mine.

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Finishing Finals

freshening foretastes

Different types of community

From God Alone

Lines Lifted from Letters

Essential Self

Cor ad Cor

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