As Easter Approaches

I awoke with a “dream” or vision of my great mentor, the philosopher, Dietrich Von Hildebrand who went to eternity many decades ago. In the vision, he was about 60 years old sitting across legged with a luminous beauty in his eyes.

At a charismatic prayer meeting during the songs of praise, I thought that even though the  music is so inferior to classical music, I like it so much because it is a kind of expression of delight love of God. Some of the usual Church worship hymns seem to me more like giving to God His due vs. sheer delight in His beauty and love.

•   Scruples:  
  
• Imagine telling a confessor this:
  
• I enabled a theft from someone who had authority. And following up with this anecdote: We have 3 cats in one house. Mine, Cleo, is on the bottom floor. When I adopted him from the Cattery in Corpus Christi I was told that she only ate wet food and if I couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t adopt the cat!  So she gets Friskee’s special. But I give her some dry food, just in case. If I drop dead, she would have to get used to dry food. But the cats upstairs in my granddaughter’s house only get cheaper dry food, except a small wet food on Sundays announced in a hilarious sing-song voice “Sabbath treat-sies, Sabbath treat-sies. 
• So, there was a new huge bag of dry food upstairs, unopened. I figured it was too hard for an 81 year old like me to open to get a little bowl for Cleo. But it turned out to be really easy to open.
• Wrap up the top so that the upstairs cats couldn’t invade it? I slyly decided to leave it open in the bottom of the cupboard and enjoyed watching one of them noticing it, sitting on the top and devouring an unexpected extra portion.
• Abetting a theft, I suddenly thought? 
• A venial sin?
• Bring it to confession?
• I decided the priest would not like to hear such a confession.  Duh! 
• But my blog master, Jim Ridley would love to illustrate this one!

A wonderful distinction made by the philosopher Stephen Schwarz is between delight love vs. only donation love. I have some pages  about  this in my book Way of Love. What strikes me most in my old age is how some of us are more into one or the other.  For example, I tend more to delight in the personalities of those I love and find it hard to exercise donation love in the form of pesky, physical, helpful tasks as needed. On the other hand, some people are very good at helpfulness and poor at expressing delight and appreciation.
​

My granddaughter had me watch a Patricia Sandoval video. I had not known of her.  She is an incredible pro-life witness.  She goes around the world telling of her sins of pre-marital sex leading to 3 abortions and then a stint of working for Planned Parenthood and eventually winding up on the street on drugs and finally almost starving to death. Finally she found her way back to her parents and to becoming a vehement pro-life speaker, especially effective because she has first-hand knowledge of exactly all the evils of abortion and the industry.  Google her You-tubes to get fired up even more than before about all this and to think of having at risk friends and family watch.

No daily Mass Wednesday and Thursday of the week of March 18 because all the priests would be at a Bishop’s conference for them. So, I decided to try out the TV Daily Mass from Canada. It was sad to make a spiritual communion, but I felt glad to daily Mass shut-in’s and those who are too poor to get to a daily Mass.

I read this fascinating paragraph about the masculine psyche in a novel by Anthony Trollope:
​ “The blow to him was very heavy. Men but seldom tell the truth of what is in them, even to their dearest friends; they are ashamed of having feelings, or rather of showing that they are troubled by any intensity of feeling. It is the practice of the time to treat all pursuits as though they were only half important to us, as though in what we desire we were only half in earnest. To be visibly eager seems childish, and is always bad policy; and men, therefore, nowadays, though they strive as hard as ever in the service of ambition –harder than ever in that of mammon—usually do so with a pleasant smile on, as though after all they were but amusing themselves in the little matter in hand.”

You all need to know I have a nifty new web-site.  It is part of En Route Books and Media  and you can get it by googling The Philosophical Spirituality of Ronda Chervin. This nifty title was devised by Sebastian Mahfood of En Route Books. I like it. There are LOTS AND LOTS of free-e-books of mine on the site.  But of course, you should look at my books on goodbooksmedia, this site, because they have Jim Ridley’s famous spoofing illustrations of my doings and thoughts.
https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/rondachervin/

Meanwhile, in a marathon of gusts of hopefully grace-filled energy, I wrote a sequel to my original autobiography En Route to Eternity which ended with the death of my husband, Martin Chervin.  This has not yet been published but will have the title En Route to Eternity: Further Along. That is Miriam Press, the Hebrew-Catholic publisher who did the autobiography back in the ‘90’s.’

My daughter Carla was reading this sequel in attachment form and came up with this great poem about it:
 Carla Conley  March 26, 2019
 What girl really knows her mother? Bone of bone sits flesh on flesh
for sustenance, to be devoured, to consume and to refresh.
It’s the stuff of some fantastic fable, mythic monsters come to mind
till girl gives birth to woman, leaving gruesome ways behind.
All the past’s a mystery and truth be told, we chart a course
dark ahead and blind behind. We tap our tales in Morse-
a code will come: continuum. A raven pecks a dove
and maybe it makes sense to some Almighty up above.
Enough of Noah! Back to Mother – she whom no one knows
not even she herself – she chases her own mother’s toes
trip-tropping over bridges where, beware! They’re thick with trolls
with passwords. But the passwords always whisper about souls
and no girl knows her mother’s till one day the mirror shows
a woman most improbably within her mother’s clothes.

A parent I know had to finally resort to threats of a spanking of his 4 year old. It made me think of the words in our Confession:
March 25______________________  Sean and Teresa – finally had to threaten with spanking, reminds the words in our  Act of Contrition: because I fear the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, who art all holy.   When the child is punished, if the father is loving in many ways, eventually …child feels that it is the loving father she is offending.

Excerpting from old journals writing my sequel autobiography I came upon these poems:
from Good Friday 2002
Carla, my daughter,  wrote a poem for Good Friday called Purgatory:
In the domain of stumblers and stones,
His body waits for me like a cross,
A thing to cling to
When twenty shades of hell
Slant down to cover stalwart faces
Lit by hope.
 How many slips and sobs till Paradise?
Here, where sorrowful mysteries circle,
Round for sliding feet,
His tongue cries light,
Flies it with the ravens of this night,
Faint as the shine of feathers
Growing wings.
 
From a Good Friday poem of Jim Ridley:
In your dread thurible of parted Flesh
Let now my timid immolation start.
Throw on the gore-sopped wad of rag, my heart;
Or nail it to the beams of that blazing Tree,
Scrap torn from the flag of the enemy.
Burn this sullied ensign of my surrender
​Into the banner of Your Victory, Your hidden Splendor.
 
More from old journals:
 
January 15, 2002
I was thinking about how many of us where I teach seek holiness, openly and sometimes almost desperately. How much easier to feign mediocrity of intent so that the gap between wish and reality would not be so obvious and beckoning of critique!
Here I am, Jesus, your failure. But, no matter what, never let me set my sights so low that I cannot fail.