Dear readers of my Blog,
Happy that Jim Ridley has finished putting graphics on World-view and I am back with you with blogs. This one is super-long because I have been saving items.

Way back in 1976 I wrote a book for seekers called Voyage to Insight, Finding Your Own Philosophy of Life.  Lois Janis, an education Ph.D. helped me format it.  It is a wonderful imaginative book with great graphics, ostensibly giving many philosophical viewpoints, but really designed as a Catholic reach out.  I don’t know how many seekers ever read it, but I also used it as an intro to philosophy for teaching with wonderful results.  It is now being reprinted with even greater graphics, by a new little publishing company called En Route Books and Media.  If you google them you can then click on lulu which has very reasonable prices for an e-book edition and a soft-cover edition.

I am been praying in the mode of the Cloud of Unknowing, the famous medieval classic. I had the feeling that the image of the cloud was a little cold. Jesus seemed to say: 
"I, Jesus, am the loving warmth of God made visible."

Another message seemingly from Jesus was this one: 
“You get heavy of heart of your limitations, to try to save people in your family, and the misery of conflicting viewpoints with your closest friends. If you let Me be even closer to you, then you wouldn’t be so stricken that you cannot win others over. For if I can totally save your whole being, and you experience that more, moment by moment, then you will know that I can save theirs." 

Hilarious joke forwarded to me about anger management:

 So, there was this couple married for 60 years. They shared everything except a shoebox in the closet the wife said he could never open. Finally, on her death bed, she consented  - he could open the box. In it, he found $96,000 and a crocheted doll.

What’s this about, he asked.

 Well, she said, my mother told me that marriages stay together if you don’t fight. When you feel angry, go crochet a doll instead of yelling.

 The husband was touched. 60 years and only one doll? 
She’d only been angry at him once.

 What’s the money for, he asked?

 Oh, that’s from selling all the other dolls.

My daughter with lymphoma, still not sure if she can be healed, wrote this on a survey about one’s World View:

Standing at the gates of heaven, and God asks you “Why should I let you in?” What do you reply?

Carla: Perhaps you shouldn’t, but please do so anyway. There is nowhere else to be that has enough light to be going on with. It is so cold in the sunshine. I think there are some people there I love and I believe they still love me. I believe in Mercy. You are everything I have loved and sought my whole life – if I don’t come in then there will never be a word called home. (In reality, I don’t believe God would ask this question, FWIW).

On the questionnaire as to “Who are you really?” she replied:

Carla: I am an odd-shaped rock held in a crevice of my husband’s tender hand. There is cotton wool everywhere I look. For a reason I don’t know, I matter.  I am a person fighting the yin-yang zodiac sign, half of a set of two commas, entwined. I am a seeker of Truth. For a reason I am not allowed to know, I matter. I yearn for God but I have not found Him because my eyes are squares and I cannot see circles. For a reason I cannot fathom, I matter. I am. I am Jonah’s whale: swallowing things whole. For reasons written in the stars by an invisible hand, I matter. I am going to die, but maybe not so soon but maybe soon. I will wait for you at the shore of another land, crazy sort of land, vision of a land of dreams. I will never let you go. I have you swallowed. I am not I was; not yet. My eyes are square: I see my father swimming in the salt. I see my brother’s bones knit back into a whole.  I will wait for you. I am waiting for you. I have waited for you. I believe in light, in goodness, in truth – I believe in circles I can’t see. There is reason and I matter. I am going nowhere and I am. I am. I am. You. Will. See. Me. Again.

Analogy that came to me about agnostics:

Suppose it is the beginning of the movie industry.  Someone has been invited to come and see by a movie-goer. She walks into the vestibule of the movie theatre and says "This doesn't seem like anything good.  I've been in auditoriums before.  It is pretty dull in here."

The friend says "Oh, silly, this isn't where the movies are. This is just the vestibule.  You have to come in to the theatre part and see the movie. It's fantastic. See the posters of what's in the movie!  See how interesting they are."

She turns on her heel and walks back out on the street thinking, "Just because my old friend thinks this is good, I'm not going to waste my time."

Just an analogy, of course, but you get the point.  Earth is the vestibule of heaven. On earth we get a foretaste of heaven but meanwhile have to suffer...etc. etc. 

Ronda:  I woke up the night feeling how tainted everything I do in that cafeteria is so self-dramatizing. My misery musings came together as this thought:

“What would it be like if, not as a gimmick, but as a response to grace, I really started every conversation with "how are you?" instead of "how I am"?

Mark Matuza,  my new friend whose pithy sayings put up here a while ago sent these:

 "Don't expect, appreciate."

"a Saint doesn't look for sympathy."

"There are no people of great power, only people of great influence, only God has power."

"It is wonderful to be at peace with creation, but it is a wonder to be at peace with the creator, the first finite the latter infinite."

"I'm not here to interfere with people and their creator. I'm only a vehicle for God to use to enhance their relationship."

"I can't save the world, I can only love."

"I must be the flint that ignites the fire of Christ in all I meet. "

"The violence of the wave does not come from the horizon, it sprouts up from the belly of the sea."

"God’s gaze is the gravity that keeps my universe in order."

____________________________________________

Janet Erskine Stuart:   “From loving God alone, I can get intuitions of Him in everyone and therefore love them, and ‘have them in my heart’ and not only in my eclectic head, with a very high-priced ticket of admission.”  
Also she quotes from from Bossuet “heaven is an eternal “ah!” 

And another “Try to take the hard things lightly as God likes us to do, and the great and glorious things ‘mightily’ as He also likes, terribly glad, terribly in earnest about them. All the rest is nothing.”

When I am angry it is often because I see myself as the central heroine of the drama of life and I am frustrated I can’t get others to be secondary characters, doing my will, or walk-ons praising me!  In prayer it came to me that when I am in deep prayer or at Holy Mass, Jesus is the hero-center but since I am central to His Sacred Heart, I am not a secondary character.  Therefore deep pray melts anger over not being central with others in my daily life. 

I have been reading a wonderful old biography of Mother Janet Erskine Stuart of the Sacred Heart nuns who died just before WWI. Here are two excerpts:

 "Remember that whatever happens you must say to yourself, according to circumstances, joyfully and thankfully, or humbly and submissively, or bravely, or if need be defiantly to the troubles within ‘This is part of the story.’   And the story is God's love for you and yours for Him."

Written by Mother Stuart to another Sister, 
 
“Our highest friendships are staked on hazardous guesses, and silent understandings. By these I mean the friendships that are all of admiration and live in the ideal, not the prosy give and take of good offices, still less those that are exacting of affection, but the friendship in which our best self calls out, and the ideal other answers. ‘How timely then a comrade’s song comes gloating on the mountain air,’ even though we should not be able to catch the words, we are raised higher by what we have seen, by what we have guessed, and by what, in glowing consciousness, we believe to be there. Soul touches soul, words and other contact are not necessary. Like ships that pass in the night, we have seen the lights and heard the voices. God allows the paths to cross, that sister souls may waken in each other the deeper spring that for the most part lie untouched.”

Here are excerpts from the homily of a newly ordained transitional deacon here at Holy Apostles:

 Homily Tuesday September 2, 2014   Deacon John McNamara

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” The possessed man in today’s gospel shouts a question out to Jesus, and it is a question that each one of us can make our own. What does Jesus have to do with us?

Obviously we know Jesus has everything to do with us, but more specifically the Gospel demonstrates that He is our healer. Focusing on a specific form of healing, as we have just heard, that of “casting out demons”.

We all need spiritual healing and there is nothing more fundamental to focus on in our lives than setting our souls right with God, being in a state of grace. The state of our soul and those we minister to now and in the future, has eternal value, therefore it requires our attentiveness and seriousness.

Jesus was sent to reconcile us back with the Father, and the important thing to remind ourselves of is that He gives us His Spirit through Baptism and Confirmation in order that we can intimately participate in His own Divine Life. Basically we live and make decisions with perpetual Divine assistance.

In the first reading St. Paul tells us that, “We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God.” Therefore we have received the Wisdom and Power of God to use in this urgent battle for souls.

As priests, seminarians, and religious, it is quite clear that the devil is continually targeting us for failure in one way or another, but the power of Jesus’ words to the possessed man in today’s Gospel give us some meaningful guidance. He gives us a few excellent battle tactics, spiritual warfare gear, or ways to maneuver and march on in our fight for souls.

The answer lies within the authoritative words of Jesus when he says to the possessed man, “Be Quiet, Come Out Of Him!” One way to look at this phrase is how it is a reminder of our own call to prayer and adoration. The words, “Be Quiet” invite us to welcome more and more silence into our daily routine. Simply putting ourselves into the presence of Jesus is the perfect time for an examination that hopefully lead to confession and healing. During this time we allow ourselves to be touched by Christ.

I was struck by an encounter I had this summer with a non-Catholic man who stumbled into the adoration chapel at my summer assignment around 11pm, and placed himself in front of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and said 3 times, “Help me Jesus, and then he let the Lord go to work! It was powerful; this man suffering greatly from an addiction and was not even a Catholic, knew that he had to encounter our Lord for healing. In the quiet and silence we hear God’s will and experience His healing grace.

The 2nd part of Jesus’ response to the possessed man in the Gospel today provides for us another key battle tactic.

This piece of advice comes from a priest who gave my diocesan seminarians and me a retreat a few years back. He explained, right in line with what Jesus does throughout the Gospels that we should never “dialogue with demons”, instead rebuke them.

Often times when we lose the necessary quiet or silence in our lives we end up dialoguing with a demon, or in other words, focusing on something contrary to the Gospel of Christ. In essence, following a spirit of the world. We all have temptations to fight against, and sins we struggle with, and an important tool for us to get rid of them, in addition to the Sacraments, which are primary, is by simply courageously rebuking them. Like the famous anti-drug slogan, “JUST say NO!” Jesus today in the Gospel does not give the demon any time to talk, he refuses to have a conversation with him, and the last thing he is going to do is let him persuade him to live according to his sly and false ways.

C.S. Lewis noted this so well in his Screwtape Letters, when he shows us how the devil twists things just the slightest bit to get our attention and make things look good, but most of time they are for our failure.

Any excessiveness or ill attachment to media, sports, video games, gossip, any addictions or whatever else that keeps us from focusing on our Lord can be healed through simply rebuking in the name of the Lord; speaking with Authority in the Spirit of Jesus!

So as we continue to call on our Lord for spiritual healing in those areas that possibly need it in our lives; may we be conscious that we have Jesus is on our side and wants “everything” to do with us; He simply asks for us to be quiet at times in order to hear Him; 2ndly rebuke those things in our life that turn us away from a closer union with Him. May His words and presence give us the courage to march on in this fight for souls.

Many people hearing about on-line classes and students rushing to these instead of to regular colleges and universities, think that this is a bad trend even if the classes are Catholic. Here is another viewpoint, mine, as expressed in a letter to the seminary Rector where I teach that he used to tell the Board of Directors more about our on-line courses.

“I have been teaching Ethics for 40 years, mostly at universities and seminaries. During this time I have built up the best course I can to set forth the positives of Catholic Ethics and refute the errors so prevalent in our times. 

“At first I was reluctant to teach in our on-line program. I am a very person-to-person teacher and very poor at tech.  However, after 3 years, I realize that it is worth any amount of suffering with tech that I can get into the hands of students, who are mostly teachers themselves of H.S. students, youth, and community college students, the best books on ethics they can read.

“The stories they relate in their responses to the readings of their own reversions from lives of sin to the treasures of the sacraments would bring tears to your eyes.

“Only in heaven will we know how many have benefited from the teachings of those we are teaching on-line who could never leave their jobs and families to study at great Magisterial universities far from their homes.”

By the way, if you are interested in on-line Undergrad or M.A. courses in philosophy or theology google Holy Apostles College and Seminary. 

At another time of prayer Jesus seemed to be telling me: 
Each person you love who loves you only gives you a piece of what you need; I can give all directly, or through them. But don’t count up all deficiencies and differences with others.  That will make you love them less. Just notice differences and offer them up and model opposites where they are off-based, but don’t talk about those differences to them or to others. Otherwise no peace, just gloating and spite!  I don’t want gloating and spite in your heart. Always always look for the good in others.



On a lighter note:   
At my age, 77, I spend many moments between things just musing. I was thinking for no specific reason of a phrase used by students about teachers, way back when I was a teen.  “So and so is a pompous ass.”

I didn’t understand what they meant then, but now after 45 years in academe I think I do.  The slur refers to a tendency that all teachers have along these lines:  we think that because we know so much about the subject we teach, that we are  also always right about everything else we say about any other subject.   Mea culpa!  

    ON CANCER

It isn’t what it is to be
hairless, poisoned,
crawling through
one dark tunnel to another
searching for somebody you
used to be. It isn’t terror:

 not of death or living like
this forever; nothing so
puzzling or mousy. It is more
this sense of distance
and a lack of door.

 To be exact, the way your children, who
will forever
not now ever
want to grow up just like you,

linger, but will never ask you why
again tonight their Mama has to cry,
are captured by a camera’s thoughtless eye:
arrested, and you see the way they try

to satisfy a space that once held you
which now has scraps, remainders and
each day, a bit more room.

Carla Conley, August 30, 2014

Sometimes  I feel hopeless about ever improving on my worst faults. Jesus seemed to tell me: The more hopeless you feel about yourself, the more you have to just rely on My mercy moment by moment.

I was asked to contribute as a former faculty member to a newspaper spread for the anniversary of a seminary I once taught at. The editor specifically wanted to write about how it was to be a woman professor at this seminary.
“I was a full professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount when I started teaching just one course a week at the Seminary in 1986.  I loved so much teaching the seminarians that I decided to come to teach full-time in 1987. I was there until the year 1994.  Though there were a few women professors who taught courses there, I believe the only full-time woman professor was St. Bernadette who lived at the seminary and supervised the internships of the seminarians at parishes. You could check this information for accuracy. I could be wrong.

I sometimes joked that decades earlier no one would have conceived of a woman professor at a seminary. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, previously Edith Stein, was a Jewish woman philosopher who became a Catholic and gave lectures between the 2 World Wars on issues of women. These were assembled in a book called Woman after her martyrdom in the concentration camp.

In these lectures she explains that typically a male professor goes from a concept, into the head of the student, back to the concept. But a woman professor typically goes from the person of the student, to the concept and then back to the student. One of the things  I loved about teaching seminarians as a woman philosophy professor was the chance to engage a future male priest concerning issues about gender,  leading into how he as a priest would be different if he understood that concept.

I thought I should see what the Rector of Holy Apostles College and Seminary would say about our graduation ceremony and a Distance Learning Student coming who was covered with tattoos but who was a convert/revert, a youth minister and a terrific student, etc. etc.

He said "I think he is a hero and we will be honored if he comes to our graduation and if a benefactor wants to pay his expenses, Holy Apostles could pay half his expenses!" 

Tears of joy!

Giving a talk in Staten Island, NYC I was driven from Connecticut by a wonderful apostolic revert, Mark Matuza.  He spouted such wonderful one liners during the 3 hour drive that I begged him to send some to me to convey to you, dear blog readers:





"I was made out of love, by love, for the purpose of love" 

"God does not give gifts with gift receipts.”

"I used to say life is the opportunity to do God’s will, now I say life is the opportunity to become Gods will" 

"God has purged my pallet, there are but few taste buds left"

 "I am obliged by love to love"

"All saints are sinners , but all sinners are not saints"

"The leaves that fall to the ground become the mulch that gives strength to the roots". 

Many of you have read about my daughter Carla who is fighting T-cell lymphoma. Between times, she makes large wall hanging size rosaries from old beads, necklaces, etc. she finds in thrift shops.  Her intention is to give these to the local Catholic Church where the priest has agreed to bless them and distribute them for free to the needy as he sees fit. Money is tight so if you happen to have any old beads, necklaces, old broken rosaries etc. that you’d like to donate, you can send them to:

Carla Conley
2998 Lake Drive
Morganton, NC 28655

Families of Jacopa is a new Franciscan community, mostly for widows, but also for any older single women in Steubenville, Ohio. Google it for more information. I gave a retreat to widows and others discerning becoming members of this group last week.  
                 You can read about them at 
          http://familiajacopa.wordpress.com/

Carla, my daughter was reading this article on what not to say to cancer patients. This was her post in response:

My advice in situ is simple to say and extraordinarily difficult to do: realize the extent to which the cancer patient’s experiences are directly touching your own and, depending on closeness or distance, may even be changing you. Focus on what you are feeling and doing and use it as a springboard toward understanding yourself. Talk THIS over with your pet cancer patient and now we are both in the land of the true, the painful, the glorious, and most precisely, the unknown. Short of climbing into the cancer patient’s body, it’s the closest you can get to real sharing.

Prayer of my daughter Carla suffering with lymphoma:  

May the Lord have mercy on me, a lowly sinner of no account. May Mary accompany me, though my knees are hobbled and heart is troubled. May the spirit inhabit my soul and grant me the fire of truth. Lord God, steer this small boat safely; Christ Jesus: let me be not alone.

Notes for a book called “The Pessimists Guide to Travel”?

Joys of travel – you leave the demons who are trying to operate in one place to meet the fresh ones at the next place.

I have been rereading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov with many thoughts!  It is the most amazing mixture of a thriller plot with the deepest spiritual perceptions. I consider it the greatest novel ever written and I teach it sometimes and also reread it every 10 years or so.  This time I am struck with how way back then in the 1880’s skepticism was so rife in the culture that religious people were terrified of what would happen to the younger generation. Whereas Dostoevsky, a devout Orthodox Christian was sure that the faith of the Russia peasants would triumph over these nihilistic tendencies, in fact it was the atheists who triumphed for the next century. 

If you have never read this novel, you might google and find the chapter of the life and thoughts of Fr. Zossima, the saintly elder, just to immerse yourself in that sisters Eastern Church's  spirituality at its most glowing.

On another topic, I so often see people like myself with genuine desires for holiness but certain flaws, habits, etc. that seem to conflict with those wishes for holiness. Reading in tandem with Brothers Karamazov a book of letters Dostoevsky wrote to his publishers and family this is so evident in him! He was addicted to gambling not for a short time but for many decades. I read that a Catholic priest delivered him from this finally after he had totally bankrupted his wife and children to the point of destitution.

Praying about this to Jesus, I seemed to get this partial explanation.  As hard as it would be for me to overcome work-aholism, or talking too much, so it is for others for whom, for example, unnecessary possessions give them a sense of security and a compensation sometimes for feelings of failure about other aspects of their lives. This and this went very wrong, but at least I have this – this being “my work,” “my money,” “my big, beautiful house.”  I don’t interpret this to mean that we should all be literal Franciscans having absolutely nothing but a patched up robe.   It is the tendency to let whatever the exaggerated habit is stand in the way of Christian love as in “I don’t have time for you because I have this artificial deadline and prefer my work to listening to your woes,” or “I could never live with just what I need because then I would seem and be poor.”  

The answer, Jesus always seems to give me is that if I were more plunged into His love for me in deep prayer I wouldn’t need to talk so much as a way of getting constant affirmation through smiles at my “wit”,  etc. etc. Clothed by Jesus’ love would others need so many stored clothes?

Do extroverts always seem more superficial than introverts?  I notice if a new person comes to teach or study at the seminary who is inward and rather silent I always imagine that he or she is deep. Especially deeper than super-extrovert me!  But religious psychologists claim that Jesus was totally balanced on these polarities we like to label others and ourselves with.   So, if introverts challenge me to be more silent, probably I challenge others to be more open and expressive.

I sent the quote from Pope Benedict to Sean, the socialist atheist grandson-in-law who became a Catholic at Easter and I like his respone: Wow, beautiful and enlightening, thank you. I like this part about a "society unable to accept its suffering members... is a cruel and inhuman society."

It reminds me of a homily I heard last week. Father was asking how it must affect us to live in a "throw away" culture, where we discard anything slightly defective, broken or out-dated. Can we really constrain this to our material goods without treating people this way? Compare it to Malawi (Sean was in the Peace Corps in Africa) where any material good was useful, even if only as fuel for the fire and then even ashes where precious.

Things Jesus has been telling me in my heart:

Jesus:   You cannot help longing for greater closeness to all those you love. That is part of love. But you have to accept the suffering that on earth this is so difficult because everyone is afraid great love from you could mean greater attempts by you to dominate them!  Please let the Holy Spirit lead you moment by moment on initiatives with family and close friends without so much anxiety, guilt and anger! 

“Each day, Jesus says, be happy that you are with Me and thank me for each thing you can do at your age vs. worry about what you can’t do or need help with.”

“What I want to bring you to, starting this very day, is a much simplified spirituality of receiving in the now everything We, the Trinity, your angel, and our saints, can pour as grace into your jumpy, jittery, soul to make the last years of your life truly holy, whole, full of Our love and yours."

“Let us start today with this very simple challenge: It is Sunday. Take in the beauty of the trees, the beauty of Holy Mass, quiet time, but everything without rush, strain, obsession.  Every time a stressed impulse to finish something in a rush comes over you, stop and pray: “Into Your hands, Jesus, my bridegroom, I comment my spirit; into Your hands I commend this moment, this hour, this day. Into Your hands I commend this project.”