Posted on 02/18/2007 3:02:35 PM PST by NYer
Is that in the original?
Ouch.
Keep fishin' -- you're on a roll! < /just kidding but not really >
What a grace to know with your heart that the Lord is present. I know with my head, but I have all the spiritual sensitivity of a cast-iron boiler.
I'll be at the 40 Hours' Adoration, Lord!
God's whole deal is to get us to choose Him freely and without distracting enticements. But first He has to get our attention and to persuade us that He's good and all that.
So He gives out lollipops. The professionals call them "consolations", but that's 'cause they talk funny.
SO when God does not give you a lollipop, He's saying,"Okay, I've taken off the training wheels. Get out there and skin your knees."
Now, personally, I'm a wuss, so I always say,"I wannanotherlollipop NO FAYurh!"
SO He kicks me in the butt.
But, yeah! This is really a fine lady. She is so up front with the struggle. After a weekday Mass last week she said,"I guess I feel pretty good about it. I'm in. Where else could I go." And I went off on how backhanded Peter's remark to Jesus is: Where ELSE could we go." as in"It's not like we LIKE you or anything. It's just that all the other stuff is OBVIOUSLY bogus. We're stuck with You."
SO it's not like we LIKE being Catholic all the time. It's like being married. Sometimes, darn it, I am SO ready to pack my bags! I am SO OUT of here! Bring me some young honey, let's have a meal of nothing but sodium and cholesterol! Let's follow it by killing brain cells and risking an STD or two or three. Now THAT's something like!
And Jesus just watches and finally says, "You done yet?"
"Yessir"
"Okay. Get to work. There's stuff needs doing."
Okay, Sir. Sorry Sir."
"It's okay. Shut up. Get to work."
It's like Herbert's poem,"The Collar".
Or,
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
- John Donne
. . . why are the 17th century English religious poets so difficult . . . and so true?
Exceptional article and sharing. God bless all our converts entering the Church this Easter Vigil.
Not salvational in nature.
Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will have no life in you!
I believe that this is salvational and I haven't come across any Protestants who believe that, though I do, and the majority of my Catholic friends and family also believe it.
The cafeteria is closed as far as most of us are concerned. The few that don’t subscribe to Catholic Doctrine are relying on God’s love and not His justice as are so many in the Christian world today. That actually scares the daylights out of me!
From my vantage point, it seems as though you have your Catholic statistics a little skewed !
Regardless, from all that I have read that you have written, you appear to be a person living out your faith in Our Savior, Jesus Christ, which makes us brothers and sisters in Christ.
God Bless us all!
Genuine freedom consists of finding the truth, which will set you free. The reason there are an infinity of Protestant (using the term in its broadest sense, as meaning neither Orthodox nor Catholic, since there is no theological unity even among Protestants) sects is that everyone has decided that their particular fragment of the truth, the one that really attracts them, is the only one. And if it's not emphasized in the church to which they already belong, they go off and found another one. The reality of Protestantism is that you have 30-40,000 bigger or smaller groups, each one emphasizing one little splinter of the truth that it finds more important than the others.
Note that I am not saying that Protestantism is based upon falsehood or maliciousness, or even upon the personal desire for power on the part of individual church founders. I think even those who found a church are genuinely seeking the truth, but because they have cut themselves off from the vast tree of doctrine that grows up from the death of the Lord and is watered with the blood of martyrs, they can inevitably get only a splinter of it. And soon someone else in their church comes along who sees another bit of truth he feels is underemphasized, and he goes off to found yet another church based on that splinter.
The Catholic Church does not replace thought and that was not the point the author was making. It's like accepting the Creed or any patristic formulation. Would you want to have to reinvent the Athanasian Creed? The Creeds, the doctrines of the Church, and all of the many doctrinal formulations achieved through the confrontation with historical challenges and often at the cost of blood and suffering and approved as being in line with tradition and doctrine from the very start are there for the taking. It's not necessary to reinvent them, and most of us would not be capable of it, anyway. It is certainly possible to think about them, however, and to call the attention of others to some aspect of them you find particularly attractive.
In the Catholic Church, people who have some aspect of the truth they feel called to emphasize more than another often found religious orders or do something similar to give a collective expression of their particular vision. I recently visited Assisi and was profoundly impressed by St. Francis and his prayerful, humble tenacity in following the Lord in the particular way to which he had been called - even though there was often considerable suspicion of him in the Church at that time, and there were other, similar movements that left the Church.
Yet because he accepted the vast trove of doctrine and simply remained certain that he was called to emphasize one aspect of Christian life within it, now, 800 years later, there are millions of Franciscans all over the world, doing good for the Lord. When I was in Assisi, I met young, orthodox Franciscans from all over the world who are absolutely on fire with their missionary zeal and desire to follow St. Francis' vision - 800 years later.
So the point I am trying to make is not that Protestant founders are evil, but that by cutting themselves off from the fullness of the Faith (that is, the doctrine that comes to us from the Apostles and has been developed over the centuries by the mind of the Church), they are condemned to have to "reinvent" it simply because human nature requires an answer to all questions. And in this process, others will come along who see some other part of it, and they will go off on their own. Human nature requires certainty of truth, but the human mind is limited. Accepting the truths of the Catholic Church is simply acknowledging that there are some things that require the collective intelligence and faith of the entire Church, and one you have accepted these truths, you are free to move on to the particular thing to which the Lord is calling you.
Bookmarking
Okay! New Metaphor. Good for Domini Canes and other Dawgs.
To teach a dog to heel, you hold the leash just so with a bight in it. You draw the dog to you and you walk briskly, and suddenly change direction, letting the bight go. The dawg walks out the extra 18" of leash and then gets a yank!
After a while, the dawg keeps his eye on you. Then, after another while no leash is needed.
Or so I hear. Right now, I'm one of those dawgs standing on his hind legs, straining against the leash, hardly able to breathe but DARN that rabbit needs chasing ....
Lord, teach me to keep my eye on you alone.
Okay, maybe Herbert and Donne are better at it than I am.
The Tabernacle. Throughout my travels, each time I have entered a Catholic Church for the first time, I immediately sought out the Tabernacle. "There you are, Lord!" Seeing the flickering candle in the Sanctuary lamp brings such great comfort and joy. It is painful to see the Tabernacle empty and the lamp extinguished on Good Friday.
That's quite true. It was true for me, at one time, as well. We may have been baptized into one particular faith, but the rest of the journey is in our own hands. If we seek to truly follow Christ, He will guide us on the path to our salvation. Otherwise, it's simply lip service.
Hmmmm . . . you must know my dawgs. Straining at the chain collar, bounding up and down . . .
Not quite. We expect imperfection in men, even those who lead our churches. We don't leave because a splinter of the truth that is important to us has been left out, but because the leadership insists on telling us untruth, while calling that untruth, truth. Most of us don't go off & start new churches or found new denominations.
You believe that God has protected your church from that kind of error, that the men leading your church are prevented from committing it. We disagree. Others before us also disagreed, which is why they left in protest.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.