Posted on 07/01/2010 9:03:55 AM PDT by Mad Dawg
Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val
O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.
That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease,Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I,
provided that I may become
as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
Dominicus Gabriel Mariae
O most gracious Lord Jesus:
To redeem an undeserving humanity
You gave up everything you had.
In your mercy, grant us the grace
of despising all things but you
and your love
That we may know the joy
you brought to us
through your dolorous Passion
and Death,
Who live and reign in might and bliss
with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
One God, in everlasting glory.
Your beautiful post made the 1000 mark. :-)
I'm a bad tempered old cuss. And a few of you on the ping list ain't a whole lot better.
But god loves us, and surrounds us with little evidences of His love. Can we not rejoice in our tears and anger?
Of course we can rejoice in our tears and anger. :-)
We can rejoice in our humanity in all its weaknesses because when we are weak that’s when we are strong. (St. Paul told us this) :-)
Most of the time, I’m a crumbled mess, so I know how it feels to be weak.
The Srciptures are so wonderfully descriptive—describing us in the Psalms as a “broken dish”. One has to remember that in the OT days a broken dish was of no use anymore—there was no Super Glue to fix it.
Now we know where our Super Glue is—He is always there, remolding this stubborn clay and filling in the cracks and brokenness.
TAKE TIME FOR ELEVEN THINGS
TAKE TIME TO WORK,
IT IS THE PRICE OF SUCCESS.
TAKE TIME TO THINK,
IT IS THE SOURCE OF POWER
TAKE TIME TO PLAY,
IT IS THE SECRET OF YOUTH.
TAKE TIME TO READ,
IT IS THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE.
TAKE TIME TO WORSHIP,
IT IS THE HIGHWAY OF REVERENCE AND WASHES THE DUST OF EARTH FROM YOUR EYES.
TAKE TIME TO HELP AND ENJOY FRIENDS,
IT IS THE SOURCE OF HAPPINESS.
TAKE TIME TO LOVE,
IT IS FUNDAMENTAL TO LIFE.
TAKE TIME TO DREAM,
IT HITCHES THE SOUL TO THE STARS.
TAKE TIME TO LAUGH,
IT IS THE SINGING THAT HELPS WITH LIFE'S LOADS.
TAKE TIME TO PRAY
IT IS THE GREATEST POWER ON EARTH.
TAKE TIME TO PLAN
IT IS THE SECRET TO BEING ABLE TO HAVE TIME TO TAKE TIME FOR THE FIRST TEN THINGS.
ANONYMOUS
THE VALUE OF TIME
Imagine there’s a bank which credits your account each morning with 86,400 dollars, carries over no balance from day to day, allows you to keep no cash balance, and every evening cancels whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course.
Well, everyone has such a bank. Its name is Time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it wipes off, as lost, whatever of this you had failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdrafts. Each day it opens a new account for you; each night it burns the records of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back; there is no drawing against tomorrow. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success. The clock is running. Make the most of today.
To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed his final exam.
To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.
To realize the value of one week, ask an editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of one day, ask a daily wage laborer who has ten kids to feed.
To realize the value of one hour, ask the lovebirds who are waiting to meet.
To realize the value of one minute, ask the person who has missed the train.
To realize the value of one second, ask a person who has survived an accident.
To realize the value of one millisecond, ask the person who has just won a silver medal in the Olympics.
Treasure every moment and use it wisely.
I like this...
Thanks, GOPJ.
It was good for me to run sheep for a while. I learned a lot.
We walked up and down and prayed. One of the other two is a novice Lay Dominican and I had my breviary so at 7:00 AM we prayed "Morning Prayer" (aka "Lauds"): psalms, canticles, one from Isaiah, the other Zechariah's song from Luke, intercessory prayers, Lord's Prayer, benediction. But in the middle was this reading from Scripture:
Eph 4:29-32Pretty good, huh?Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Very good. :)
Most excellent! :)
Today is a gift. That’s why we call it “the Present.”
:-D
Third Order high fives~!
Amen, Brother.
Totally marvelous; totally beautiful; totally true.
I realized that I should have gone for a Ph.D. in vanity. I could have challenged all but the language requirements, and my life would serve as dissertation. I am FAR too concerned about what other people think of me, what I look like, how I act, etc.
Maybe part of this could be excused by — or baptized into — prudence. I know that most teaching and some kinds of preaching include a kind of a sales job — “Hi! I'm an interesting and amusing person; you want to hear what I'm saying.” But more likely that's just God doing His ‘alchemy’ and turning my vain and histrionic evil into His evangelical good: My fear of disapproval (or whatever) leads me to adjust and time my presentation for maximum effect. God graciously blesses my words (or, at least, that's my assumption) and uses them to help others.
In a way, I'm okay with that. The “mission,” after all, is to spread the Word, the Good News of God's Love in Christ.
But, with Paul, I have a legitimate concern that, having brought (as is my hope and prayer) many to the Gospel, I not end up losing out myself.
So maybe here's a chunk o’ Gospel: God has made good works for us to walk in. We, of ourselves, or not worthy to walk in them, but shall we deny the gift the Lord of all gives? Not me!
And yet, to walk is good for one. The first year I walked in the MS 50k walk, I trained by walking 300+ miles. I started weak, and I have lately become asthmatic. But by the end of the summer, BP was down, pulse was down, endurance was up, spirits were good.
So, while we can and should (at least on this thread) put away contention about justification and sanctification and merit and the rest of the bazz fazz, may we not hope, ought we not to hope, that as God leads us along the paths he has set before us, we will somehow become stronger in HIS strength, and when we reach the end of the Way, we will find that, by His Grace, both End and Way were nothing other than the Love of God in Christ Jesus, the strength was His gift, and the Joy is He, and He alone.
Allow me to inflict upon you a prayer I wrote for and offered to the very religiously diverse group who walked the 50k walk a few years ago:
(extra points if you can ID the text which inspired the prayer.)
High, Mighty, and Holy God:
We thank you
for this wonderful day,
for the great task you have set before us,
and for the people who have worked and given to bring us here.
But how shall we, who are so different, pray to you?
What shall we call you?
We call you High,
But we have seen you here in the faces of those whose work and gifts have brought us here today.
And we have heard your Word of Love in the letters, the e-mails, the pledges sent to us.
We call you Mighty,
But we meet you in the people whom we seek to serve;
We hear your voice when they ask for help – or suffer silently.
We call you Holy
And you know, Oh Holy One, that we are not so very holy, not often anyway.
And yet you are with us, and have shared your holy work with us
And have given us the holy work of caring for one another
And of needing one another.
And for what shall we pray?
Just this, O Holy one:
That when we are weak and weary
we will know your strength and power,
That when we are sad and hopeless
we will see you in your Joy and Gladness,
That when all seems dark
we will see your Light,
That when we are lost
You will lead us in your Way
The way that leads
through death to Life,
through sorrow to Joy
through work and weariness to your rest.
This is a good prayer. Amen.
THX THX
Excellent!
I try, occasionally, for the fun of it, to think about what I'm talking about. And for my bubbas and sissies here I thought about vanity and abortion. (I didn't say any of this in Church.)
And here's what came to the alleged mind: The Song of Mary, the Magnificat. The particular verse that floated up through the litter in my head was:
"He has scattered the proud in their conceit." Here's an older version:
"He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."
The Latin and Greek both say, pretty much, 'the minds of their hearts' but my Greek Lexicon (Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, for my fellow geeks) suggests that dianoia (διανοια) can have the sense of "disposition" (might we say "world view" or "prejudices"?) and can be used in a pejorative sense in the LXX and, it seems to say, in secular Greek as well from the time of Aeschylus. Me, I wouldn't know.
But it does get me to thinking about what kind of mind I used to have (and therefore Paul's urging that our minds be renewed), the kind of mind that could entertain calmly the idea of ending infant life in the name of "quality of life," (or some other, um, periphrastic prevarication - okay, I'm a little giddy here ...).
And all I can say is, Wow! Was I ever stupid!
I did say this: Not only do we have "Moses and the prophets," we have the testimony of our own hearts. What sound on earth can give greater happiness than the gentle cooing of a baby? In the normal course of events do we not rejoice at the news of a birth?
Is it not written on our hearts, and on the hearts of Pagans, that a child is of inestimable worth? Sure, in demonic perversion this perception led people to offer their own babies in sacrifice, but surely it was some deep sense of the incalculable worth of a baby.
And I believe this is true, that it was humans at war in themselves who exposed their young then and who kill them now.
We are at war with ourselves. From our first parents, each looking for someone else to blame for eating the forbidden fruit, we have been afraid to know ourselves too well, for fear, perhaps, of the horror we might find.
So we construct "the imagination of our hearts," a less-upsetting alternate reality. On this we base far, far too much. And because, being false, it is essentially rickety, we prop it up with little vanities.
Or not so little, such as the vain idea that we know so much about everything that we can set out to kill an innocent human without moral consequence.
We may tolerate and even smile at little vanities. But we should recognize how venomous they are when full grown
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