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.
Gee, are you sure it's that? Maybe you're just scared of the responsibility of having to live up to it . . . sort of stage fright when you realize someone's actually watching. I don't know -- not a problem I have to deal with lately! ;-)
Oh yeah! I might have to live up to my PR! They’ll expect me to be better tomorrow.
I’m an expert in stupid.
LOL! We always expect you to be better . . . and then better than that . . . and then better than that -- etc., etc. -- sort of like the Cliquot Club kid in reverse (if you remember that!)
I'm clear on that too, dear brother in Christ!
You wrote:
... there is nothing you can do and nothing you must do to be saved ... but it's very hard to do nothing.Dear brother, the constant act of living Faith is never "nothing!"
You wrote:
And let us all pray that God will enable us to heed the promise of Exodus 14:14 — "The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be still."This wisdom evidently is of very ancient heritage. From ~1500 B.C. Egypt we have the "Wisdom of Amonepone" (author anonymous, spelling doubtful):
"Rest still in God's arms,It seems to me if we feel we are walking in darkness, The Book of Exodus and Amonepone's insight can remind us of the helps and consolation we have from the Holy Spirit of God, by Christ's unimaginably stupendous Sacrifice, so to give us patience for the return of His Light....
and your silence will confound
your enemies."
It seems to me the Holy Spirit is always near to those who manifestly love Christ, even if the Spirit seems "obscured" or somehow "distant." Saint John of the Cross speaks of this sort of thing as the "dark night of the soul".... The 23rd Psalm speaks of "the valley of the shadow...."
Yet St. Anselm of Cantebury speaks passionately of direct communication with God....
All these insights come from human experiences of an extraordinarily elevated order. JMHO FWIW
In Christ's love and peace, dear brother Mad Dawg!
All Praise and Glory be to our Lord God!
Thanks for the prayer suggestion..
40 days of prayer is very holy.
Yes—and Psalm 84 tells us “......when they go through the Bitter Valley, they make it a place of springs.
:-)
I’ll be with you in the Forty Days of Prayer for the Unborn.
Do we have a special prayer for that?
So here's a nice story:
For the non-feelthy papists, the year after you're baptized as an adult you're a "neophyte." And we kind of extend that courtesy in my parish to anyone for the year after they've become Catholic one way or another. And once a month I make myself available to the neophytes. I have a program, but I try to make it as flexible as possible.
So, tonight, one, (1) - as in ONLY 1!!!! - neophyte shows up, and he and his wife haven't come to any of the previous evenings. So I'm kind of bummed.
But I try to catch them up on the concept of neophyte, on our living no longer with our life but with the Life of Christ in the community of Love which is the Trinity, on how we share our Lord's sorrows as well as His joys, His defeat as well as His victory -- and how, because we 'know' the victory, our very defeats, like His, are blessed.
So he tells me that he was a junior naval officer, with a career ahead of him, and all, and suddenly he comes down with juvenile diabetes!
And first he tries to be really really good so that he will be worthy of a miraculous cure.
Then he realizes that that's crazy. (The worthiness part, not the praying part.)
Then he realizes that in his illness (which is not SO bad but still ...) he is experiencing a closeness to Christ he never knew when everything was hunky-dory!
Is God great or WHAT?
Once again, I'm running my mouth, feeling like a garrulous bozo, and the guy I'm talking to is drinking in every word because it tracks his walk with IHS.
I am in awe of God's greatness!
May your words come true for the victims of abortion, and of the kind of thought that leads to abortion.
Mind you, one of my dear friends on facebook is a liberal and was delighted to hear that I’m not talking politics for 40 days. ...
My FAVORITE! ps 84. One of the great ones! And that line ... Ah. So much promise!
Re: special prayer.
If the fearless leader in our local effort comes up with one, I’ll pass it on. I’m just going to add the Dominican Novena to my ‘rule,’ for the duration.
To God be the glory, not man, never man.
There is clearly a false humility. One species in the genus is spite or despite for life itself.
We can see where it begins. Dead sand is "clean"; living humus is "dirty." Which would you rather have on your hands, SAE-30 motor oil, purified and dead, or snot? Who among us has escaped the humiliating experience of being pooped on by a bird? Ah! Life! NOT!
Human life can be seen as more of a plague than the occasional avian insult. While cities should be monuments to creativity and civility, yet they too have their excretory functions, and it takes planning and discipline for humans in cities to avoid fouling their nest.
And in this we can see not only our ambivalence, fallen as we are, about the burden and delights of our animal life, but the fell hand of the enemy, and his disastrous thoughts seeping into our minds.
"Too many children!" is the cry. Diapers in landfills. Children squalling in restaurants. Babies yowling in church. Parents "punished with a baby," as our president once said -- worried, frustrated, unable fulfill their potential, their dreams.
We must, we are told, prevent fecundity. We must make our beds sterile, while we impose no obstacle to orgasm, however achieved. For the good of life, they tell us, we must adopt the practice of death and snatch, scrape, and tear the pre-nascent human from the place ordained, "appointed" as the Bible charmingly says, for it. Otherwise our lives will be ruined.
But they are not our lives, not OURS, not really. As Lewis says, to pretend this is MY life, MY body is ludicrous. Imagine a prince, the young child of a king. In love the royal father makes him lord of some small principality. He receives the honor, the title, the coronet. But still the principality is really governed by the king and his counsellors.
How foolish would that child be who wanted to exercise for himself the princely power! Before his subjects could hear, laugh, and possibly rebel, the kingly sire would send him to his room without any supper!
Yet we claim sovereignty over ourselves, our 'persons' as the old language has it, and seek to extend that sovereignty over the mystery of ensouled life around ourselves, and even in ourselves, all in the name of our dominion.
And the outcome? When we set ourselves against the Lord of Life and Love, what can the outcome be but death and misery?
We humans have been given the titles of dominion and many powers. Beguiled by our seeming majesty we exercise this lordship but in pride and disobedience, not in the wonder which Life, mucus, smells, and all, should compel -- does compel when our eyes are open and our hearts alive.
What false charity to destroy our own kind! What false humility to despise the miracle of our life! What sorrow and wrath we bring down on our own heads, and those of our children, when we, as our pagan forebears did, sacrifice our children to ensure our ease!
May we be forgiven. May we be given new hearts. May we bear life-giving Love, the Son of Love, into a world where we are so lost that to many of us the way to joy is through the death of our heirs.
Lord have mercy upon us.
Christ have mercy upon us.
Lord have mercy upon us.
"Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee...." [Psalm 84, KJV]
Thank you so much, Running on Empty, for the citation of Psalm 84! It is marvelously on-point here....
Good morning MD! Thanks for sharing your morning mutterings. The above line made me think of an awesome country music song, Love Like Crazy by Lee Brice. One of the lines is, “where she blessed him with six more mouths to feed” … this is the exact opposite perspective to the ‘too many children’ mantra … and the one God wants us to have, IMHO.
Lord Have Mercy On Us indeed!
Deuteronomy 30:
15Consider that I have set before thee this day life and good, and on the other hand death and evil: 16That thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways, and keep his commandments and ceremonies and judgments, and thou mayst live, and he may multiply thee, and bless thee in the land, which thou shalt go in to possess. 17But if thy heart be turned away, so that thou wilt not hear, and being deceived with error thou adore strange gods, and serve them: 18I foretell thee this day that thou shalt perish, and shalt remain but a short time in the land, to which thou shalt pass over the Jordan, and shalt go in to possess it. 19I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both thou and thy seed may live: 20And that thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and obey his voice, and adhere to him (for he is thy life, and the length of thy days,) that thou mayst dwell in the land, for which the Lord swore to thy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give it them.
Or in the RSV,
Blessed are the men whose strength is in Thee, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
As they go through the Valley of Bekaa, they make it place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.
They go from strength to strength; the God of gods will be seen in Zion.
So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O’er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy:
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy,
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown,
My heart will keep the courage of the quest,
And hope the road’s last turn will be the best.
-— Henry Van Dyke
TRUE TRUE.
THX THX.
I think there may be either an ambiguity or a pun in “the valley of Bekaa” because the Hebrew for “He wept” is Bakah.
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