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.
LOL!
You know you’re in trouble when you start interrupting yourself.
(LOVE your tag line!)
Actually, I was reading “Night” by Eli Wiesel.
Keeping you in prayers, brother.
YAY GOD!
DRE’s baby is right way around and doesn’t need to be pulled, so DRE is teaching tonight, not me. Great weight off the alleged mind.
(You guys know that DRE means “Director of Religious Edumication” right?)
thank you.
thank you.
Mad Dawg, you have my prayers- and my admiration. May God bless you.
RCIA was great fun for me tonight:
After the break we did half an hour of “Ask Mad Dawg Anything,” and I got GREAT questions!
- Why do people resist the Gospel?
- How can we think that the Sacrifice of the Mass is identical with the Sacrifice of Calvary?
- Why do I wear a miraculous medal along with my Dominican “scapular medal”?
- What is the relationship between Grace and Free Will?
(Send a ‘love offering’ and a stamped self-addressed envelope for the final word on THAT question. Yeah, right.)
So we talked about
- the “scandal of particularity”,
- what “Eternity” means,
- a little teeny tiny bit of Mary as the true preacher of the Word, and
- what was really going on when my kid and I danced together, and she stood on my feet.
( By “we” I mean “I”.)
I would rather do that than eat. I think. maybe.
I would rather do a lot of things than eat. However, eating is something I can do while also doing everything else I don’t really want to do. You know?
The tightness of my trousers gives evidence against me that I know all too well.
My daughter, when very young, wanted to dance with me. So she stood on my feet. I provided the motive power and the direction, and so we danced, both of us happy.
But of course, for this to happen, she had to want to dance with her papa, and she had to be alert to where I moved my feet and to choose to move her feet with mine rather than against them.
But we must ask why did she want to dance, to move with me? Isn't it because from the instant after I pulled her from the birth canal and held her up and gazed into her eyes -- as she stared back, it was my constant intention to fill her up with love.
I think that the job of being a parent includes filling the child with love, as a reactor is filled with radioactive material until the reaction is self-sustaining.
I filled her with love until she was able to return it. And so we danced and laughed.
It is also like an induction motor. God loves me; He loves my kid. And all that powerful love acts through the walls of my pride and induces love between me and my wife, and me and my child.
It is all from Him. Without Him, coldness and death. With Him, love and warmth and freedom.
What a silly choice to prefer the illusion of my own solitary grandeur when I, by grace, can choose to put away my aloofness and enter the dance!
If you, as a fallible human - although a pretty well advanced one - can love your own that much, think about how the all-powerful, all-knowing, infallible, loving creator and sustainer of the universe loves His own! It is beyond our comprehension, yet He does. Praise His name!
Yes indeed! It is not that God is ‘like’ a father. He is THE Father, and we get to be a little like Him — enough to have a clue not only in our minds but in our emotions, a clue about what REAL love is.
I think that's why Satan hates families so much - if a child has little/no relationship with an earthly father, how much more difficult will it be to have one with his heavenly Father?
What a beautifully simple observation. Its why statists and the welfare state work for the demise and irrelevancy of the father.
Thanks
Your daughter is blessed...
Dude.. you made me tear up.
The great cloud of testifiers with whom God has surrounded us is not limited to the saints who have gone before. All the gifts of nature proclaim His goodness, and we must perform violence on our intellects and affections if we are to be deaf to their witness.
Praise God! Isn’t He wonderful? I learned so much from being a papa.
A friend told me that Aristotle said the ability to make metaphor is a sign of Genius.
Just sayin’
(Dang. I’d better pray that Litany some more, huh?)
You know, beloved in the Lord, I am depressed — whatever the cause is. Things are sometimes rough. My kid has not found a rich Catholic to marry. I mean, DARN!
But in all this I hear angels and creation singing, you know what I mean? It’s Psalm 19 and 104 and the “apocryphal” “Song of the Three Young Men.”
Yes, I dare say than despite me, my daughter is blessed. But ‘serving’ her as a husband and father ought to serve his family has been such a blessing to me that it cannot be measured.
You all may know that I ran sheep for a decade and more. I grained them year round. I had low troughs in the field, a feed shed, and a cart to carry buckets of feed. Of course it was easier if I got as much grain as possible into the 5 gallon buckets because that meant fewer buckets to monkey with. (In addition to my soon to be world famous flashlight collection, I have an immense number of colored plastic buckets).
So how do you get as much grain as possible into a bucket? You scoop it in, then you shake the bucket, then if there’s barely enough room for the final scoop, you press down on what’s in the bucket.
You can imagine the epiphany I had one day. That’s how God measures the grace He gives to us! Shaken down, pressed together, running over! As much as He can possibly jam into us!
Praise Him and magnify Him for ever!
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