Very sleep-deprived this morning. Hard to think straight.
STILL those mean-girl kakofoni (new subjargon needed??) actively spiteful & hateful towards the "perfume woman"???
WHY.
Donation email Spirit-push during Adoration. Unexpected but surprisingly loud & insistent. Refused to ignore it, and immediately gave.
"Did I do the right thing; God are you happy with this? give me a sign."
IMMEDIATELY someone outside "friendly beeped" their car horn multiple times. I almost laughed from the cheerful wonder of it
Took SO LONG to pray & prep food. Literally so disoriented and dizzy we thought we were going to faint. Glucose 80 though???
Julie won the $5 today, haha. Sharing it with "Addie and Audie"
...
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Got this video notification and IT HITS HARD=
https://youtube.com/shorts/__8HNCtNrqE?si=midVWrzQMjKLNupy
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VOTD = John 16:33.
"This beautiful world is fractured." Its only hope is JESUS. But "take heart"-- that hope is INDOMITABLE.
Jesus is honest about BOTH the inevitable pain we will endure, AND the promised joy to follow, if we drink the cup WITH HIM.
A crucifixion without Christ is just an execution. But with Christ, it is the very means of Resurrection. Suffering is transmuted only "in the Cup of Joy and Love shared in Eucharist," where "EVERYTHING is transformed in Jesus Christ," as Knife's prayer reminds us so profoundly.
The Eucharist-- the Last Supper and the Cross united-- offers to God a different Cup than the one at Gethsemane: indeed it is the very response to it. Christ drank the bitter cup of death & suffering to the dregs, and BY that very cup, poured out His Precious Blood to refill it with mercy?? His death and suffering were suffered FOR joy and love, to save us from the death & suffering OF SIN, to offer a NEW Cup of a NEW Covenant that would STILL HOLD SUFFERING but forever transmuted THROUGH UNITY WITH HIM? The Blood of the Eucharist is LOVE & JOY, because it EXPUNGES SINS, even though it still hurt to shed? I'm rambling. I can't type this off the cuff on a phone. Suffice to say, there is depth here that must be dived into. There IS hope even in our worst agony, solely because Jesus is with us there, and He gives it new purpose in unity with His Own Sacrifice.
Fractures are how the Light gets in, always.
Unsurprisingly the questions are very relevant.
"How will you take hold of courage and hope today?
+ I will cling to the peace of God when I go through tough situations.
+ I will not give up when I go through hard times because I know that Jesus is in control.
+ I will expect God's Presence to go with me when I go through trouble."
I need to take this bit by bit.
1) "Take hold."
2) Hope AND courage-- the two actually feel inseparable???
3) "Clinging to peace." What evocative language, and what a seeming paradox.
4) "I will not give up." There's heavy conviction there.
5) JESUS is in control. Not just "God," which-- although true-- is a "generic" enough word to give excuse to allow sinful depersonalization of it to creep in.
6) "EXPECT GOD'S PRESENCE."
7) The distinct situations = "tough situations," "hard times," and "trouble."
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KVOTD is Acts 3:6-7 by HIGHWAY KIDS and they always crack me up, just as consistently as they have good messages.
"Even though the beggar-- the lame man-- wanted money, Peter and John knew they could give him what he needed, something way more than just silver & gold. Peter and John were enabled and empowered by the Holy Spirit to heal that man. And you know what? We are enabled and empowered to do the same thing today!
Today's challenge: listen and be aware of what the Holy Spirit, and what God wants to do in your life. There are hundreds of little miracles that you can do in your world today."
Man that just SLAMMED into me. My sinful doubt had me closing my heart, saying "no, I can't heal anyone like they did, they're giving false messages," but that's devil talk. Of course you couldn't heal anyone with how little FAITH you apparently have in the Spirit!! And its not about big showy things either. There are COUNTLESS LITTLE MIRACLES that the Holy Spirit CAN DO and WANTS TO DO THROUGH YOU, EVERY SINGLE DAY. Stop letting pride quench the Spirit.
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Reading some more Catholic Answers today because our brain is too fried to process & type on the Expositor sermons.
"One of the tragic consequences of the mystery of sin is that, having grown accustomed to it, we feel naked and insecure without its familiarity."
Guess what else does this? TRAUMA & ADDICTION. Which isn't surprising, ultimately, since both those things only exist BECAUSE OF SIN.
...
Okay now there are tons of quotes from the C.S.Lewis book "The Great Divorce" which we've never read, but NEED to now because WOW--
"...an angel encounters a soul with a lizard on its neck... the reptile, which symbolizes lust... promised not to keep whispering dirty ideas into his ear... but it “won’t stop.” So the soul is ready to take his inappropriate companion and go back to hell. The angel proposes another way, albeit by steps.
“Would you like me to make him quiet?”
The soul seems enthusiastic about the prospect.
“Then I will kill it.”
But, on approaching them, the soul already feels uncomfortable... When the angel asks whether the soul really wants the pest killed, the latter begins to temporize. “You didn’t say anything about killing him at first.” That’s so “drastic.” All the soul wanted was lust’s “silence,” not necessarily its separation. And he wanted its “silence” because, well, its overt visibility is “so damned embarrassing.”
But the angel doesn’t give up. “There’s no time.” Now is the time (literally, since heaven is the eternal now).
The soul keeps multiplying excuses. “I shall be able to keep it in order now.” ...In the end, the soul admits its fear: in killing it, you’ll kill me. The angel assures the soul that’s not true. But “you’re hurting me now.” The angel is clear: “I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”"
EVERY SINGLE WORD OF THIS IS DESCRIBING OUR HISTORY AS A SYSTEM.
OH BUT THE CONCLUSION IS MINDBLOWING =
"The angel then plucks the lizard from the soul’s shoulder and fatally twists its neck. At the same time, the soul “gave a scream of agony such as I had never heard on earth.” What then happens is amazing. The soul begins to grow in stature, “not much smaller than the Angel.” His beauty emerges. The lizard, too, changes. From an ugly reptile emerges a vigorous white stallion, which the soul approaches and nuzzles. Then the soul hops on its back and, together, both ride off to the mountains—the heights—of heaven."
THE "KILLING" DIDN'T "KILL IT"????? IT TRANSMUTED IT!!!!
THAT'S LITERALLY WHAT LAURIE'S AXE DOES
BUT CONSIDER THE PURPOSE OF THAT IN LIGHT OF THIS BOOK!!
THERE IS NO DEATH IN HEAVEN YOU MORON
IF GOD IS GOING TO ANNIHILATE SOMETHING IT'S ONLY EVER GOING TO BE DEATH ITSELF THAT DIES
EVERYTHING PURE & GOOD & TRUE & LOVELY IS OF GOD AND THEREFORE HAS LIFE IN IT AND CANNOT BE KILLED.
...which is exactly the obstacle we have been facing for years.
We WANT to kill it.
We want to kill something God has created and put in us, and we don't want it back.
...or, at least, we are terrified of admitting it.
That brings us to the conclusion of the article=
"Human beings are sensory creatures. The world comes to us through our senses, including touch (which includes sex). Eros is that love which most directly affects the senses. It is powerful. It gives us “lust” for life and love. It drives us forward.
In itself, eros is very good. It’s when its power is directed in the wrong ways that the powerful stallion becomes the creepy lizard hanging on our necks. Saint Augustine was an erotic man. His misdirected eros led to many sins and wasted years. But when his lizard was killed, he became a saint whose spiritual vigor outdid many.
Catholicism does not ask we deny the senses. It does ask that we put them in the service of the good. The failure to control them leads to lust; their discipline supports love. “Love” and “lust” are not cousins... Our sensual world confuses them... [But] imagine what great saints would arise if that eros were channeled into true love instead of lust."
...CNC killed that part of us in a psychic suicide.
Last year, Infinitii died again, and took everything ze had held with hir. And the Spectrumind won't let him resurrect.
Why do you think the Core Bloodline is STILL shut down??? Why do you think the apatefoni keep trying to mutiny and usurp the position? Why do you think the thriskefoni have such disturbingly cold hearts?
We shot the stallion. That is, assuming the dragon devouring us even suffered a spinal severance. Did Infi count, with hir skull so split by scars?
Oh my gosh is this the prelude to an actual answer to my desperate prayers?? I can't get my hopes up. I can't presume.
But also I'm too damn terrified.
We murdered Eros because we mistook him for his "cousin."
THAT'S THE PROBLEM. THAT IS THE ENTIRE BLOODY PROBLEM.
To be completely blunt with you, in the most base language I dare to use.... I love eros. I hate sex.
And in the very beginning, when our hapless tween psyche was first being exposed to such concepts, sex was all we were taught. Forcibly.
...
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SONOFAGUN LOOK WHAT LITERALLY JUST APPEARED IN MY EMAIL
"There can be no marriage between heaven and hell. In fact, there is a great divorce. This is the argument of famous Christian thinker, C.S. Lewis, in his book The Great Divorce..."
OKAY HOLY SPIRIT I GET THE HINT
*OPENS UP THE EBAY APP*
OH COME ON AND THIS WAS ALREADY IN MY CART?????
"CAN YOU DRINK THE CUP"
*SLAMS THE BUY IT NOW BUTTON*
Listen man I don't make the rules but when synchronicity hits this hard YOU LISTEN
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Oh boy this next article is gutting me like a fish. I can FEEL the fearful resistance. Therefore I MUST read it and not run-- and WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT’S HELP.
Lord please open my eyes & heart to recognize and accept your Truth. May YOUR Will be done, especially in the ways that I have heretofore resisted or even denied. Please, guide me to receive these revelations in willing surrender, so I can finally see & cooperate with Your Purposes. I am afraid to change because I am afraid to die, and i see death here. Reassure me with Yourself. You know what is best, and what is real, and what is good-- I don't. Please change my heart to match Yours. Jesus I trust in You. Holy Spirit guide my thoughts. Lead me into Your Truth. Amen.
"Through the inspired author of Genesis, God revealed two things about human nature. We are made 1) in God’s image and likeness and 2) male and female. The first pertains, at minimum, to our rational, immortal soul, which sets us apart from the other animals. The second tells us that we are, at the root, sexed beings. Our bodies’ sexual characteristics are not, as the modern gnostics want us to think, accidental to who and what we are, but essential. We can’t change what God created us to be—not by mutilating our flesh, not by donning different clothes, not through attempted conjugality with persons of our own sex. Our sex runs right to the core."
And there's the guillotine.
Honestly, and brutally so, in reading that part of me DOES die. I "want to" close the phone, sit on the floor, and dissociate from reality so hard I don't exist anymore. It's a cowardly response, and foolish. But it's the honest truth, that THAT is, on a "survival" level, my knee-jerk trauma response. Can't fight, can't flight, so just cryofreeze.
...but oh man WERE WE TRAUMA-RESPONDING???? "Flight" by running from family & neighbors, rejecting all even vaguely feminine things? "Fight" by living as a man for a solid decade, even taking hormones to battle biology? And the fatal "Fawn" in our hellish history of continuous, torturous sexual assault & abuse, all involving identity annihilation?
But nothing "worked"; nothing could alter the Catholic & chromosomal testimonies. We were female. We were forever female. And we decided we would rather die instead.
...but I'm so tired of running from God. If something has to die, if a neck must be snapped, then...
...
...
"How we live out our sexed-ness, then, is not merely an animal pursuit for our bodies, or merely a spiritual sense of how we feel deep inside. Rather, it is an integrated and central aspect of our flourishing and perfection as human beings. Our genitalia are not “junk”; they are physical signs of a spiritual reality. We don’t merely consume sex like junk food or play at it like a video game because sex, by its nature and ours, contains and communicates the fullness of our dignity."
HOW. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE. WHY.
I'm sorry, that's the pain of abuse & objectification. I have to bring that to God too.
...
"Jesus loves His one spouse, the Church, with perfect fidelity, even giving His life for her. We who are his bride are called to love Him with equal fidelity and with obedience, making possible an intimate, marriage-like union with Him, body and soul, that culminates in eternal life. All of this informs our view of sexual sin because sex is at the heart of marriage. It consummates the vows, making a sacramental marriage indissoluble. Over the course of a marriage, it symbolizes and re-presents in a fleshly sign the mutual self-gift that husband and wife pledged to each other. Offenses against chastity are thus offenses against sex’s proper expression in marriage— meaning that they’re offenses against the principal sign by which God has chosen to reveal His relationship with us."
...this kind of talk, specifically of a religious context, makes me actually so physically ill I'm shaking & nauseous.
I feel like an abused child, so damaged I've gone numb. "Do I have to?" I feebly ask, wishing I could rather die, but hopeless for any real deliverance. "I don't want to," I want to sob hysterically. "I don't want to have sex. Please don't make me." I'm a child, a child!! I'm not a bride! I'm not a wife! Except I am, as part of the Church I'm both, and from the time they stamped an "F" on my birth certificate everyone knew I was destined to be f*ckd. And I'm sorry, but the brutality of that ugly word is the only honest vocabulary I have. Because I DON'T see sex as some "loving and sacred and wonderful thing." For God's actual sake I'm a child and I DON'T WANT TO HAVE SEX. I'm scared to death. I feel like I'm trapped in a gas chamber. I have no future. Every person who looks at me sees a beautiful doll, a precious possession, to own and use and put away. Nevermind the cracks in the porcelain. That's normal.
That's not what God made sex to be.
...that's the bottom line of all of it, isn't it? I have NO BLOODY IDEA WHAT "SEX" ACTUALLY IS BECAUSE I HAD A DEVILISHLY DIFFERENT DEFINITION VIOLENTLY & VICIOUSLY INFLICTED UPON ME LONG BEFORE I EVER LEARNED THAT GOD WAS SUPPOSED TO BE INVOLVED AT SOME POINT.
...
...
Okay I'm literally going to vomit so I need to pause.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sex-is-kind-of-a-big-deal
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Back to Mallett.
"If the Body of Christ is truly following her Head in her own Passion, then we will also be forewarned as was our Lord:
"He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. (Mark 8:31-32)"
Jesus knew the details of who would persecute him and put him to death. So too, in our day, the main players are being identified and the antagonists revealed. In fact, the main powers are not even attempting to hide their plans... As it was apparent to Christ, so too in our day, the enemies of the Church are making themselves known."
It's actually scary how obvious the devil's work is now, in so many aspects of our culture and society, across the globe... and it's even scarier how, BECAUSE it's so obvious and shameless, it's seen as normal or "just the way it is" or even "progressive." Just because it's "out there in the open," people assume it's therefore "nothing to hide" or "not something we should suppress," etc.
Of course this is the most scandalously obvious in matters of gender & sexuality, especially here in the USA.
...
But it's apparent with violence, too. It's apparent with control, with lies, with manipulation. It's apparent with casual and common blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy.
...
Romans 12:21 PEV SLAMS:
"So don’t do payback to anybody. Don’t do bad things to them. If you do that payback, it is like you let that bad part of you win. But instead, you have to be good to everybody. That’s how you properly win against bad things."
The last line says not to let evil "overcome, overpower, conquer, defeat, or master" us. "Don’t let evil get the best of you. Don't let it get power over you. Don't let it win." It's very serious language, and can feel daunting... until we read the simple and amazing response. We can do the SAME THINGS TO EVIL by doing good. We CAN "overcome, overpower, conquer, defeat, and master" evil works and schemes, BY DOING GOOD, which we can ONLY do THROUGH CHRIST. And THAT is why our total victory is assured-- because Jesus CANNOT be defeated, ever, by anything. We are simply bringing His Eternal Victory into our own temporal circumstances, for His Glory, as God's Children.
But as for the application of this to the warnings? Be not afraid.
Neither mankind nor the devil himself can control or conquer the almighty and invincible Love which IS GOD. Evil cannot win. All it can do is exhaust itself. So "Rejoice & exult in hope, because of our confidence in Christ... be steadfast and patiently endure in suffering & tribulations... and be devoted to prayer"-- pray "constantly, faithfully, perseveringly," "at all times" and "instantly"; "continually seeking wisdom, guidance, and strength" and "never giving up." Prayer is our anchor for it all; prayer is our direct line to God Himself. Never stop praying.
I'll let the PEV close this up:
"We know that everything will be really good after God fixes everything up, so think about that and you will be really happy. But if people give you trouble now, don’t give up, but stay strong for God. And keep on talking to God about everything."
Live like Jesus, with Jesus, for Jesus, no matter what.
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""Christ is always being born again through all the generations, and so he takes up, he gathers humanity into himself. And this cosmic birth is realized in the cry of the Cross, in the suffering of the Passion. And the blood of the martyrs belongs to this cry"... countering the spirit of the world through their witness... building God’s army—soldiers who would fight with faith, hope, and love, proclaiming the Gospel of Life... "This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel! It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known… The Gospel must not be kept hidden because of fear or indifference"... Christ wants us to exercise our authority in Him now, more than ever… This is not the time for comfort, but the time for miracles!"
We really, really need this rallying cry.
We ARE a warrior. Somehow I cannot deny this. If only for Christ, if only BY Christ, then still, we feel called to be a warrior of Love, a Soldier of Life, a faithful member of God's Army.
You see headspace. Battle has always been part of our life, striving to do what is right, to conquer sin, to protect our soul. We cannot chicken out now, just because the trauma environment has settled down and the shakes have set in. We cannot retire, no way. We miss having a good fight TO fight.
...
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