prismaticbleed | nov 2019 faithposting (Reply)

St. Paisios the Athonite says: “Christ must be the core of every human movement!”

And if our core is not in Christ, then it will in the world. Do not endanger your soul so!

--------------------------------

When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God. Truly they do; for they are all one in God, and where God is, there are they also. Where the sun is, thither also are directed all its rays. Try to understand what this means.
St. John of Kronstadt

…Honestly, my heart yearns to just reflect on this gorgeously humbling profundity for hours. It’s beyond the capacity of words to express. And yet… try to understand what this means. What a blessedly beautiful prayer that is too. Try. Try anyway, to grasp the ineffable glory of this truth, to touch the tender heart of it– because what is impossible for man is possible for God, and through His Spirit in you, and through the love of His Son, you are even less alone than you realize… you are bathed in light even in your deepest night.

Where the “sun” is, indeed.

---------------------------------------------------

Catholics don't worship Mary because Mary is not a goddess; she does not have any creative power or omniscience and/or omnipotence or anything of the sort. the important thing about Mary is that God created through her! Christ could have come in Great Power and glory and manifested himself as some wonderful thing and had people believe in Him because of that... but He wanted to be born in the most humble manner possible. He wanted to be born as a baby and to grow up as a human being with all of the struggles and pains and difficulties that involved. THIS is why people find it hard to believe in Him I guess. but this is important because it shows that Mary did not create Him. God created HER, but when Gabriel came to visit her he basically said you will conceive BY the Holy Spirit! but NO woman creates the soul of her child; her body is able to form a body, but how? by eating things that God gave her! by her body working in the way God made it to work! GOD is the One Who creates everything. and basically Mary was the doorway. she was the means BY which Jesus Christ entered the world, but she did not create Him. her body created His body, again through the grace of God. so when we pray to her she's the mediatrix of all grace-- as she's the door through which Jesus entered the world, so she is STILL a channel through which grace enters our world! and so we only pray to her. we're not saying "Hey, create this, do this, do that"-- she is simply a doorway through which GOD continues to work! she is the most powerful intercessor on our behalf because of this. so we're not asking her to do what God does! we're just asking her to continue to be this great mediatrix between God and man.

----------------------------------------------------

“St. Matthias: Apostle by chance; disciple by choice; saint by grace.”

I love how this highlights the three key elements of following Christ– He calls us seemingly by “chance,” against all odds, from the darkest depths, in defiance of despair and degradation… but it is our choice to follow that call, using our free will to strive to imitate Him, and in making that choice we are given the Grace to amend our lives and be reborn as Children of God.

We are chosen by God, we in turn choose to cooperate, and then we are carried further up by Him than we ever could alone. It’s a beautiful process, even with its crosses– perhaps especially with.

But it takes all three steps. It takes the Trinity, and we are profoundly blessed to be part of their plan of redemption. We just have to respond with our whole heart… and They will help us.

---------------------------------------------------

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

— Czeslaw Milosz

This false “solace” is no real comfort at all, especially not to any heart dedicated to both justice and mercy.

To hold such a selfish belief– to think, “I can commit any so-called ‘sin’ that I want; there’s no hell, I can get away with it! I’m living for me, doing what I want to be happy, and that’s all that matters.”– is to utterly and abominably reject the very humanity of your fellow man. To betray, to cheat, to harm, to offend another soul in any way “for your own good” and not to think of THEIR good… this is a demonic mindset. Worse still is to think that you can get away with it, that it can all be hand-waved away as “oh, I was just doing my best!” or “well it’s their fault if they were offended” or “what’s wrong for you is right for me” or some similar self-worshipping blasphemy.

I assure you, Satan laughs at such phrases as he stokes the fires of hell, ready to roast those people… unless they repent and turn to Christ, of course. But such a metanoia requires divine intervention. No self-righteousness will ever save anyone. And that is the key sin of this thought process: the totally false belief that after death, there’s nothing, and therefore, nothing matters. “I can do no wrong because 'wrong’ doesn’t exist,” they claim, but that argument inevitably collapses in on itself– ironically, usually when its believer becomes the receiver of their own cruelty from another. Steal from the thief, and suddenly it’s an intolerable act. But a sin is always a sin, no matter how you may sugarcoat it for yourself.

Truly, there is no solace in nothingness. It’s simply the only thing muting one’s conscience, and that tenuous silence, that buried sense of guilt and shame, is misinterpreted as “peace” by someone whose soul would otherwise be living in constant moral torment. Their “solace” is just a panicked wish that they can avoid looking at the big picture, forever– that they can torch the world around them and never have to so much as smell the smoke. But the fires will catch up to them, no matter how they run. It’s inevitable. For one who lives by the sword, even metaphorically, that same blade will bring their death as well.

There is justice. There is a judgment, there is a moral debt righteously demanded after death, and unless you admit, repent, and are absolved of that sentence now– through Christ alone; you could never pay that much blood back on your own– you will be utterly damned for your self-idolatry.

Hell exists. And if you make other’s lives into it while they’re alive, you’ll end up there for a lot longer once yours is over.

----------------------------------------------------------------

“If Christ isn’t sufficient, if He doesn’t make you valuable, then no one nor no thing ever will.”

Christ Jesus is God. He’s a member of the Holy Trinity itself. He is The Word through which all things were Spoken into Existence. He is our Lord, our Redeemer, our Savior, our Bridegroom, our Good Shepherd, our Brother, and our Friend. Christ is everything.

Therefore, if Christ isn’t sufficient to you, nothing else could ever be.

The good news is: He is. He is sufficient and He does make you valuable– in fact, you are so valuable to Him that He chose to die to pay the crushing debt of sin for you, personally, so that you could live with Him in heaven forever, loved by God Himself.

Whatever lack or loss you’re afraid of, it’s based on earthly suffering, and does not apply to God. Christ cannot betray you. Have faith in His steadfast love. He can and will deliver you if you let Him.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

“Turn your eyes incessantly to the Blessed Virgin; she, who is the Mother of Sorrows and also the Mother of Consolation, can understand you completely and help you. Looking to her, praying to her, you will obtain that your tedium will become serenity, your anguish change into hope, and your grief into love. I accompany you with my blessing, which I willingly extend to all those who assist you.”

-Pope St. John Paul II

I don’t think many Catholics fully grasp the depth of this truth– I will admit that I sure didn’t.

Mary raised Christ Jesus from infancy. She carried Him– God incarnate!– in her womb. She adored Him, and loved Him like any good mother loves her child, except her love for The Child was greater and deeper that we can even imagine. His Presence sanctified her, filled her with complete joy, and stayed by her side for thirty-three years straight.

And then she personally watched her Child be tortured and crucified.

The amount of agony in her heart, standing below the Cross, meeting Him on the way to Calvary, seeing His blood spattered upon the soil… it is unfathomable, unbearable. Mary had a literal bond with our Savior that no other soul ever can or will have. She was His mother, tangibly so, and when she held His dead body in her aching arms… oh what a terrible final sword impaled her weeping heart! Mary experienced a Sorrow comparable only to that of Christ Crucified, whose Passion she united herself to, as intimately as He was once united to Her in the womb. She was not divine– she was not, and is not, God– and yet, God Himself shared both His earthly life and death with her, to an extent every saint has yearned to experience in turn.

Reflect on this. Realize the greatness of Mary’s Sorrow, sharing in and indeed flowing from Christ’s Sorrow. She knows more pain, more torment, and more anguish than any soul before or after her could or can ever know– because it was an agony of love, with no sin or fault attached to it whatsoever. Her misery was pure, motivated by love and endured through the same. And it is because of this purity that she can console us, her adopted children through Christ. We were baptized by His Blood, the same Blood she watched staining the wood of the Cross, Blood that He shed freely out of profound love– we, too, have been called to share His suffering, her suffering, in our new lives as Christians. We can only be resurrected to Life if we first die to Death, and when we feebly falter and struggle beneath our own splinters of the Cross, we, too, can meet our Mother on that bloody road, to receive a comfort and hope and understanding that only a Mother can give… that only the Mother of God-made-man can give to the men He calls to ultimately live with God, having become like Him through this sacred suffering and steadfast love.

It’s all so profound, so beautiful– words fail to fully express it. But our hearts know… and Mary’s Immaculate Heart will tell us, tenderly and truthfully, whenever we run to her as our loving Mother… just as the Christ Child did. Believe me– she understands.