PathToHoliness

Way back in March when I started helping my parish, Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel, by live streaming Mass on the church Facebook page I had no idea I would still be doing this today and with no end in sight. But I am not complaining. I consider it an honor to use a skill I have for this reason.

Besides Mass I also recently live streamed a very good oboe string quartet that performed on the altar in the church. It was a beautiful hour of music in front of the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle. You can watch it here.

I have to add to this post how grateful I am for my faith, family and friends plus all the wonderful people who have provided my company with work during this very stressful time. Business has looked very bleak at times and then we have received a project to work on. It has seemed miraculous in light of the status of the agribusiness sector we work in.

For now I want to focus on being calm and patient. There is so much trouble in our society and country right now that it is easy to lose focus on what is important. I do pray for an end to abortion, violence, hatred, rioting and persecution.

We’ve had our agent working on 2014 health insurance for a couple weeks now. He’s been having a hard time getting good information. I wonder why?

I don’t know about y’all but this ObamaCare thing is the biggest mess I’ve ever seen and I don’t know how they’re going to fix it. I got pretty fed up with it and posted a letter to President Obama on Facebook which I thought I’d share. Hopefully you’ve already let your senators and representatives know how you feel.

Dear Mr. President:

I�m writing to let you know that your ObamaCare isn�t working. Did you know that? Well, of course you did. I�ll bet from your perspective it�s working great. Exactly the way YOU want it to.

When you got into office promising hope & change even a conservative like me �hoped� for the best. Didn�t happen. Except for the change part. I thought our country was embarrassed by Bill Clinton as president but you are now number one in the embarrassment category as far as I�m concerned. I believe your legacy will be as a cheap, arrogant dictator wannabe with the most inept group of administrators ever appointed.

Getting back to ObamaCare. I always reserve full judgement until I have some facts and experience. I�ve got more than I want now. My health insurance company will let me renew my plan on Dec. 31 this year as long as I agree to a 24% increase in premium. This is after moving to Florida a little over a year ago and getting new health insurance then that was about 24% higher than what I had before. They pointed to your law as the reason for that increase. We�re talking thousands of extra dollars in expense in 2014 that will severely impact my company and income. No one subsidizes me and I don�t want someone else�s money http://www.wildstarplatinums.com.

Why should Americans care about this? To start with, it�s happening to millions of people. Many are people like me. I have a small business with my wife. We provide important income not only for our family but also for nine people we pay every month. Your law means we now have to make decisions that might mean not paying one of those people next year. Or paying them all less. Now that�s change! I really can�t believe people are willing to let your government order citizens to buy something they don�t want or need.

I don�t like ObamaCare. I�d like it to be repealed in full. Fat chance of that happening now that the idiots in Congress have allowed it to happen. You lied to the country you swore to serve. Your apology is not only tepid but I do not accept it. I envision you getting out of that studio and laughing at all the people who are willing to believe anything you say. I feel sorry for them. And I feel sorry for you too. You, your family and our country will continue to remain in my prayers though. One thing I never give up on is Hope.

Sincerely,

Chuck Zimmerman

As Catholics we must always have a joyful awareness that this life, as beautiful as it may be, is not our ultimate end. Though we fight for truth and freedom in our beloved country, it remains but an earthly dwelling place, a temporary homeland where we must prepare ourselves for the greater Home that awaits us:

I know the country I am living in is not really my true fatherland, and there is another I must long for without ceasing. This is not simply a story invented by someone living in the sad country where I am, but it is a reality, for the King of the Fatherland of the bright sun actually came and lived for thirty-three years in the land of darkness. (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C)

Heaven. Resurrection. Eternal Life. What we believe, what we hope for, is not merely some lofty philosophical ideal or the fantasy of uneducated simpletons. It is truth, Divinely revealed and able to be known through human reason (CCC 156-59.) I love this little dialogue at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

“Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushecka?”

“Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha relied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.

“Ah, how good that will be!” burst from Kolya.

How good that will be, indeed! As this month for All Souls comes to an end let us pray for all the faithful departed: Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen

Now we begin that great season of hope where we prepare ourselves for the coming of the Lord when truth and justice will reign for all eternity.

This was a great source of comfort to me during my adoration earlier this week:

You’re not alone. Suffer tribulation cheerfully. It’s true, poor child that you don’t feel our Mother’s hand in yours. But have you never seen the mothers of this earth, with their arms out-stretched, following their little ones when, without anyone’s help, they venture to take their first shaky stems? Your not alone: Mary is beside you. The Way ~900

And Christ, our Lord, is with us, even to the end of time (Mt. 28:20):

What we cannot do, our Lord is able to do. Jesus Christ, perfect god and perfect man, leaves us , not a symbol, but a reality. He Himself stays with us . He will go to the Father, but he will also remain among men. He will leave us, not simply a gift that will make us remember him, not an image that becomes blurred with time, like a photograph that soon fades and yellows, and has no meaning except for those who were contemporaries. Under the appearances of bread and wine, He is really present, with His body and blood, with His soul and divinity. Christ is Passing By, essay on the Eucharist

Here is Pope Benedict’s video message for the U.S. The theme for his visit: Christ Our Hope

h/t: MONIALES OP ~ Dominican Nuns

Benedict in America

Rejoice in the Risen Christ!

Christ is Risen (Luke 24:1-35)

But at daybreak on the first day of the week they took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb; but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were puzzling over this, behold, two men in dazzling garments appeared to them. They were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground. They said to them, “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised. Remember what he said to you while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and rise on the third day.” And they remembered his words. Then they returned from the tomb and announced all these things to the eleven and to all the others. The women were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James; the others who accompanied them also told this to the apostles, but their story seemed like nonsense and they did not believe them.

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb, bent down, and saw the burial cloths alone; then he went home amazed at what had happened.

Now that very day two of them were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He asked them, “What are you discussing as you walk along?” They stopped, looking downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?” And he replied to them, “What sort of things?” They said to him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place. Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see.” And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures.

As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning (within us) while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Do you ever experience moments of extreme nothingness in the midst of the world? I mean when you’re sitting there, even surrounded by family, and you think that everything around you, by its own merit, is nothing. That without God nothing has value and, as Pope Benedict points out in Spe Salvi, there is no hope. Much of his encyclical revolves around St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in which he tells the Gentiles that for a time they were “alienated from the community of Israel…without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12).

At these times, when the nothingness of the world creeps into my senses, I have a renewed longing for God and proclaim with the psalmist:

O God, thou art my God, I seek thee,
my soul thirsts for thee;
my flesh faints for thee,
as in a dry and weary land where no water is.
So I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary,
beholding thy power and glory.
Because thy steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise thee.
So I will bless thee as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on they name.
(Ps. 631-4)

I was asked once to desccribe how I envisioned Heaven. I never answered because, quite frankly my mind draws a complete blank at the thought. However, in Spe Salvi Pope Benedict gives an excellent reflection on eternal life (paragraphs 10-12). Here’s a piece:

To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22).

Suck on that for a while.

The Pope says that this is how we must think if we are to truly understand the object of Christian hope and what our faith leads us to expect.

See the Catechism of the Catholic Church on Heaven.