July 3rd, 2018
It is official. It is the Summer of Hate.
Adam Shatz in a blog post on The London Review of Books blog yesterday so dubs it. I have to agree. The summer of 1967, The Summer of Love, with all of its sins, is a remarkable contrast.
Blessings to all.
Tuesday, July 03, 2018
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Psalm 142 (143)
Lord, show me your mercy at daybreak.
Lord, listen to my prayer:
in your faithfulness turn your ear to my pleading;
in your justice, hear me.
Do not judge your servant:
nothing that lives can justify itself before you. ...
Come quickly and hear me, O Lord,
for my spirit is weakening.
Do not hide your face from me,
do not let me be like the dead,
who go down to the underworld.
Show me your mercy at daybreak,
because of my trust in you.
Tell me the way I should follow,
for I lift up my soul towards you.
Rescue me from my enemies:
Lord, I flee to you for refuge.
Teach me to do your will,
for you are my God.
Your good spirit will lead me to the land of justice;
for your name’s sake, Lord, you will give me life.
In your righteousness you will lead my soul
away from all tribulation.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen.
Lord, show me your mercy at daybreak.
Psalm 146 (147A)
Let us give joyful praise to our God.
Praise the Lord!
It is good to sing praise to our God;
it is a joy to sing his praises. ...
He heals broken hearts
and binds up their wounds.
He counts all the stars;
he calls each of them by name.
Our God is great and great is his strength,
his wisdom is not to be measured.
The Lord supports the needy,
( but crushes the wicked to the ground.) ...
He covers the sky with his clouds,
he makes rain to refresh the earth.
He makes grass grow on the hills,
and plants for the service of man.
He gives food to grazing animals,
and feeds the young ravens that call on him.
He takes no delight in the strength of the horse,
no pleasure in the strength of a man.
The Lord is pleased by those who honour him,
by those who trust in his kindness.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen.
Let us give joyful praise to our God.
– At the break of day I will reflect on you, O Lord.
Lord, make your people know your salvation, and forgive us our sins.
You created humans in your image and in Christ you renewed us:
shape us in the image of your Son.
– Lord, you are our life.
From Pope Benedict’s Homily in Lisbon during Fatima visit May 2010:
Always seek the Lord Jesus, grow in friendship with him, receive him in communion. Learn to listen to his word and also to recognize him in the poor. Live your lives with joy and enthusiasm, sure of his presence and of his unconditional, generous friendship, faithful even to death on the cross. Bear witness to all of the joy that his strong yet gentle presence evokes, starting with your contemporaries. Tell them that it is beautiful to be a friend of Jesus and that it is well worth following him. With your enthusiasm, demonstrate that, among all the different ways of life that the world today seems to offer us – apparently all on the same level – the only way in which we find the true meaning of life and hence true and lasting joy, is by following Jesus.
The latest version of the eschatological hope of modern human progress – but I do, more or less, agree with it. (How could I not?) Hopefully we just don’t destroy ourselves first.
From Matt Riddley in the Wall Street Journal:
“... ideas are having sex with each other as never before.”
Genetic diversity seems good for the species so why not cultural diversity too. Besides, I can’t help it. I think anthropologically.
A new Archbishop in LA - Does this mean anything?
“... in the audience was Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima, Peru, a controversial prelate who is said to be a close friend of Gomez. Cipriani, who has clashed with human rights groups in Peru, is the first Catholic cardinal to be trained by the theologically conservative Opus Dei organization, which also trained Gomez.”
The Lord has defeated your enemies for you.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010 Monday after Pentecost
From Commonweal.com –
St. Augustine refers in one sermon to the inundatio Spiritus–the flood of the Spirit.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Morning prayer -
– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.
I rise at dawn and cry out to you.
– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.
Psalm 101 (102)
Lord, let my cry come to you: do not hide your face from me.
Lord, listen to my prayer
and let my cry come to you.
Do not hide your face from me...
For my days vanish like smoke,
and my bones are dry as tinder.
My heart is cut down like grass, it is dry –
I cannot remember to eat. ...
My days fade away like a shadow...
But you, Lord, remain for ever...
I will say, “My God, do not take me away
half way through the days of my life.
Your years last from generation to generation:
in the beginning you founded the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands. ...
The children of your servants shall live in peace,
their descendants will endure in your sight.” ...
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Psalm 86 (87)
“All my being springs from you.”
Saturday, May 22, 2010
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Colossians 3:1 
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you. Romans 8:11
Almighty and ever-living God,
by your will the celebration of Easter
is summed up in the mystery of Pentecost.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Psalm 83 (84)
Blessed the man whose help comes from you,
who has set his heart on climbing to you.
They pass through the valley of thirst
and make a spring there:
the morning rain will cover it with blessings.
They will go from strength to strength:
they will see the God of gods, in Zion.
John Allen: Now we look to Fatima, which will be the spiritual culmination of this trip. What meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, you were asked if the message of the secret could be extended beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could it also be extended to put the suffering of the church today in the context of that vision, including the sins of the sexual abuse of minors?
Pope Benedict XVI: In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don’t come just from outside the church. The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the church. The church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. Forgiveness does not exclude justice. We have to re-learn the essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That’s how we respond, and we can be realistic in expecting that evil will always launch attacks from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil. The Madonna for us is the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010, the eve of the Feast of the Ascension
Seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is his name. Amos 5:8
Psalm 112 (113)
Praise, servants of the Lord,
praise the name of the Lord.
Let the Lord’s name be blessed,
now and for ever.
From the sun’s rising to its setting,
the Lord’s name is to be praised.
The Lord is high over all peoples,
his glory is above the heavens.
Who is like the Lord our God, who lives on high,
who bends down to watch over heaven and earth?
He raises the weak from the ground,
the poor from the dunghill,
raises them among the princes,
the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a household,
makes her the happy mother of children.
Ephesians 2:4-6
God loved us with so much love that he was generous with his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ – it is through grace that you have been saved – and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus.
The Phos Hilaron (Φῶς Ἱλαρόν) is an ancient Christian hymn originally written in New Testament Greek.
From the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer
O gracious Light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!
Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds.
translation used by the Orthodox Church in America at vespers
O Gladsome Light of the Holy Glory of the Immortal Father, Heavenly, Holy, Blessed Jesus Christ! Now that we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening, we praise God Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For meet it is at all times to worship Thee with voices of praise. O Son of God and Giver of Life, therefore all the world doth glorify Thee.
As sung in the Ruthenian Catholic Church[1]
O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the Father Immortal, the heavenly, holy, blessed One, O Jesus Christ, now that we have reached the setting of the sun, and see the evening light, we sing to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (+). It is fitting at all times to raise a song of praise in measured melody to you, O Son of God, the Giver of Life. Therefore, the universe sings your glory.
From The Cloud of Unknowing:
From DotCommonweal On Not Craning One’s Neck
May 13, 2010, 3:37 am
Posted by Robert P. Imbelli
Christ ascended physically in the presence of all his disciples and sent the Holy Spirit as he had promised...
Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is quite incidental to the spiritual reality.
The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there is really there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason Saint Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.”
Love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides, as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already by love and desire.
O God, fill us with rejoicing and reverent thankfulness,
for Christ your Son’s ascension lifts us up with him.
We, his mystical body, are called in hope
to where he, our Head, has preceded us in glory.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God for ever and ever.
Amen.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Pray for Taiwan and China.
August 10, 2009 A Million in China Evacuate Ahead of Typhoon
BEIJING — Saying they were taking no chances, Chinese officials evacuated a million coastal residents on Sunday as a weakened Typhoon Morakot swept onto the mainland south of Shanghai after battering Taiwan the day before.
I pulled these words from the blog on Commonweal magazine.
“some lines from Denise Levertov’s poem “The Thread.” ... Christ’s metaphor informs the whole of what I take to be her description of her poetical and religious journey:”
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
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