Hi John, I can’t add or subtract anything from the your opening para John for sure! I had to delete it the Board told me off for being too wordy:blush:
Quoting NCJohn
We all end up “looking for love in all the wrong places”, putting our ego selves at the mercy of the world and turning cartwheels to try to conform to its expectations. As we humbly come instead before God, seeking to know ourselves as we are known, God will indeed fill us with the grace we need.
Agreed! Sooner or later and somehow or other we come to a crossroads I think. We have a choice of goal: sinner or saint. Wide indeed “is the road that leads to perdition” and narrow that way that leads to God. It is not an easy road. I read something pretty profound I thought yesterday that Ghandi said “the moments in your life may not seem important, but it is important that you live them”. I think that the sheer routine and mundaneness of life over long spans can be as crushing as any heavy cross. I read years ago in one of Thomas Merton’s works and he was actually referring to novices who on the night before their first vows are asked to give up anything unnecessary. Merton commented that the very thing we hold back from God, may be the very thing necessary. That one thing that we feel we cannot do without sooner or later we will probably be confronted with the fact that to serve God, we needs abandon it. But God who can seem to demand much, always returns one hundredfold. But first one feels the sting of loss: the purgation of detaching.
There is a beautiful little book called “Spring Comes Barefoot” written by an American Poor Clare nun who had been in the airforce. It is written in the form of a diary and I laughed so often in that book as I learnt the lesson she put across. It was very funny in parts. She tells of how she started to read the mystics and decided to become a mystic she had to become detached and so began the work. She wrote something like this: “about three months after the big decision to become detached I found I did not give a d*** about any jolly thing”. Boy, did I laugh. Detachment is a detaching as one attaches. Do read the book if its still around, John. I read it many years ago but still remember it fondly. I lent it out and it never came back.
Our society andculture can make the road especially difficult today with the constant assault of advertising. They are pretty clever people, having worked as the secretary to the Managing Director of an Advertising Agency. Not that I stayed there very long . I was really shocked at the research undertaken prior to putting together an advert/advertising campaign. Exploitation of our weaknesses. And if necessary to attempt to create a weakness. All very cleverly done indeed.
While the article mentions some of the psychological methods as superficial, I found them personally to be an excellent starting point in not only recognizing my own silly tendencies and failings, but in realizing that if I have them I have to also allow that others will have them and feel the same compassion for them that I have to hope for for myself. In doing so I slowly came to realize how totally dependent we are on the mercy of God–that we’re ALL in that same boat–and that unless we help carry each other’s crosses, tending to each one as the “least of his brothers”, that we are missing the whole message. For if we say that we love God, but don’t love our neighbors we are liars. For we cannot love the God we cannot see if we don’t love the neighbor we can see.
Agreed John. Love is of God - true love. In fact it is sharing in His Life. And since He loves all equally, if then I do not, how can I say I love God or share in His Life of true love. It does make me realize just how far short I keep falling. The moment one honestly and rather ashamedly and even fearfully admits who one truly is, there waiting is God’s Loving Mercy. Until then, I think it remains something of an intellectual concept? There is that saying that love of God is not only vertical but horizontal at the same time. The love of God is horizontally vertical.***Thanks for another challenge to my humility Barb. I do need the constant reminders.***Then it’s you and me both, mate! The other day I was pondering something or other - some thought that had popped into my head decidedly truly uncharitable. I thought to myself “What a comfort it would be if I could blame Satan for the thought” But then decided that I had to own my own selfhood. That the thought had welled up from deep inside me - that in my deep regions there is still an aweful lot of work to be effected by Grace. And there waiting in my owning my own misery was God’s Loving Mercy.It’s really wondrous matter, the Goodness of God and His Mercy, huh?
Cacha when your back on deck!
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