Ok.
OK. Any suggestions regarding post 168?
You mean do I have any suggestions for you, something to read or do? Not really. We are perfectly where we wish and need to be, believe it or not. Each on’es personality simply runs its course till you see clearly by the Grace of what we unfortunately call “God.” It is immeasurably greater than that Title implies, and we limit immeasurably by what we have learned to attach to that symbol.
One can to some extent prepare the mind to receive grace by ardent work, prayer if you will, aimed at adoration of what is beyond thought, and as a corollary, questioning what it is that is conscious. But even that may not do much. It is not in our hands, so to speak, as far as I know.
The transforamative experience which Bernadette Roberts recorded could be useful, starting from her pre-Carmelite days, or a similar secular one by Franklin Merrell-Wolff. As an overview of related ideas, a simple and profound short work by Jac O’Keefe does well. Beyond that, there are thousands of years of writings that are available, and current living proponents.
The thing is, you see, that due to our limited exposure to the actual spectrum of understandings of our possible experience, the Church is superb at book learning. Unfortunately, God is not in a book, nor is much of an intellectual happening, though that is not apart from it, though only in a preparatory and then a post experiential way.
So unless you are intimate with Mystics, Catholic or otherwise, you won’t get much but dogma, which may be a great start, but only goes so far, mostly in ineffective behavior modification. The real work, on the other hand, can be discovered to have already been done, the trick being to get one’s infantile prejudices of what constitute you, God, and the relationship of those two out of the way. That would mean everything one has been tought since childhood.
Perhaps that confuses you more, and if it does, I’m not surprised. The whole endeavor is very much like discovering how to look at one of those magic pictures: it all looks like static until you look correctly, and then there is a 3-D phenomenon before your eyes. Then you can switch back and forth at will, and be a religionist if it pleases you, but a competent one, based in real experience as distinct from book learning.
But then you have to wear protective coloration in many instances or they will crucify you, burn you for a witch, or do other unpleasant inquisitorial things to you, even in our “advanced” society. The line is pretty sharp between those who go by the book and fear and those who see beyond the veil of intellect and experience, even though there are degrees and kinds along the way.
The Church stops its public approval a bit short of the goal. Ask St Teresa of Avila. They burned some of her work before realizing she was a Doctor of the Church, right? Very common story, though you won’t hear it much. But a few always get through, lol!
What does all that have to do with Marian devotion/worship? Simply that it can be found under proper scrutiny of the Soul propensity that the symbolism we are taught is only a partial carrier of ideas regarding our full(er) possible understanding of Deity and its putable relationship to Man/Soul.
Of course Christians belonging to the CC are to defer to the teaching office of the CC, as opposed to the de facto teachings of the devout Marian worshippers.