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Showing posts with label Judgement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Judgement. Show all posts

Friday, July 11, 2014

A time of Visitation

By Caroline


The Good Shepherd, Ravenna Mausoleums (Wikimedia Commons)

Besides you know the time has come; the moment is here for you to stop sleeping and wake up,
because by now our salvation is nearer than when we first began to believe.
–Romans 13:11
Maybe it’s the season for angels. I don’t know.

I usually don’t have time to stop in the hospital chapel after my visits, but today was different. Today I sensed something in my spirit, something palpable, but hard to put in words; that still small voice gnawing at my soul, vying for my my attention, which for several hours had been preoccupied with the stories of God’s dear people. They, who are worn down with the afflictions of physical suffering are many times over my greatest teachers.

But today, I somehow knew I was not to pass up a visit to the chapel.

With each passing week, I’ve noticed in many patients another sort of fatigue has set in and it has nothing to do with their bodies..It’s as if through them, the Lord is trying to tell me something; they whose suffering leaves nothing to the imagination, yet whose smiles make room for me to sit– though their hospital gowns barely cover them– and nurses intrude on their tears as they bare to me the spiritual wounds of their heart. In almost every patient I’ve recently seen they are crying as if in imitation of Christ, not for themselves, but for us as a country and people who are turning away from the day of the Lord’s visitation.


Continue reading at Caroline's blog Bell of the Wanderer.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Only you have been keeping me out

By David Torkington



File:S.M.degli.Angeli037.jpg
St. Francis of Assisi (Wikimedia Commons)

 
An Examination of Conscience

When we begin to experience God making his home within us, we are beginning to experience the most  momentous and the most moving moments  possible on earth. They are not just moments of blissful happiness, but moments when we enable the love of God to surcharge our weak human loving, so that we can be more and more like Jesus, enabling his loving to be alive and active again in the world through us, through all we say and do. This is how God’s sway, his sacred sovereignty  is spread, how his secret plan or  his Mysterion can finally be brought to completion here on earth, as it is in heaven.

 ‘Only You Have Been Keeping Me Out’

There is only one thing that can prevent the implementation of this plan and that is the sickness  of selfishness that  does to the mystical body of Christ what  high cholesterol does to the physical body.  It must ultimately be controlled, if not totally rooted out. This is a long process and can never be fully achieved without God’s help, and the acceptance of the suffering that this will mean.


Continue reading at David's blog David Torkington.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Meditate on the Last Things

By Ruth Ann Pilney



File:John Everett Millais - Autumn Leaves.jpeg
Autumn Leaves by Millais (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons).


Watching the beautiful autumn leaves fall reminds me of the temporality of earthly life. An excerpt from Bambi, a children’s novel by Felix Salten, is a dialogue between two oak leaves clinging to a branch high above the others.
     “So many of us have fallen off tonight we’re almost the only ones left on our branch,” said one. 
     “You never know who’s going to go next,” said the other.
     “Can it be true,” said the first leaf, “can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”
     “It really is true,” whispered the second leaf.  “We can’t even begin to imagine it. It’s beyond our powers.”
     After a period of silence, the first leaf said quietly to herself, “Why must we fall?”
     The second leaf asked, “What happens to us when we have fallen?  Do we feel anything, do we know about ourselves down there?”
     “Who knows?  Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it.”
     “Let’s not talk any more about such things,” said the first leaf.
     “No, we’ll let it be.”
Many people eschew discussing death, but at this time of year the Church encourages us to ponder such things: death and judgment, heaven and @#!*% , the end of the world, the second coming of our Lord and Savior, and the establishment of the Reign of God.  We wait in joyful hope!


Ruth Ann originally posted this at her blog From the Pulpit of My Life.