Saturday, November 8, 2008

Post-election reflection.


The Heavens are still telling the Glory of God

Yep, God was Sovereign over all of Creation before November 6th and He will continue to reign as sovereign throughout Obama’s presidency and infinitely beyond; despite many of His friends choosing to replace His age-old Law with that of a 47-year old Democrat from Chicago/Hawaii/Kenya.

It is quite interesting that the other day Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff for his administration. Emanuel (God is with us…?) is an irrepressible and uncompromising liberal gentleman known to thrust steak knives into the table whilst shouting out opponent’s names followed by ‘dead, dead, dead’ (LifeSiteNews.com). Emanuel has been not-so-lovingly described by colleagues and friends alike as being an attack dog in enforcing policies and in his general political demeanor. Sounds like a pleasantly approachable starting point for the Obama administration.

How and Why Christians, Conservatives and Christian-Conservatives (yes, they are separate somehow) Are Being Picked Out and Thrown Out

“The others” can focus their well-planned and non-strenuous rebellions because they can so easily target us. Our particular (peculiar) moral blend makes us not unlike elephants standing in the corner to an onlooker. Among ourselves, however, we perceive innumerable difference causing much division, and as a result, much weakening. Not only are most intentions noble in the initial stages, but they are more often than not, not just good intentions but good intentions bathed in blood, sweat, and tears from the backbreaking labour of educating and protesting, protesting and educating. Yes, friends we are being faithful to our call, but faithfulness must exceed far beyond the creation of a hub for change. This hub must connect with all of the others, or else it will turn in on itself and become an instrument for our own demise and our enemy’s gain (and ridicule-although this is a secondary loss). How much more would the Lord of the harvest be enabled to bless us with prayers answered (and souls saved) if our efforts were united. The success of one pro-life organization is a personal success for each one of us.

This past weekend, I took in “Amazing Grace” a movie about the life and work of William Wilberforce, a civil rights warrior for the abolition of slavery in the 18th century. I am inspired. I noticed one thing in particular, and that was the UNITY of the abolitionists. We MUST unite, or we will not be successful. If we unite only to become more inconspicuous, so be it- although we can still find ways of being inconspicuous whilst remaining true to our call-as did Wilberforce and his league.

So this means collaborating. This means communicating and striving for more transparency. As we know, one of the sure “fruits” of the enemy is division among well-intentioned people.

“Whoever is not for us is against us!”

I recently became perplexed when I thought about the idea of division and how in Sacred Scripture Jesus tells us that He did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword. **enter verse about turning family members against one another here**. I see this not as division but as the unifying of two groups each at their respective poles. I believe that Christ’s second coming will constitute the ultimate fulfillment of this work of unity. He will return to separate the sheep from the goats, once and for all. In this era of mercy, God is allowing people to choose life or death. Sadly, many of us will see our own family members choose death; some of us already see our family members making grave morally-wrong decisions. But this is where mercy comes in- our chance and the chance for our family and friends to “join the right team”.

You may be thinking, as I am, about those “well-meaning” members of our society who are seemingly faithful but who have begun to compromise for the sake of an uninterrupted “peaceful” state of life and, to put it bluntly, an unchristian love of comfort and of human esteem. It seems that there is very little to be said here except that there is a new generation of young people rising up who have JPII’s words “BE NOT AFRAID!” still ringing in their ears. Indeed, my dear friends in Christ, we must not be afraid. We must not even think of sacrificing one small element of our faith in the effort to maintain our image among our peers. We know that there is a difference between right and wrong and even when wrong is flanked with right…it is still wrong. At the risk of getting too political (here, my roots and my principle passion will inevitably show), allow me to highlight one very concrete example of preferring comfort over the Law of God. Yes, I am going to go there. I am talking about voting for and/or supporting a candidate whose personal doctrine explicitly or implicitly (for surely they are one in the same) involves upholding the culture of death: that is, the killing of over 100, 000 babies each year in our country. This is unacceptable. There is no amount of money that can be offered to the poor, no amount of carbon tax, no amount of social funding that can come remotely close- “proportionally” -to the devastation resulting from the mass destruction of human life.

One cannot know the height, or depth, or breadth of what it means to be pro-life

A very wise priest recently told me that the term “pro-life” like so many other buzz words has become diluted from its originally beautiful and supernatural form. “Are you pro-life?” should not be a reasonable question with a rehearsed yes/no response. Being pro-life means being in favour of living; living not only for beauty but also for its pain and for its power to save. We cannot pretend to understand the full “height breadth and depth” of this gift of life. So therefore we cannot isolate its parameters or even its threats. If God’s enemy’s are at work always and everywhere, and God is love and the source of all life, how much more will the affronts against life be complex, full of appealing lies and embedded comfortably in a massive “grey area”? There is, therefore, no small sliver of room for overlooking certain moral evils for the sake of other goods. We are taught as children that little white lies will always come back to haunt us, and to extrapolate from this little paradigm-any slackening on one’s esteem for the life of another human being is a massive loss for all of society. It is not a personal choice. The “choice” to kill one person is choosing the upheaval of a society. Because once one death can be rationalized for certain reasons, all other deaths can therefore be rationalized.

You can predict a great deal of demise from a country that pays no heed to Wisdom as she is revealed through history and through her students, the Saints.

Let us transplant ourselves into the rich soil of Wisdom, if we are not there already, only in this way will we grow beyond infancy- literally and figuratively.

Monday, November 3, 2008

T' was the night before elections...

Try to put your finger on it, and find that a finger won't do


When and if leaders in the public sphere speak out against the distorted nature of homosexuality and abortion they are immediately ransacked by the left movements as being fundamentalist bigots. It seems bizarre that such movements have so much power to silence the very people that facilitate their power.

For example the Queen of Spain, the Matriarch of an ancient, historically Catholic empire spoke out on abortion, euthanasia and perhaps most vehemently, against homosexual marriage. In doing so, the Queen was not staking out new territory or setting any new precedents; she was merely re-stating age old tenets that have facilitated the growth and well-being of her empire for centuries.

The Queen was particularly criticized for her comments on gay “marriage”.

"If those people want to live together, dress up as grooms and enter into a union, it might be in their right, but they shouldn't call it matrimony, because it isn't," The Queen said.

This was not only the voice of the Queen of Spain speaking, this was also the voice of natural order and of history. This is actually the voice of reason, a voice that has become so ostracized that its intonations now sound foreign to even the most ‘right wing’. Even in speaking truth, our voice sounds strange and shaky. From whence has this overwhelming pressure come?

There is an undeniable force rendering people of ‘good will’ subject to disillusion; this force is also disproportionate in that those individuals who are ‘gravely offended’ by tradition are an unmentionable minority (this point becomes more and more irrelevant by the day). Those members of society who have no tolerance for students of history (and of reason) have somehow harnessed the rest of the world to push their agenda forward as they bask in the swollen tide of political correctness.

I began to think about this phenomenon while reading an article on the Queen’s recent statement and the inevitable riot from homosexual lobby groups that ensued. My thoughts were summed up by a comment at the end of the article.

However the author of the book, veteran journalist Pilar Urbano, has defended her work, claiming that it is completely accurate and was even vetted and approved by the Royal House before publication.

"We can understand all of the prudence that surrounds the Royal House, but there is a very powerful lobby in this country, which is the gay lobby," said Urbano in a radio interview.

So then I am not being alarmist. Other people are noticing the walls moving in. We need to stand firm- the more we retreat and remain silent, the more of us will be lulled to sleep in the pseudo-peace that a dangerous passivity like ours creates.

When birth rates and marriage numbers plummet, it seems to me quite clear that a population is in decline. We continue to prop up our own distinction and the erosion of our children’s quality of life one small “nicety” at a time. The statements “freedom of choice” and “right to [fill in this blank with pretty much anything]” are workable in and of themselves. We must examine what we mean when we concede to these statements: if in saying them, we are saying that a given individual has the right to do such and such a thing at the cost of another person, where does person A’s rights end and person B’s rights begin? Is there then no standard? Do we construct morality, then on a case by case basis?

If I have the ‘right’ to kill another person the day before they are born, can I then kill them a week after? How about one year? Why not 30 years after their birth? A life is a life is a life. Where are our precedents? Who took down all of the fences without first asking what it was they were protecting?

We are living in times of reckless demolition.



To read about the Queen of Spain’s comments: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/08110301.html

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Why is no one else concerned?

Not to be an alarmist or anything but we are in serious trouble.

I've heard it said that history tends to accumulate in 200-year political stints. Well, my God-fearing friends, say goodbye to democracy and to free speech. That era is over. Reason counts for nothing as well. We are being effectively squished.




Obama an Early Student of Man Who Dedicated Book on Community Organizing to Satan

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08102912.html


Global Radicals Will Have Free Rein to do Whatever They Wish Under Obama Presidency
It is likely a whole slew of left-leaning treaties will be ratified and global governance movement will advance


http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08102804.html


for many, many more articles you won't see covered in 'big' media visit: www.lifesitenews.com

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Thoughts on a subway train..

A face even a mother could love.

Even a mother. Because mothers (capital 'M', in my opinion)love their own even if no one else does. You can bank on the love of a Mother. Once again, language serves as an aid in pointing out the 'poverties and perks' of the human condition. C.S. Lewis sparked this up-and-coming thought in his book "The Four Loves", which I wholeheartedly recommend (and fall just short of paying) for you to read.

If we obliterate the most certain of loves; that is, unconditional love; the love upon which one can always count, then one can count on a complete societal collapse: a crisis of love.

To sever the love of a mother, to disrupt or to unnaturally dissolve it is to wreak havoc upon human love as a whole. If we cannot love those whom nature has set up that we love by default, how can we even think about loving those whom we have never met, or even our friends, for that matter.


and of course:

“If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people to not kill each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.” -Mother Teresa

Monday, August 25, 2008

houses on sand

I was at the beach and I was drifting off to sleep in the warm sun when it came-
we cannot build permanence here.
The rocks, being more at home here than we are, belong-but we do not.
The only thing that holds us here is time.
When our time is no more, nothing can keep us here.
We are not meant to build up kingdoms of security and comfort here below,
We are meant to love Him with all of our heart with all of our soul and with all of our minds. In doing this, we store up treasure for ourselves in heaven-not here where moths will eat and destroy.
The one who tries to secure his place here, who does not acknowledge his own mortality or the path that twists and eventually ends- man who lives for wealth alone: he has been deceived. He has been seduced to build his house on sand.
Like a flower that springs up in the morning and by the evening withers and fades-this is our reality.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Perfect Love Casts Out All Fear

Fact: You lose nothing by reckless abandon or by unhindered devotion.

Your brother is in a car accident and you spend the rest of his life (and yours) day-in, day-out reading to him as he lay in a vegetative state without a single response.
Undeterred by the apparent lack of acknowledgement or awareness on his part, you read novel after novel. You are ridiculed for your "neurotic" time investment; and your commitment costs you much, In fact, your leisure time-your time spent reading aloud in a hospital room- is viewed as lost time and you are held in contempt for scheduling it in each evening on the way home from work.

Then one day everything changes.

You enter your brother's hospital room for what must be the thousandth time. Your brother is awake. There he sits. Incredulous nurses stand all around waiting for your reaction.

You are so shocked that your legs give out and you break into sweat and tears immediately.

Suddenly everything fits together, all becomes just.
"Thank you brother, for your faithfulness- I heard every word you read to me. you were my light in the darkness of my mind; you were hope made manifest."

Everything was worth it. Nothing was lost.

"Not only did you choose to sustain my apparently meaningless life but you became the visible sign that it had inherent value.

Thank you for choosing love over convenience, for choosing life over death. All is choice on the surface, but look below and you will see that only love is truth,and love does not compromise. Love necessitates necessity.

Yes, I have learned much in my silence. I have learned in the prison cell that was my suffering body. They will never understand what they hasten to snuff out. If they knew, they would have no such desires."

All is made simple in love.
Dig deeper, deeper and deeper still- if you are hindered by human reason, you have not dug deep enough; if you are still heavily influenced by the voices of the world, you have not dug deep enough. If you have reached darkness and there is nothing but profound silence, you are right where you need to be. Be attentive and real love will come for you. Love will guide you through swollen bouts of darkness; through hope's long draughts ...without a glimpse of daylight you will be carried to the Son.
Faith is like this.
Invest in love.

Monday, July 7, 2008

And just because this needs to be addressed...

Please read this article with regards to Morgentaler's recent reception of the Order of Canada.
(an article by Stephanie Gray for the Calgary Herald)

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=6409f554-5ef8-4dbd-bc89-f8514903cb6f

Summer stop-over in Yarmouth

It is kind of ridiculous how long it has been...but for everything there is a season- and I will be faithful to the ebb and flow that is laid out for me.

I have not had the chance to write because of the busy-ness of life and because of the difficulty in making my head meet my heart so that they could collaborate in the production of a truthful entry.

I guess I could begin by saying that it is so good to be home, but there is a bittersweet aftertaste, most certainly. There is something so captivating about this little ocean town, it plants something in your heart that entangles your whole being if you allow it.

There is a reason why captivating is the perfect word for Yarmouth because when you fall in love with this place, it takes you captive. There are so many sweet, sweet childhood memories that surface on the shores surrounding my home and it is difficult to tear my identity and my sense of personhood away from it's natural gravitation...that is, to all things foggy but also to all things sun-and-salt-kissed; to all things Maritimes. I think it is a hopeless situation and one that cannot be dwelt upon for too long or else all will be lost as all that is within me becomes captive to this place...never happy or satisfied anywhere else.
Life calls us forward but love calls us home. And although this is fair, and it is to be desired, it is a painful experience because we are forever strangers and sojourners longing for a constancy and for a home that no longer exists or if it did, its existence was primarily found in the aftermath of a good book or a single beach day's residue. This rose-tinted perception of the past is conveniently (and mercifully) only composed of the first fruits of our past, the restless days are left in the fog where they had their beginnings.
So there you have it...the past is largely illusion but it is preserved in our minds and hearts in such a way that there is no place we would rather live...the tug is forever noticeable and it is just enough of a pull to get us home with a broken heart.
Thank you Yarmouth, thank you childhood, thank you Jesus: for going before us always with a broken heart.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Breakfast in Galilee

Green of the countryside, wind in the trees
Dew on the roses, spring in the breeze
March of His soldier beating his drum
Source of sea's waves as swiftly they come

Washing and buffing our outermost shore
Where no power of man has ever before
Created and breathed life in the midst of the dead
Where water springs eternal- as so You have said
My eyes You have opened
On Your water I sputter
My mind You have cleared from the noise and the clutter
You call me to shore from the boat where I toil
Like Peter I swim from my world to dry soil

'It's the Lord!' It was said by him whom You love

I swim to You madly, my need for You grows
I want You to love me with that love that John knows
But yet I know firmly it is already mine
It is and it was from the dawn of all time

Because even today…

You catch all the fish and you give us the merit
You've purchased our souls that we may inherit
This intimate moment we share as fish fries
As dawn breaks above us in opal crisp skies
This moment is ours on Tiberias' shore
This one, Beloved, and so many more

As family you've bid that we share in Your feast,

With an eternity of chances to fix what we've damaged
As we look to our brother, as thrice he did manage
To remind us all gently that yes, we shall fall
But faithfully, surely, You follow and call
You bid us to shore to share in your meal
Like Peter I swim, and like Peter I'm healed.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Hidden Kingdom

Just as your majesty is veiled by a small white Host;
Just as your mother’s pure and spotless beauty was clothed in humility;
So do I wish to be veiled
So do I wish to be hidden
It is not in earthly pleasures I shall seek my comfort
For I have found my only treasure in You.
I did not find my treasure in the place where I saw the crowds trample before me;
I looked in barns and stables
I looked among the poor and the lost
And there I found You;
Encased in dirt,
And in the downtrodden baggage of human misery
I was looking with the wrong eyes before
But how quietly and knowingly I now gaze upon You;
Enamored,
In awe. Because:
You have hidden these things from the world’s nobles
And You have revealed all this to only the simplest of hearts.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

On Holiness

As is sung by Danielle Rose- "Holiness is Faithfulness"...

The holiness we all want, as children of the John Paul II generation is holiness in its simplest form. For surely true holiness is essentially this: the aroma that emanates from a simple heart. This holiness is without the trappings and the complexities that plague all other areas of our society. It is paradoxical in that it is simple to live out once gained but so difficult to attain by human effort. By this very fact, we establish its supernatural nature…this holiness seems to find those who befriend silence regardless of their state of life. The activist can find it just as surely as can the contemplative.

This true holiness is a divine science that is unitive (brings together opposites: the introvert and extrovert, the academic and the blue-collar worker). It is without principle but richly layered and unmistakeable in its manifestations. Those who ‘emit’ this fragrance are mostly unaware or are indifferent to this emission because this holiness-in all its sweetness- is merely secondary. The only thing that matters to the truly holy is communion with the Beloved. Anything else that flows forth as a fruit of this union is considered superfluous to the enamoured.

The devotion of the saints is unique in that it is completely object-centred. Devotion springs forth from love in the way a mother fusses over her child. Love underlies all of her efforts and even the most eccentric movements of a mother’s heart towards her child are out of a selfless, all-consuming love. So it is with genuine love of God. That which appears to be excessive to the world to the heart of the besotted, is necessary. A devoted, fervent soul will stop at nothing to make its love known.

Yet, the pursuit continues far beyond sanctity. One has never reached a state that is ‘good enough’…(read St. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle)…
What is it then to be called to be holy? The Lord Jesus meets us on the road. His hope is that we find and recognize Him on the road because otherwise we will most certainly exert ourselves far beyond what is necessary to know Him. When a holy person approaches the Lord Jesus in prayer it is gentle and simple. Kneeling on the outside and on the inside, the holy soul waits in adoration. Since these souls are friends of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself takes pains to lift the very soul to God and the humble soul is thus reminded again of her smallness.

God bestows this gem of holiness on those who allow themselves to be found; on those who drop their defences and begin to loosen their fearful grip on time and ‘their lives’. Characteristic of this holiness is the disappearance of all anxiety regarding the passing of one’s life and having ‘nothing to show for it’. The best imaginable moment is one of perfectly simple receptivity. This can’t be taught but it must be learned.

Look at these lives:
Brother Andre Bessette
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
St Gemma Galgani

Not only do they know that God IS, they know that God is NEAR. That God is here in this moment in a more real way than we are here in this moment. It is only because He is here, in this moment that we ARE.