Ubi Petrus

I grabbed my mother by the elbow and whispered, “is everything okay with Dad?”

“Yes,” she assured me, but the look on her face suggested she wasn’t quite telling me everything.  Mom had gone through a lot in life, not as much as many but no rose petal littered path either, and had learned to deal with things quietly by herself.  I, for my part, had learned how to figure out when she wasn’t saying what she was thinking.  Time to put on the stupid kid bit and just ask. [click to continue…]

There is just something about the way Il Papa can move from painfully intricate to sublimely simple in a few short words.  I know the beginning of this is a bit heady for some, but get all the way through it – you won’t regret it.  From The Spirit of the Liturgy:

God is beyond all thought, and therefore all propositions about him and every kind of image of God are in equal proportions valid and invalid. What seems like the highest humility toward God turns into pride, allowing God no word and permitting him no real entry into history. On the one hand, matter is absolutized and thought of as completely impervious to God, as mere matter, and thus deprived of its dignity. But, as Evdokimov says, there is also an apophatic Yes, not just an apophatic No, the denial of all likeness. Following Gregory Palamas, he emphasizes that in his essence God is radically transcendent, but in his existence he can be, and wants to be, represented as the Living One. God is the Wholly Other, but he is powerful enough to be able to show himself. And he has so fashioned his creature that it is capable of “seeing” him and loving him.

I don’t normally go for overstatement (*ahem*) and in this case I don’t entirely think I am.  Sometimes you come across something where the only reaction you can come up with is stunned agreement, your mind torn equally between silently absorbing what you’ve taken in and the urge to yell out in your finest Southern Baptist twang, “Preach it!”  Adoro’s post Souls in the Balance is without a doubt one of those.  I echo here her closing sentiment: “Christ did not die a horrible death on the Cross so that we could be comfortable. Who, around you, is hanging in the balance? Go get them!”

Matthew Warner has a post that anyone who cares about evangelizing in this modern world has to read.  The numbers are stark and sobering.  Particularly for someone whose parish scores very low on the social networking scale.

…and I’m sure the MSM wasn’t exactly going to fall all over themselves to tell the story.  Not only is Kim Yu-Na the Olympic figure skating champion, she’s a recent convert to Catholicism.  The part about the ring could well be a lesson for all of us, perhaps just a little too comfortable in our sometimes nearly-invisible faith.

Yet temptations, though troublesome and severe, are often useful to a man, for in them he is humbled, purified, and instructed. The saints all passed through many temptations and trials to profit by them, while those who could not resist became reprobate and fell away. There is no state so holy, no place so secret that temptations and trials will not come. Man is never safe from them as long as he lives, for they come from within us—in sin we were born. When one temptation or trial passes, another comes; we shall always have something to suffer because we have lost the state of original blessedness.
Many people try to escape temptations, only to fall more deeply. We cannot conquer simply by fleeing, but by patience and true humility we become stronger than all our enemies. The man who only shuns temptations outwardly and does not uproot them will make little progress; indeed they will quickly return, more violent than before.

…

Above all, we must be especially alert against the beginnings of temptation, for the enemy is more easily conquered if he is refused admittance to the mind and is met beyond the threshold when he knocks. — Thomas Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

It is, perhaps, a bit over-the-top.  It might even be called pessimistic.  But it’s also thought-inducing.

Quite a collection of books by the Saints here, which is a mirror of the original collection here.  Me, I intend to grab the collection and when I get five spare minutes make a donation in thanks for the work it took to get these online.