Ubi Petrus

New Apostolic Exhortation on the Bible

frival — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:24:39 +0000

The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want more vocations?

frival — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:23:59 +0000

Find more priests who truly love their vocation and are willing to share that with others:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fr. Barron on religious “drifters”

frival — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:01:34 +0000

I once proposed a paper for my senior English thesis dealing with the role of organized religion in an individualistic society. I was told that the modern society was not individualistic but rather formed of a series of group-think and peer-pressure groups. Lo these many years since, and look where we have come.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A thought for Lent

frival — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:46:12 +0000

From Thomas A. Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ:

If you cannot recollect yourself continuously, do so once a day at least, in the morning or in the evening. In the morning make a resolution and in the evening examine yourself on what you have said this day, what you have done and thought, for in these things perhaps you have often offended God and those about you.

Arm yourself like a man against the devil’s assaults. Curb your appetite and you will more easily curb every inclination of the flesh. Never be completely unoccupied, but read or write or pray or meditate or do something for the common good. Bodily discipline, however, must be undertaken with discretion and is not to be practiced indiscriminately by everyone.

Devotions not common to all are not to be displayed in public, for such personal things are better performed in private. Furthermore, beware of indifference to community prayer through love of your own devotions. If, however, after doing completely and faithfully all you are bound and commanded to do, you then have leisure, use it as personal piety suggests.

Not everyone can have the same devotion. One exactly suits this person, another that. Different exercises, likewise, are suitable for different times, some for feast days and some again for weekdays. In time of temptation we need certain devotions. For days of rest and peace we need others. Some are suitable when we are sad, others when we are joyful in the Lord.

About the time of the principal feasts good devotions ought to be renewed and the intercession of the saints more fervently implored. From one feast day to the next we ought to fix our purpose as though we were then to pass from this world and come to the eternal holyday.

During holy seasons, finally, we ought to prepare ourselves carefully, to live holier lives, and to observe each rule more strictly, as though we were soon to receive from God the reward of our labors. If this end be deferred, let us believe that we are not well prepared and that we are not yet worthy of the great glory that shall in due time be revealed to us. Let us try, meanwhile, to prepare ourselves better for death.

“Blessed is the servant,” says Christ, “whom his master, when he cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you: he shall make him ruler over all his goods.”

The strength to know how to be weak

frival — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:29:13 +0000

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.

“Well it’s just that I haven’t seen him touch a cigarette all day and it’s almost noon,” I said. Dad smoked a cigarette before getting out of bed and had another with the coffee and orange juice that were his breakfast almost every day; he’d go through at least a pack on most days, so him not lighting one up here or there sent off alarm bells. I wasn’t yet worried, but my usual mix of curious and concerned.

Her face relaxed some and then twisted to a perplexed look as she glanced in his direction. “I asked him that this morning,” she said, “and he just said ‘Nope, I’m not.’ So… I’m not going to push it or ask anything else, just let it go and see where it goes.”

To this day, somewhere around twenty years later, Dad has never smoked a cigarette again. No meeting with a doctor, no ultimatums, no sudden health scare, no death in the family. He just woke up one Sunday morning and decided to quit a smoking habit he’d had since High School. I was old enough to know that just kicking a habit as tenacious as tobacco doesn’t just happen all at once when it has been that deep and that long. As my mother would tell me later though, “when your sets his mind on something, he just does it.” I found myself marveling at an ability that to this day has eluded me even as I’ve sought it every single day.

It’s the quintessential American trait – to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and quietly go about doing something others thought couldn’t be done; to ask no applause, to shrug off any assistance. The rugged individual built this country. Or so the legend goes.

I’ve spent twenty-some years of my life subconsciously trying to live up to the example set in that moment – to pick myself up, dust off and by sheer force of will simply do what seems beyond any reasonable expectation. There is a saying that fathers live through their sons; I think in many ways sons also live through their fathers.

This past week that concept finally crashed down all around me. Nobody died, no catastrophic changes in life, just the usual string of sins and failings that have chased me around for years like a string on a tiger’s tail. Oh I’ve heard and said a thousand times such fine lines as “let go and let God” and “without Him you can do nothing”; I’ve taught those facts to people in RCIA classes over the years. I even thought, from time to time, that I was living it out, if only in my own small way. But in the back of my mind was always that image of my Dad just walking away from cigarettes and never once complaining. Somewhere Screwtape was egging me on, “c’mon, you share all those genes, you can do things yourself too.”

Sometimes, yes, it’s true – I’ve done things that others just don’t think should have been possible. That was just the loophole in logic I needed to think that maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough or didn’t really want it enough. The real trick was that those very things I’d allowed myself unknowingly to develop pride in were, indeed, not particularly significant and had been done by many far better and with far less fanfare before and since. There are, as the saying goes, none so blind as those who do not wish to see. I had been blinded to my own blindness and took a perverse sort of joy in it the whole time. Well played, Screwtape.

It’s rather strange, but I can’t even remember an exact moment when I came to the realization of what had been going on these many years – you’d think I’d know bingo it was at such-and-such a time. In this case it was more like an unfolding over some short period of time – as if the bandages over a man’s eyes were slowly removed and more and more light slowly filtered through.

My recent post about being just “normal” was, I think, the starting point for this. First I had to be willing to be something other than average, milquetoast blend-into-the-background beige and do something out of the ordinary if the opportunity presented itself. That was, surprisingly, the easy part. The hard part was coming to the realization that I, just like all the saints, could not do that on my own. It is, as with all great spiritual discoveries, far easier to say than to do.

It was not coincidental I should think that on the very day this flower was opening in my soul I should come across these words by Dietrich von Hildebrand in his book Transformation in Christ, a work I am still making my way through:

This creed must refer, first to the omnipotence of God. It is not enough for us to entertain a theoretical and general belief that God has the power to do everything. In every concrete situation we are faced with, the omnipotence of God must be so palpably present to us as to lessen the reality of all other facts, immutable as they may seem. Even in the face of outward dangers, which make our situation appear desperate – of a person whose state of mind robs us of all hope as to his conversion; of our own wretchedness when we see ourselves relapsing again and again; of the crushing weight of our sins committed in the past – we must always remain vitally aware of the paramount truth that the archangel Gabriel announced to the Blessed Virgin: “No word shall be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

So be it said, so be it done. It is a consolation and a joy to know we are all called to something more than just ordinary and that we go on that path not alone. Indeed, we could not ask for a better traveling companion. The first step – is to take the first step.

No related posts.

Putting God in a box

frival — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:21:04 +0000

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.

Putting a price on it

Medjugorje investigation begins

frival — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:05:48 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Preach it, sister!

frival — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:55:35 +0000

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!”

Another must-read

frival — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:33:19 +0000

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.

Here’s one you didn’t see coming

frival — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:48:22 +0000

…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.