Ubi Petrus

The many and the few

frival — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:35:39 +0000

From The Imitation of Christ, Book 2 Chapter 11:

Jesus has always many who love His heavenly kingdom, but few who bear His cross. He has many who desire consolation, but few who care for trial. He finds many to share His table, but few to take part in His fasting. All desire to be happy with Him; few wish to suffer anything for Him. Many follow Him to the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the chalice of His passion. Many revere His miracles; few approach the shame of the Cross. Many love Him as long as they encounter no hardship; many praise and bless Him as long as they receive some comfort from Him. But if Jesus hides Himself and leaves them for a while, they fall either into complaints or into deep dejection. Those, on the contrary, who love Him for His own sake and not for any comfort of their own, bless Him in all trial and anguish of heart as well as in the bliss of consolation. Even if He should never give them consolation, yet they would continue to praise Him and wish always to give Him thanks. What power there is in pure love for Jesus—love that is free from all self-interest and self-love!

Seek the Cross the and Consolations will come; seek only consolations and, well, you do the math.

Simplicity and purity

frival — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:56:02 +0000

From The Imitation of Christ, chapter 4:

A MAN is raised up from the earth by two wings—simplicity and purity. There must be simplicity in his intention and purity in his desires. Simplicity leads to God, purity embraces and enjoys Him.

If your heart is free from ill-ordered affection, no good deed will be difficult for you. If you aim at and seek after nothing but the pleasure of God and the welfare of your neighbor, you will enjoy freedom within.

If your heart were right, then every created thing would be a mirror of life for you and a book of holy teaching, for there is no creature so small and worthless that it does not show forth the goodness of God. If inwardly you were good and pure, you would see all things clearly and understand them rightly, for a pure heart penetrates to heaven and hell, and as a man is within, so he judges what is without. If there be joy in the world, the pure of heart certainly possess it; and if there be anguish and affliction anywhere, an evil conscience knows it too well.

As iron cast into fire loses its rust and becomes glowing white, so he who turns completely to God is stripped of his sluggishness and changed into a new man. When a man begins to grow lax, he fears a little toil and welcomes external comfort, but when he begins perfectly to conquer himself and to walk bravely in the ways of God, then he thinks those things less difficult which he thought so hard before.

Or, as my father would have put it, “things aren’t as hard as you’d like them to be.”

True self-surrender

frival — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:00:37 +0000

Just today my wife and I were discussing people who get married just so they can be “not alone” and how, in the end, those marriages never worked. It was, surely, no coincidence that just earlier in the day I had read this from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ (and yes, I’m finally only a few pages from finishing it):

True self-surrender … implies that we are entirely centered upon the object in which we lose ourselves. The value of that which holds us, and by no means the pleasure of being held, dominates our consciousness. One who seeks that pleasure for its own sake errs just as they do who yearn for the thrill of love rather than thinking of the beloved person, and hence never attain real love at all.

There is no point in our longing to lose ourselves in general. What we should long for is exclusively to lose ourselves in Christ. Let us never forget that, though an intense love or enthusiasm as such is undoubtedly a great experience and a fine sight, its value essentially depends on whom or what we love; on the person or thing that evokes our enthusiasm.

Without reserve

frival — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:45:41 +0000

(I meant to post this yesterday but, well, life intervened.)

In this Friday’s Morning Prayer we have a reading from the letter to the Galatians that made me really, truly, stop and think. We read:

I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I live now is not my own; Christ is living in me. I still live my human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:19b-20)

For some reason every time I’ve read this passage I’ve always at least partially dismissed it as Paul’s description of himself. I don’t think there is any arguing that St. Paul was a zealot, so seeing such strong and complete language from him isn’t very surprising. But yet this is far more than a reflective statement – more than just Paul explaining why he acts the way he does. Behind these words is the cry, “I have come this far, come with me, live only in and for Him!“ It is, as is only fitting, a call to follow.

So … all those times you have the opportunity to do what you want or do what you ought, which do you pick? And when you do do what you ought, do you do it begrudgingly or with the joy of knowing you are following Christ’s call to charity? Do you find joy in the freedom of being yoked with Christ or look askance at your perceived loss of freedom? It may be that in surrendering what we perceive to be our freedom we find ourselves only then to be truly free.

Step it up, Laity

frival — Fri, 28 May 2010 02:01:06 +0000

You look around at the world about you and can’t help but feel a twinge of concern mixed with anger and frustration. The world seems to be spinning on an unstable axis, wobbling ever closer to Babel than Jerusalem. The world tells you there’s nothing you can do and no reason you should try. God, however, has other ideas. Improve the world by improving yourself, then those around you, always with charity. It’s time we take this responsibility seriously.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope for the future

frival — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:43:55 +0000

Last evening I had the opportunity to attend a concert put on by the Chroale and Schola Cantorum from Holy Family Academy here in town. The concert was held, as so many wonderful things in this city, at Ste. Marie’s church, which provided magnificent acoustics, even for those young men and women who were a little nervous in front of the good-sized crowd that had assembled. Seeing them give glory to God in their singing, and particularly so in the many pieces of sacred music, was a truly powerful experience of hope. When they intoned the Kyrie to start the concert I quite literally felt a chill run down my spine.

This is the future of the Church – this new generation of children and young adults growing up receiving a more full education both in the world and in the Faith than has been seen in decades, and growing up in love with Christ and His Church. As much damage has been done in the past decades by terrible-to-nonexistent catechesis, the future looks even more bright. Deo gratias!

Canon Law vs. modern society

frival — Wed, 19 May 2010 02:53:53 +0000

Tonight was our last RCIA session of the year and, as per usual with this group, we ran off into some rather interesting topics and some pretty deep water. In what was supposed to be initially a discussion about prayer we spent the first half hour talking about the abortion case in Phoenix and how excommunication works and what it is. It quickly digressed to a discussion based largely on nuance and detail. This has been making me think – in an age of Twitter and soundbite journalism are people really ready for nuance and fine details?

One question though really struck me as symbolic – “how can someone get excommunicated?” It’s a question with seemingly a thousand answers, all different and all correct. But yet saying “it’s complicated” seems to translate into “it’s an arcane holdover without an ounce of Christian charity”. Somehow there needs to be a way to answer questions like this without delving into heavy theological and ecclesiological issues. I think in many ways it’s the inability to provide these Baltimore Catechism-style answers to common questions that has helped put the Church into the corner it finds itself trying to fight out of modern days. What do you think?

If I needed it, someone else might as well

frival — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:40:55 +0000

No excuses, only apologies. Life has been incredibly busy, and I have allowed it to become so. My apologies for the length of this excerpt, but it has helped me see where I’ve twisted myself around and just maybe it can help someone else as well. This is from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ.

A “cramped” character reflects a subtle form of self-indulgence

Let us take the cramped character first. How does a person belonging to this category behave? Now he ruminates incessantly, as though he were spellbound, over some irrelevant idea, or uselessly reiterates some long-exhausted chain of considerations that can no longer yield any further result; now he overstrains his will, pressing himself to unnecessary and meaningless sacrifices, or trying to force things which by their very nature cannot be commanded, such as joy, sorrow, or enthusiasm. Or again, he flogs himself into certain kinds of eccentric attitudes that bear a note of specious sublimity: an ungenuine heroism, for instance, or an excessive contempt for the body and its needs with an oriental or gnostic flavor about it. This very crampedness he may often experience as the manifestation of an extraordinary will power and hence as a sure sign of his freedom.

Because he never relaxes, he forms the conviction that he always maintains himself on a level above the situation, that he makes no concessions to his nature, and that therefore he is eminently free. Is he not always watchful, always on his guard, always keeping out whatever might be interpreted as self-indulgence?

Yet in fact he is guilty of self-indulgence, inasmuch as he obeys the dictate of spastic automatism that is prevalent in his nature. The strain he constantly displays does not spring from a vital response to values. It expresses a general tendency of his nature, which discharges itself in the way of a functional necessity, without any proportionate foundation in the respective objects. Such a person is, in truth, characteristically unfree.

The “duty complex” is a form of unfreedom

The cramped attitude may also manifest itself in reference to the fulfillment of one’s duties. The duty complex is an important source of unfreedom. Some people are possessed by certain duties or are hypnotized by certain tasks they have taken upon themselves, to the point of no longer being capable of responding to any higher demands.

However, the mere fact that they bear a responsibility expressible in juridical terms, or that they have charged themselves with a task, does not confer upon the thing they are attending to a surplus of objective significance above everything else. Often, for instance in the minds of such people, vocational obligations will unduly outweigh the demands of charity; or again, kind offices or acts of charity to which they have formally committed themselves will take precedence over others which lack the motive of a formal commitment, even though the latter may imply a deeper meaning and constitute, in the ultimate sense, a higher obligation.

To this type of mind, duty is primarily defined in terms of a tangible, outward, officially sanctioned and specified obligation: one that can somehow be subsumed under the aspect of juridical obligations. They tend to overemphasize such obligations as result from ties either of kinship or of contract, and to underestimate such others as follow inherently (but less automatically, being less susceptible of a statutory formulation) from the logos of a deep and meaningful relation of friendship.

Obligations implicit in the logos of love they will at best take for granted inasmuch as they have their place in the framework of conjugal or family relationships; yet even as regards the sublime and holy obligations inherent in marriage, they will stress their legal aspects in a one-sided approach. Whatever lacks the official hallmark of obligatino they would hesitate to recognize as obligatory.

In such cases, then, the consciousness of obligation does not arise organically from a true appreciation of values; it lies rooted, rather, in a general disposition to cramped and constrained states of mind. Persons of this type, as soon as they enter into a situation that implies an element of publicly recognized, formal obligations, develop a kind of interior spasm in which they stay immured, with souls deaf to other and higher demands. Subordinating themselves entirely to the autonomous mechanism of a definite set of obligations, they become unable to see either the duties in question or the hierarchy of values in general according to their true proportions.

Should they even theoretically discern the superiority of some value outside the circle of those duties or recognize the primacy of some demand of another order, in fact they will not be able to relax their taut attention to the task with which they have charged themselves and in which they are held tight as in a strait jacket. They are simply unable to break through the automatism of that self-imposed strain. Though they were ever so much attracted by some other theme, though their heart cried out after that new value – the compulsion is stronger than they. They fail to overcome the delusion that represents to them this pure dynamism of of obsession under the specious guise of an objective command. If once in a while they are in some way forced to quit the charmed circle that holds them prisoners, they are tormented by pangs of conscience.

No related posts.

New Apostolic Exhortation on the Bible

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

The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

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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.