Last post...for a while

This semester has been busy for many of the writers of this blog and we feel that at this time we need to cease the blog operation and focus on other ways of engaging those who want to have contact with the seminary and seminarians. We are looking at using the blog for those who would like to follow the two classes who will be traveling to Israel and Rome this coming January. Until then, thank you for your loyal following of this blog and may God bless you.

The Catechism is sweet!

So I was reading the Catechism and poof!~
2639-"Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives Him glory, quite beyond what He does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing Him in glory. By praise, the Spirit is joined to our spirits to bear witness that we are children of God,"121 Cf.Rom 8:16. (CCC)

I don't know why this strikes me as beautiful, but it makes me pretty happy. God has raised my fallen nature! I can do this! Praise be God!

Peace, and a new scene opens

Well, things are still thick as ever, but I have found some firm waves on which to stand. In fact, this weekend has opened out as a rare opportunity to get a bit ahead and enjoy some recreation. As always, I hope to recreate as Christ would, or at least with Him. Which reminds me of that hymn of Elizabeth Poston, a person about whom I otherwise know nothing. But who are we to say what our great contribution is in the Providence of God? Perhaps He called me into the seminary only to move other men through it. Perhaps He called Elizabeth only to arrange this music. Take a rest beneath the Apple Tree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm3fZDZxiko

Radical Dependence

Chesterton deserves to his picture up in these pages at least once.

As much as I like poetry, I do not have much enthusiasm for trite, rhyming slogans. Among these I would count, "The Attitude has to be Gratitude" and its family of variations. However, as much as I don't like the expression I cannot deny the content. There is a way in which being thankful for what one has never fails to brighten the day, open up new possibilities, and clarify how the situation is not nearly that dire. Chesterton captures this, rather well I think (though my bias is known) in his biography of St. Francis:

"If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the world upon nothing. If Saint Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. Saint Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps Saint Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards."