Spam, Delete, or Leave the Nasty Comment?

Got my first very insulting comment tonight from an atheist blogger with 22 profile views, and no comments on any posts on his initial page, and without an email so I could reply letting him or her know that I found the comment insulting and assuming.

I remember well back in April and May 2011, when I started blogging, what it was like to post 2-3 times a week and realize that there were very few folks actually reading what I was writing.

It was up dramatically from when I would write in my own scripture journal, or when I would have so much to work through that I would use Word or Open Doc and seal it with a password.

So I did what this person did, as it would be more fun to have actual readers.  I went off reading and commenting.  I over-followed initially, looking for the reciprocal follow back to my blog.  This was not a statistically successful tactic in retrospect.

The comment was nasty because it was blasphemous, and belittling, not that I avoid a good humbling, with all the great Saints telling us over and over again how important humility is to advance in the spiritual life.

Decision then:

1. Leave it, and post a reply 
2. Delete it
3. Move it to spam

I went with 3.  I could have taken it if it was just insulting to me, but not if it was insulting to God.  It was basically a rebuttal to the God is Love post I did late last month.

I have no idea how young, or old the person is, nor how long the person has been an atheist.  What I know from the comment is there is an assumption that anyone that believes God is Love is not actually using the thinking potential of the brain.  

I'm going to say a whole 5 mysteries of a rosary tonight for this person so they can know that God exists, God created this person to be loved, and to know, love and serve Him, through the mediation of Jesus Christ, Our Savior.  In short, I am going to be a militant intercessor along with our Lady for this person.  A shrink might say I'm passive aggressive or something, but this just feels right.

Well what would you have done, or what have you done when this happens to you?

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On different note, the 9/11 memorial programs are really getting to me.  I had a baby girl 14 days after the tragedy.  I thought it was the pregnancy hormones then that had me sobbing on the way into work every day.  It wasn't.  It is just that sad, because I am doing the same thing tonight when they are showing the families of the deceased in the days following the attacks.

Our Lady of Peace please pray for us.  Please pray for peace in this world, and an end to the two wars that our country's military is fighting.

Our Lady of Peace

God, Our Father, we thank you that you are going to bring about the Kingdom of your Son and a new heavens and a new earth, and that the delay is to save more of your children.  We thank you for your mercy, and ask you for a greater outpouring of your Holy Spirit that your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.  In Jesus Name, Amen

God is Love and God Loves Me

"In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins." (1 John 4:10)

"God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." (Romans 5:5)

It is Sunday and as Sunday is the beginning of a new week, and the first day of the rest of our lives, thought it would be good to post on the most foundational truth we need to absorb, and believe with all of our hearts.

Christopher O'Donnell, in Life In The Spirit and Mary wrote:

The fundamental truth of God's personal love for each one of us is a necessary foundation for any spiritual growth whether a person is enmeshed in sin or growing in higher states of prayer, it will be a necessary support for advancement.

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father . . . " (James 1:17a)

We know this is true that all the gifts we have, from existence, free will, our families, the gift of faith, hope, and also even the obstacles to faith and hope are gifts coming down from the Father.  The obstacles aren't always what we would call good and perfect, but they too are gifts.

Sometimes we are dealt a blow, and usually it is a series of blows in life that clouds us to the most beautiful of all realities, God is Love, and God Loves Me.

Today, hear God telling you, "I love you, (insert your name here).  You know this is true, but do you really understand it?  Ask me to help you understand it."

Pope Benedict XVI wrote two of the most beautiful paragraphs in print on this most essential truth of our existence, our past, our present, and our future in the Introduction to his Encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love):

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John's Gospel describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should ... have eternal life” (3:16). In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel's faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth. The pious Jew prayed daily the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which expressed the heart of his existence: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (6:4-5). Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbor found in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18; cf. Mk 12:29-31). Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere “command”; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.

If I really believe and rejoice in this personal love of God for me, it is motivating.  I want to show God's love, God's goodness, Christ's meekness and strength to those connected to my life.  

We who have been grasped by the love of God in the person of Christ Jesus, Our King, want to respond by cooperating with the grace and work of the Holy Spirit in us to draw others to Him.

How has the truth that God is Love and God loves You been the starting point for a new life in the Holy Spirit, where you are filled with joy to say, "Jesus is Lord"?

If you don't yet have that joy in your heart, and you can't seem to believe in this truth, what is in your way?

When Jesus taught the crowds, and when he talked to individuals we read how his teaching and his presence makes a deep impression on them.  Many times crowds forgot about the essentials of food to stay and hear him teach.  We read about some cutting a hole through the roof of where he was so they could get their paralyzed friend to him to be healed.  Miraculous conversions occurred, like we hear in the conversion of Zacchaeus.  The Gospels are filled with people either coming to Jesus or him coming to them, for example the woman at the well, and they are not the same afterwards.

Fr. Bartunek had a great take on this:

"Whether we realize it or not, in our hearts we yearn for God, and so when we come into contact with someone close to God, our hearts are moved.  When the crowds came into contact with Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, their hearts burst with astonished joy."

Part of that explains why it is so easy to love Mary!  She is so close to God, our hearts are moved!  It is also why I can read some of your blog posts and comments and my heart is moved.  You are writing out of hearts that are filled with God, and in response to the love you have been shown.

For those of you that rejoice that God is love and God loves you personally, I hope you will be encouraged in your calling to continue spreading that love and your gift of faith in all the ways God provides you the opportunity.

For those who want to believe, consider that if you are looking to be reassured of God's love, it is really in response to him reaching out to you.  Also please consider that not once in the Gospels was there a person that turned to Jesus, that he did not help.

Jesus always wills to HEAL us.  Some of us may need physical cures, or want physical cures for others.  This may or may not be willed.  This isn't always easy, and is sometimes upsetting.  We want to yell out, "Hey Jesus, you healed the blind men, the paralytic, the leper, the mother-in-law, why not me?  You raised several people from the dead, why not this person?  You love them too, right?"

I am not God, and I am not adequate to answer questions like that in a satisfying way.  I do believe with everything in me that a) God does love you in a more profound, and infinitely wonderful way than you will be able in this life to comprehend, b) I am confident that if you turn to Jesus and ask him, Jesus will heal you on the inside--in your heart and in your mind.  The key thing is to acknowledge your need for him, and come to him in confidence and humility, and then I am confident he will heal you.

If you want to read more about why you can be confident in God's Care of you, please look here.

Watershed Morning

Someone must have been praying for me last night or this morning, because I had so much new to me, or deeper than before insights this morning during my meditation time.  I did pray for wisdom and the Holy Spirit last night before falling asleep, but I've done that before and didn't wake up the next day having a few spiritual epiphanies before 10 a.m.

While I learned many things this morning, I'll focus this post on my latest take of Jesus as the Way, as in the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14:6).  More specifically, that Jesus showed us the Way to live, and that what was primary was staying focused on his mission, following the plan of his Father, and the way he ensured that focus was by ensuring he prayed every day.  The other aspect of the way Jesus lived, was by his gentle attentiveness to the people he encountered in his life.

1) Jesus modeled the primacy of daily prayer.

Our Parish priest two weeks ago focused on one of the frequent lines in the Gospel about Jesus going off to pray.  For some reason that seed didn't grow roots immediately then (it may have been that my kids were not listening and I was distracted myself telling them to listen), but after reading what Fr. Bartunek wrote in the meditation passage, it became very clear.  All emphasis added to the below quote from The Better Part is mine.

Christ was perfect, sinless, without any selfishness, laziness, or pride.
His character was flawless, as firm as the mountains and as gentle as a mother's caress.
His mind was beyond brilliant, filled with radiance of divine light and understanding.
No emotional scars from a difficult family upbringing.  (Mary was without sin too, and Joseph was a saint.)
No personality disorders or imbalanced self-esteem.
No lacks, no wounds, no imperfections at all, 
and yet over and over again in the Gospels
we see him go off to be alone in prayer:

"In the morning long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place to be alone in prayer and prayed there." (Mk 1:35)

Christ was perfect, God from God and Light from Light, and yet he needed to reserve time just to be alone with his Father; he needed to go off to pray.  He even had to get up early to make time for it.  Sometimes he had to stay up late in order to make time for it.  But he always did it.

If he who was perfect, needed prayer in order to fulfill his life's mission, what does that imply for us, who are so imperfect, so weak, so vulnerable to every sort of temptation, and wounded by every kind of sin.

Christ was a man of prayer and as he himself put it, "no disciple is greater than his master." (John 15:20)

My realization was if I am going to have any spiritual knowledge, any depth to my relationship with the persons of the Holy Trinity, any insight into God's will during the unpredictability of the day's events,  I need to pray and battle against the distractions that keep me from either morning or nightly prayer.

2) Jesus modeled the Golden Rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Lk 6:31) in his gentle, attentive, friendly way with people.  

In the passage I was reading this morning Jesus healed Peter's mother-in-law not with a word, or a wave of his hand, but instead, "He went to her, took her by the hand and helped her up." (Mk 1:31)

That is gentleness, that is attentiveness.

I thought about this because yesterday I was trying to teach my 12 year old that he should say hi to his classmates when he sees them outside of school, using their name, and by showing in his face that he is glad to see them, glad that God created them and that they are in his life.

After reflecting this morning I was thinking, what do most people want--not all people, some people are turned inward from being wounded, or other reasons. But what do most people want?  Or to put it another way, which people make the biggest impression on us and stick with us long after we don't see them regularly?

To the first question, I remember some of my parenting books teaching that we should show each of our children on a regular basis, especially when we see them after a separation during the day, how happy we are when we see them, how blessed we are that God gave this little person into our care.  The feeling of love, and joy that we show them that they are in our lives, is what people hope to experience beyond the home as well.  When someone walks into the office building, or the school building they are hoping the person they meet or see, will maybe stop from another conversation or something, and just say hi in a a way that says, "Geez, great to see you again."  It might not be the same as a mom to a kid, but the more sincerely friendly it is, the better we feel, right?

To the second question, which people make the biggest impression on us, and are most memorable to us, I think it is the persons we meet that have the goodness and generosity, and the focus on people, rather than tasks or things, that they show to others they are really glad they get to be around them on a given day.  I've known a couple of people like this in my life, and the book, Tuesdays with Morrie was written about a guy who exemplified this.

How did I come to this realization?  When I read the line, "He went to her, took her by the hand and helped her up," I prayed:

Lord, please -  I know and thank you that you are near.  Please take me by the hand - if it is your will, and help me up.

Then the next line I read from Fr. Bartunek was, "Christ is a man whose whole attention is focused on others."

This then led me to think about not just what I was asking my son and other kids to do, and how I know I love to be treated, but how do I act?  Am I treating others the way I want to be treated---not just with fairness or common respect or decency, but how I really want to be treated?

I know what I want Jesus to do for me--take me by the hand.  How do I like people to act toward me?  I like when they greet me by name, with a smile and look of friendship on their face.

Again, how do I act toward others?

Since this isn't the confessional, I'll leave it as I found another missing piece of self-awareness, in conjunction with a deeper understanding of the teachings of Christ, that could make a real improvement in how I am following Christ in my home, and in my relationships outside the home.
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And if my morning meditation was not enough, by 1 p.m. I had also spent an hour in prayer alone, before the Blessed Sacrament, followed by a chance meeting with our Priest/Pastor in the rectory.  I had forgotten something there earlier before I went to pray, and he was unexpectedly home from the hospital where he is a chaplain.  We had such a great talk.  I told him about some of this, and more, not that he is my official spiritual director (don't have one of those yet), but he really encouraged me.

The other thing I noticed is that when I walked into the church this morning, I immediately had this feeling that I was in love with God.  In love with Christ.  In love with the Holy Spirit.

I have been praying for this, and I felt this way yesterday too when I went outside in the early evening.  I looked at the sky.  It was beautiful, AGAIN.  Seems like I see a beautiful, fills me with awe sky everyday.  This time I looked and I just felt in love with God looking at it.

I really felt driving home from Church and after seeing our priest today,  as though Jesus did will to take me by the hand to help me up, so he did.

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

The Sunday before Lent starts in the Eastern Church is known as Forgiveness Sunday.  The homilies for these liturgies focus on the need to forgive so that we can be forgiven.  Father told us that when we refuse to forgive that we are creating an obstacle to God's mercy and forgiveness and grace.  There is also a beautiful rite that begins with the parish clergy kneeling, and asking forgiveness of anyone of the parish that they may have offended during the year.  They then go through the church asking individuals for forgiveness, and the parishioners do the same as the Spirit moves them, or the gifts of humility and fortitude sustain them.

After all no one wants an obstacle to God's mercy, forgiveness, and grace -- right?

Father also said there are times when we do try to forgive, but the resentment, or hurt runs so deep that it is only by praying for God's help to forgive that we can forgive.

Of course I also remember another good way of getting the humility necessary to forgive is to stare at a crucifix and ask the questions:

- Who is suffering and dying on that cross?  

- Why is He dying?  

- Who is He dying for?

I do believe that the purgation we receive either in temporal punishments in this life, or in Purgatory are to bring us to a place of more perfect, more Christ-like love.  A dear priest said in a homily, "You must know that you will not get into heaven until you forgive and love everyone."

It's all there in the Gospels, especially the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant who was forgiven the equivalent of billions and wouldn't forgive a hundred (Matthew 18:21-35).  The teaching from Fr. Bartunek in The Better Part on this is that if we refuse to forgive the little offenses others cause us, we "handcuff God's mercy and put ourselves under strict justice."  

Who wants that?  

Lord please give light, eyes that they may see, and ears that they may hear.  Please let all that don't understand that it is your will for them to be forgiving and merciful as you have been to them, absorb the light of the Gospel and Your teaching on forgiveness.

It's right there in the Our Father, for Pete's sake:  "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."