Rules for self discovery

“It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly
until He has hurt him deeply.”
A.W. Tozer

(self portrait found in the river rocks/ Las Vegas, New Mexico / Julie Cook / 2011)

The celebration, the worldly hype and even sadly the joy all seem
to be quickly fading…
As the notion of transition now races madly from anticipation to resolution.

Seasons clash…
It is the Spiritual versus the worldly.

For we have moved from a season of hope into a season of self reflection.
The heavy question grabs us by the neck as if a drowning man might grab
the neck of a potential hope of rescue…
can joy reside within the depths of self reflection?

Reflection.
Introspection.
and eventually….if we are fortunate…
Resolution.

Determined…or not.
Good or bad.

Isn’t that what we are supposed to do at the closing of one year as we
anticipate the beginning of another?
Reflect and then commit?

Yet what do we commit to?
What might it be…
or rather what could it be…?
or even better yet…
what should it be?

“Rules for Self Discovery:
1. What we want most;
2. What we think about most;
3. How we use our money;
4. What we do with our leisure time;
5. The company we enjoy;
6. Who and what we admire;
7. What we laugh at.”
A. W. Tozer

God does everything well

“We must always remember that God does everything well,
although we may not see the reason of what He does.”
St. Philip Neri

(one of my favorite photographs from Glendalough National Park,
Co. Wicklow, Ireland / Julie Cook

“Prayers are God-filled words in which our love and God’s love are joined.
That love embraces the people for whom we are praying,
and love always changes people and situations.
This doesn’t mean that we will always get what we want,
but Jesus does promise that we will get what we need.”
Rev. Jude Winkler, OFM, p. 14

looking

Sometimes we think we are looking for God.
But it is always God who is looking for us,
and he often allows himself to be found by those who are not looking for him.
Henri de Lubac, S.J.
quoted in Fr. Donald Haggerty’s book The Contemplative Hunger

(a young hawk sits in Forsyth Park, Savannah, Ga /Julie Cook / 2021)

“Look up, you whose gaze is fixed on this earth,
who are spellbound by the little events and changes on the face of the earth.
Look up to these words, you who have turned away from heaven disappointed.
Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who are heavy and
who are crying over the fact that the earth has gracelessly torn us away.
Look up, you who, burdened with guilt, cannot lift your eyes.
Look up, your redemption is drawing near…
something different from what you see daily will happen.
Just be aware, be watchful, wait just another short moment.
Wait and something quite new will break over you:
God will come.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is In the Manger

the undoing within the transformation

“We might say the whole mystery of our redemption in Christ,
by his incarnation, his death and his resurrection, consists of this marvelous exchange:
in the heart of Christ,
God has loved us humanly, so as to render our human hearts capable of loving divinely.
God became man so that man might become God—-
might love as only God is capable of loving, with the purity,
intensity, power, tenderness, and inexhaustible patience that
belong to the divine love.
It is an extraordinary source of hope and a great consolation to know that,
by virtue of God’s grace working in us
(if we remain open to it by persevering in faith, prayer, and the sacraments),
the Holy Spirit will transform and expand our hearts to the point
of one day making them capable of loving as God loves.”
Fr. Jacques Philippe, p. 67-8

(zebra swallowtail / Julie Cook / 2019)

Today was a day for undoing.

The taking down and the packing up of all that which gives way to the barren.

The colors and lights surreally diminish… as we transition from light to dark.

And thus it is along this train of thought–the thought of transitioning from the then and now that my thoughts have wandered…I looked back to something I wrote years ago regarding our time as Believers and that of transition—we are currently living  the post Christmas season, to that of Epiphany to eventually that of Lent-as our seasons ride right into the next season of our constancy of faith…

And so we have something from from 2016.

I wrote this in January of that year…it was while we were still in the throes of a passing Christmas and what all that held as we looked toward what was to come—a Lenten season.

Here is that post…

There had been a whirlwind of emotion
Exuberance road wildly as if on the back of a broncing bull…
Holding on for dear life…
Yet madly giddy within the rush and exhilaration of the ride.
Major changes raced across the winds…

Soaring endlessly upward, words and feelings rapidly flowed downward…
as if caught in a raging torrent…
There was so much that needed to be shared, expressed, re-lived.
Time was the enemy, this much we knew…
If put on hold or held back, it might all be too late…
or so we reasoned…

The depth of feeling was so raw yet so very real.
Clarity had been granted, but for how long was anyone’s guess.
There was a sense of power beyond self…
As if one was being guided and willed onward by or from some other different place and time.
This was bigger than all of us combined and it had to be shared…
It was truly a race between life and death…

All consuming is the best way to describe it.
Mad we were labeled…the activity deemed by the State…nefarious.
Hope and death mingled dangerously together…yet at the same time there existed a calm which surpassed understanding.
We had seen the results of being caught, accused, condemned….
Yet a resolute feeling of determination prevailed…we knew that all would be well…
With this feeling of hopefulness spurring on the momentum…
It was a heady time…

It was a time of grave danger with imminent death if discovered.
Yet there was no turning back…the die had been cast
Three years had laid the foundation, three days cemented our fate
A lifetime would be our legacy as thousands more would follow suit.

As it turned out, time would not be the deterrent…
We would weather the centuries of both denial and persecution…
We would work together across the oceans of the world, hand in hand…
allowing our words, our deeds, our actions to tell the story…
There were times when voices were silenced and many lives were lost…
But transformation had been found
Renewal had become a reality
Power was indeed found in the weak
The blind had seen and the lame had walked
As Salvation blanketed the land…

Yet now we wonder…
Where has the urgency gone?
Where has the importance of this story gone?
Has the truth been lost in complacency?
Where is the momentum…?
Do lives still not hang in the balance?
Is Hope not still viable…?

Miracles have not ceased…
Hearts are still turned…
Life has indeed conquered Death
Yet the headiness,
the acuteness,
the gravity…
seem all but lackluster…

The importance
The need
The urgency
are still very much necessary…
Yet those of us who have been left to further the cause, spread the word,
live the story…
have fallen into lethargy, compliance with the world and sadly indifference…

May we once again find the strength, the need, the urgency to continue to fight the good fight…
For it is Time who is no longer on our side….or so we have been warned.
The winds have shifted, the signs are real and the headiness of exuberance, need and necessity is all but waiting…for our time has come….
are we still willing to be the voice behind the story….
If not us, then who….

Here we have the great wonder of heaven and earth,
the prodigious excess of the love of God…
God became man without ceasing to be God.
This God-man is Jesus Christ and his name means Savior.
St. Louis de Montfort
The Love of Eternal Wisdom

the day after…

You desire that which exceeds my humble powers,
but I trust in the compassion and mercy of the All-powerful God.
Saint Stephen

“If you know what witness means, you understand why God brings St. Stephen,
St. John, and the Holy Innocents to the crib in the cave as soon as Christ
is born liturgically. To be a witness is to be a martyr.
Holy Mother Church wishes us to realize that we were born in baptism
to become Christ — He who was the world’s outstanding Martyr.”
Love Does Such Things, by Rev. M. Raymond, O.C.S.O.

(the recycle bin / Julie Cook / 2021)

The paper is torn and discarded.
the ribbons are cut and forgotten…
while the bows are simply tossed aside.

The table is a cluttered mess.
Dishes, bowls, plates, glasses all sit scattered in a skewed
disarrayed jumble.

Empty boxes long to be filled while other empty boxes are
forlornly broken down.

The moving of seasons…the in between of what was and what must be…

Is there a glow in the aftermath of what was?
Or does there remain a sense of longing?

The secular world clashes with the world of Christian heritage.

The calendar tells us that today is Boxing day…
the newspapers tell us it is the day for after Christmas sales.
Yet the Church calendar tells us that today is the
feast day of St.Stephen.

Previous posts have been written about both–

And yet we cannot ignore the fact that we are reminded that there
remains a history…
a history that is both ancient as well as more recent.

A clash of time and space…
between the then and now.

And whereas most of us have lived these past four weeks though
the season of Advent–a four week anticipation of light while we
transition from what will be to that of the miraculous…
we must remember that our world does not stop on December 25th.

St Stephen reminds us of this.
The first recorded Christian martyr.

Oddly or purposely we are reminded that sacrifice must follow
the joy of birth.
Or are the two not already intertwined?

It seems as if we are dogged by the specter of death.
Unfair as that may seem.

Here we are basking in the joy of the innocence of birth yet we are
reminded that sacrifice must follows directly behind that joy.

Yet if there was or is anyone who had to understand the notion of sacrifice,
it would be Mary.
A woman who’s heart would be pierced.

And so as we begin the transition between then and now..the old and the new..,
may we be reminded that we are afforded but a brief time in which to bask
in our joy…for tomorrow will always remind us, time is of the essence,

There were thus two things which the Savior did for us by becoming Man.
He banished death from us and made us anew; and,
invisible and imperceptible as in Himself He is,
He became visible through His works and revealed Himself
as the Word of the Father,
the Ruler and King of the whole creation.
St. Athanasius,
On the Incarnation

a gift freely given

God has done everything; he has done the impossible:
he was made flesh. His all–
powerful love has accomplished something which surpasses all human understanding:
the Infinite has become a child, has entered the human family.
And yet, this same God cannot enter my heart unless I open the door to him.”
Pope Benedict XVI

(Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2020)

“God travels wonderful ways with human beings,
but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people.
God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather,
his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof.
Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels,
where our piety anxiously keeps us away:
that is precisely where God loves to be.
There he confounds the reason of the reasonable;
there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be,
and no one can keep him from it.
Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous
that he does wonders where people despair,
that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…
God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings.
God marches right in.
He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where
one would least expect them.
God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost,
the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded,
the weak and broken.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger:
Reflections on Advent and Christmas

And so He has come…

God of God
Light of Light
Very God of very God…

Begotten of woman, not made
Born man
Crucified
Dead
Buried
and yet Risen again for our Redemption and Deliverance

And so it is on this Christmas day…
this day of Light and Hope…that we find not only life…
but it is in that life that we must also find death…

For it is in the miracle of both life and death…
That of His birth, His life and eventually His death…
it is there that we actually find our most necessary Hope…

It is a hope found in both life and death—
of which each mingle together so blessedly and painfully…
yet oh so poignantly…
melding into that single transcendence of the Resurrection.

So on this Christmas day we are reminded, once again, that yes,
we are to rejoice…
We rejoice because we have each been invited to a grand banquet…
We have been invited to claim our rightful place at the table…
taking in all that is freely given and yet that which is gravely
undeserved…
but miraculously given nonetheless.

So in that Hope, found in both birth and death,
is a brilliance of illumination…scattering the
darkness from wherever it yearns to spread.

A great Light has shown in that darkness.
And that darkness scatters
because that Light has overcome the darkness.

Hope
Joy
Salvation
Redemption
Deliverence
Resurrection
Life…

All of which is offered to each man and woman, young and old,
sick and in-firmed, lofty and simple…underseved, yet a gift
freely given…

So yes, we are told to rejoice…

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Again I say,
Rejoice!

“What worthy return can we make for so great a condescension?
The One Only-begotten God, ineffably born of God,
entered the Virgin’s womb and grew and took the frame of poor humanity.
He who upholds the universe, within whom and through whom are all things,
was brought forth by common childbirth.
He at whose voice archangels and angels tremble,
and heaven and earth and all the elements of this world are melted,
was heard in childish wailing.
The Invisible and Incomprehensible,
whom sight and feeling and touch cannot measure, was wrapped in a cradle.”
St. Hilary of Poitiers

languages of the Spirit of the season

O Father, in your Truth (that is to say, in your Son, humbled, needy and homeless)
you have humbled me. He was humbled in the womb of the Virgin,
needy in the manger of the sheep, and homeless on the wood of the Cross.
Nothing so humbles the proud sinner as the humility of Jesus Christ’s humanity.
St Anthony of Padua

(a painting of St. Anthony and the Christ Child / artist, Unknown /Julie Cook / 2021)

“The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages.
These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ,
such as humility, poverty, patience, and obedience;
we speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others.
Actions speak louder than words…
it is useless for a man to flaunt his knowledge of the law if
he undermines its teaching by his actions.
But the apostles spoke as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech.
Happy the man whose words issue from the Holy Spirit and not from himself!
We should speak, then, as the Holy Spirit give us the gift of speech.
Our humble and sincere request to the Spirit for ourselves should be
that we may bring the day of Pentecost to fulfillment,
insofar as he infuses us with his grace, by using our bodily senses
in a perfect manner and by keeping the commandments. ”
St. Anthony of Padua
Excerpt From
Witness of the Saints, p. 492

Here is the link to a small story about me, St. Anthony and the image of the painting
I’ve chosen for today…

ora pro nobis—pray for us

the mystery in misty memories

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved
and where all your yesteryears are buried deep,
leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.
Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour
because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones,
vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud,
formidable from a distance.”
Beryl Markham

(a misty rising of the superman / Julie Cook / 2017)

(a timely tweaked re-post from 2017)

Whispers slip out from scented branches…
all while caught lingering between twinkling lights.

Each bauble, each ball, each special tangible memory calls out from ages past…
transporting the now to the then.

Broken, chipped, bent or faded…it matters not–
the flood of what once was cascades down upon the unexpected.

Voices long since silenced are suddenly as clear as a bell…
as a clock chimes upon a stocking draped mantle.

Each box, now reopened once again…
as each unearthed trinket is removed…
dusty and now worse for the wear from the years of in and out,
dangles precariously on a needle encrusted branch…
bridging both space and time…yet caught between a sea of red and green.

A story line begins to unravel….as a tale of love, loss and even hope sits
arranged, ever just so, inviting all to come behold.

For better or worse, we begin again…
Carrying on with and without…
and if we’re lucky, year in and year out…
a Mystery breaks through the barriers of both life and death.

And we are the better for that Mystery…

“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty.
A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery.
We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery.
Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes,
because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery.
They are not yet finished with this world;
they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do.
We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary
of our being,
because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal,
and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…
Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life,
nothing of the mystery of another person,
nothing of the mystery of the world;
it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world.
It means remaining on the surface,
taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated
and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation.
Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of
life at all and even denying them.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

What he knew and others chose to ignore. Déjà vu or simply a continuum? (let’s revisit this shall we?)

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Winston Churchill

(Winston Churchil /Casablanca, 1943)

Following the 2014 Winter Olympics hosted in Sochi, Russia–
the world was basking in the afterglow of global peace and harmony.
This collective sense of worldly kumbaya was found in the simple idea of
the competition of winter athletics.
Yet that sense of good cheer was quickly crushed when that year’s
Olympic hosts, that being Russia, boldly decided to invade neighboring
Ukraine. A sovereign nation.
And now once again, the world sits waiting and watching as a hungry ravenous bear
raises a massive deadly paw, poised to strike.
So given our times…be it 2014 or 2021, I offer this previous
post—not much seems to have changed in 7 years…

On March 21, 2014, with the sweeping act of a single pen, Valdimir Putin signed away Crimea, transforming a portion of Ukraine back to what was Soviet Russia. Changing the world map.

In 1938 Adolph Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia, with a similar sweeping act of a pen, known as the Munich Pact.
Changing the face of Europe forever.

This week, Lithuania’s president Dalia Grybauskaite, who is attending a European Council meeting of the heads of state discussing the EU’s response to the situation in Ukraine, told a BBC reporter that we, the world, are sitting on the edge of a new Cold War.

In 1946, Winston Churchill, addressing Westminster College in Missouri, introduced the world to the phrase “iron curtain” just as the Cold War was rearing its ugly head.

(Churchill surveys the ruins of chamber of The House of Commons after
a German assault of the Blitzkrieg.)

(The smiles of Uncle Joe deceive, while a wise Winston is all too keen to true motives.)

(1943 Churchill addresses a joint session of Congress urging the American allies to remain steadfast, staying the course, in their “duty to mankind”)

Within the blink of an eye and the sweeping act of a pen,
the world changed this week.
The world map shifted as a piece of the free world was unimaginably
sucked back in time.
If we, the world, choose to simply remain as mere spectators,
change will continue–history teaches us such.

Winston Churchill was the lone voice of foreboding warning alerting
the World to the true motives of first, Adolph Hitler,
then those of Joseph Stalin.
Each time, the free world chose to ignore his words.
Words which were alarming, scary, troubling.
Who wanted to think of such?
Why should anyone worry,
it’s not like this was happening in the backyard of the US or
that the island nation of Great Britain would be affected.
That was all over there, not here—
these being our thoughts as we lulled ourselves into looking the other way.
Maybe it’s all just bravado and bluff.
We just want to live our lives.
We don’t want to dwell on bad things. . .

But then the bad things happened. . .

Each time, Churchill was correct.
And each time, the world was too slow to react.

I wonder what Churchill would say after this week’s blatant act of
“what’s yours is now mine” by Valdimir Putin?
I somehow think there’s an “I told you so” out there somewhere.

May we be mindful of our continuing duty.

(and on we go…once again…over and over and over…)

the last of the lions

“What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar

(Senator Bob (Doyle, 95, salutes the casket of his friend, colleague, opponent and
fellow WWII vertern, George, H.W. Bush)

(this is a portion of a post I offered back in 2018 with the passing of
President George Herbert Walker Bush— Bush 41…
Bush was the dear friend, colleague and fellow veteran of Senator Bod Dole
—one of the last of the greatest generation who pledged their life
and service to our great nation—Senator Robert Dole passed away
yesterday…)

If there is one image that has touched my heart the most, over the past couple of days
other than the image of former President George H.W. Bush’s service dog Sully resting
at the foot of his casket, it is this image…
this one picture…

The poignant and heart touching image of Senator and fellow WWII Vet
Bob Dole of Kansas being helped to his feet, in order to salute his longtime friend.

Senator Dole, of Kansas, is 95 years young yet is frail and is in failing health
but he was determined to be brought to the US Capitol building in order to pay his
respects to his fellow veteran and friend.

To most men of ‘that generation’ respect has always meant standing, and in this
case saluting, as both men fought, and were each wounded,
during what they simply referred to as “The War.”

Bob Dole was in the infantry fighting in Italy when he was hit by German
machine gun fire in the back and arm.

According to Wikipedia:
Dole was badly wounded by German machine gun fire,
being hit in his upper back and right arm.
As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries,
all they thought they could do was to “give him the largest dose of morphine they dared
and write an ‘M’ for ‘morphine’ on his forehead in his own blood,
so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose.”

Dole was transported to the United States, where his recovery was slow,
interrupted by blood clots and a life-threatening infection.
After large doses of penicillin had not succeeded,
he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin,
which at the time was still an experimental drug.
He remained despondent,
“not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever.”
He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who
had been working with veterans returning from war.
Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would
never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole’s outlook on life,
who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide,
“Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it,
rather than complaining what had been lost.”
Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times,
free of charge, and had, in Dole’s words,
“an impact on my life second only to my family.”

I am always gratified when I read of or hear of the stories about the impacts
that one human being can have upon another…
impacts, that more often than not, are unbeknownst to the one who is doing the impacting.

I call it the gift of the unknowing.

These unknown gifts actually consist of simple things such as time,
assistance or a listening ear or even what might be perceived as an
insignificant opportunity…
These gifts, which more often than not are unbeknownst to the giver…
become paramount and even life-changing to the recipient.

Bob Dole had his gift giver.
And we Americans are better for it.

And if the truth was told, I think most all of us have had a gift giver, if not several,
during the course of our lives.

Senator Robert J. Dole (1923-2021)
Mr. Dole, a son of the Kansas prairie who was left for
dead on a World War II battlefield,
became one of the longest-serving Republican leaders.
(NYT)