are you willing to man up?

“When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith,
the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours.”
St. Angela Merici

When I read the above quote for the day by St. Angela Merici,
my immediate response was…

“Am I ready?”

Am I ready to step up, to man up, to woman up (for those more sensitive to gender)
to the virtues, the trials, the tribulations that Jesus
readily revealed, experienced and endured during his time of suffering???

That of betrayal, arrest, a mock trial, scourging, the Via Dolorosa, being nailed
to a tree, being hoisted into the air…only to hang by his hands and feet…
deprived of relief…
a long, slow, torturous and inevitably painful death…?

Am I ready?
Am I ready, am I willing, to take up my own cross that He is ready and most willing to
handoff to me?

I ran track in high school…
I ran two different relays.
I know about handoffs.
I know about the importance of the syncing of the handoff.
The necessary effortlessness.
The timing.
The precision.
Hand to hand.
Trust.

So the question remains…
Am I ready…
Am I ready when He would desire to extend such a “grace” to me?

It is a tall order.
It is even a hazardous order given our day and times.

But it is one that we, the faithful, must be willing to take.

The day’s light grows dim.
Time is of the essence.
Are we, both you and I, ready to man up?

St. Francis had to ask himself the same question when confronted with what was a perceived
horror of his own day…leprosy.

In his conversion, he had submitted his all to God.
He had humbled himself to man…but was he willing to humble himself to God?
Was he willing to trust with a blind faith?

Would he, could he, walk the talk when faced with a possible and impending doom?

Spoiler alert…he did.

“Now, as he was riding one day over the plain of Assisi he met a leper,
whose sudden appearance filled him with fear and horror;
but forthwith calling to mind the resolution which he had made to follow after perfection,
and remembering that if he would be a soldier of Christ he must first overcome himself,
he dismounted from his horse and went to meet the leper, that he might embrace him:
and when the poor man stretched out his hand to receive an alms,
he kissed it and filled it with money.
Having again mounted his horse, he looked around him over the wide and open plain,
but nowhere could he see the leper;
upon which, being filled with wonder and joy,
he began devoutly to give thanks to God,
purposing within himself to proceed to still greater things than this.”
St. Bonaventure, p. 4
An Excerpt From
The Life of St. Francis

Sleep Deprivation or brainwashing

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching,
but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of
all I might have learned at home by myself.”
George Bernard Shaw

(Oh to sleep like a new grandbaby / Julie Cook / 2018)

The older I’ve become the more I’ve found that the notion of a precious night’s sleep
is not only alluding me but has become a fleeting fancy.
Meaning, it just seems to be a dream rather than a reality.

And how poetic that the inability to sleep should be but a dream…

Being able to finally fall into a bed of something that is somewhat welcoming and inviting–
providing a bit of respite and a place to temporarily sever the maddening ties of the day…
is the hope and desire of most human beings.
For we were wired to rest and to sleep—a time period given us in order to repair
and replenish ourselves.

Yet as we age, falling asleep no longer comes readily.
Staying asleep seems impossible… so much so that waking is a near depressing event as in
it signals another passing night of weary failure.
They chalk it up to age, stress, hormones and life…
sigh…

Enter the new grandchild.

As all new parents and grandparents know,
tending to a new baby that has decided to be an owl,
meaning that said newborn prefers to sleep during the day while choosing to be wide-eyed
at night, is an exhausting affair for all involved but the new babe.

A sleep-deprived brain has been compared to the same as if a person is intoxicated.

Poor choices, poor coordination, poor processing…
A dangerous mix.

Many an enemy combatant has opted to use sleep deprivation as a means of “torture” on their
captured prisoners in order to break the will while hoping to glean a few loose lip secrets.

So today, in a bleary-eyed state, when I read the latest offering by the renegade Anglican
bishop Gavin Ashenden regarding cultural brainwashing, it reminded me of my own sleep-deprived state.

In such a weakened state of brain fog and fatigue, it’s really quite easy to yield or to succumb
or to simply give in to all sorts of notions…

Anything anyone says we readily agree to, adhere to or adopt as our own as we are simply too tired,
too weak, too lacking…to resist.

So it would behove us, the Faithful, to be vigilant and to hold fast to our faith as the
current cultural trend is to brainwash the masses into accepting and eventually believing
a wealth of lies and falsehoods…

The following is an excerpt of the Bishop’s latest take on the current leanings of brainwashing
a gullible society…brainwashing both Believer and non-believer into accepting that which runs
counter to the natural and Holy intentions of a Divine Creator…

“The death of Billy Graham reminded me of how terrified I had once been of
being brainwashed.

I remember deciding to go on a quest to discover if Christianity was true or not and walking
into an Anglican Cathedral to hear an evangelist talk about Jesus.
His day job was being a vicar in York.
He wanted to help people examine who Jesus actually claimed to be.

“What if they try to brainwash me” I found myself thinking?
Someone, at some time, had managed to plant that thought in my head and it had stuck.

What I didn’t know was that these mild Anglicans were the last people on earth to want to
do any brainwashing, but that other people and other ideologies would be along shortly
who would be much more likely to try.”

In Bristol this week, some parents fought back against the brainwashing of their children
in infant school. The national campaign to destabilise childrens’ understanding of their
own sexuality has now reached down deep into our childrens’ childhoods.
Drag queens have been recruited to do workshops on gender identity for our 5-10-year-olds.
‘Diversity’ is the propaganda cover mantra.
Confusion is what the parents fear.

Christianity- the antidote to cultural brainwashing.

‘So remember what you have received and heard;
and keep it, and repent Therefore if you do not wake up,
I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you.
Revelation 3:3

distortion

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

(bullseye glass/ Galway, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

“All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its ‘nature’ cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed. There is good reason, therefore, to praise an uncorrupted thing, and if it were indeed an incorruptible thing which could not be destroyed, it would doubtless be all the more worthy of praise. When, however, a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is, by just so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good. As long, then, as a thing is being corrupted, there is good in it of which it is being deprived; and in this process, if something of its being remains that cannot be further corrupted, this will then be an incorruptible entity [natura incorruptibilis], and to this great good it will have come through the process of corruption. But even if the corruption is not arrested, it still does not cease having some good of which it cannot be further deprived. If, however, the corruption comes to be total and entire, there is no good left either, because it is no longer an entity at all. Wherefore corruption cannot consume the good without also consuming the thing itself. Every actual entity [natura] is therefore good; a greater good if it cannot be corrupted, a lesser good if it can be. Yet only the foolish and unknowing can deny that it is still good even when corrupted. Whenever a thing is consumed by corruption, not even the corruption remains, for it is nothing in itself, having no subsistent being in which to exist.”
― Augustine of Hippo

(***time is not my own these days, so my apologies for a post or two that are a bit less than–less than creative, less than truly personal and or overtly creative….)