altars

“Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator
as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You.
Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us.
Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.”
Augustine of Hippo

(altar tomb in the Rock of Cashel, the Cathedral of St Patrick / Co Tipperary, Ireland/
Julie Cook / 2015)

A thick blanket of smoke hangs heavy in the air.
It’s not the result of burning effigies or burning communities
but rather from the woods of North Carolina and northern Georgia which are on fire…
and the winds have shifted…

The sinking grey smoke is a somber reminder that there is a dangerously severe drought…
and the parched land is now beyond thirsty…

Yet there is more to this current drought than simply a lack of rain…
for there is more that is dry than mere vegetation and brush…
And there is more to this endless thirst than a need for water….

Vehemence and anger are filling the air, accented by vile and profane sentiment.
As the mobs march toward the altars of self indulgence and guile.
Immaturity laced with ignorance stokes the fires of rage as the hate filled
smoke fills the nostrils of a nation.

Self absorption and egocentric worshipers have taken to the streets.
They have taken to their computers and to their phones…their current altars of choice.
All the while they shout vile rhetoric as they stomp their spoiled bored feet.

If you must…
Protest against atrocities,
demonstrate against hunger,
fight against killing…
but not because you’ve simply forgotten, or have never known, how to lose.

Young dismayed parents now publicly lament how are they to console their
confused children who cry in fear from the big bad what ifs of hysteria…
simply because democracy has been at work–once again…

Nay, answer with truth…
the truth that one person lost while another person won…
For that is how this game is played…one person wins while one person loses…

Yet ours is a culture currently obsessed with the win win…
because we’ve grown moralistically soft while deciding everyone should be a winner…
We cannot live with the sad notion of losing…
Never mind old adages of always trying again…

There are those who are falling at the altar of womanly feminism…
which is currently shored up by gender neutrality, resentment and anger.
Marching not for policy or real equality but rather for the notion that
the wrong sex was the victor…as the votes which were cast are ignored….

Tears are being shed not because freedom has been lost
or because lives have been lost,
nor because a nation has lost all hope…
No…
rather tears are flowing because an election was lost…

And now we no longer want to play…
Because reality is simply no longer considered fun.
While we have found ourselves kneeling before all the wrong altars…

Ours are the empty altars of hero worship and of self…
the altars of gadgetry, boredom, appeasement and ignorance.
Altars of fear, anger, hostility, emptiness and divisiveness…

For what or whom has become our idol, our god?
Who or what are those hungry deities which have left us empty, sad,
frustrated, angry and resentful…
as we turn upon one another in the feeding frenzy of resentment?

We have gathered before all the wrong altars for far too long…
These altars have left us shallow and empty while also full of loathing and contempt…
We continue to march without leadership and direction…
lost and wandering…all the while lashing out at those we assume to be our enemy…
never realizing that we are all actually one.
One people…one nation…

And all the while hidden deep within the suffocating smoke of our thirst
lies the only One true proven path in which we need march…

Yet we have decided it’s far easier to wander angrily in the parched darkness
while hiding behind the vitriol sputum which oozes forth from our mouths…
spewing out upon our fellow human beings…

As it seems we’d rather choose…
paranoia to Grace
greed to Offering
ignorane to Enlightenment
darkness to Light
death to Salvation
egregiousness to Gentleness
hate to Love…

May we all fall at the foot of the one true altar,
the cross of Resurrection, Salvation, Hope and Life.

The Father willed that his blessed and glorious Son,
whom he gave to us and who was born for us,
should through his own blood offer himself as a sacrificial victim on the altar of the cross.
This was to be done not for himself through whom all things were made,
but for our sins.
Francis of Assisi

I ain’t no saint….

If God sends you many sufferings,
it is a sign that He has great plans for you and
certainly wants to make you a saint.
St. Ignatius Loyola

(stained glass St Patrick’s Cathedral / Dublin, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

First of all,
let’s make this perfectly clear,
I am not in any way,
nor have I ever been,
a saint…

I have never professed to be…
nor have I lived what would be considered a
very saintly life.

But that is not to say that I am a wanton miscreant either…

I’m very much like the next person, full of foibles, warts and all…

I have, rather, during this life of mine found much wisdom,
and even grace, in the words written and shared
by those individuals who have, by no campaigning of their own, found themselves
named to that more sacred list of the who’s who….

It is during the more trying times in life that I tend to seek much
needed wisdom and clarity.
Certainly more so than during those more quiet and calmer days of living.

This time, here and now….is no bed of roses….
In fact it reminds me of the Churchill quote…
“If you’re going through hell, by all means keep going…”

Between Dad and me, I think I’ve seen just about every ologist out there.
Then with my poor husband,
who is up to his eye balls trying to settle his late dad’s estate,
we have been busy with the esquires….

I suppose you know it’s bad when the latest doctor you’ve seen,
who has known you for the past 25 years,
looks at you with his hand literally on your pulse and asks

“when is the last time you slept?!”

With my response being…

“you tell me?!”

as he soothingly comes back with a…

“Well I’m going to prescribe you a little something to help…”

With me sardonically quipping…

“well I hope its a sledge hammer”

It helps if you’ve known one another over the years—
through things like surgeries, colonoscopies, childbirth…..

Hopefully tomorrow with one more ologist and pedic doctor on the list, there will be some
relief…

And so I thought I’d share a few wise words of comfort by a few of
our past sisteren and brethren out there who have known a thing or two about
hardships, hardtimes, suffering, pain, loss and illness…

Cause you see….
that’s the thing often about these sacred who’s who members…
their words are not mere flippant off the cuff comments meant to sugar coat anything.
Many of them lived pain filled lives both physically as well as mentally and emotionally…

And yet…they allowed their hurting, their sorrows, their struggles…
to act as beckons of light…
focused upward rather than inward and downward….

One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying.
He is offering up his sufferings to God, and many a time he is praying much
more truly than one who goes away by himself and meditates his head off,
and, if he has squeezed out a few tears, thinks that is prayer.
St. Teresa of Avila
(lost her mother when she was just 14. She suffered grievously from migraines
and prolonged illness–during which she experienced many divine encounters)

It is You Jesus, stretched out on the cross,
who gives me strength and are always close to the suffering soul.
Creatures will abandon a person in his suffering, but You, O Lord, are faithful…
(1508)
St. Faustina
(lived most of her life in poverty–even being turned down from several Cloisters
due to her low status in life.
She developed TB and died at the age of 33—
only after having established the devotion of Divine Mercy)

Courage, my sons. Don’t you see that we are leaving on a mission?
They pay our fare in the bargain.
What a piece of good luck! The thing to do now is to pray well
in order to win as many souls as possible.
St Maximilian Kolbe
[Said when he was first arrested.]
(sent to Auschwitz Nazi death camp where he sacrificed himself in order
for a fellow prisoner to be spared
and was sent to a starvation cell where he sang and prayed with the
other prisoners as they died one by one. He survived two weeks before the guards
entered the cell and ended his life with a deadly injection)

the honored created

“For reasons known only to Himself, God honored man above all other beings by creating him in His own image.”
A.W.Tozer

(St Patrick’s Cathedral / Dublin, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

Imagine that—having been loved and wanted so deeply, so intensely, that the God of all of creation willed our, as in yours and mine, very being.
The making, the creating, the birthing of man

And yet sadly, it all broke His heart.
We, as in you and I, broke His heart.

Oh there are those who would argue that if He was a god, and or real for that matter, then He would have, should have known better…He should have known, would have known, that “his creation” would fall short, screw up, disobey, go in the wrong direction, and multiply without ceasing…
so therefore…
He should have stopped it all…
He should have turned it all around…made it all good…fixed it all…stopped it all…rewrote it all…
but…
Love doesn’t do that.
Love stands back, waiting in the wings…for it is not controlling, dictating, ruling…

“Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possesses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His own likeness. The fact of God is necessary to the fact man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence”

Dependent.
A word and concept we have always looked upon as a negative, a weakness an undesirable characteristic.
Babies and children are dependent, not grownup adults.
For it is our goal, from the moment we begin to crawl then walk, to become independent.
We vie to live a life of independence…
freedom to make our own way, our own choices…
the determining of our own destiny, charting our own course…
setting our own comings and our own goings….
We rue the day we have to give up our independence due to accidents, illness, age…

And yet our very being is just that, dependent upon the very being of God the Creator.
Left to our own devices, well, we’ve see how that has worked out down through the ages…

Imagine…
primordial goo slinks out of the waters, crawls ashore and eventually evolves into the human being you see today walking down the sidewalk.
Without God, what of it?
Who cares that something a million years ago slunk up out of the swamps and became a human being.
What’s the purpose?
What’s the point?
There is no point…
And along with that… all that is…is, in turn, equally pointless.

And yet it does matter,
it all matters,
because God matters,
and therefore…
we matter because of God.
It is a continuum…
our continuum

And so here we are this late December…waiting, watching, expecting…
We wait, once again, not for the emergence of primordial goo, but rather for a birth…
and not just any birth…
This is the birth of the created image of the Godhead and man…
The dependent existence of One to the other, of the other to the One.
Because Love seeks that which It loves.
The Lover seeks the beloved…
and the beloved longs for the Lover..
The Lover of Life and of all that was, all that is and all that will be..
So yes, Come Lord Jesus, come….