an adopted path to Grace

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by
laws analogous to those of physical gravity.
Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces,
but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it,
and it is grace itself which makes this void.
The imagination is continually at work filling up all
the fissures through which grace might pass.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

(Rosemary Beach during Hurricane Sally / Julie Cook / 2020)

Tossed within the surf of a sea churning with tumultuous emotions…
joy, sorrow and even regret now vie for prominence within my heart.

An engulfing crescendo of deep abiding love is gently offered…
yet is is overshadowed by the inward naysaying whispers of a past
that speaks of unworthiness.

Grace and Graciousness, along with open forgiveness,
have each been tenderly extended…
freely extended by the hands of unconditional love.

The very word unconditional has always made these eyes fill with tears.

Humbled by such a love leaves this heart feeling only more unworthy
and even trembling.

Ode to a child of adoption…the child who finds the unconditional
a foreign gift.

Condition most often becomes the wiring of the adopted one.
And thus the thought of such worthiness is oh so far away from anything
the adopted individual finds possible…
for the single sense unworthiness clings for dominance.

If you’ve ever visited this little corner of the blogosphere of mine very often,
then you know I’ve written at length about such feelings and that of
my own adoption over these many years.

The highs and lows, the battles and the healings.

With adoption, the notion of healing and that of worthiness each become
a lifelong quest.

For the one who was given up and given away…to be able to ever feel worthy
of accepting such a precious offering of true and abiding love…a gift given from one
freely to another, feels as a near impossibility.

And so a battle ensues…

The adult who has lived life and attained hindsight now fights with the
ever present child who was born of rejection.

Logic wrestles with raw emotion.

Yet what we know, is that in the end, love does indeed win.

Because we know that anyone who calls
themself a Christian, is adopted by Grace.

I am a child of Grace and I am a person who is so ever grateful
to that of the unconditional…

to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, “Abba! Father!”
So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
Galatians 4:5-7

Only God satisfies

“In this life no one can fulfill his longing,
nor can any creature satisfy man’s desire.
Only God satisfies, he infinitely exceeds all other pleasures.
That is why man can rest in nothing but God.”
St. Thomas Aquinas

(a lone pelican cruises the surf / Julie Cook /2021)

“In the spiritual life,
I can promise myself nothing without the special help of God…
From one moment to another, I may fall into mortal sin:
consequently, even though I may have labored many years in acquiring virtues,
I may in one instant lose all the good I have done,
lose all my merit for eternity, and lose even that blessed eternity itself.
How can a king rule with arrogance when he is besieged by his enemies
and from day to day runs the risk of losing his kingdom and ceasing to be a king?
And has not a saint abundant reasons,
from the thought of his own weakness,
to live always in a state of great humility,
when he knows that from one hour to another he may lose the
grace of God and the kingdom of Heaven, which he has merited by years
of laboriously acquired virtues? ‘Unless the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain that build it’ (Ps. 126:1).
However spiritual and holy a man may be,
he cannot regard himself as absolutely secure.
The Angels themselves, enriched with sanctity, were not safe in Paradise.
Man, endowed with innocence, was not safe in his earthly paradise.
What safety,
therefore, can there be for us with our corrupt nature,
amid so many perils and so many enemies who within and without
are ever seeking insidiously to undermine our own eternal salvation?
In order to be eternally damned,
it is enough that I should follow the dictates of nature;
but to be saved, it is necessary that divine grace should prevent
(go before) and accompany me, should follow and help me,
watch over me and never abandon me.
Oh, how right therefore was St. Paul in exhorting us to
‘work out our salvation’—which is for all eternity—
‘with fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12).”
Fr. Cajetan da Bergamo, p. 21-22
An Excerpt From
Humility Of Heart

it isn’t easy, nor is it ever fair…

“The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest,
the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play.
But the other source is the hatred of superiority.
At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter.”
C.S. Lewis

(a roped off area where a sea turtle has laid her eggs / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2020)

Life is hard and it is certainly not always ever fair…

And yet we humans seem to be trying oh so hard to keep things as equitable, even, fair,
as well as level, as far as our conscious demands…

That is until we are stymied…

Stymied not so much by our fellow man or menacing mob, but rather stymied by
the likes of someone much more powerful…that being Mother Nature.

We can scream at one another about fairness, justice, injustice, and unfairness all we want.
We can make other men kneel at our sword and cower to our words and demands.
We can threaten, harass, harangue, and even inflict harm all in the name of making
others bend to our will for a purported notion of justice or fairness.

Yet in the end, it really isn’t any of us who will have the final say.

We had made plans long ago to come down to the Gulf this week…
our plans were long before a string of storms began advancing.
But such is any planned trip to a beach during this time of year.

The Gulf’s latest intruder is named Sally.

Unfortunately, I left my transfer cable for my camera at home so all of my
pictures from my camera will have to wait to be uploaded onto my computer when I get home…
I did, however, manage to get a few pictures using my phone.

This is the time of year when the sea turtles come to shore in order to lay their eggs.

There are beach volunteers who will mark and rope off the areas where a turtle nest
is situated.
Sea turtles, their nests, eggs, as well as hatchlings, are all protected.

Walking the shoreline yesterday evening, only hours before the storm would advance
as it has today causing massive erosion, we saw several roped-off nesting sites.
Some of the sites were far enough away from the battering surf but there was one
directly in the surf.

Poor turtle, I thought, her hard efforts, her nest, her offspring,
will most likely be in vain.

Had the weather been calm, the nesting site would probably have faired well but
I knew given the storm, there would be no site remaining the following day.

This was what we found this morning—a single staub jutting out of the surf
where yesterday there were four well marked and roped staubs.

And as we walked later in the day, as the gulls and plovers roamed what sand
was not underwater, we found a lone egg.
Cracked and dented.

(a lone turtle egg / Julie Cook / 2020)

And so as I ponder Mother Nature…her fickled ways with both life and death–
my prayers are with our neighbors to the West…those who are living in the midst of
hell on earth as wildfires ravage Oregon, Washington, and California—
just as I think and pray for yet another Gulf area that will be hit by yet another hurricane.

We may think we can bend man, or woman, to make him or her do as we please…
but in the end, it will be Mother Nature,
her and her alone, who will always have the final decisive say.

And yet…in actuality,
it just might be what we do in the wake of her decisions that will make the more
lasting difference on humanity…be that for good or be that for bad.

She plays her hand and then we must respond.

Maybe she just wants to divert our attention from ourselves for just a brief respite.

By my great power and outstretched arm I made the earth, mankind,
and the animals that are on the face of the earth, and I give it to whomever I see fit.
Jeremiah 27:5

gain greater than loss

“I see clearly with the interior eye, that the sweet God loves with a pure love the creature
that He has created, and has a hatred for nothing but sin,
which is more opposed to Him than can be thought or imagined.”
St. Catherine of Genoa

(gull along the surf / Rosemary Beach, FL /Julie Cook / 2019)

“Man threw away everything he had—his right to speak freely, his communion with God,
his time in Paradise, his unclouded life—and went out naked, like a survivor from a shipwreck.
But God received him and immediately clothed him, and taking him by the hand gradually led him to heaven.
And yet the shipwreck was quite unforgivable. For this tempest was entirely due,
not to the force of the winds, but to the carelessness of the sailor.
Yet God did not look at this, but had compassion for such a great disaster…
Why? Because, when no sadness or care or labor or toil or countless waves of desire assaulted our nature,
it was overturned and fell.
And just as criminals who sail the sea often drill through the ship with a small iron tool,
and let the whole sea into the ship from below,
so when the devil saw the ship of Adam (by which I mean his soul) filled with many good things,
he came and drilled through it with his voice alone, as if it were an iron tool,
and stole all his wealth and sank the ship itself.
But God made the gain greater than the loss, and brought our nature to the royal throne.”

St. John Chrysostom, p. 19
An Excerpt Frp,
A Year with the Church Fathers

looking up and being reminded

(a pigeon rests on a statue placed above the ridge of the Assumption chapel at the corner
of Garancière street and Palatine street, behind the Saint-Sulpice church. / Julie Cook / 2018)

Back in the summer, back when the beach was consuming so many of our minds,
I offered a post featuring some shots I’d taken of some pelicans I’d seen while enjoying
our summer trip to the panhandle of Florida.

Nothing says beach and ocean like seeing a brown pelican sitting on an old weathered pier or that
of a formation of these gangly birds gliding effortlessly just above the surf…

Days such as today…days that are damp, windy, overcast and grey quickly push our thoughts
to warmer sunnier days. This as we are just entering into our darker colder days of the year.

I noted in that previous post how much, for reasons unknown, that I love pelicans…
They are my favorite birds oddly enough.

Birds that eat whole fish and hold them in their gullets for later…
my husband calls them nasty birds while I call them resourceful.

My previous post touched on the seemingly odd relationship pelicans have had in Christian lore
and tradition.

I did a little research and offered a bit of teaching from the information that I had gleaned…
The premise was that during times of famine, mother pelicans have been known to pluck their own
breasts until they bled in order to offer their own blood to their hungry babies…
offering life-giving sustenance.

A direct reference to Christ who offers His own blood for our spiritual hunger and
our own salvation.

So recently when visiting Paris, we were staying at a small hotel just outside of
the Luxembourg Gardens.

(just a tiny area of the Luxembourg Gardens with a shot of the Senate building behind/
Julie Cook / Paris, France / 2018)

This boutique hotel sits in the shadow of the second largest church in Paris,
Eglise Saint-Sulpice.

(Eglise Saint-Sulpice / Julie Cook / Paris, France / 2018)

I happen to really love this church as it is not Notre Dame.

(Notre Dame / Julie Cook / Paris, France / 2018)

It is not consumed by crowds and tourists.

It was the anchor to the neighborhood my aunt and I called home for a couple of
days about 8 years ago and the same anchor to the same neighborhood my husband and I called
home more recently….the Germain-des-Prés, Odéon of the 6th arrondissement.

Entering this historic building is definitly otherworldly.

It’s like walking into an ancient, silent and dark crevasse…as well as
stepping back into a far removed time…think pre-Revolution and pre-Bonaparte.
Yet the Revolution did hinder the finishing of the facade.

The original church was constructed in the 13th century but the building we see
today dates to the early 1600’s—finally being completed in the late 18th century.
Yet it suffered, as did so many in Paris, during the Revolution.

There are some famous paintings by Eugene Delacroix…

Along with some masterful statues and some simple but lovely stain glass…

Along with the scars from living through the days of a revolution down to
simple neglect and decay…

Add of course the massive and impressive organ

And yet there is reverence…
There is a deep and mystical yearning by many who come here…
those who come curious or those who come seeking.

They come to sit,
to pray,
to sleep,
to hide,
to rest,
to wander,
to wonder…

And so it was when I was actually outside on a side street…
walking alongside the perimeter of this massive hulking building that I looked up
and actually saw it…
the mother pelican sitting atop a spire of a side chapel.

The same imagery that came to mind back in July…and here it was again in September.
Found not at the beach and not in some warm tropical locale but rather in the midst
of a massively large city whose people are often too busy to glance upward albeit toward
their rather famous tower…

And yet here it was…as always, a powerful reminder of sacrifice.
Life, death, redemption, and salvation…

(all photos by Julie Cook / Paris, France / 2018)

Remember to always stop long enough to look up…

And may we now offer our prayers for our Jewish brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh
as well for all the first responders…

Lord have mercy…

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/pelicans/

God’s perspective verses man’s

I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it;
whether he would or not it is his nature to.
Mester Eckhart

(a stormy surf / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

An aged man, whom Abraham hospitably invited to his tent,
refused to join him in prayers to the one spiritual God.
Learning that he was a fire-worshiper,
Abraham drove him from his door.
That night God appeared to Abraham in a vision and said:
“I have borne with that ignorant man for seventy years;
could you not have patiently suffered him one night?
The Talmud

one day

There is only one day left, always starting over:
it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Jean-Paul Sartre

One day, while you’re out and about simply minding you’re own business…

(pigeon waddling on the beach / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

As you’re merely caught up in the day to day business of living life while
pecking out an existence…

(a flock of plovers / Rosemary beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

Yet without hardly noticing, life begins to grow a bit dark as things
just seem to grow harder and harder…

(sparrow / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

Suddenly one day, and very much out of the blue, you find that you’ve face planted…
falling helplessly into the sands of life…
and you realize you’ve all but given up the ghost…

(a dead loon / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

The situation, having grown dire, hinges on just a matter of time…
For it is now or never…
Either you get up and get going, flying the coop….
or you succumb to the shifting sands…

(seagull /Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

And yet it is within the change in scenery…
that you slowly and most assuredly begin to find the solace,
along with the long sought healing,
all within the rhythmic motion of the tide…

(brown pelican / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

and finding your happy place…
you begin to feel a bit more like your old self…

(yours truly / happy in the chilly gulf surf / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2017)

He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
Psalm 147:3