Category: meditations

  • 3 Rules that Always Apply

    3 Rules that Always Apply

    This is the text of a presentation on ¶1789 from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These are just notes, but the talk was good! My paragraph comes in the section of the catechism dealing with the human conscience. Very briefly – for the sake of this presentation – the conscience is that part of…

  • Day 151: Parthenos

    Day 151: Parthenos

    But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. – St Paul, I Corinthians 7:32-33 THESE THREE ESSAYS…

  • Day 150: Self Gift

    Day 150: Self Gift

    Picking up from yesterday’s post… BUT COVET EARNESTLY THE BETTER GIFTS: and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way (I Corinthians 12:31). With this promise of showing us a more excellent way, Saint Paul opens the passage in 1st Corinthians known as the Love Chapter. He goes on to explain all the ways…

  • Day 149: Only A Tool

    Day 149: Only A Tool

    WHEN I WAS FIRST CONSIDERING the priesthood in the Episcopal Church (as a teenager) the most common response was around marriage. “Can they get married?” “But you’re able to get married, right?” “Well at least that kind of priest can still get married.” It did not take long before I realized that what they were…

  • The Burning Bush

    The Burning Bush

    MOSES’ VISION OF THE BURNING BUSH is read as a typological prefigurement of the Incarnation. God enters the womb of the Most Holy Theotokos without damage or corruption just as the bush was burned yet was not consumed. This, along with reading through Pope Emeritus Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, and today’s feast of the Transfiguration,…

  • Of Masks, Statues, and Jehoshaphat

    FRIDAY IN THE 15th WEEK, Tempus per Annum, the readings in the Daily Office all conspire as if someone had set up it on purpose. In the Office of Readings, David and the story of Jehoshaphat, in Morning Prayer, David again, Jeremiah and St Paul all come together in one great story. In the Office…

  • Fractal Structures of Hell

    ⁋1865 Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root. Peccatum exercitationem constituit ad…

  • Day 100. Facie ad Faciem

    QUARANTINE’S FIRST TERRIFIED PANIC led to a tedium where days blent together in disordered shades of fog. This, in turn, parted like a curtain on a sort of political theater which allows us to pass the time with a modicum of excitement unrelated to our sickness or death. In my fear at the beginning of…

  • Day 75. What Has Been Learned?

    Very early in this I learned that I can go quite a long time on autopilot without realizing this is not “the new normal” but rather this is the rut I let myself make and it’s only that I’m calling it the New Normal. For a while my two emotions were fear and snark. Sometimes,…

  • Day 66. Acedia & Depression

    I am neither a spiritual director nor a psych-anything. This is a meditation. Two of my favorite podcasters (who do not podcast together), Fr Harrison and Gomer, have been talking about acedia in their podcasts and/or social media. This topic has interested me since before I was Catholic. My first visit to an Orthodox monastery,…

  • The Rosary: Closing Prayers & Suggestions

    When praying the Rosary, it is traditional to do one set of five mysteries (eg, The Joyous Mysteries) – also known as five decades – at a time, although another pious practice is to do three Mysteries a day as a minimum.  My personal practice is five decades a day, although I do not get…

  • The Rosary: The Coronation of the Blessed Virigin

    Our Lady’s coronation by her divine Son as Queen of Heaven is, in fact, the second coronation in the Rosary: the first being that of her Son, himself, by the Romans; but where the Virgin receives a crown of twelve stars from Jesus, he, at the hand of his fellow men, received a crown of…

  • The Rosary: Our Lady’s Death and Assumption

    Here, at last, is one place where the Romans and the Orthodox might differ in the Rosary – although as recently as the middle of the last century this was not so. When I was a freshman in High School I found at a used bookstore, a book on the Apparitions of Our Lady. It…

  • The Rosary: Pentecost

    The Mystery of Pentecost, the Out-Pouring of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles and all of Creation, is the beginning of the fruits of Christ’s actions among us. The Holy Ghost makes all of us divine if we will but let Him into our lives and reform, reshape, heal, cleanse, make whole what is shattered,…

  • The Rosary: The Ascension

    Our Lord’s Ascension is the first evidence that the “key has changed” as I noted in the last mystery: the Eastern liturgical texts speak of how amazed the Angels are at seeing one of our race of men entering into the Heavens.  The Psalm text, “Who is this king of glory?” is read as the angels…