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Moral values are the highest among all natural values. Goodness, purity, truthfulness, humility of man rank higher than genius, brilliancy, exuberant vitality, higher than the beauty of nature or of art, higher than the stability and power of a state. What is realized and what shines forth in an act of real forgiveness, in a noble and generous renunciation, in a burning and selfless love, is more significant and more noble, more important and more eternal than all cultural values. Positive moral values are the focus of the world; negative moral values, the greatest evil, worse than suffering, sickness, death, or the disintegration of a flourishing culture.

Dietrich von Hildebrand & Alice von Hildebrand

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All of us who lead isolated, autonomous lives tend to think that other people have let us down, and consequently, we often pity ourselves. Many of us even when we are thirty or forty do not see how unrealistic and selfish our expectations are of other persons... And, it is probably true that friends or family have treated us badly more than once... When human relations become unbearable, we often feel that all we can do is sit down and cry. It is enough to break  a person's heart. But pain and suffering are unavoidable in life. Childhood days of camaraderie, of shared adventure, and of common pursuits disappear forever. The best of friends quarrel bitterly over nonsense and never speak to each other again. Every American family self-destructs once or twice. Nevertheless, we are all bound together, parts of each other, and without compassion and understanding, our lives will sink into misery, bitterness, or cold-heartedness. We become compassionate and understanding when we are liberated from our narrow selves, and, for many of us, that only happens through pain and suffering, those two universals that unite humankind.

George Stanciu, The Unexamined Life

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Burnout

We find ourselves trapped in a terrifying wheel of work with seemingly no end in sight. I think this is because we believe work begins and ends with us, that it is our primary faculty as human beings. But as has been recently pointed out: we are 'homo sapiens', not 'homo economicus'. The work is not ours to begin or end. We are simply witnesses to the truth of what work is ordered toward - the truth that there is a beauty beyond work, a beauty that is transcendent, primary, universal... and that beauty can only be known as stillness. And our 'work' is not to accomplish this, but to grow in wisdom enough to know that it has already been accomplished.

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What is “worth”?

The ability to simply… be. Not to be nothing, because that is a reality which will overtake us beyond this gate. There is no denying our inherent mutability, our constant malleability. We are born to be in motion. But the trick of the whole problem is not to find our motion and pursue it to the end, but to find our motion within ourselves, to allow our motion to emanate from our stillness. The flight of a sparrow is unachievable without the currents of wind which move it; without air, a sparrow would never be able to leave the ground. Similarly, there is an inner force, a driving breath of our souls, which buoys us up and would allow us to rest in its perfect capacity, if we could only find a way to let it carry us onward, instead of thinking we need our physical feet to run the race. We are to train not like we are shadowboxing, the apostle says, but to compete in a real tournament of life or death. The funny thing is, such training must all occur internally. If we don't believe that we are going to win the race, then there is no point in running it. If we don't believe that we are capable of succeeding, then there is no point in trying. This belief, this trust in who we were meant to be, is able to carry us beyond the supposed significance of material achievements, of measurable success. There is no way to measure our capacity to be victorious on this earth. The trophy was not meant to be seen here. The laurels of victory await us beyond the precipice. All we have to do… is let ourselves fall.

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A Certain Tenderness

How does Joseph respond to his calling to be the protector of Mary, Jesus and the Church? By being constantly attentive to God, open to the signs of God’s presence and receptive to God’s plans, and simply to his own. This is what God asked of David, as we heard in Samuel 7. God does not want a house built by men, but faithfulness to his word, to his plan. It is God himself who builds the house, but from living stones sealed by his Spirit. Joseph is a “protector” because he is able to hear God’s voice and be guided by his will; and for this reason he is in touch with his surroundings, he can make truly wise decision. In him, dear friends, we learn how to respond to God’s call, readily and willingly, but we also see the core of the Christian vocation, which is Christ! Let us protect Christ in our lives, so that we can protect others, so that we can protect creation...

I would add one more thing: caring, protecting, demands goodness, it calls for a certain tenderness. In the Gospels, Saint Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man, a working man, yet in his heart we see great tenderness, which is not the virtue of the weak but rather a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for concern, for compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love. We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness!

Pope Francis, Homily, March 19, 2013

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“If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a crisis in America involving a particular sex, and it’s not female. Men are in deep trouble, in just about every area of life, and that spells deep trouble for all of us.

Tucker Carlson at FOX News has begun a series about “Men in America”, airing every Wednesday during March. His first installment was sobering, to say the least. It is a must-watch.

… This is a terribly bleak reality. Yet, as Carlson points out, the media and the medical community don’t seem to believe it a problem worth considering. The prevailing message of our day is that women are the real victims. Men, the terrible “patriarchy,” are the oppressors. To dare question or contradict this message is to invite venomous public wrath and political doom, so few are the brave souls willing to say a peep.

Liberal feminism has played a huge role in the collapse of men, and it is high time this poisonous philosophy was recognized for what it is. Masculinity is desperately needed in our society and there is nothing toxic about it. Women do need men, and men need women. Men and women are not interchangeable. Families crumble without husbands and fathers.”

Read it all.

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…Peterson begins this lecture by putting up an image of the maternal archetype on the projector: an image of the Virgin Mary. He goes on to admonish his students that society’s emphasis on professional work and power as ideals create for women, and even for most men, an inhuman dilemma.

Reclaiming respect for maternity is an essential project for modern society, Peterson says:

This image has to be held up as transcendent, and by that, I mean, it’s an image that’s got to be at the basis of a value structure insofar as there’s going to be human beings because there aren’t going to be any human beings without the infant and the mother. And so, if that’s not held up as an image of human value, then it all falls apart. It’s something our culture does extraordinarily badly.

Of our rampant devaluation of motherhood, which stems from our devaluation of the human work of the “private domain” as Leon Kass put it, Peterson says, “You can hardly diagnose a culture that is more pathological than that. It’s appalling.”

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You must enjoy life without resting in it. You must have a zest for life but also a desire for heaven. And you must see God in all things, realizing that he transcends them all. #MotherAngelica (at St. Francis of Assisi)

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at St. Francis of Assisi

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at St. Francis of Assisi

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"This was the method that Jesus used with the apostles. He put up with their ignorance and roughness and even their infidelity. He treated sinners with kindness and affection that caused some to be shocked, others to be scandalized, and still others to hope for God's mercy. And so He bade us to be gentle and humble of heart." St. John Bosco, pray for us! (at St. Francis of Assisi)

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St. Philomena, daughter of light, pray for us.

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Heart to Heart

It's time for a little moment of clarity. Time to talk about something that no one else seems to be talking about. I hear almost every day the struggles, the tragedies and the complaints, the desires and the fears, of our parishioners for their souls. And not just for their souls - for their children's souls. For their spouse's soul. For their grandparents, their siblings, their next-door neighbors, their co-workers, their fellow parishioners' souls. And together we all get caught up in the challenges, dreaming bigger, dreaming better, planning, plotting, and lamenting all the while the lack of focus, trying to tackle the lack of communication, trying to force interest, trying to single-handedly extinguish the trend of lacking personal investment. We quote experts like Sherry Weddell and her statistics on the "nones", on the Catholics who have left the Church, on the lack of parish involvement, on the steady and quickening decline of Mass attendance. We remember our parishes in the past, and remember how close we used to be, and we remember where everything went wrong. And when we speak of hope, of change, we speak of hope in the future, of change in the future, not in the now, because first we have to finish dealing with everything we were just complaining about. We base our whole operating model, our every event and every retreat, on these fears, these desires, these losses and these needs.

And so naturally, when we reach out, when we try to fix it, when we try to help… we're reaching out with our frustration, with our desperation, with our fears, written in stark white on our foreheads, on our smiles, in our eyes. We're not reaching out with kindness, with sincerity, with humility - we're not reaching out with love.

Which is not on purpose! This isn't our intention. We're trying - really, honestly, earnestly, we're trying. But it's not good enough, is it? And deep down we echo this, in our heart of hearts, and we sometimes - and sometimes more often than not - allow ourselves to think that we're not good enough. Which brings us to the part of the conversation that no one else seems to be talking about - that we aren't good enough. Because we aren't! But that doesn't at all change what we are - that we're definitively, unequivocally, good. Because we can feel that fear. That frustration. That desperation. That absolute, bone-deep need to worry about other human beings and their choices, their future end. Because we don't know how to reach out in love, because we don't know how to channel our desires and fears into a dream that can really be real, no matter how much we seek out a dream that can survive more than a moment, more than an hour, more than a day. And you know what? It's because we're not good enough that everything's ok. If we'd found a way to never be afraid, to never allow our frustrations to rule us, if we'd found a way to always help completely out of self-giving love - well, we wouldn't be who we are. And that would mean we wouldn't need God. Which - let's admit it - probably should be our greatest fear of all. Us autonomous of God? Separated from him completely? What a nightmare! But no - our brokenness, our sinfulness, everything we lack, this all means we are capable of so much more; and because we aren't good enough it also means we need Him so desperately that, as our Father, as our Brother, we find Him doing everything that we cannot - and He sent us the Spirit of truth, to guide us, to be there for us every time we fall, to assure us that His mercy is boundless. Endless. To assure us that there is a big difference between being worthy - being enough - and being worth it.

So take a deep breath. Breathe out. Take a minute. Breathe in. Close your eyes. Breathe out.

Let the Holy Spirit breathe in for you. This is His job, His grace, and His passion. The Spirit that rests upon us will only effectively burn brightly when we allow Him to do so - because His light will not shine from us without our permission. And when we act out of fear? When we focus on our desperation, of the frustrations of feeling like we're one of the few who even cares? We're stifling his light. We've reduced the roaring flame of faith to mere embers of experiencing sorrow - a sorrow we could mitigate if we just let go and let God. But never despair! He won't ever stop asking for us, won't ever stop knocking on the doors to our hearts. We will have every opportunity, all of our lives, to keep answering Him, to keep saying yes to His grace. And there will be days when those embers seem to be going out - but there will be many, many more important days when that fire burns so fierce and so brightly that not only will our mettle be truly tested, and not only will our fears be truly beaten - but you'll see His light shine so brightly in your life that you will know, for just that one, burning moment, exactly how much you are loved. And that - He - will be good enough.

Do not fear: I am with you. Do not be anxious: I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. For I am the Lord, your God, who grasps your right hand; It is I who say to you, do not fear, I will help you. - Isaiah 41:10, 13

Emphatic Background Music - Rag'n'Bone Man - Human

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We're waiting for tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes, our last breath is right upon our heels, yet we still refuse to run, 86.400 seconds, and we're in another day, all slipping through our fingers, as we look the other way, days, weeks, months and years, are made up of right now, a string of fleeting moments, that we never can pin down, we gaze into the future, as though it's where we're meant to be, always planning for that day, when we can say that we're happy... We spend so long looking forward, that we may as well be blind, since we don't see until the very end, all the things we've left behind, and now I know it's just a theory, but I think I've worked out how, the only way to happiness, is to love what we have now. -e.h. (at Keller, Texas)

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prompt 944

Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” So if you take that advice, what’s the truest sentence you could write for today?

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In everything you do, act without grumbling or arguing; prove yourselves innocent and straightforward, children of God beyond reproach in the midst of a twisted and depraved generation - among whom you shine like the stars in the sky. #philippians2 #RCIAformationday (at St. Patrick Cathedral, Fort Worth)

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The God of our ancestors designated you to know his will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the sound of his voice; for you will be his witness before all to what you have seen and heard. #Acts22 #truemetanoia #stpaul (at St. Francis of Assisi)