#he told me about ignatian discernment and said gods been guiding me and that’s what ive been feeling :)

[everymanpdf]

moodboard for i spoke with a priest finally and it really really helped me and a massive weight has been lifted and im way less scared. featuring nick caves introduction to the gospel of mark

[angeltreasure]

Hi, it's Cecilia, I saw your answer and also wanted to give you an update. First your answer really did help me, and I didn't know you were an ACOD too, I've started reading the book Life Giving Wounds from the Catholic oranization of the same name, I'd suggest it if you want to look into a Catholic source for healing from a parents divorce. Also psalm 139 is a great one reading through it is rather helpful too! Thank you for sharing it. So I talked with my spiritual director and he told me that discernment is not easy, that there will be trials, sometimes from God wanting to test our will vs His, and sometimes from the devil trying to tempt us away. So God could be breaking down some barriers within my heart to build me up for what His will is, that way I can do His will to the best of my ability when the time comes. He also said that aside from following what that Sister said, which would be an act of obedience, that it's obedience to God as well since He probably was speaking through her. So I feel a bit better, it still stung being told tge way Sister said, but I've been feeling less bad. I've noticed on tumblr among Catholic blogs as well that there's a lot of tribulations happening with frustration, sadness, or confusion of God's will for our lives. I'm wondering if Satan's trying to affect us all somehow and is trying to place despair and apathy in us all. I know God will win, but it's just something I've noticed. Also for your retreat I'm glad you had a pleasant time, and I think perhaps since you've been a few times if that might be why you didn't get as much this time, I'm sure you're in good hands, God's hands are always good. So God Bless, and here's a little prayer for you. God, give me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference. This prayer really helps me when I'm upset or stuck in a spiritual rut. God Bless and love ya Sister Angel!

Thank you, Cecilia!! 🙏🏻💖

I wanted to add to this as well. I was listening to Relevant Radio while heading to Eucharistic Adoration at a little church on Friday and I happened to catch the very end of a conversation about discernment of spirits. They mentioned St. Ignatius has a method to discern the spirits, whether these thoughts we have are from the evil one OR from the Holy Spirit. I found a book on Amazon that uses his method, The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide For Everyday Living by Timothy M. Gallagher, O.M.V…. I think I’ll buy it and see if it helps!

Fr. Chad Ripperger mentioned once the closer we get to God, especially in a state of grace, that is when Satan will attack us more, to make us fall into a state of mortal sin. That’s probably why we are seeing an uptick in tribulations among our Catholic brothers and sisters on here. He says demonic activity has been on the rise as well.

[mucampusministry]

Mass of the Holy Spirit - August 28, 2017

Homily - Rev. Thomas Krettek, S.J.

“Be the Difference” calls for a plan and that plan is linked to Beyond Boundaries, which requires us to think differently and act differently. It provides an inspirational and tangible framework for Marquette to embrace new and collaborative methods of teaching, learning, research and service, all while promoting the greater glory of God and the well-being of humankind.

This aspiration places all of us at Marquette squarely in the heart of the history of the mystery of salvation.  A history that begins with Abram our father in faith, to whom the Lord said: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.  I will bless you . . . All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.”

The God whose people we will be is the God who is the original entrepreneur and the origin of all innovation because our God is the one who makes all things new.

Go out from your familiar surroundings and comfort zone because I am calling you to something new, something that you do not yet see or know so that I can bless you and you can be a blessing to all the people I place along your path.

However, Ezekiel reminds us of the problem we encounter that is later noted by Jesus in Luke’s gospel when he says “But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.  39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’”

Maybe we don’t really want to be made new because the “old is good.”  The down side of which is expressed well in Mark’s Gospel “Jesus wasn’t able to do much of anything there—he laid hands on a few sick people and healed them, that’s all. He couldn’t get over their hardness of heart.”

For me, Annie Dillard helpfully explores this dynamic in her collection of reflections Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, especially  in “An Expedition to the Pole” where she “sets polar exploration next to the worship of a small Catholic parish to see what this juxtaposition might produce. . . Her fellow worshipers at mass likewise struck her as singularly unprepared for encountering the unknown. . . . [It] prompted in Dillard the feeling that this too was a descent into mystery, the well of the absurd, where one sacrificed education, dignity, distance and propriety for the sake of a glimpse of the sacred. ”

She writes: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of Power we so blandly invoke? . . . the churches are children playing on the floor with chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to the pews.  For the sleeping god may wake some day [and] draw us out to where we can never return.”

Being from Council Bluffs, Iowa where the only waves I encountered were the “amber waves of grain” I, like Peter, don’t do well when Jesus calls me to come to him across the water. I prefer those nice safe harbor cruises that you can on down at the lake.

Fortunately, as we learned in the second reading, the Spirit comes to help us in our weakness for God knows everything in our hearts of stone.  The Spirit can teach a stone to talk by turning it into a heart of flesh. The Spirit, we hear also in Ezekiel, “God, the Master, told the dry bones, “Watch this: I’m bringing the breath of life to you and you’ll come to life. I’ll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You’ll come alive and you’ll realize that I am God!”

The universal Church’s Mass of the Holy Spirit is celebrated on Pentecost Sunday and uses very different readings because its purpose is very different.  Masses of the Holy Spirit are celebrated by all Jesuit educational institutions across the world with the readings that we have for today because its purpose is very different.  We ask the Spirit to help us in our weakness.

As Paul reminds the Ephesians: “God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.  And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t think straight anymore. . . But that’s no life for you. You learned Christ! . . . Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. . . . then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.

Ignatius’ experience: Regarding his encounter with the Moor on his way to Montserrat he himself says it would “be good to write down, to understand how Our Lord dealt with this soul, still so blind, though highly desirous of serving Him in every way he knew.”  In March of 1522 he sets out from Loyola toward Montserrat feeling “such rejection for his past sins and such vivid desire to carry out great things for the love of God” in imitation of the saints.  He reports “From these thoughts he took all his consolation, not paying attention to interior matters, nor knowing what humility, charity, or patience were, nor the discernment to guide and measure these virtues, but all his attention was directed at doing these other great external works, for those were the works the saints had done for the glory of God, without consideration of any other circumstance.”  Took all his consolation from great external works rather than paying attention to interior matters.

Jesuits and thus Ignatian Education is not contemplative but is “Contemplative in Action,” the meaning of which is brought out well for me in Ron Rohlheiser’s “The domestic, the monastic bring powerful values.”  You can find God . . . in a monastery but, ordinarily, God is found wherever there are little children, and families, and kitchen tables, and petty squabbles, and bills to pay, and all those other kinds of things that seem unspiritual. Carlo Carretto, the renowned spiritual writer, shares how he learned this from experience. On one visit home to Italy, sitting with his mother, he was struck by the fact that she - an earthy practical woman who had raised a large family and who had gone through whole years of her life so preoccupied with the duties of raising her children she never had any quality time alone - was more of a contemplative than he was, her hermit son, who had spent years alone in solitude trying to block out the distractions of the world so as to pray. Realizing that his mother, who had been so busy and preoccupied for so many years, was more contemplative than he was didn't suggest that there was something wrong with what he had been doing all those years in the desert.   Rather it suggested there had been something very right about what she had been doing during those years when the constant demands of little children and family left her with no time ever for herself.  Contemplativeness and openness to the presence of God are not as much a question of silence and quiet as they are of being unselfish and beyond self-preoccupation. Contemplativeness is self-forgetfulness. Silence and the desert can help us to forget ourselves, but so too can duty, the demands of family, parenting, job and vocation.”

The mission given to young Jesuits during First Studies is to study.  That is the duty of their state in life.  The Spirit led Jesus on his mission and the leads the Church on hers. At this Mass of the Holy Spirit we implore that same Spirit to lead us on ours, both personally and institutionally because as Saint Pope John Paul II in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis reminds us: Our Massing is for our missioning in this time when the reality of the world in which we are missioned is one in need of unity and the Spirit, a time and a people who are “hungry for justice, peace, love, goodness, fortitude, responsibility, and human dignity.”  

And so our prayer is “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.”