Dear Father in Heaven, 

I am confused. And yet everything is so clear, so sharply clear it cuts my heart like a razor. I see You there, with your eyes looking deeply into mine and we both know. We both know and your tears and my tears they mingle as we mingle when the Eucharist is in my mouth. We know each other's pain. Rachel weeping for her children. 

If I could take my arms and draw everyone under thirty-five to me and I could protect them and tell them about how things used to be in America. There were little pockets of sweetness once--little pockets of sweetness and you could block out the marijuana and acid and Ac/Dc and the snaky, slithering Mic Jaggar and his demonic stage presence. In the sixties and seventies when I was young, you could hide and watch I love Lucy and Dick Van Dyke and Gilligan's Island. The tide of corruption and filth of our culture was slowly coming in, but if you wanted to, you go run ashore higher. 

Now, there is nowhere we can go. Nowhere to turn off the culture unless you live in a cloister. We are being boxed in with unspeakable horrors. 

Jesus, let me draw them into my heart and protect them? Even one. I want to be your heart for these little ones. 

We knew this time was coming. And we know the outcome and it is bad and then very, very good. And though I know we can now lift up our hearts for our redemption draweth nigh (if not for the world, for at least our personal souls), it still means that a claw is being torn into our innocent children's flesh and they are being preyed upon as road kill. Before the light, it is getting very, very dark. And we will not be able to see ahead of us. We only have faith that You can see us.

Oh my heart cries, "Where are Your shepherds, Lord? What do we do in these times?" It seems they have no plan. 

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Prov. 29: 18

I can hear the little ones perishing. I hear them through Your ears and I see them perishing through Your eyes and I feel them perishing through Your heart. How can You bear it? 

To watch the wolves devouring these little lambs, I want to turn away. So many people turn away Lord. But I can't. You won't let me. You want me to rescue the lambs, to be Your arms and to be Your safe harbor where they can be protected. 

Give me the grace to know how to do that. Give me the wisdom to know where and how to fight. I want to fight like an archangel and a mother. Let me fight with love and courage and wisdom.

Let me not live to be loved by anyone but You. Let me no longer fear what others think. Let my words and my actions glorify You that one day I may rest at Your feet and anoint them with oil and brush them with my hair. That You will lift me up and we will dance. But till them my heart will be remembering the future and my feet and hands will be here on earth loving the little lost ones for You.

The sheep are wandering. Oh send St. Peter and our Blessed Mother to help us. Open our eyes and open our ears. Save us from this flood. Let me reach my arms out to You and grab You that I may grab others and pull them to You. 

Father and Beloved, Savior and Lord.

This is a fun version of my life I am in the middle of working on.... Don't look at it yet!


What I was going to be when I grew up:





But I was going to be a great humanitarian as well as being a famous actress:



My Junior year at boarding academy:

Our rooms:

Our teachers:

How I felt as a rich girl among at the girl's dorm: 

My senior year at boarding academy:



How I felt at the end of the year:

The Mother I was going to be: 

What I wanted my romance to be like: 

What I wanted my marriage to be: 

How many children I wanted: 

What my goal was as a singer: (I could hit those high "f's, but I didn't quite have the huge voice for the lower parts!

How to Offend Every American: Question the Bill of Rights

I didn't wake up this morning and think, "Gee, how can I offend everyone today?" I really didn't.  I have no friendless-wish (like a death wish), but I do like to discuss things that some people are going to freak-out over. So what am I supposed to do, treat certain taboo subjects like they are sacred when they are secular? 

Now I am even confusing myself so I will get on with it. (Deep breath.)

Why do Christians enshrine the "right to pursuit happiness"? This right to pursue happiness has truly become idolatry in America. I don't read that right given to us in scripture at all--at all, anywhere. In fact, I see the opposite. We are given the freedom to choose or reject obedience to God. If we choose obedience to God then we don't have the right to pursue happiness, we have the obligation to pursue holiness. 

Seems pretty simple to me and I am okay with not pursuing happiness. But for some reason Americans associate our freedom to pursue happiness with godliness. Please show me that in Christian history or in scripture.

Does God want us to be happy? Of course. Does He want us to pursue happiness? Of course not! I mean, come on, even ancient philosophers could figure that one out. We can never find happiness by pursuing it. This enlightenment idea was debunked thousands of years ago. It's a lie to teach that you can be happy by pursuing it and if you look around you can see evidence of that lie all over the place. 

Set aside the Bible for a moment and lets just look at results. The whole idea of pursuing happiness is ludicrous as its premise is illogical. 

The Problem of Making Happiness a Right

An example of how the idea of "rights" can get ugly and aggressive: 

We all know that we have the opportunity to marry someone who is attractive to us. That part of our natural experience. But what if our constitution had a "right" in there to pursue a spouse who we find attractive? Think about how our courtship attitude would change. We could sue bars that didn't have pretty girls in item  (Those greedy Capitalists are hogging all the ladies and taking away my rights!) Stalking would be legal. (I have the right to pursue attractive people!) Supermodels would be receiving lawsuits at every step. (She's impeding my rights by ignoring me!) 

There can logically be no "right" to an attractive spouse even though we all have that opportunity to pursue one. Freedom is one thing, as it is the natural context of God's kingdom. When, however, we attach a right onto freedom we are indoctrinating everyone that we somehow deserve something without any effort on our part. As if there is a government reserve of our rights in a warehouse somewhere and they are hoarding them instead of giving it to us. 

This is the problem with a right to pursue happiness. It makes us feel aggressive with self-centeredness. Happiness becomes the goal of life rather than the natural outcome of pursuing truth and goodness. 


A more important point:

Nobody Really Knows What Makes Them Happy

Eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream may make us momentarily happy or stealing a pretty piece of jewelry may give us a kick, but after a few moments of pleasure, we suffer the results. There is one of the problems with the pursuit of happiness--most people lack the the maturity to know what will make us happy tomorrow based what we did today. We seem to not care about tomorrow. We want instant gratification and that will never make us really happy. 

What if children had the "right" to pursue happiness, there would be no bathrooms or beds, no clothes, no school and the driving age would be 6 years-old as would be the drinking age. We'd be living the Lord of the Flies (okay, we are living the Lord of the Flies--but I'll get there later.) We, as their parents, understand children have neither the maturity to know what will make them happy nor the discipline to do what makes them happy if they did know. God gave them parents for that reason. 

But actually all humans, not just children, lack wisdom and discipline till they are quite old--if they ever acquire it. And by that time, they have already made so many huge mistakes pursuing happiness that the'd need a life do-over to implement all the knowledge they'd discovered from living a life of pursuing happiness. So this pursuit of happiness yield some voiceless, wise old people sitting in retirement homes full of regrets. 


God understood that if we had carte blanche to pursue happiness then we'd make awful decisions that look good on paper but living them out is hell, not happiness. We'd be getting married to someone because we are attracted to them and sleeping with them before we're married. We'd cohabitate. We'd be taking drugs and watching too much television. We'd spend too much time on the internet, we'd be pursuing money, we'd be getting divorces. We'd be disrespectful and lazy and overweight and more interested in Beyonce than our credit score. We'd lie on our resumes, we'd resent our children because they are impeding our pursuit of happiness, we'd place our own ambitions above our family. In short, we'd be the Lord of the Flies. 

We who have the Constitutional right to Pursuit of Happiness as our national goal are not happy:

The United States has a higher suicide rate than Haiti, Egypt, Columbia, Iran, North Korea and India. 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/health/suicide-rate-rises-sharply-in-us.html?_r=0)

We are some of the most unhappy people on the planet. 
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/06/02/poll-americans-are-less-happy-now-than-they-were-in-2011/

http://thejoysofbeingcatholic.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-to-do-now-that-sky-has-fallen.html

And again, if we had listened to Aristotle (and Jesus) we'd know we were setting ourselves up for a fall trying to achieve happiness by aiming at it. 

Yet, the right sounds so... nice, so decent, so sacred. (But as we have seen by Nancy Pelosi, our ideas of sacred are at best.... corrupted.) 

This is going to get worse.... but I'll leave that for the next post. 

As Usual, Michael is BRILLIANT!

Mr. Tim Haines at Vericast!

First, there was EWTN.

Then, there was ChurchMilitantTV.

Now there is...VERICAST!














http://www.vericast.net
http://www.vericast.net/true-manhood/#ref=Wibiya_bar2


All in service to the glory of our Blessed Lord.

WATCH.... SUPPORT.... SHARE 

How To Die Happy and Successful

The America culture has a rotten underlying premise when it comes to the meaning and purpose of our lives.

Here’s how it is supposed to go according to the media (magazines, television shows, movies, billboards, etc.):

1. America is the best country on earth because we all have the right, the freedom, to pursue happiness.

2. The culture teaches us success (in pursuing this happiness) is acheiving money, fame, power and/or influence.

Have you any of these?

Are you walking around in the latest fashion, able to go to the spa and receive Botox injections, and liposuction? Is your life filled with expensive vacations avoiding the pesky paparazzi? Is your day filled with Dow Jones updates? Do you have Senators over for a few drinks?

No? The conclusion is: You have failed. Sorry.
Along with the vast, vast major of Americans we get a "F" in the current American dream of success.

We all know something is wrong with this premise. We all know the people who achieve this vacuous success are superficial and unhappy, but we still dream of fame and fortune anyway. We still worry that our lives won’t have any meaning unless our personal contribution is written in newspaper headlines or is accompanied by a big check.

As Christians we chastise ourselves for secretly desiring fame and fortune, because we know what really matters. It’s our faithfulness to Christ and to each other. However, we still couch this love in terms of how much money we give to charity or how noteworthy our involvement is. We take pictures of our mission trips and put them on our Facebook and in our church newspapers for proof. We want our names attached to our philanthropic sacrifices. I have actually seen church pews with the donators' names on them.

It’s still about the love of money and fame rather than about something much more meaningful. When our heads rests for the final time, I doubt we will be thinking of our fame, our fortune or our influence per se. We will be thinking of the value of our lives in eternal terms.

Okay, so what do we do to live these eternal values? If its not about money, power or fame, what is it about? What truly gives our lives meaning?

The three ways through which God shows us His love are the ways we can give true and lasting meaning to our lives. These are beauty, truth and goodness.

If you want your life to have genuine meaning, use your time and talents to bring God into the world through beauty, truth and goodness.

If you love to sing, don’t sing for fame or money, learn to sing with beauty and sing beautiful songs. Don’t go with what is popular or sells, sing about something of goodness and truth. And you will die happy for you lived a meaningful life.

If you are a hospital administrator, use your talents to bring the patients and medical team under your supervision beauty, truth and goodness. Don’t let money be the bottom line. If you live your life bringing truth and goodness, you will die happy and successful.

If you work in the complaints department of Sears, let your words be filled with truth and goodness. If you work with computers or machinery, if you are an educator, a builder, or an insurance adjuster make your life goals to bring beauty, truth and goodness into the world and you will die knowing your life was of value. 

Ask yourself daily if what you are doing is making your space more beautiful. Just doing something little like planting flowers, opening the window to see the blue skies is bringing beauty. Wear something that makes you feel good as a Christian. Living sloppy can depress us and devalue ourselves in our own eyes as well as others. 

Ask yourself if what you are doing today bringing truth. Do you live a truthful life? That takes research and thought, and honesty. 

Ask yourself if you bring goodness into your daily living. Are your words filled with good things? Are your actions good? 

These little acts of truth, beauty and goodness build, gradually build until these seeds of God's grace blossom and life turns into joy and peace. These great gifts take the stress out of success--for anyone, anywhere can start anytime.

No matter how wealthy or influential you are --you can be a child or a billionaire--you always have access to these three things. These gift of God are what bring meaning and happiness to our lives. And they are accessible to everyone.

Nancy Pelosi's Slide into Hell

All Christians need to fast and pray for Ms. Pelosi. She either has demonic oppression or she is mentally ill. Her soul is in great jeopardy. 

She has multiplied her sins by associating the murder of children with Catholicism and even calling a woman's reproductive choices sacred. 

I shudder for her. She is the Catholic Jezebel and rather than hate her, instead we must pray for our enemies, for she had made herself an enemy of God. Our fervent prayers can do miracles!! We CAN win her back to the faith.

Fast and pray for her and our bishops that they will know how to courageously deal with politicians who align themselves with evil and call themselves Catholic. This has become a scandal that has wounded the heart of God and His children. 


2008




2009


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2011



2012



2013

How Christians Become Catholic

There are at least two routes from Protestantism to Catholicism.

1. Through Truth
2. Through the Church

These two routes are best explained by asking the following questions:

Does Your Church Look Like the Early Church?


Since there is as many different nuances of scriptural interpretation as there are Christians, a seeker for truth would at some point have to ask, "What did Christ mean when He said such-and-such?" Because it doesn't really matter if we have the words correct if we have the meaning wrong. Being able to memorize scripture without comprehension doesn't give a person the truth about God. That's like a four-year-old memorizing Billy's Joel's Piano Man, its very cute, but....

When Christ taught, the meaning isn't up for grabs. He had something He was clearly trying to tell His followers and it needed to be understood as He meant it.

So, how do we know what Christ meant when He said, "Blessed are the poor" and "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect" and "You are rock" and "This is my body." Christian scholars disagree. The Holy Spirit isn't teaching us different things about what Christ taught. There is an answer and we can know it.

It would make sense that the early followers of Jesus who heard Him teach and walked with Him as His Apostles would know best what He meant. Or those first and second century Christian leaders who learned it from the Apostles--like Clement or Ignatius or Polycarp or Justin Martyr or Tertullian or Ireneaus. Maybe the early documents like the Didache can tell us as they are almost twenty centuries closer to having heard the Apostles as we are. Just what did the earliest church believe Jesus meant? I would trust the teachings of a first and second century apostle-ordained leader more than a post-enlightenment American scholar whose worldview is culturally two millennia and a few continents from Christ.

Once you start studying the early church you will either become Jew, agnostic or Catholic, because Protestantism is nothing remotely like the early church. If you remain Christian after you know what the early church taught.... You'll have to be Catholic.


Did Christ Establish a Church?

Another route is more direct. Did Christ establish a church? Read the gospels, then read St. Paul. As you are reading ask yourself, "Did God start an actual church body? Did He bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth when He came by means of an organized religion? Is there such thing as a one, true church as the Body of Christ?"

(I am not at this point arguing that He did. I am asking the hypothetical "if?")

If you discover that Christ established a church, then you have to be in that church. It doesn't matter if it is perfect. (Christ warned us that is wasn't going to be. Look at Israel.) It doesn't matter if you agree or understand the doctrines. It doesn't matter if you don't like the leaders or the music or the people or the way they worship. It simply doesn't matter.

If God did establish a church, then we must be obedient and submit to that true Church because every other church wasn't established by God. Other Christian denominations and groups are loved by God and may even be saved. They may be wonderful people, serving God. But they are in a man-made tradition and they are playing church like little girls play at tea parties.

If God established a church, then the church is about what He wants and not about what we like, what we want or what we think. We don't get a vote. God doesn't ask us our opinion about who He puts in charge, if we want to sing with our hands in the air or with drums. He didn't include us in the worship committee or doctrinal committee. The Church is about what God wants.

In the end, it is about obedience.

If God established a church, we have the obligation to find out what that is and join it.

So, if the Bible convinces you that God did establish a church, you will end up at a church with apostolic succession.... a Catholic (or Orthodox).

For He promised His Church, "I will be with you to the end of the age." God doesn't break His promises.

Faith Alone?

PRAY AND FAST!

When Our Fathers Fail Us

"You're bad. I hate you. I don't have to obey you!" The nine-year-old screamed at her father when he told her she couldn't wear lipstick. Her reaction wasn't really about the lipstick. A few days earlier she accidentally overheard her parents speak of his infidelity. She was crushed; her life, her illusions of a happy family were gone. Her father was supposed to be perfect. 

All heaven wept for the little girl. While mother forgave him, the nine-year-old didn't and rejected her father. She decided God had been mistaken at giving her a father that was so wicked and unfaithful to what she had wanted and needed. It wasn't fair. Daddies were supposed to be good and love mommies. So she looked for a new one. A better father.

As the girl grew older she began looking around for other "father" figures to work out her pain. And she went from boy to boy and later, man to man. Her choices for a father figure never quite turned out the way she had wanted. Her choice for a good man was just as flawed as God's. 

_________________

The twenty-four-year-old dad kicked his three-year-old son sitting on the floor playing legos. He had never done such a ghastly thing before. 

He had been without work for weeks and bills were closing in on him. He felt like a failure and he was angry with himself. When he walked in and stepped on a lego, he painfully kicked the lego out of the way with frustrated fury and then kicked his son out of the way. He didn't mean to do it so hard. He just meant to push his boy out of his path. But his anger got the best of him. 

His wife saw it. Her heart failed her. This was no longer the husband she married. Her husband's reaction was unforgivable and no kind God would expect her to live with a monster like that. She took the boy and left. 

All heaven wept for this wife and son. The boy grew up without his father. He looked for other father figures but none turned out to fill the need he had for his own father. 

___________________

All heaven weeps for the sins of the fathers. Their sins impact a family like no other. Poverty is rampant where fathers fail. Sexual morality crashes among young people where fathers fail. Where dads fail, a broken home often follows with ripples into the next generations.  And divorce is disastrous on families and on all the little, precious souls that grow up inside what was supposed to be the safe haven of home.

All heaven weeps when fathers fail. 

And yet God doesn't take away the father's roll of priest and head of the home because fathers fail. God's chosen authorities are never perfect. But God doesn't take away their position because wives and children hate them, were betrayed by them, were wounded by them. 

A God who would force a family to stay with a father who fails them seems like an unreasonable, sadistic God, doesn't He? No child should have to remain under such a tyrant father who makes mistakes, right?

I am not sure. I will not write for all circumstances, but I would like women and children to consider this: 

What has our culture come to because our families have not stayed in and fought for marriage and family? What does our culture look like because it has not remained faithful to a failing dad who may want to be better but not sure what a good father looks like or needs our support in becoming a good man? 

In most situations, the father needs redemption, not abandonment. We too quickly give up. (Please don't tell me about your neighbor who was beaten to death or your friend who has a crack-addicted husband, I am not talking about that. I am talking about the Christian man who falls. I am not advocating staying in a dangerous situation.)

Because of sin, we all fall. But when the authority falls, it usually has a catastrophic ripple that takes out the wife and kids like an earthquake. And when the authority falls, there is generally a huge undertaking of clean up and repair. It takes years for wounds to heal and trust to be restored. 

But carefully weigh the results of a fatherless home. In most circumstances, God is calling us to a supernatural gift of forgiveness. It may rip your heart out, but genuine forgiveness contains most of the wound to yourself and minimizes it upon your children. Divorce can cause the wounds to multiply exponentially to all involved and even the next couple generations.

Watching the effects of his failure upon his family is a purgatory for men of God. Leaving a husband and father because of a sin--even a big one--often blinds the man to the extreme hurt he caused and can even create victimhood. The process of forgiveness and reconciliation can bring enormous fruits of maturity to families. It can even break the slavery of addictions in some cases. 

Sticking together through even the most thick of disasters caused by the father, sends families through the fires of holiness and saints can emerge. But only God can do it. Hold fast to Him and all things are possible. 

So now to the point of this:

This same challenge is given for God's spiritual authorities. Jesus told His followers, 

"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit on Moses seat, so you must obey them and everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach." Matt. 23: 1-3

Christians often pass by the first part of this statement ready to condemn Israel's leaders, with Christ, as the hypocrites they are. As tempting as it is to get all worked up in the righteous anger of Christ as He rightly calls them blind fools, we forget that we must obey them. Yes! Jesus knows how rotten they are shutting the kingdom up to those trying to get in and making converts twice the sons of hell the Pharisees are. That is very condemning language.

And yet, we are to obey them. They seriously wounded the family and devastated the hearts of the innocent ones. It makes my blood boil to think of it. Aren't we supposed to overthrow tyrants?! Isn't the greatest cry of earth "freedom!" from these thoroughly corrupted leaders? 

God's Part

Jesus says we are to obey His appointed leaders. He is going to take care of them, that is not up to us. Vengeance is His. He is going to take care of these hypocritical, corrupted priests. He may or may not take them out of their position. He may redeem them.

Our Part

The Bible never tells anyone to break from God's authorities, even if they are not perfect. We don't abandon our dads because they fail us. Sheep do not abandon the flock in search of another shepherd when their God-appointed shepherds fail them. 

A shepherd who fails isn't necessarily a false shepherd. Peter failed. Our earthly fathers fail. 

God's church failed. And we Christians were crushed. Our illusions of a happy spiritually family were gone. We thought the Church was supposed to be perfect. We decided God had been mistaken for giving us priests that were wicked and unfaithful to what we wanted and desired. It wasn't fair. 

The Perfect Church

Some Christians claimed the real church couldn't fail, so they looked for a new one with a better father. And see the results of this search for our own spiritual authorities? 

We no longer care who is a false shepherd or a true one a long as we like the person and as long as the person doesn't disappoint us. And when they do, as they always will, we either learn to forgive or start the whole process over again of finding the perfect church.

This isn't the family got placed us in. As Christians, we are not at liberty to pick out our own spiritual authorities anymore than our biological fathers. 

Sin has challenged our spiritual family, absolutely. When our priests and bishops fail us, forgiveness and reconciliation puts us through the holy fires of purgatory till we come out as saints. And through our personal sacrifice of forgiveness we minimize the damage to our spiritual children. 

Sounds hard? No, actually sounds impossible. But God calls us to pray for the grace that gives us the courage to faithfully walk through the fires of the miraculous. 

God calls us to the miraculous duty of forgiveness and healing. And often, miraculously our fathers are given supernatural courage to become the men of God the position is calling them to. 

Miracles happen. I've seen them.