If gravity binds us to the Earth, then Love binds us to God. That primal force is not so different from weight. Whereby the one who carries stones in his pocket is slowed down with extra burden, so too does our flesh, complete with all its pride avarice and lust, slows down the soul from rising to stasis in perfect stillness and peace in the divine order.

Does not fire reach for the sky? Does not stone roll down a mountain? A stone does not roll up a mountain unless it is bent against the order of gravity that pulls earth to earth. A force exerted against the divine order is required to roll stone uphill.

So too is the primal force of love, which moves a person who is not yet at rest. The force of love draws to itself in the way the earth binds earth with gravity, God binds man, made in his image, to himself with Love. All his creatures, mortal and material, intellect and irrational, are propelled through a changing universe to a place of natural stasis and balance whereby they find perfect peace.

Should you shake a jar of oil and water, they separate perfectly and move continuously until they reach perfect balance. Love moves in us this same way. We bend against it, not always going the way of the perfect path, fighting the primal force, in which we will never find peace, for love is the weight of our actions and cannot be balanced until it is drawn to itself in a place of rest.

Therefore, let your will be His will. Let your flame reach the heavens. Gain mastery over yourself that your flame does not bend unnaturally to the earth, whereby it will only find fuel to continue to burn. If you burn unnaturally forever, you will only consume yourself, all the oil of your lamp burnt up, until there is only darkness.

Yet the flame of love that rises and rises becomes light itself. Love begetting love, light from light. This is the natural order of things. You are light. Rise and shine.

I return home a stranger in enemy territory, feeling more like an outsider on a mission than a member of the community that resides in this land inhabited by foreigners. My home is not of this earth.

The wild west has captivated my heart and filled me with renewed sense of purpose. At 30, my public ministry begins. My mission made clear.

At 12 thousand feet and mountains in the landscape as far as the eye can see, one realizes the beauty of God’s creation is also in the most desolate and disparaging places on earth. Each and every person has at least 7 times as many mountains within themselves that are 77 times taller than the tallest mountain on earth.

And these are the creature’s that the evil ones desire to enslave, to control what they did not create and bend to their own will God’s gift of freedom to love. What avarice ! What pride !

They who bend the will of their neighbor, not in upbuilding community for the sake of love, but in service to themselves for the purposes of money or self-preservation, to bend the will of their neighbor not to God’s will but to themselves, these evil ones consume their neighbor like a cannable, who pours hot coals on their own head so that they themselves will be cooked for wickedness that consumes itself.

Desire not the ways of the wicked. They boast not realizing that they flaunt the devil’s shit.

Let your feet be washed in the blood of Christ and walk the earth in The Spirit as one who will rise from death to dwell in the mansion of a heavenly land. Return from begging for the devil’s waste that is fed to his pigs and in all humility approach The Father. And you who dwell in His home welcome every man whose feet our weary from living out Abel’s curse for murdering his brother. Wash his feet in the blood of Christ and add oil to his lamp that he can see in darkness and re-enter the world to light the way home for others.

All will see Christ returning on the clouds. Satan wants to enslave his servants permanently and is trying to do so in capturing sovereignty over their identity. Moses led our father’s fathers from slavery, into the desert of freedom where faith plants the seeds for meadows and wills mountains into mansions, where clouds of hope rain tears on fertile soil of love. Our father’s fathers who followed Moses missed the trash their slavers allowed them to feed on until the winds of faith blew their clouds of hope allowing tears to fall in the land of love.

Embrace the dessert of the solitude in the wild to see the freedom and dignity bestowed upon you, a prince of the King’s court. Learn here to have faith. Train your ears to hear and your eyes to see. Then the climb to summit all your mountains will be made clear. The trip is long, the path often difficult, but each step before you will be within the Lord’s magnificent creation, wild and free.

God made man for a purpose. He mad man to work. For Adam translates to gardener, or to tiller of the soil. God mad Adam to work the garden of paradise.

He gave him dominion over the garden, that is to name all the creatures of the earth. This is no small child’s play of a task. Previous religions of the world reserved such powers for gods, yet here in the record of Israel we find that a plain man, the first man, the personification of all mankind, that human beings were given dominion over the earth and his purpose is to rule it.  

Yet, mankind’s rule over the earth has boundaries set forth on that rule which we see personified with the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God made man, gave him dominion, and gave him the knowledge he needed to rule over all the earth. Yet he did not give man all knowledge or all judgement.

To eat of this forbidden tree is to have experienced evil and know judgement so as to decide for oneself what is right and wrong and not rule with the purpose God created mankind but with a purpose he sets about for himself. Without the knowledge of evil, man would not be able to rule the earth in unjust and perverse ways.

God reacts to this tragedy. First, he punishes Adam for his lack of faith in perfect union. He now keeps Adam in his purpose to till of the earth, for Adam remains created for work. He still has purpose in his being. Yet, he now must till the earth in pain and sorrow, with sweat and blood and trial. To fulfil is purpose is now difficult to him.

God also protects man from evil and total corruption. He does this by restricting access to the tree of life. Without death, the evil would persist in the world forever. How can a man unknow what he knows? For man has experience of evil. He cannot unknow that experience and so must die or else it would persist forever.

Yet the experience goes beyond one man. Memories are passed through families in their DNA. Today’s understanding of the methods of God’s creation, (aka science), we have come to know that memories are hardcoded and stored in the DNA of man. The brain is but a processer, a cpu of sorts, where as the material of life and a man’s being all that he is we find in the DNA.

So, as we find in Adam, you also have the memory of evil knowledge in you. This is why God takes pity on the Children of Noah and creates the rainbow because his children are born with evil in their hearts, not the way He created them. It goes back further still, where we see Cain’s murder of Abel and the creation of the Cannanites an enemy of the people in the line of Seth, the third son who gets the blessing as the first is dead and the second is cursed.

So if evil and the experience of it passes from one generation to the next through the DNA of the parents, God must cutoff all mankind from the tree of life and the memory of the curse to find one’s purpose with difficulty remains.

What might be this forbidden knowledge?

Well look at all the perverse fruits of the earth: from genetic studies and use of medicine to harvest the stem cells of babies, and to modify life as god created it and make virus that destroy the earth and modify matter as to explode cities. The knowledge to use money to enslave a man in all his dignity. The knowledge to poison the minds a whole nation with propaganda to do evil to one another. To make judgments that we use to rationalize any use of evil so as to allow total warfare for the benefit of anything. This is the fruit of that evil tree.

God does not want evil to remain into perpetuity, so he must engineer a means of salvation.

Thus we have The Christ. For Jesus is the second person of the trinity (The Word) made flesh. He entered the world through the womb of a virgin who God prevented the memory of sin from entering her being and Christ was born of no memory of sin and never sinned. Yet, we was of the flesh and subject to God’s curse on the sons of man. He toiled in the world to complete his purpose of our salvation and offers us the blood and water from the cross. He gives us the way of salvation for Christ is not cut off from the tree of life and there is power in his blood, resurrection power. And heaven starts when we completely learn to trust and rely on God for the purpose for which he created us and for which we will find our truest happiness and fulfillment.

Glory be to The Father and to The Son and to The Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean. For you are within me and I in you. Tears are the blood of the soul, and the value of suffering is redemptive. For suffering opens new chasms in the heart and expands the capacity for love.

Did you not make me with the purpose to till the soil? What good are my hands and my feet if my heart is crushed? Do not the feet become like concrete boots and hands like worthless nubs?

Most Wonderful Gardner, till the soil of my heart. Remove the rocks. Remove the roots of the unwanted plants of death. Burn the chaff and store the wheat. You who know what is good and what is bad, you who made me, sort. I place all that is in my heart at the foot of the cross. Tell each item where to go. Then make my heart your home. Abide in me my God. Rest in a heart worthy of your peace. Lead me in the way that is eternal.  

He did everything he could to have what did not belong to him; a dream is what he held on to where he ought to have placed his hope instead in, He who is.

A man whose most precious possession is a memory is destined to be anchored to a world that is damned.

Yet the heart yearns. Then the heart compels.

Today’s first reading (Exodus 2-4, 12-15), God delivers bread to the Israelites. He does so saying he would open up the doors of heaven and rain down bread from the sky. He did this because the people desired the full stomachs which were links in their Egyptian shackles. And God answered the prayer they made in their hardship of freedom, and rained down bread from the sky.

The people did not recognize the bread. A dew dried with the heat of transition from morning to day and a very fine and flaky substance appeared. While they expected God’s grace to appear in one way, and while they stared at the sky, they did not recognize the miracle that surrounded their feet. They asked, what is this?

This is the bread the LORD has given you to eat.

–

What miracles has the LORD performed for me that I have not recognized, perhaps until someone else pointed out the miracle for me? How can I be more attentive to the LORD and his ways?

Jacob’s Ladder brings to mind many images among the public today. Some first think of a classic child’s toy that changes images when it shifts. Others first think of an exercise machine, a ladder that you forever climb and reach no destination. Still others think of a famous carnival game, a type of rope-ladder, which is hung low and parallel to the ground that you must balance carefully in order to reach the end and receive a prize, or else fall off and land on an inflatable cushioned mat.

One thing all three of these images have in common is that there is some sort of trick or gimmick.

Very few first think of the song, Nearer my God to Thee, likely because we first associate this song with The Titanic. And yet, the very lyrics of the song are directly from the original story of Jacob’s Ladder as written in Genesis, where Jacob has a vision while sleeping. In his dream, Jacob sees a ladder, or more accurately translated in more recent scholarship, a stairway, one that connects heaven and earth with a passage-way that angels ascend and descend on their travels between the realms.

Jacob, which means supplanter of the flesh, was on his way to a far away land in search of a wife who was not of the Canaanite tribe, at the request of his mother Rebekah and command of his father Issac. He had just received his father’s blessing, which was intended for Esau, but he now carries the blessing that follows the line of Abraham, Noah, and Seth, Adam’s third son as his first (Abel) was murdered by his second (Cain), who God cursed for his murderous deed.

The blessing Jacob receives carries God’s covenantal promise first made to Adam and reaffirmed in Noah and Abraham, that God would restore humanity from our fallen state. Esau went to Ishmael to marry a Canaanite woman to spite his father. Jacob’s line gives us Christ through the line of David. Esau’s line gives us Mohammed and this strife continues to this day.

What did Jacob see in his vision:

“A stairway rested on the ground, with its top reaching to the heavens; and God’s angels were going up and down on it. And there was the Lord standing beside him and saying: I am the Lord the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and through them you will spread to the west and the east, to the north and the south. In you and your descendants all the families of the earth will find blessing. I am with you and will protect you wherever you go, and bring you back to this land. I will never leave you until I have done what I promised you.”

This stairway likely would have borrowed images from the tower of babel, a very large and winding stair way, and the many steps represent the line of decedents as promised in Jacob’s dream, the many decedents in the ancestry line to David and ultimately to Christ. God’s covenantal promise is again reaffirmed with Jacob that Abraham’s decedents would be more than a chosen people, but restore the inheritance of humanity to the whole world.

Yet, early mistranslations have deeply engrained Jacob’s vision as that of a ladder and this has become deeply rooted in our culture.

Jacob saw in his sleep a ladder lifted up and standing upon the earth, and the top thereof touching heaven; the angels also of God ascending and descending by it, and the Lord leaning upon the ladder. [Gen 28.12-13] Douay Translation, based on the Vulgate.

The Word is truly a living word and one inspired by the Holy Sprit who teaches us through tradition as much, or even more so, than through the written word. For the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth.

Jacob’s Ladder is a vision of Christ – Alleluia !!!

Who connects heaven and earth but Christ himself? Who is it that the Lord Our Father preannounces to the world a savior through the prophets? A God that intends to send a savior to redeem the whole world would out of courtesy tell us how to identify him when he comes.  

And tradition gives us the beautiful image of Christ as a ladder connecting heaven and earth. This ladder has two sides and six rungs by which to climb. The six rungs are held together by His divine and human nature.

The first two rungs are his legs, for how else would Christ walk but in poverty and humility? He was humble when he took our nature looking upon the humility of his handmaid. He was poor in his birth, where the poor virgin bore the very Son of God having no-where to lie down, he first rested in a manger, a trough from which animals eat.

The third rung, wisdom, lies in his torso. Our instincts have a gut feeling and wisdom knows how best to use the passions of the heart in proper proportion. The Lord was wise, for he began to do and to teach [Acts 1.1].

The fourth and fifth rungs are his arms, for Our Lord’s works are of mercy and done with great patience, just as we often steady our right hand with our left. The Lord was merciful in his treatment of sinners and he did not come for the righteous but for the sick. With great patience he bore sufferings. As spoken by Christ through the prophet Isaiah, I have set my face like a flint. When a stone is struck it does not strike back, nor murmur against whoever breaks it.

The six rung is the Lord’s head, whose obedience supplants the flesh. He was made obedient even to death, death on a cross.

This is the ladder that stood on the earth, preaching and performing miracles. This is the ladder that touched heaven. He spent nights alone on mountain tops in prayer to God, transfigured on the mountain in front of his apostles, and ascended into heaven.

This is the ladder that has been setup for us, so why would we not climb?  Why do we crawl about the earth with worms among the dung doing violence to one another and trampling on the feelings of those about us, wasting time as though we have a million years and always at the mercy of our own self-centered passions?

Climb! Climb the ladder set for you. Jacob saw angles going up and down the ladder. Go, you angles and prelates of the church. Ascend and contemplate how sweet the lord is. Descend and mend to your neighbor. Do you think you can reach the heights of heaven by any other means? Do you think there is another way than by the Ladder of humility, poverty, and the Lord’s passion? Indeed, there is not!

Where all other ladders are filled with tricks and gimmicks, I’ll tell you a secret. Where you misstep, and when you can’t find a rung on the ladder or lose your balance, cling to the sides of Christ, for in his very nature he will steady you again until find yourself in union with The Lord. Do not be afraid, because the Lord himself is leaning on this ladder, waiting to receive those who climb.

–

This reflection paraphrases St. Anthony’s teaching from one of his homilies in his great work Sermons for Sundays and Festivals. Parts are taken word for word, but I’ve taken great liberties with the text, which is how he intended his work to be used.

The Cornucopia is a symbol of abundance that today in North America is often associated with Thanksgiving.

This ancient symbol often makes its way to the dinner tables as a horn-shaped wicker basket which is filled and overflowing with all kinds of fruits and vegetables that are festive to the holiday. This horn-of-plenty, horn-of-nourishment, horn-of-abundance, is there to remind us of the many many blessings that overflow our lives. 

Yet, strangely enough, this horn-of-nourishment often includes the peculiar fruit of the gourd. A gourd is an excessively large fruit that is misshapen, full of knots and funky colours, and too bitter to eat. Why do we include the bitter gourd amidst the abundance of goodness on our tables? Why a bitter and useless fruit in the horn of plenty? 

This gourd is to remind us that some of God’s greatest blessings are bitter. Unanswered prayers. Rejection. Grief. Pain and suffering. God does not wish that we suffer. He is all good and all holy. Yet God knows what is for our own good and God works where there is bitterness. Many of us have faced lots of bitterness, this year especially. Yet we can give thanks always.

In all circumstances, give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. – 1 Thessalonians 5:18

Paul does not qualify when we should be thankful, or what we should be thankful for. Paul says we are to be thankful in ALL circumstance and he means ALL circumstance. This is no metaphor, the previous two verses are equally unqualified, pray without ceasing and rejoice always.

We are in Christ Jesus. And because we are in Christ Jesus, just as there is no qualification in grace from God, His blessing extends to all of our lives. This includes the good and the bad, our light and our shadows, happiness and sadness, the sweet and the bitter.

As we are in Christ Jesus, the Lord’s will is that we always pray, we always rejoice, and we always give thanks. As Christians, the world’s circumstance does not define who we are and how we act.

So, when things do not go our way, when we face hardship and struggle, when we face our own brokenness, we give thanks for the blessings and remind ourselves that God is Lord of All Creation, and that the whole of our lives, bitter and sweet, overflows from the abundance of God’s love.

A man once told me, with all the saints and angels willing and able to help us on our earthly pilgrimage, we have no excuse not to become a saint. What better way is there to call on the saints regularly than with your own personal litany?

After some thought and prayer and practice, here is my daily devotional personal litany. Make your own.

–

Baby Jesus, meek and mild, be with me an orphan child. Be my strength, be my friend, be with me until the end.

Sacred heart of Jesus, have mercy on me.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Angles, pray for me.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend me.

St. Anthony, Miracle worker, friend of baby Jesus, finder of lost objects, my patron saint, pray for me and walk with me.

St. JPII, man of conviction, pray for me.

St. Faustina, daughter of mercy, pray for me.

St. Padre Pio, knower of sins and performer of miracles, pray for me.

Mother Theresa, servant of the poor, pray for me.

Fr. Solanus Casey, humble servant, harmonica player, door holder, pray for me.

Bishop Fulton Sheen, great speaker and story teller, pray for me.

Guardian Angel, watch over and guide me making clear heaven’s pathway.

Lord God, hear my prayers resounded from these Saints and Angels, the Queen of Heaven, and unite them to your sacred heart.

Do not be tempted to act in violence against those who do wrong. Think of the nail in my hands and the scourge on my back.

 

When the way of sin is convenient, and the way of righteousness will bring you hardship, think of the holes in my feet, the many bones fragmented after my tiring walk with the cross.

 

When you are so broken and dejected and fall over in despair, have hope knowing that the very man who pierced my heart with a spear is a saint in heaven. There is no depth so low that I am not there with you.

 

A crown of thorns belongs to those who love me. Peace resides in the heart of those who wear it.