The Lamp Stand

Do you know how the robin received his red chest?

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This story comes from an Irish saint who awoke one morning in his hermitage along the coast to find a robin on his window sill. “Have you a song for me?” he asked. To which, in reply, the robin sang a song of Good Friday:

From his nest in a tree, the robin saw the Lord on Calvary, and the Lord saw the little brown bird. Christ acknowledged the robin who then fluttered upon him and sang above the jeers, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty” wiping away blood with his chest and singing sweetness for his ears. Mary then spoke to say, “As of this day, you shall forever be known as Christ’s own bird.”

This is the story of how the robin’s chest became red on the day it watched Christ die.

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No matter the cross you carry or bear, sing to the Lord joyfully and remember that if the world hates you it hated him first. Be like the robin when you suffer and sing praise to the Lord Almighty.

The transformative nature of baptismal gifts in death are that faith and hope are replaced with sight and possession, and that peace is the fruit of divine love.
What then is purgatory?
I think that maybe it comes from the lack of a complete peace because our sight and possession is not yet wholesome or fully transformed. Perhaps in the acts of life and the act of death, we retain fear and we possess what is not from God. I wonder if sometimes it comes from the fear of losing that possession that is not from God and that our hopes are not yet entirely placed in Him, or more specifically His will.
There is an act of justice in the sufferings of purgatory, for what is the work of justice if not the work of peace? The restorative powers of justice have the same goal as the object of our hope, the tranquility of order, completeness and perfection, the peace of Christ.
Baptism for us is like the Word made a seed and planted in us; and confirmation is like when a seed containing life makes first contact with water, that it might sprout and grow into fullness. However, a seed must stop being a seed to be a plant. A fruit must no longer remain attached to a plant to be useful to the one who buried the seed. Purgatory is for us who are not picked first, but when we let go of our roots to the earth, we might find our way still to the banquet in one basket or another.
The Lord will take us at His will. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

God of Hope, who brought peace into this world, be with us this advent on our journey to the stable of Bethlehem.

Be with us in our travels and our preparation. Be with those we meet and those we spend time with. God of Hope, the rock we stand on, centre of the nativity, be the focus of our lives especially during this time of Advent.

When there comes a time that I know that I will never again be comfortable, either from getting old or a grave injury or near death, I can remember that today I was comfortable. Today was good.

God, this body is not mine and belongs to you. All I have is borrowed. Times will come when the good things you have given me are no more. Times will come when even my health will leave me. The days that my bones unwillingly drag along the skin that clings, let me not rebuke you. Let me not debate with you about justification for bitterness. Where I fail in these challenges let me see you that I may know to disown my failure and repent.

I think about the times that Job feels his suffering is unjustified when measured against his good deeds and faith. I think, he rightly wonders how you might allow his suffering. He longs for when he had good things in abundance. He is angry even, but always confirms your divinity and keeps his wisdom even when he lacks understanding.

Then I think about Jonah. What a simple and short story that shows how uninteresting is the worldly man. Jonah to me seems a satire of a man, opposite of Job, with shallow faith and full of bitterness and entitlement. Most of all, Jonah is without fear of the Lord.

You see, Jonah starts out his story in disobedience to God going his own way. Job, even at the loss of his possessions and family, praises you Lord and keeps faith. In a time of trouble Jonah becomes wise and repents seeing his fault among the storm and turns to God. Yet how quickly does he get angry when a tree appearing in a day that gives him shade is taken from him again in a day. A tree he neither planted nor tended. Job always did right, was always wise, and after a life of suffering questioned why. Why should the Lord permit suffering to the righteous? Jonah did one good thing after failure and repentance and then questioned God for taking a tree he did not plant.

Then I think about Jesus, my Lord and Savior, who chooses willfully the crucifixion after sweating blood in a garden. Before His death, he too asks you Father God, “why have you forsaken me?” Then, acknowledging the power of your will, he gives you his spirit. To your hands, left and right, he gives you his soul.

I think about Job’s reward. He received everything he had double. I think about Jesus’ first miracle, praised because the best wine was saved for last. I think about Jonah, who ends the story in the desert angry with no tree to shade his head.

Blood and water gushed forth from heart of Jesus that God maybe merciful. By the water of our baptism we are justified and saved by His blood.

The fear of the Lord is wisdom; and avoiding evil is understanding.

Job had wisdom and misunderstood. Jonah understood enough to beg a second chance. Jesus is divine.

Donald Trump Jesus Christ and Jonah

How like Jesus Christ is Donald Trump? Throughout all the world everybody knows his name. Many hate him. However, he draws great crowds of the poor – the disenfranchised worker and those who feel that America has abandoned them and forgotten the promise of the American Dream.

Everywhere I travel, the moment I tell someone that I am from Washington D.C. they all ask me ‘so, what do you think about Donald Trump?’ From Rome to Brussels to Krakow, people from all over the world have an opinion of Trump and expect everyone else to as well.

Perhaps this is similar to a man living during the time of Christ in the Palestine region. Everybody knew the name Jesus. He was loved, hated, and a controversial figure the topic of conversation among all the poor and rich.

Let me tell you about a man named Jonah. He does not believe. We met on a side street near the market square of Krakow. I a tourist and he peddling tickets to a burlesque cabaret. We briefly crossed paths when he stuck in my face a risqué graphic with show times.

To simply decline a persistent sales man is not enough, even when language is not common. He walked with me long enough that I indignantly declined his offer and pointed to the bugle tower of St. Mary’s saying, “That’s the truth.”

The moment my message made it across the language barrier, in his broken English, Jonah told me that he knew of the abuses of the church and proceeded in the opposite direction. What he did not expect me to say is that he was right. To acknowledge his objection bought me a few short minutes for evangelization.

Before Jonah’s co-worker arrived and ended our conversation, he told me about ying and yang, the purchase of indulgences, and evolution. I tried my very best to explain the divinity of the church and that belief in evolution requires the same amount of faith in science as faith in Jesus Christ. Turns out, I’ve not been a good enough student of C.S. Lewis to restate under pressure of dialog across language the claims of C.S. Lewis on science and evolution.

Perhaps in the future I should stick to Christ has risen.

What to me was the most shocking, though should not be, is Jonah’s belief that Jesus Christ did not exist and the entirety of Catholicism is made up for the means of medieval rulers to control the population and enrich themselves.

I should not be shocked at Jonah’s belief because at one time I have had these very same thoughts in the middle years of high school trying to rationalize the existence of religion, while at that time I had zero religious education outside of public-school history and science classes. For me, it was an explanation that allowed me to group together and discount all religion in the name of science who teachers told me was truth because of fact.

After sometime spent in a Slovakia mountain side cabin reading the Gospel, it dawned on me that Donald Trump is Christ like in that he is loved by the poor and hated by the ruling elite who try to trap and ensnare him for everything he says. Most of all, everyone all over the world knows his name. What if I had responded to Jonah, is Donald Trump real? How do you know, have you met him?

Perhaps he might say, I’ve only heard about him because of news and gossip and here is what I think.

I do not know how much of an impact I had on Jonah and to my deepest regret I could not remember the name of the church nearby that I had attended mass who was starting RCIA. He refused my literature and I gave him no place to bring his questions. Praise God and have mercy, I tried to give him my precious pocket prayer book and third class relic of Faustina and JPII. Their face is on each cover and inverted half way through with excerpts from each of their writings. I showed Jonah the relic-book and told him one was Ying and the other Yang. My God, have mercy. After, I went to the tourist door of St. Mary’s and l entrusted to JPII Jonah’s continued conversion with a lit candle and a prayer.

Donald Trump is not Jesus Christ. I should not have to write this, but I do not want to be crucified by Trump haters or burned at the stake by the faithful. Christ spoke in parables. Praise God. Christ’s name is holy.

What is it that you want to free me from? Spirit of God, rest upon me and show me what it is that I am a slave to.

What is virtue without trial? Can there be virtue without trial? Can there be love without freedom? They say freedom is not free. What about virtue? It certainly does not come cheap.
The fakeness of the world….
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Freedom comes first and foremost from our relationship with God; yet, we choose to define ourselves by our bondage.
Father God, teach me to be free and to choose to love with practice of the virtues.

Jesus said, shake the dust from your feet and then go on.

Let not your failure travel with you. Leave it behind and entrust your failure to the mercy of God.

The Psalms tell us, do not stand in the way of sinners.

Do not stand in you own way. Rather, go! Flee and be not who you were. The past does not belong to you, but make use of the present moment.

Jesus said, Father forgive them because they do not know what they do.

Know your intention. Use your intellect to discern your fantasy and determine what are the motivations of your will. Act on goodness, so that goodness is done. Discover what actions have sinful motivation and using your intellect make it your will to banish from your fantasies what is evil.

What is good is Love of God and love of neighbor. Make selflessness your fantasy and the will does follow. Act repeatedly on goodness and habit defends virtue.

Listen to the bells.

They capture the bustle and activity of life in all that melodic racket. Pay attention to how they stop ringing. A few last hard strokes of the final bell bellows above the dampers of the many, which now resonates softly after the clapper’s final strike.

Then silence.

Only once the bells stop ringing does the mass begin. Only after death do we see beyond the veil. The noise stops with the beating of the heart, but the silence is an eternal stillness that remains forever. When the disturbance dissipates, banished only to a moment, the silence remains.

Written after mass in German at St. Anthony of Padua, Frankfurt Germany.

Sadness. Where does it come from?

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Some questions are meant to be answered. Others are to remain a mystery. Misery is the envy of angles.

God sometimes brings us suffering and He is good. Look at Jesus Christ on the Holy Cross. Perhaps sadness is the reconciliation of mankind. Or, maybe it is only the recognition of our separation from God and His paradise – made for us from his love and goodness. Or, sadness is our rejection of God – reflected. Once, rejection was a finite moment in Genisis and is now a continuance of longing and regret.

Where is it possible to find happiness? Must we forget what we are? Dust dissolves into the earth and what am I? An envy of an angel.

Jesus Christ, come again. My savior. My Lord.