Seized by Christ

They are experiencing Christianity as joy and hope, having thus become lovers of Christ.

Category: Faith & Theology

  • Valley of the Shadow of Life

     

    Those are the people who say to God: “Thy will be done.” No soul that seriously and constantly desires Joy will ever miss it. To those who seek, it is found. To those who knock, it is opened.

    Ah, the saved . . . what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. 

    What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery, turns out, when they look back, to have been a well. And where present experience saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.

    The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven

    And that is why the Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven”

    And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not deep Heaven, ye understand. “Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life

    C.S.Lewis – The Great Divorce

  • Spe Salvi 47

    Section 47 is my favorite in the Encyclical Spe Salvi by Pope Benedict XVI. I never tire of reading and meditating on it. It is available in several locations including Vatican.va I have added sentence numbers, because the individual sentences are priceless. I refer to it a lot to describe the conversion process.

     

    47.1 Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior.

    47.2 The encounter with Him is the decisive act of judgment.

    47.3 Before His Gaze all falsehood melts away.

    47.4 This encounter with Him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves.

    47.5 All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses.

    47.6 Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation.

    47.7 His Gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as though fire”.

    47.8 But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of His Love sears through us like aflame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.

    47.9 In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not strain us forever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, toward truth and towards love.

    47.10 Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion.

    47.11 At the moment of judgment we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of His Love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves.

    47.12 The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy.

    47.13 It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world.

    47.14 The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time–reckoning–it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ (39).

    47.15 The judgment of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace.

    47.16 If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice–the crucial question that we ask of history and of God.

    47.17 If it were merely justice, in the end, it could bring only fear to us all.

    47.18 The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together–judgment and grace– that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12)

    47.19 Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1)

    POPE BENEDICT; SPE SALVI; NOVEMBER 30 2007

    Plus, I would like to encourage comments on the content

     

    Regards

    Tom Neugebauer

    Seized by Christ

     

  • Amour Laetitia Section 196 – 198

    Amour Laetitia Section 196 – 198 (Pope Francis)

    These passages talk about how the family’s small community, made up of extended family and close friends, should work.

    196 A big heart

    196.1 In addition to the small circle of the couple and their children, there is the larger family, which cannot be overlooked. 196.2 Indeed, “the love between husband and wife and, in a derivative and broader way, the love between members of the same family – between parents and children, brothers and sisters and relatives and members of the household – is given life and sustenance by an unceasing inner dynamism leading the family to ever deeper and more intense communion, which is the foundation and soul of the community of marriage and the family”.223 196.3 Friends and other families are part of this larger family, as well as communities of families who support one another in their difficulties, their social commitments and their faith.

    197.1 This larger family should provide love and support to teenage mothers, children without parents, single mothers left to raise children, persons with disabilities needing particular affection and closeness, young people struggling with addiction, the unmarried, separated or widowed who are alone, and the elderly and infirm who lack the support of their children. 197.2 It should also embrace “even those who have made shipwreck of their lives”.224 197.3 This wider family can help make up for the shortcomings of parents, detect and report possible situations in which children suffer violence and even abuse, and provide wholesome love and family stability in cases when parents prove incapable of this.

    198.1 Finally, we cannot forget that this larger family includes fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law and all the relatives of the couple. 198.2 One particularly delicate aspect of love is learning not to view these relatives as somehow competitors, threats or intruders. 198.3 The conjugal union demands respect for their traditions and customs, an effort to understand their language and to refrain from criticism, caring for them and cherishing them while maintaining the legitimate privacy and independence of the couple. 198.4 Being willing to do so is also an exquisite expression of generous love for one’s spouse.

    NOTE 223: John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio (22 November 1981), 18: AAS 74 (1982), 101