🌹Monday's with Blessed Mary 🌹
🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by Servant of God, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Fr. Don Dolindo,
🍆The Veggies = My 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = "A Letter of Guigo, 5th Prior of the Grande Chartreuse: THE SOLITARY LIFE", introduced and translated from the Latin by Thomas Merton
🌭The Meat = Book: "Way of the Ascetics", By Tito Colliander
🍧The Dessert = YouTube video: "Striving to be a real catholic", by Marino Restrepo
🍈 I had learned that wisdom and folly are like different kinds of food. Some are wholesome and others are not, but both can be served equally well on the finest china dish or the meanest earthenware. In just the same way, wisdom and folly can be clothed alike in plain words or the finest flowers of speech." By Saint Augustine of Hippo
🍘 "Silence is a choice. We choose the things we want to do. These things, then, order and measure our lives. Someone said that Christians "order and measure" their lives from communion to communion. We might also say the Christians "order and measure" their lives from silence to silence. Silence, at its best, is God-awareness. We quiet down our outer and inner lives, and listen to God speak. Someone said that when God speaks, His words are like the sound of a flutter of a bird's wings. We need to be attentive if we are to hear anything. Outer silence is a choice. When my son, in his teen years, rode with me in the family car, we cut a deal. He had the car radio half the time, and I had the car radio half the time. He always chose his half at the beginning of the trip. Like most teens, he wanted his jollies up front. For my half of the ride, I sometimes chose silence, because I like silence. I really didn't do it to cause him pain. He, however, did sometimes have a restless and difficult time of it. Later he did tell me that he enjoyed our quiet evening rides together. Outer silence calms the senses. By contrast, sensory overload and excitement can be addictive. Inner silence can usually be achieved only by substituting one thought for another. Hence, the Jesus Prayer overrides our usual compulsive stream of consciousness about our own anxieties. Beginning with this form of prayer, then we might be led to deeper inner stillness, prayer without words. The caution here is that prayer without words is not heaviness, semi-sleep dullness. Rather, wordless prayer is alive, vigorous God-awareness. A seventeen year old said she learned recently that, "Silence is my friend." Abba Pastor tells us that any trial which comes to us can by conquered by silence". By Dr. Albert Rossi
"Resting on the hope of mercy, without trust in its own merit, it thirsts after heaven, is sick of earth, earnestly strives for right conduct, whichit retains in constancy and holds firmly for ever.
It fasts with determined constancy in love of the cross, yet consents to eat for the body’s need. In both it observes the greatest moderation for when it dines it restrains greed and when it fasts, vanity. It is devoted to reading, but mostly in the Scripture canon and in holy books where it is more intent upon the inner marrow of meaning than on the froth of words. But you may praise or wonder more at this: that such a life is continually idle yet never lazy. For it finds many things indeed to do, so that time is more often lacking to it than this or that occupation. It more often laments that its time has slipped away than that its business is tedious"
My response = It seems to me, to not have the attitude of resting upon the hope of mercy, is to be dependent on "self" and concerned with "self works". To depend totally on God, is to know that we are not worthy of one single merit to enter heaven period, end of story. Therefore it is quite necessary to depend on mercy, grace, and God's good will to take us all the way to the top. Why not, to the top, is it possible for us to merit anything, even to be able to crawl to the door? No, we can't even crawl through the door, we are dependent on God for our very breath. Let us live as best as we can, and never fail to desire all that the Good God can and wish to bless us with. To ask to to show we want it, with the recognition that what we want we are unable to achieve on our own. We should desire great things, big things, to rank as high saints, etc. What limits us from having those lofty desires? Maybe it is a dependence on our own capabilities. A paramount thought should be that What we can provide for ourselves is brackish water
Isaiah 55:1-2 "Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost. 2"Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance" |
Thoughts continued about how the good that we do, can be liken to just showing up for an event. One can be present and show up, but do not have what it takes to enter the door. Showing up indicates a desire to enter and posses the contents within, but more than that is needed to be successful. We possess not one single coin that would allow us to stand tall and enter, much less would we have enough purchasing power once inside to secure anything once we get the chance to enter into the door. Of our own, what we possess is dross.
To understand this is to desire, desire, desire,and surrender, surrender, surrender. To closely associate with the gate keeper, standing at the Gate, for Jesus is the gate, or standing at the door, for Jesus is the door, is to be let in. Once inside desiring what we want, but with no money, through, with, and in Jesus, He who owns it all can freely give us the desires of our hearts. Small desires verses large desires, we choose.
Info from this site: http://transfiguration.chartreux.org/Guigo-Letter-Solitude.htm
Introduction
"Guigo is one of those extraordinary figures in literature and in spirituality who, unknown and perhaps in some sense inaccessible to the many, have been accorded the most unqualified admiration by the discerning few. Thirty years ago Dom Wilmart, editing Guigo’s Meditations, did not hesitate to say that he considered this little book “the most original work that has come down to us from the truly crea-tive period of the middle ages.” No small praise when we reflect who Guigo’s contemporaries were! Dom Wilmart names a few: not only Hildebert, William de Conches, Bernard of Chartres, Honorius “of Autun”, Gilbert de la Porrée, but even Abelard, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Bernard himself. The opinion is neither rash nor even new. The very ones Wilmart names were among the first to praise Guigo without reservation. Peter the Venerable called him “the fairest flower of our religion.” We know what effect the Meditations of Guigo had on Bernard of Clairvaux (see St. Bernard, Letter XI). Some of the most fundamental ideas in Bernard’s own doctrine of love were inspired by his Carthusian friend. Wilmart compares Guigo, without exaggeration, to Pascal. (1) We find in the Meditations the same psychological finesse as in the Pensées, the same metaphysical solidity, the same religious depth. But we also find in the twelfth century Car-thusian a rocklike wholeness and coherence, untroubled by the anxieties and ambivalences that stirred the solitary of the convent of Port Royal. The difference is doubtless to be sought not only in the characters of the two and in their lives, but also in their times.
Fifth Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, Guigo was born in 1083 in Dauphiné. (2) He entered the Chartreuse at the age of twenty-three, and three years later was elected Prior. We cannot suppose that the Carthusians were given to impetuous or ill-considered action. The choice is significant. In fact, Guigo held this post for thirty of the most crucial years in the early history of the Carthusians. He made the first foundations and wrote the Consuetudines (Customs). He edited the Letters of St. Jerome (and the edition has recently been found). He wrote his Meditations as well as a life of St. Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble. In 1132 he rebuilt the Grande Chartreuse which had been de-stroyed by an avalanche.
The present Letter is supposed to have been written after this event, toward the end of Guigo’s life. (He died 27 July, 1136.) We do not know to whom it was addressed, nor do we know how he responded to the invitation. MThe Letter itself is a masterpiece of its kind, surely worthy of an assiduous reader of Jerome. It contains some of the classical tropes on the solitary life; the otium negotiosum, or the contemplative leisure which is more productive than any activity; the militia Christi, in which the monk, soldier of Christ, fights not against others but against his own passions, overcoming the world in himself, offering his bod-ily life in sacrifice to Christ. The hermit, sitting alone in silence and poverty, is the ‘true philosopher’ because, as Guigo says in another place he seeks “the truth in its nakedness, stripped and nailed to the Cross” (“Sine aspectu et decore, crucique affixa, adoranda est veritas!”)
It is this utter devotion to truth that has led Guigo himself, we feel, into solitude. To love solitude is to love truth, for in solitude one is compelled to grapple with illusion. The solitary life is a battle with subjectivity in which victory is to be gained not by the subject but by Truth. Unless we struggle with the falsity and delusion in ourselves, we can never break through the deceptive veil of rationalizations with which ‘the world’ adorns and conceals its empty wisdom. MThere is an inimitable naked power in the austere style of Guigo the Carthusian from which every suggestion of ornament, indeed every useless word is ruthlessly excluded. The extraordinary compression of this thought and language convey something of the fervor, the passionate seriousness of this saint and genius, a pure exemplar of the Carthusian spirit and certainly the greatest Carthusian writer.
Editor’s notes:
1. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose, author of the Pensées (Thoughts). He propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason.
2. This Guigo, also known as Guigo I, or Guigo of Saint Romain, after the name of the castle where he was born, is not to be confused with Guigo II (died 1193), 9th Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, who wrote an important work on prayer, the Ladder of Paradise or Ladder for Monks, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n° 2654.
GUIGO'S LETTER
To the Reverend N. Guigo Least of those servants of the Cross who are in the Charterhouse to live and to die... for Christ.
One man will think another happy. I esteem him happy above all who does not strive to be lifted up with great honors in a palace, but who elects, humble, to live like a poor country man in a hermitage; who with thoughtful application loves to meditate in peace; who seeks to sit by himself in silence. MFor to shine with honors, to be lifted up with dignities is in my judgment a way of little peace, subject to perils, burdened with cares, treacherous to many, and to none secure. Happy in the beginning, perplexed in its development, wretched in its end. Flattering to the unworthy, disgraceful to the good, generally deceptive to both. While it makes many wretched, it satisfies none, makes no one happy.
But the poor and lonely life, hard in its beginning, easy in its progress, becomes, in its end, heavenly. It is constant in adversity, trusty in hours of doubt, modest in those of good fortune. Sober fare, simple garments, laconic speech, chaste manners. The highest ambition, because without ambition. Often wounded with sorrow at the thought of past wrong done, it avoids present, is wary of future evil. Resting on the hope of mercy, without trust in its own merit, it thirsts after heaven, is sick of earth, earnestly strives for right conduct, which it retains in constancy and holds firmly for ever. It fasts with determined constancy in love of the cross, yet consents to eat for the body’s need. In both it observes the greatest moderation for when it dines it restrains greed and when it fasts, vanity. It is devoted to reading, but mostly in the Scripture canon and in holy books where it is more intent upon the inner marrow of meaning than on the froth of words. But you may praise or wonder more at this: that such a life is continually idle yet never lazy. For it finds many things indeed to do, so that time is more often lacking to it than this or that occupation. It more often laments that its time has slipped away than that its business is tedious.
What else? A happy subject, to advise leisure, but such an exhortation seeks out a mind that is its own master, concerned with its own business disdaining to be caught up in the affairs of others, or of society. Who so fights as a soldier of Christ in peace as to refuse double service as a soldier of God and a hireling of the world. Who knows for sure it cannot here be glad with this world and then in the next reign with God. What else? A happy subject, to advise leisure, but such an exhortation seeks out a mind that is its own master, concerned with its own business disdaining to be caught up in the affairs of others, or of society. Who so fights as a soldier of Christ in peace as to refuse double service as a soldier of God and a hireling of the world. Who knows for sure it cannot here be glad with this world and then in the next reign with God.
Small matters are these, and their like, if you recall what drink He took at the gibbet, Who calls you to kingship. Like it or not, you must follow the example of Christ poor if you would have fellowship with Christ in His riches. If we suffer with Him, says the Apostle, we shall reign with Him. If we die with Him, then we shall live together with Him. The Mediator Himself replied to the two disciples who asked Him if one of them might sit at His right hand and the other at His left: “Can you drink the chalice which I am about to drink?” Here He made clear that it is by cups of earthly bitterness that we come to the banquet of the Patriarchs and to the nectar of heavenly celebrations.
Since friendship strengthens confidence I charge, advise and beg you, my best beloved in Christ, dear to me since the day I knew you, that as you are farseeing, careful, learned and most acute, take care to save the little bit of life that remains still unconsumed, snatch it from the world, light under it the fire of love to burn it up as an evening sacrifice to God. Delay not, but be like Christ both priest and victim, in an odor of sweetness to God and to men.
Now, that you may fully understand the drift of all my argument, I appeal to your wise judgment in few words with what is at once the counsel and desire of my soul. Undertake our observance as a man of great heart and noble deeds, for the sake of your eternal salvation. Become a recruit of Christ and stand guard in the camp of the heavenly army watchful with your sword on your thigh against the terrors of the night. Here, then, I urge you to an enterprise that is good to undertake, easy to carry out and happy in its consummation. Let prayers be said, I beg you, that in carrying out so worthy a business you may exert yourself in proportion to the grace that will smile on you in God’s favor. As to where or when you must do this thing, I leave it to the choice of your own prudence. But to delay or to hesitate will not, as I believe, serve your turn. MI will proceed no further with this, for fear that rough and uncouth lines might offend you, a man of palaces and courts. MAn end and a measure then to this letter, but never an end to my affection of love for you."
ON A RESOLUTE AND SUSTAINED PURPOSE
"IF you wish to save your soul and win eternal life, arise from your lethargy, make the sign of the Cross and say: In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Faith comes not through pondering but through action. Not words and speculation but experience teaches us what God is. To let in fresh air we have to open a window; to get tanned we must go out into the sunshine. Achieving faith is no different; we never reach a goal by just sitting in comfort and waiting, say the holy Fathers. Let the Prodigal Son be our example. He arose and came
Link to video: https://youtu.be/YJbH9gwZcpQ