🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, Fr. Edward Leen, and St. Angela Merici
🌽The Veggies = My 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = “Becoming a Living Flame”, by Fr. Robert Pelton (2 of 2)
🍗The Seafood = Book: ”Way of The Ascetics, On The Jesus Prayer”, by Tito Colliander
🍰The Dessert = YouTube Video: “Spiritual Warfare and Communism, Deny Existence”,by Fr. Chad Ripperger (Part 01 Segment 07)
🌑While in the desert for 40 days; Jesus fasted
✨Praying for the grace to fast which heightens the senses to really listen and be open to the Holy Spirit.
🌑The devil tried to temp Jesus with sensual sin of the flesh
✨During this Lenten season, will pray for the Virtue of Purity; in thoughts and actions especially while praying the St Joseph Consecration.
✨With pure thoughts it will be easier to stay Peaceful inside when challenged with certain relatives.
✨I also want to increase my daily prayers and to pray them from my heart.
🌑Charity, Purity of Mind and Heart and Fasting Amen!
Let us join in with Addie, we can all hop on the bandwagon of Charity, Purity of mind and heart, and Fasting.
🕷 “Art is the right procedure as determined by reason that is to be followed if one's efforts are to issue in work that is perfect, in cases where the work proceeds from the human brain and hand. Ars est recta ratio factibilium. In a similar way there is an art of sanctity. It is the procedure that is to be followed in our spiritual, mental and moral activities, if sanctity is to result from these activities. A Saint is a moral work of art, a finished product of personally controlled and personally directed actions. The art of sanctity has its fixed principles as have the fine arts”. By Fr. Edward Leen
🐟 “Disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family”. By St. Angela Merici
🥊Our Father-
As babies do we have any worries? No, no, no, no. Every need is taken care of, the father’s job is well done. As we get older and mature, our father may not know what is going on in our lives, but we go to them. We know we will receive support, help, advice, etc. Like so with our Heavenly Father, He is ever with us to help us
📖 Luke 6: 46-49 “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I command? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, listens to my words, and acts on them. That one is like a person building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when the flood came, the river burst against that house but could not shake it because it had been well built. But the one who listens and does not act is like a person who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, it collapsed at once and was completely destroyed.”
🥊Who art in heaven -
In the heavens, the place for all eternity where the God head operates with full authority, in power and might, perfectly.
📖 1 Chronicles 29:11 “Yours, LORD, are greatness and might, majesty, victory, and splendor.For all in heaven and on earth is yours; yours, LORD, is kingship; you are exalted as head over all”
🥊Hallowed be thy name -
He who is, is our Father, and we can always call on Him. His name is Elohim, and when His children calls, the Father will answer.
📖 Psalms 79:9 “Help us, God our savior, on account of the glory of your name.Deliver us, pardon our sinsfor your name’s sake”
📖 Psalms 135:13 “O LORD, your name is forever, your renown, from generation to generation!”
📖 Deuteronomy 5:11 You shall not invoke the name of the LORD, your God, in vain. For the LORD will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain.
🥊Thy Kingdom come -
It’s to truly realize that each second which unfolds is doing so under the auspices of Divine authority. To those grasping wholeheartedly the reality and truth of this, then peace will prevail as we do our part that God’s will be done.
📖 Mark 1:15 “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
📖 Psalms 45:7 “Your throne, O God, stands forever; stands forever; your royal scepter is a scepter for justice”
📖 John 3:3 “Jesus answered and said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
🥊Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven -
Nothing more, nothing less. The perfection in heaven where all is well, have it’s counterpart on earth. All is indeed well here also, because all is working for good. Some good in one way or another, for someone regarding anything.
📖 Romans 8:28 “We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose”
🥊Give us this day our daily bread -
How well do the Father know what we need to survive, and He is quite capable of providing what can sustain us. No exceptions to that, be it for the body, mind, soul, or spirit. The Cattle on a thousand hills are His.
📖 psalm 50:7-15 “Listen, my people, I will speak; Israel, I will testify against you; God, your God, am I. Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you, your burnt offerings are always before me. I will not take a bullock from your house, or he-goats from your folds. For every animal of the forest is mine, beasts by the thousands on my mountains. I know every bird in the heights; whatever moves in the wild is mine. Were I hungry, I would not tell you,for mine is the world and all that fills it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of he-goats? Offer praise as your sacrifice to God; fulfill your vows to the Most High. Then call on me on the day of distress; I will rescue you, and you shall honor me.”
🥊And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us -
Even the world with it’s “Golden Rule” gets it right, but to model scripture you choose to go the way of excellence. In order for a vessel to be able to receive something, it must be empty. If we are filled with unforgiveness, being preoccupied, we lose the focus for the need for asking for forgiveness, which removes the clutter and frees us. In turn we in freedom can proceed to forgive the other.
📖 Matthew 7:12 “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you.i This is the law and the prophets”
📖 James 2:8 “However, if you fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself, ” you are doing well”
🥊And lead us not into temptation -
When we are docile to the Holy Spirit, He will shower us with His gifts and the fruit will be ours. We will find our way through the maze, and recover from a slip, able to get after a fall. The truth will set us free, as darkness is dispelled.
📖James 1:13 “No one experiencing temptation should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God is not subject to temptation to evil, and he himself tempts no one”
🥊But deliver us from evil. Amen -
When we are united, abiding in Christ, all that happens is leading us to the victory. No one or nothing can deter us from winning the race and receiving the crown. It is not evil that is touching us, when it seems like things are going wrong, it is the unfolding of God using crooked lines to write straight.
📖 Sirach 33:1 “No evil can harm the one who fears the LORD; through trials, again and again he is rescued”
Info from this site: https://www.madonnahouse.org/becoming-a-living-flame-by-fr-robert-pelton/
“In the story of the Pharisee and the publican, the Master is responding to this bewilderment of ours. He is telling us how to ask for the Holy Spirit. He is revealing to us the only fuel for the fire that he wants to set in our hearts. That fuel is humility.
That is the clear lesson of this parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, but Jesus has told this story because it is much less clear how humility joins together simplicity and infinite depth. Most of our notions of humility are loaded with the baggage of self-hatred. The Master wants us to see that humility has nothing to do with self-hatred, partly because our sinfulness is so unsurprising, but above all because the Father’s goodness is so endlessly, spectacularly surprising. The Lord wants to teach us how to be humble, by telling us the truth about our own wretchedness as he reveals to us the greatest truth—the truth enfolding and encompassing every other truth—that is the mercy of his Father.
The Pharisee stands before God secure in his own right-acting and right-thinking, and does not meet God at all. The tax-collector stands before God in utter poverty, with empty hands, and he meets the God whose deepest name is mercy and tenderness, who delights to call himself our Father.
The Pharisee thinks that he sees God’s face in the good order of his life, but he sees only his own narrow heart. The tax-collector sees only his own poverty, and in that emptiness, God shows the beautiful face of his mercy. Father Lot led a life of true justice, yet he knew something was lacking.
Father Joseph stretched out his arms to heaven and showed him that, beyond the careful country of Father Lot’s rule, lay the bright, clear air of the Kingdom, the boundlessly open space of God’s passion to clothe us with his own splendor and to fill us with joy of his own freedom. Thus the Master is teaching us that humility carries us into the kingdom of love because humility is the living knowledge that the mercy of God is our true environment.
We always want to live somewhere else—in the security of wealth or power, in the safety of our own intelligence, in the false peace of our own ego-strength, behind the walls of our good works and right opinions, in the house built by the esteem and approval of others. But Jesus is teaching us that we have no home except in the mercy of God, that outside this home we are fish flopping on dry land, birds trying to fly in water, children trying to learn the language of love without parents to teach them.
Everyone who tries to build his own life will see it collapse, but whoever dives into the mercy of God will be lifted into glory. There are good arguments against a life lived like that: it is too risky; it is too childish, not risky enough; it is too difficult to be that simple; it is too demeaning; it is all too likely to end in a false peace that ignores the injustice of the world and the pain of the poor.
However, the overwhelming argument on behalf of a life lived in total dependence on the tender love of the Father is Jesus himself. In him there was no sin, yet he became sin that we might become God’s goodness”.
📖 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him”
He was equal to the Father, yet became poor that we might become rich, and now his poverty and his Lordship are one. He is the wholly meek one, yet who has ever been more free? He is God’s own fool, yet who has ever been so wise? He is completely the Father’s Son, the eternal Child, yet who has ever been more adult? He refused the chance to become an earthly king or a political revolutionary, yet he built with his own body a kingdom of justice and love for all the poor. In the end, we must simply decide if this way of Jesus is opium or the very bread of life. This is a question addressed every bit as much to those who consider themselves conservative as it is to liberals or radicals, for it is not just some sort of political styles or social structures that the humility of the Master reveals to be inadequate, but all of them.
The pattern of order as well as the wellspring of freedom, the source of human justice as well as the origin of humane social processes—all begin in the act of truth that accepts God’s mercy as home and asks his Spirit to consume us as Jesus was consumed for us and is consumed by us in every Eucharist. Our Lord and Master has made himself our food and drink as he has made himself our fire and light. If we remain inconsolable until our own prayer pierces the clouds and the Father makes us also living flames, the reason is that our burning is ultimately for others. Everywhere our sisters and brothers are dying of hunger, cold, and disbelief. If we refuse the humility of Christ and the fire of his love, who will feed them or warm them or light their way home to the tenderness of their Father.”
“The saintly Abbot Isaiah, the Egyptian hermit, says of the Jesus Prayer that it is a mirror for the mind and a lantern for the conscience. Someone has also likened it to a constantly sounding, quiet voice in a house: all thieves that sneak in take hasty flight when they hear that someone is awake there. The house is the heart, the thieves, the evil impulses. Prayer is the voice of the one who keeps watch. But the one who keeps watch is no longer 1, but Christ.
Spiritual activity embodies Christ in our soul. This involves continual remembrance of the Lord: you hide Him within, in your soul, your heart, your consciousness. I sleep, but my heart waketh,
Song of Solomon 5:2.
📖 Song of Songs 5:2 “I was sleeping, but my heart was awake. I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.*The sound of my lover knocking! “Open to me, my sister, my friend, my dove, my perfect one!For my head is wet with dew, my hair, with the moisture of the night.”
I myself sleep, withdraw, but the heart stays steadfast in prayer, that is, in eternal life, in the kingdom of Heaven, in Christ. The tree-roots of my being stand fast in their source. The means of attaining this is the prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Repeat it aloud, or only in thought, slowly, lingeringly, but with attention, and from a heart freed as much as possible from all that is inappropriate to it. Not only worldly interests are inappropriate, but also such things as every kind of expectation or thought of answer, or inner visions, testings, all kinds of romantic dreams, curious questions and imaginings.
Simplicity is as inescapable a condition as humility, abstemiousness of body and soul, and in general everything that pertains to the invisible warfare.
Especially should the beginner beware of everything that has the slightest tendency to mysticism. The Jesus Prayer is an activity, a practical work and a means by which you enable yourself to receive and use the power called God's grace-constantly present, however hidden, within the baptized person-in order that it may bear fruit. Prayer fructifies this power in our soul; it has no other purpose. It is a hammer that crushes a shell: a hammer is hard and its stroke hurts.
Abandon every thought of pleasantness, rapture, heavenly voices: there is only one way to the kingdom of God, and that is the way of the Cross. And to hang crucified on a tree is horrible torment. Expect nothing else. You have crucified your body by nailing it fast with a simple and uniform manner of life under strict self-discipline. Your thought-life and imagination ought to be as strictly controlled. Nail them fast with the words of prayer and Holy Scripture, with the reading of Psalms and the works of the holy Fathers, where these things are commanded. Do not permit your imagination to fly about at will. What men call "the flight of thought" is usually an aimless fluttering in the world of illusions. As soon as your thoughts are not occupied in your work's behalf, let them turn again to prayer. See to it that both imagination and thought are as obedient to you as a well-trained dog. You do not allow it to run around and yap and rummage in garbage pails and bathe in the gutter. Likewise you ought always to be able to call back your thoughts and imagination, and you must do so untold times every passing minute. If you do not do so, you are like a horse driven now by one rider and now by another, says St. Anthony, until, worn out and lathered, it collapses.
If you hammer a nutshell too hard, you may crush the kernel as well. Lay on with caution. Do not pass over suddenly to the Jesus Prayer. Hold back to begin with, and even afterward, use your other prayer practices as well. Do not be overanxious. And do not suppose that you can pay proper attention to a single Lord, have mercy. Your prayer is bound to be divided and scattered: you are, indeed, human. Only in heaven the angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven, you on the contrary, have an earthly body with its own cravings.
📖 Matthew 18:10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my Heavenly Father”
Do not shriek to high heaven in amazement if at the beginning you completely forget your prayer practice for many hours at a time, perhaps for a whole day or longer. Take it naturally and simply: you are an inexperienced sailor who has been so anxiously occupied with other things that he forgot to keep watch on the breezes. Thus, expect nothing of yourself. But do not demand anything of others, either. Concentration is one thing, distraction another. Prayer will make your thought vital and clear: then it is right. The praying person sees everything around him, notices and observes everything, but the right doing of this comes through prayer, which sheds on all things its piercingly clear light.
The spirit works in the realm of purity within us. As long as we keep extending this realm of independence of heart, our spiritual humanity will continue to grow. Prayer will call forth an inner calm, a peaceful relaxation in grief, love, gratitude, humility. If you are, on the contrary, tense and stirred up, in high spirits or in deep despair, if you feel contrition or bitterness or an exaggerated will to action, if you are thrown into ecstatic experiences or a drunkenness of the senses, such as you enjoy when listening to music, if you feel a supreme enjoyment or satisfaction so that you are "content with yourself and the whole world," you are on the wrong road. You have built altogether too much on yourself. Sound your retreat and go back to that self-reproach that must always be the starting-point for every true prayer. The angel of light always brings peace, the peace that the demons of the dark wish at all costs to disturb. By this, say the holy Fathers, one can recognize the evil powers and separate them from the good. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, A Sinner.”
Just a few hours before completing my work on this post, found this quote while looking for a text mess to share with that arm of the GIG Apostolate. It fits in very well here:
🗣“When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once”
This quote is from Milarepa, but thinking no need to throw out the baby with the bath water, it’s to:
📖 1 Thessalonians 5:21 “Test everything; retain what is good”
YouTube video link: https://youtu.be/FP_rNsY1Sp0