🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by St. Antony the Great, Anonymous, and Luther Burbank
🌽The Veggies = My 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = “Amid COVID crisis, the Church ‘acted according to the general secular logic”, By Bishop Marian Eleganti
🍗The Meat = Book: ”Way of The Ascetics, On The Use Of Material Things”, by Tito Colliander
🍰The Dessert = YouTube Video: “Spiritual Warfare and Communism, suffering of others”, by Fr. Chad Ripperger (Part 03 Segment 07)
St. Antony the Great
🌑 “May the beatific vision be the pot of gold that continues to delight as the end of the rainbow continues on and on eternally”. By Anonymous
☁️ Don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers, plant your own garden and decorate your own soul”. By Luther Burbank
“Sin is a false thirst”
__ Mother Teresa: “How do we know that God is thirsty? On the cross Jesus said, ‘I Thirst’. He was not asking for something to drink. When they offered Him vinegar he didn’t drink it...Very often we too offer bitter drink to Jesus. This bitterness comes from the depth of our Hearst’s and wells up in our words. When we give this bitterness to one another, we give it to Jesus”
🌑 me= Lord Jesus Christ, help us not contribute to your thirst, but rather to satiate it. Our wayward actions, hard heartiness, and thin skin dominating all to often, and because it is all about “self”, and not putting you on the throne in our hearts. It is surely a bitter drink that is being offered to thee, yes, bitter like gall. An unclean heart is the root cause, and only you can successfully do a spiritual root canal. Bless us to see more with eyes filled with compassionate love wedded to kindness, then what we do, say, and think, will glorify you in every way, everyday. For who knows when it will be our last day, and it’s important at that moment to be found embracing virtue and not vice. Create a clean heart O God, and renew within us the right spirit.
__”The essence of sin is a false or misguided thirst. We can pursue false paths, things other then God usually for self-exaltation. It’s easy to take false thirst & bad effects too lightly. Sin brings death & separates. A lack of seriousness causes complacency to venial sins, which impede grace, puts us on the road to royal ones, and deform God’s image in us, also it distances us from Him and we don’t even notice it until we have wandered far from truth and joy”
🌑 me= Sin most certainly brings us death and separation. It’s just like when you do things to spite or try to hurt someone, what happens is that people really end up hurting themselves, as there is a cut off of graces. Big fools we are when we allow darkness to pull the strings, do consider it ropes when it’s mortal sins that are involved. In the end they hang us. Truly sin is a false thirst attempting to quench the thirst of self satisfaction, something that will never, ever work. Especially sad it is when people who are called by name “Christian”, look upon the Christ and spit in His face. So insidious, little by little losing the ability to live in truth, and thinking we are the Lord’s, how sad and pitiful that is.
__”Running after false thirsts, we unravel God’s hopes and cause unnecessary pains to ourself and others. Lukewarmness, no eagerness to receive the Sacraments, being quick to defend ourselves & accuse others, making peace with intemperance in food and drink, content to gossip, hold on to resentments & criticize, we are in danger of becoming like Christians from the church of Laodicea spoken of by Christ:
📖 Revelation 3:15-17 “I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything, ’ and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked”
Jesus stands at thee door knocking, desiring to set us athrist for Him as He promised St. Margaret Mary: “I will make tepid souls fervent”
🌑 me=We all are guilty and fall so short, no doubt about that. Many may not know how short they are falling. So let’s pray and make reparation for ourselves and for others. That we night begin to see our errors and not offer Christ a bitter drink, but live up to the bill of calling ourselves Christians and quench the Lord’s thirst. In that manner, we allow Him to be our all in all. His thirst is that sin not be dominant in our lives and that He alone reign supreme on the throne in our hearts. A permanent state where Jesus Christ is Lord, let that be the goal we all pursue wholeheartedly.
“Your faith has helped you! What do you think the Lord would say about the universal sacramental shutdown within the Church that has deprived the faithful — among them many elderly and dying people — of the sacraments across the world? Such a thing has never happened in the 2,000-year history of the Church, not even in the hardest times of war, plague, and persecution. What would have happened if the Church had intensified its sacramental life? But instead, it acted according to the general secular logic, which does not know faith and causes the shutdown of the sacraments and the desolation of the places of pilgrimage, among other things (cf. the empty St. Peter’s Square). Nevertheless, on March 25 of last year, Pope Francis urged us to ask God for the end of the pandemic worldwide. So to what do our faith and reason have to refer: to trust in our own measures, which did not achieve the desired effect but caused enormous damage, or to God’s supernatural help?
Was it reasonable for Israel to look to the bronze serpent raised by Moses in the wilderness to escape with their lives after the deadly snakebite?
📖 Numbers 21:4-9 “From Mount Hor they set out by way of the Red Sea, to bypass the land of Edom, but the people’s patience was worn out by the journey; so the people complained against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness, where there is no food or water? We are disgusted with this wretched food!” So the LORD sent among the people seraph* serpents, which bit the people so that many of the Israelites died. Then the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you. Pray to the LORD to take the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses: Make a seraph and mount it on a pole, and everyone who has been bitten will look at it and recover. Accordingly Moses made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever the serpent bit someone, the person looked at the bronze serpent and recovered”
Was it reasonable to think that five barley loaves and two fish could feed a huge crowd so that they would not collapse from emaciation on the way home?
📖 John 6:9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?”
Was it reasonable to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment in order to be healed?
📖 Matthew 9:21 She said to herself, “If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.”
Is it reasonable to believe daily in the change of the substance of bread and wine into the body of Christ, which presupposes an intervention of God in the here and now? In Mark 16:18 we read that even the drinking of deadly poison will not harm the disciples.
📖 Mark 16:18 “They will pick up serpents [with their hands], and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
This does not mean that we should do it wantonly, where there are other solutions. It means only that the secular reason, not the faith, acts unreasonably in the contact with GOD from a certain point. I know the pertinent place in St. Thomas Aquinas’s works. In our context, we talk about something else. With many miracle healings Jesus has praised the faith of the people in question as a prerequisite: “Your faith has helped you!” The biblical examples could be multiplied at will. Instead, all the world has seen that large parts of the Church think and act quite secularly, as if they had no faith in the efficacy and presence of God, e.g. in the sacramental context.
Mocking accusations were made even by worldly parties — which have no skin in the game — that the Church did not sufficiently bring God (“its core business”) into the conversation about overcoming the crisis. This has consequences. In Nazareth, Jesus could do only few miracles, because he did not find there the faith which he looked for and presupposed for his supernatural work. I do not say that we should challenge God in an unreasonable way to abolish the laws of nature. But what the secular or political “reason” has imposed on us is to a large extent unreasonable, as well: for instance certain numbers which have not been put into the right context and have been manipulated arbitrarily to justify rigorous measures, or to talk about protection some measures allegedly offer, which are simply not real.
All COVID-related measures can be questioned with good reasons as to their actual protective impact and as to their negative to devastating effects threatening and destroying one’s existence (who is going to pay for it?). Others will do so. In any case, there will be much to talk about for a long time to come. What’s important to me is that trust in God and counting on his help and his protection in our context is not at all unreasonable. Everybody decides for themselves how far he or she goes along with it, and how unreasonable he wants to appear to others. In this regard, I recommend to everyone Psalm 91, which sounds quite unreasonable in our context, but is not unreasonable at all in the mouth of a believer praying. He just sets other priorities.”
“We are made up of soul and body; the two cannot be separated in our conduct. Let the physical therefore come to your aid: Christ knew our weakness and for our sake used words and gestures, spittle and earth as media. For our sake He let His power flow from the fringe of His garment
📖Matthew 9:20 “A woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the tassel on his cloak”
📖 Matthew 14:36 and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak, and as many as touched it were healed.
from the handkerchiefs or aprons that were carried away from the apostle Paul's body
📖 Acts of the Apostles 19:2 “He said to them, “Did you receive the holy Spirit when you became believers?” They answered him, “We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit.”
yes, from the shadow of the apostle Peter
📖 Acts of the Apostles 5:15 “Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets and laid them on cots and mats so that when Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them”
Therefore use all that is of earth as a staff of remembrance on your troublesome wandering along the narrow way. May the whiteness of the snow and the blue of the heavens, the jewelled eye of the fly and the scorching of the flame, and all of creation that meets your senses, remind you of your Creator; but make use especially of what the Church offers you to help you yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness
📖 Romans 6:19 “Romans 6:19 I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your nature. For just as you presented the parts of your bodies as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness for lawlessness, so now present them as slaves to righteousness for sanctification”
First of all, the Lord's Holy Communion. But likewise the other mysteries, or sacraments, and the holy Scriptures. And the Church offers you also the holy icons of the Mother of God, the angels and the saints; and prayer before them, and candles and incense, holy water and the gleam of gold, and singing. Receive all this with gratitude and use it all for your upbuilding and encouragement, improvement and benefit as you travel further. Give free outlet to your love for the generous Lord of love, kiss the Cross and the icons, adorn them with flowers; if only evil be crushed with silence, the good will be allowed to breathe freely. If what is given in love is received with love, the scope of love is increased and enlarged, and this is the aim of your work.
The greater the river, the wider the delta. Use your own body, too, as an aid in the struggle. Trim it down and make it independent of earthly whims. Let it share your trouble: you wish to learn humility, so let the body also be humble and bow to the ground. Fall on your knees with your face to the earth as often as you can in privacy, but get up at once, for after a fall follows restoration in Christ. Make the sign of the Cross assiduously: it is a wordless prayer. In a brief moment, independent of sluggish words, it gives expression to your will to share Christ's life and crucify your flesh, and willingly, without grumbling, to receive all that the Holy Trinity sends. Moreover, the sign of the Cross is a weapon against evil spirits: use this weapon often and with reflection. A house is never built until the scaffolding is raised. Only the strong man has no need of outward support. But are you strong? Are you not the weakest among the weak? Are you not a child?”
Video link:
https://youtu.be/2miAw6l4TSM