🌹Monday's with Blessed Mary🌹 = By St. Anselm of Canterbury
🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by St. John Chrysostom, Jungerheld, and Piers Morgan
🍆The Veggies = my 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = "What Did Thomas Aquinas Believe About Head Covering?", by Jeremy Gardiner
🌭The Meat = Book: "Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain: A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel"' by St. Nicodemos (part two)
🍧The Dessert = Audio presentation: "The church's tradition of head covering and uncovering", by Pastor Mark Minnick
🌰: "The goal is not to secularize the sacred”. By Jungerheld
🌑 "There is a massive difference between seeing religious artifacts tastefully and respectfully laid out in a museum, and seeing them stuck on some flesh-flaunting celebrity’s head at a party… A lot of the imagery was highly sexualised, which you might think not just inappropriate for a religious theme but also incredibly offensive to the many victims of sex abuse in the Catholic Church". By Piers Morgan
This quote provided a real grace moment for me the day it was discovered. It served as a morning meditation and as a text mess to share with others. Wondering what it will do for the mature spiritually engaged soul who take time out to partake of it's delights. This prayer unfolded so easy for me:
🙏🏼 Lord help us all to wake up. Strengthen and bless us in a grand and glorious manner, like only you can do. Bless especially those who so wills and desires to move from milk to partaking of solid food in order to live life in a deeper relationship with the Holy Trinity. Dear God, our Precious Father, who smothers us with your love, quicken us to respond to the call of the Holy Spirit with our whole heart. May the windows and doors closed by anxiety, fear, and a lack of true faith and trust, be fully opened allowing us to breathe in your love and exhale all that limits us in our faith walk. Whatever limits the flow of our love and causes us to live with a small heart, and please touch all that is out of order that it may become transformed and renewed in your perfect love. May we come to know the love that we are seeking, desiring, pinning over. Surprisingly we'll see that it is a love that we already possess. O God, you so loved the world, and you love each and every one of us infinitely. For you do call us each by name, how grateful and blest we are for that grace.
The deficits we experience from man, God we have come to know that your love is more than sufficient, more than adequate, more powerful than what we can ask or imagine, so it is that we shall not want. Would this become more deeply engrained in us. When we begin praying from the heart rather than from the head, praying rather than just saying: "give us this day our daily bread", then we'll be able to rise up and live above the level of spiritual impoverishment. Such a level strips us of true peace and true joy. When We'll begin to truly unite and abide in you, oh Jesus the Christ, the understanding will be present that you, the Lord as the Good Shepherd ever at our kside, we shall not want. Processing this as it should be internalized more and more, we'll be able and ready to receive your graces that are poured out for each day as sufficient for every minute and hour. Therefore, with out a doubt, it will be all about our accepting what the Father is permitting, tapping into His will, and carrying the cross, tailored for each of us, in peace so strengthened by the joy of the Lord.
Either the scripture informing us that the joy of the Lord is our strength is true or it is false.
How short we (ME) fall, but seeing the light little by little, that will be helpful in fueling hope a sit burns brightly inspiriting one to keep on keeping, consistently moving towards the goal. Abandoning the darkness and pursuing the light, that's my desire. It's all about growing in grace and growing in God. The GIG apostolate have meaning, all should be adamant that living life atrophying day by day is no fun, and something that jeopardizes our spiritual welfare. Let us run quickly towards the Good Shepherd, then looking back when it's all said and done, we'll be able to shout: Praise The Living God, because of His great mercy and everlasting love, by grace the victory we've won!
Info from this site :
www.headcoveringmovement.com/articles/what-did-thomas-aquinas-believe-about-head-covering
"Head Covering: Church History Profiles
"Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian. He is considered by the Catholic Church to be its greatest theologian and one of the thirty-three Doctors of the Church. In the 1200’s Thomas Aquinas published a commentary on the book of Corinthians. It’s a thorough treatment that shows us how he understood head covering and how it was practiced in the middle ages. To set the stage, Aquinas believed the focus of 1 Corinthians 11 was issues related to the Eucharist, and head covering related to proper dress during this practice. He said “[the Corinthians] erred in clothing, namely, because the women gathered for the sacred mysteries with heads uncovered”. So for Aquinas, head covering was a church issue.
He gave us two reasons to explain what it was that head covering symbolized. The first reason was “because a veil put on the head designates the power of another over the head of a person existing in the order of nature. The second reason he gave was, “to show that the glory of God should not be concealed but revealed; but man’s glory is to be concealed.” So head covering was a symbol that you were subject to another in nature and it was also meant to conceal the glory of man.
Since head covering is for when one “prays or prophesies”
1 Corinthians 11:4-5 "Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered brings shame upon his head. But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled brings shame upon her head, for it is one and the same thing as if she had had her head shaved" |
Other situational objections he dealt with were bishops who would teach (outside of church) with a miter on their heads. Aquinas responded that bishops only needed to uncover their heads when they recite “the Sacred Scripture in the church”. He also dealt with some who chanted psalms in choir uncovered and female nuns who had shaved heads. In every situation he explained how it did not contradict what was taught in 1 Corinthians 11 rather than saying what anyone did was wrong. Speaking of shaved heads, Aquinas stated that “it is natural for a woman to have long hair”. He saw how women cared for their hair as evidence of this by saying, “a definite inclination is present in women to take care of their hair. For this is true in the majority of cases that women take more pains with their hair than men.” So woman is to have both “a natural and artificial covering” and if she was “deprived of an artificial covering” it would be dishonorable, just like if her head was shaved.
Another interesting point in his commentary is 1 Cor 11:10 where it says women are to cover “because of the angels”.
The final verse regarding head covering (“we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God”) “silences the impudent hearers” according to Aquinas. It shut down all further debate regarding this practice to show that the churches were unified on this issue. Aquinas paraphrases this verse by saying “we Jews believing in Christ do not have such a practice, namely, of women praying with their heads uncovering, nor do the churches of God dispersed among the Gentiles. Hence if there were no reason, this alone should suffice, that no one should act against the common custom of the Church”.
All quotations can are from “Super I Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios lectura” (translated into English by Fabian Larcher). It can be read online here.
Excerpts from chapter nine: Guarding the Imagination
"Also the imagination not only record things, that is, receives images of things seen, but also recalls those images that have been forgotten, fashions other images on its own with its substitutes for others by adding or subtracting or changing. Thus it can change insignificant images insignificantly, both when we are awake and when we are asleep through our dreams, in which dreams, I suggest never believe. It is written: "For dreams have deceived many, and those who put their hope in them have failed".
From this we conclude that passionate imagination has greater power and authority over man then the senses themselves. Once someone is overcome by a passionate imagination he becomes altogether subservient to that imagination. Thus he may not be able to see even though he has the sense of sight; he may not hear even though he can't hear; neither can he smell or touch. Having all his sense organs open, he appears to have them close and totally interactive.
The devil has a very close relationship and familiarity with the imagination, and of all the powers of the soul he has this one as the most appropriate organ to deceive man and to activate his passions and evils. He indeed is very familiar with the nature of the imagination. For he, being created by God originally as a pure and simple mind without form and image as the other divine angels, later came to love the forms and the imagination. Imagining that he could set his throne above the heavens and become like God, he fell from being an angel of light and became a devil of darkness. Saint Dionysius spoke about this devil: "What is the evil of the devils? Irrational anger; unreasonable desire; and reckless imagination." The the devil uses the imagination as his Oregon. He deceived Adam through the imagination and raised up to his mind the fantasy of being equal with God.
St. Maximos noted: In the beginning passion and pain were not created together with the body; nor forgetfulness and ignorance together with the soul; nor the ever-changing impressions in the shape of events with the mind. All these things were brought about in man by his disobedience. He would he who would remove passion and suffering from the body achieves practical virtue; he who would remove forgetfulness and ignorance from the soul has properly attained the natural vision; and he who would release the mind of the many impressions, has acquired the mystery of theology. For the mind of Adam at first was not impressed by the imagination, which stands between the mind and the thoughts, setting up a wall around the mind and not allowing it to enter into the most simple and imageless reasons of created beings. The passionate physical perceptions of the visible things or scales that cover over the clairvoyance of the soul and prevent its passage over to the authentic word of truth. Adam, however, was able to was able at first to be attached to the thoughts of the mind and to enter into them without the immediary area of the imagination.
Not only Adam but most persons who have ever fallen into sin and deceptions, into irrational superstitions and heresies and evil and corrupt doctrines, have all been deceived through the imagination. This is the reason why the holy fathers called the devil a pantomine and an ancient painter, as we have seen especially in St. Chrysostom. Saint Maximos has noted that the devils deceive men not only when awake but also when they are sleeping, by inciting them with the passions of the body through the imagination. The imagination is considered by the fathers to be a bridge of the Devils. Saint Kallistos has written: "Imagination is like a multiform and many-head monster similar to the mystical Hydra, which the devil utilizes as a sort of bridge, as the saints have previously noted. These murderous villains communicate and unite themselves with the soul, making it into a hive of parasites, a place of passionate and fruitless thoughts. Saint Gregory the Theologian said that imagination is because of both the consent and the act of sin. Do you see now how many evil things imagination brings about? I beseech you therefore, to guard your imagination as much as you possibly can so that no images harmful to the soul are impressed upon it, as they seek to enter through the senses. And if they have already entered, seek not to compromise with them or to give your consent in your heart, but run directly to God through prayer of the heart.
I have referred to images harmful to the soul because there are other images which are permissible. Such images include the contrition, the grief, and the humility of the heart; the meditations upon death, the future judgment, and the eternal punishment; the study and meditation upon creation and the incarnation of the Lord; the phenomena of creation, the miracles, and the mysteries of the Lord's incarnation the birth, the baptism, the crucifixion, the burial, the resurrection, and so forth. Finally, it is permissible, when fighting against certain inappropriate and evil imaginations presented by the enemy, to use other appropriate and virtuous imaginations. Do not pay any attention to the shameful and fearful images of the foolish and irrational imagination and do not be frightened by them. Ignore them and consider them unworthy of your attention. They are empty playthings without any true substance.
He who is used to ignoring the imagination can also ignore the real things themselves that are depicted in the imaginations, as Saint Maximos has noted: "He who conquers over the passionate fantasies will also be able to prevail over the realities they represent". Let me conclude this chapter and summarize what I have been saying. Know that if you impress upon the board and chart of your imagination beautiful and appropriate images, you will be praised on the day of judgment, when what each person imagines secretly will be revealed. But if you allow inappropriate and evil images to be recorded and to dwell in your imagination, you will then be condemned, as Saint Basil has noted"
Audio link:
www.headcoveringmovement.com/sermons/mark-minnick/1-The-Churchs-Tradition-of-Headcovering-and-Uncovering.mp3