Scribbles I

Scribbles -One

Our command is not to change the Church to fit our image of what it should be but to change our image by the power and wisdom of the Church. 

We anxiously await everyone to fall in line with our expectations of what they should be.

Contentment with our brothers and sisters happens only when we finally accept thatwe need to expect nothing but accept anything. 

Religion has become as uninspiring as light beer, instant soup andgames played on a Sunday morning.  Now within easy grasp and complete understanding of every age and segment of society, the faith is nothing for which civilization can strive. It is background music in the elevators of our minds.  It has met us all on the corner of cheap street and easy way and there we are no more interested than we are in our other past times.  

The best modern empirical evidence for the belief in the Communion of Saints is that many on Facebook are talking today to their mothers who have long passed to another life. We should then, have no compunction in extending that practice to "speaking" to the thousands of the faithful believers who have gone before us. 
(I love you Mom!)

Adolescence is the process of turning inside out.

It is amazing that we, the big people, can be conquered by such small things.


On the contemplation of a falling star, I note that even the stars give up.

The two most beautiful points in creation are life and death.  Only then are things in proper perspective. 


When we begin to look down on people, we are below them.


No matter how many are around, the search for God is a lonely one.  

You cannot disguise the search by numbers of people or thousands of idle words.

In the end it is still a vast quietness between you and only God. 

There is only one greater time in life than when you are laughing with a friend....
When you weep together. 


Prayer is much like sleep, without knowing it you are there.


I think when I grow up, I will be a theologian contemplating the side of a Welch mountain on a distant time space - letting God write the books and poems and songs of a glad heart. I think I will work away hate and ignorance. And using the raw material of the human soul create a mountain worthy of contemplation.  And in the very mean while,

my seventy-year adolescence makes plastic toys and artificial playthings of the imagination to fill the time between birth and birth. 


Religion is something you are, not something you say.


We are closest to one another but when there is nothing else but each. 

There is me and there is she. One clutches his martini, slippers and television, and the other stands on the empty, lonely spot where the home stood before the quake shook from her hands the play things of her heart. She cries,  “
O, God, why?”.  And I, with more embarrassment than a blush can handle, know that it was the voice of God moving, beckoning me to drop the martini and the t.v.
and hold her before there is nothing left to grasp and to reach out while there are still arms and to love while there still Is.


Each man is the keeper, not the master, of his soul.

Yeah, sure, I’m certain that today you had quite a cross to bear and that your suffering was just too much. It is rough, you have to eat hamburger, drive a five year old car and work hard five days a week.  The old TV is even losing some of its color. Let us pray to God to look favorably on us and ease our sufferings, trials and afflictions.  Why should He waste his time on the mid-East when my air conditioning needs fixed?


Humpty World sat on a wall, a very thin one between right and wrong.  And after the fall there wasn’t anyone who could put it together again.  But that really wasn’t true now, was it?  There was you and me and thee and all of the other fairy tales in the world.  There were the Beethovens, the Disneys and The Jesus.  There were the Dumpties who thought they were right and that they couldn’t possibly be wrong.  They kept telling us that there was no one or no where of significance.  They said that things were un-mendable that that things were only breakable.  And the doctor said there was no hope and we began to believe him.  And, there we were just sitting in the corner eating our curds.  They finally became right on the left. There really were fewer and fewer who could mend the fall and they began to gain ground because when you believe, all things can happen. So we put our trust in the princes of darkness and the light was withheld from us who were once able to see.   Requiem Aeternam.

Nothing is as important than this love here, this Presence here, this here.

Where we are being led is not a place but to a state of being, to a place as close as myself, a place as close as God. 

Spain is a good choice. Canada is nice. Aruba is lovely. If you are not committed to our democratic system which is the voice of the majority, I have no animus toward you. Go with love to a place better than our country of tolerance and respect for your opinions. Go to find greener grass over the fence of respect. Find a place better, and I will follow. I think your search will be empty and your animus will be lost with the realization that there is no greater a place than our beloved country.--

Scribbles - Two

The marine forecast says that too many will be lost in the war and that the terrible waste will continue through the weak end of our lives. Alpha and Omega. 


Don’t you think that we travel much too fast and see much too little?  Where have all the flowers gone anyway?


I observe that there are corrupt officials in high places and I, therefore, will avoid high places. I observe that there are politicians who strive for public office and for fame and fortune and I will, therefore, have nothing to do with politics. I note too that the educational systems harbor those who cannot teach and who pose a threat to supple minds.  I then, will not learn.  

I see that there are hypocrites in a church which teaches against hypocrisy and therefore must not attend or give to a church who fails in her mission.

I note too that I fail and, having given up all else must also,with gnarled logic must avoid associating with myself.  I then am nought. 


We can smell the dirt only by getting down, close to it. 


Though mankind has progressed, produced and reproduced his progression he is virtually at the ape-stage of understanding the Source of all things.  He can see facts but not from where they came.  He can use love but cannot tell what it is.  He can theorize  but theory  ultimately fails to to define, analyze or classify the Substance of life.  Why does it take eons upon eons for the simplest of truths to stake a place in the hearts and minds of God’s highest creation? 


Do not be overly disturbed that you cannot understand it all.
 We can only comprehend those things that are smaller than we ourselves. 


Wisdom is not as catching as is the disease of ignorance.  


Perhaps one of the reason that wildlife is frightened of Man is that over the centuries,  his kind has exchanged nature’s rhythm for an urban rhythm of life that is contrary to the  natural order.  Man’s primeval movement and pace once resembled the gentle flow of the stream, the gentle  tree-ballet  and the  slow, soft-padded footsteps of the the creatures of the forest.  But someone said “Up”,  “Yours should be a frenzied movement of wild electrical impulses. Yours is meant to be a rhythm of powerful proportions. You are meant to do things, not to be things.”  But the birds no longer understood Man.  We had exchanged the natural order for the fast metronomical pace of the 21st century.  But watch, O Man, very soon there will be an unbridgeable chasm fixed between us and what is natural , and creation will weep that man has left the Family forever. 

Reconcile yourselves to the fact that the mind and the heart have to cohabit the same universe.  

What happens when all of our bubbles burst and left is only the naked reality of the bare fact - that what appears to be really isn’t and what never occurred to you is. 


God is well pleased just to be sought after, to be offered what ever we have at the moment, and to be loved. The act of self oblation regardless of our worthiness or our combination of particular words in our prayers
is sufficient to erase all and to provide a fresh start to our tomorrows.  


Why is that we think that religious experiences have to lead somewhere else when, if they are real,  they in themselves contain the Reason?  Why search for the pot at the end of the rainbow when the rainbow is sufficient unto itself?  

Let us be glad in the present moment.  


It seems at times that everything is just too big for its container - almost like the beginning of time when solid matter exploded scattering specks of the beauty of God throughout the universe.  


The sunlight, like God is everywhere at once and yet capable of being focused as by a magnifying glass to be a concentrated burning force.  The Eucharist likewise focuses God’s force, power and love in one spot for a burning few moments to warm us weak and cold-hearted creatures.  It is the cosmic explosion in reverse. 


Loneliness is in the wait between, “I love you” and, “I love you too”.


We “become” so gradually that we are never aware of our changing until we are there.  It is a bit frightening that our evolution is finished before we even know it started.  It is, therefore, ever important to examine ourselves daily, to step back and take a look to see how we are different today than yesterday before yesterday
becomes the future and we are of a sudden, memories of how we were. 


You think things are bad?  Take a tally of today’s good and fill the book in one day and footnote it with a “bad” (or two) and you have the full scope of Love and its Cause. Multiply it for all of His-story and you have the
incomprehensible magnitude of the Plan and the unbelievable beauty of creation.  

So stop your whimpering, O Man,  and pick up the other end of the spy glass to see clearly how skewed your self conscious view of God’s world has been. 


God is speaking to Moses right now on TV.  I wish it were that easy but I know differently.  I wish there were bushes burning without being consumed, someone here walking with a hem to touch.  But instead, we are given to trust in Bach as His tongue and the chorales as His palette.  We are to know that the crispy-blue hued sky is His touch and the innocent child his hem.  Today’s challenge is to see the Theophany in all things good given to us in our time and in our place.