A time to keep silence, and a time to speak…
You may have noticed, I’m writing fewer blog essays these days. The reason is NOT because I’m peacefully occupied elsewhere! The truth is, I am struck almost wordless, I strain with difficulty speaking of it, so incredible are these times! I stand and watch, hardly able to believe what I see and hear in front of me. It is as though the half of the world has gone mad – has lost all sense, all reason, making up “reality” as it chooses, as it wishes, as it wants. Life has become a parody of a game, “Virtual Reality.” But there is no comic relief in this insanity: there is only a fearsome obsession in zealous protagonists of their “new reality” – and the lusts for it will be satisfied, no matter the cost.
Augustine was right. All of salvation history is the story of the two cities, one set in opposition to the other. There is the City of God, men and women laboring and suffering in the name of God, in hope of a glory to come, burning in love for the Truth known only in faith. There is the City of Man, intent still on building their Tower of Babble reaching high into the sky for man’s own glory, driven by material lusts of the flesh and of the eyes and by ambitions of power, while each seeking glory in the eyes of one another. Righteousness is mocked and abandoned in favor of self-serving “political correctness.”
The culture of America today is one infused with citizens of both Cities. Citizens of the City of Man are in the streets and are in the Church, in the Bowery and on Wall Street, in the government and in the prisons, in the monasteries and in the brothels – and so also are the people called into and belonging in the City of God! They are called into God and His City; some know it and some do not – yet. Some are lost and still blind, some are only barely seeing, some are crying in hunger, and some are feeding the hungry, their brothers and sisters, growing strong for the trials of the days to come.
I’m looking for parish invitations! I want to pass on to those who are hungry, the precious Truth wrapped in God’s call. We have been given, in Baptism, a share in His very Life – and that Life, given in potency as it is, even to a precious infant, is intended to live, to grow, to develop all the way to maturity. His life is given with the potency of personal sanctity, the supernatural power to enable a communion with Him, a communion in His divine and eternal love.
There is a trustworthy path to that goal of maturity. The Church has brought forth, by God’s grace, many holy saints. Their experience, and their witness, together coalesce into a spiritual theology of ascending the stairway of holiness. There is an “Ordinary Path to Holiness”; in the perfect prayer given to us by Jesus, there is an “Interior Liturgy of the Our Father” that maps for us the way of prayer-journeying to Him. He wants us to grow, to ascend, to complete His intention for us from the beginning.
I’m looking for places to speak and to present these truths; I pray the Lord to open doors for this; please pray and seek with me. Please pray with me for a true, real, authentic renewal of the Church! Renew the Church!
I’ve added a page to this website – Presenters and Presentations…. It is listed and linked on every page of the website, in the right-hand column of links, in the “Pages” Menu – “LOOKING FOR — Presenters and Presentations?” If you agree that we need, in the Church, this sort of catechesis – share this blog essay, and this link. Maybe they can be part of the opening of doors, to begin to bring substantive adult formation into our parishes and dioceses. We have been fed too little for too long. The times – and our Lord! – are calling for much, much more.
