car for sale

hey everyone! I am selling my car!
2001 VW Jetta
100,000 miles
very good condition
1.8 liter turbo
sunroof
heated seats
keyless entry
let me know if you know someone who is interested in it.

The 5th Day of Christmas

Christmas is so great it takes 12 days to celebrate it. Parties and concerts and children's plays are all wonderful and appropriate. Don't forget to pray and recollect and give thanks.

Recollection is a term of the spiritual life. It means that we keep a conscious awareness of the love of God and our presence before him. If we practice the spirit of recollection we will grow in grace and avoid the pitfalls of sin.

Dissipation is the opposite of recollection. Dissipation can happen through the busy-ness and trials of life, through wilful distraction, and mostly through sin. The Christian should strive to practice the spirit of recollection and fight against the spirit of dissipation

More from St. John Chrysostom

I am not ashamed, having still to teach them not to be ashamed. For he (St.Paul) knew that if they succeeded in this, they would speedily go on and come to glorying also: and do you then, if you hear any one saying, Do you worship the Crucified? be not ashamed, and do not look down, but luxuriate in it, be bright-faced at it, and with the eyes of a free man, and with uplifted look, take up your confession; and if he say again, Do you worship the Crucified? say in reply to him, Yes!

"For you are not to learn everything from me, but to take pains yourselves also and enquire further, lest ye become more dull-witted." Words from St. John Chrysostom at the beginning of his homily on Romans 1.

The fly that clings to honey hinders its flight, and the soul that allows itself attachment to spiritual sweetness hinders its own liberty and contemplation. St. John of the Cross

St. John of the Cross

Here is a link to John's "Sayings of Light and Love."

http://www.karmel.at/ics/john/dichos.htm

They are great one-liners for reflection.

11. The blind person who falls will not be able to get up alone; the blind person who does get up alone will go off on the wrong road.

From the "Imitation of Christ" continued from yesterday

He reveals his secrets to a humble man and in his kindness invitingly draws that man to himself. When a humble man is brought to confusion, he experiences peace, because he stands firm in God and not in this world. Do not think that you have made any progress unless you feel that you are the lowest of all men. Above all things, keep peace among others. It is better to be peaceful than learned. The passionate man often thinks evil of a good man and easily believes the worst; a good and peaceful man turns all things to good. A man who lives at peace suspects no one. But a man who is tense and agitated by evil is troubled with all kinds of suspicions; he is never at peace with himself, nor does he permit others to be at peace. He often speaks when he should be silent, and he fails to say what would be truly useful. He is well aware of the obligations of others but neglects his own. So be zealous first of all with yourself, and then you will be more justified in expressing zeal for your neighbor. You are good at excusing and justifying your own deeds, and yet you will not listen to the excuses of others. It would be more just to accuse yourself and to excuse your brother. If you wish others to put up with you, first put up with them.

From the "Imitation of Christ"

On humility and Peace
Do not care much who is with you and who is against you;
but make it your greatest care that God is with you in everything you do.
Have a good conscience, and God will defend you securely;
no one can hurt you if God wishes to help you.
If you know how to suffer in silence, you will surely receive God's help.
Since he knows best the time and the way to set you free, resign yourself to him, for God helps you and frees you from all confusion.
It is often good for us, and helps us to remain humble, if others know our weaknesses and confront us with them.
When a man humbles himself for his faults, he more easily pleases others and mollifies those he has angered. God protects and frees a humble man; he loves and consoles a humble man;
he favors a humble man; he showers him with graces;
then, after his suffering, God raises him up to glory.

Very Funny!

http://bewareofthedoghouse.com/videoPage.aspx
I'm not even married and this makes sense to me.

Oh yea!
It is the anniversary of my baptism.
Yea! I'm not a pagan!

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Anyone who would understand the nature of the tree should examine the that encloses the roots, the soil from which its sap climbs into branch, blossom and fruit. Similarly, to understand the person of Jesus Christ, one would do well to look to the soil that brought Him forth: Mary, his mother."
Romano Guardini

Most people are bothered by those passages of scripture which they cannot understand; as for me, I always noticed that the passages in Scripture which trouble me the most are those that I do understand. Mark Twain

from the Catholic News Service

Popular U.K. children’s dictionary now excludes Christian words
London, Dec 9, 2008 / 03:49 am (CNA).- Words associated with Christianity have been removed from an Oxford University Press children’s dictionary for the United Kingdom. Editors justified the changes by citing declining church attendance and multiculturalism.
Lisa Saunders, a mother of four from Northern Ireland, compared various editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary after discovering that the words “moss” and “fern” had been removed from her son’s edition, the Daily Telegraph reports.
She discovered that many words associated with Christianity had been removed, in addition to words associated with the monarchy and the natural world.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the deleted Christian words include abbey, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, and vicar.
New words were inserted based on word frequency and included the words allergic, curriculum, celebrity, and MP3 player.
Vineeta Gupta, who is in charge of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press, described the aims of the Junior Dictionary to the Daily Telegraph.
"When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,” Gupta said. “That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don't go to church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as ‘Pentecost’ or ‘Whitsun’ would have been in 20 years ago but not now."
Gupta said the publishing company produces 17 children’s dictionaries with different selections and numbers of words.
Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the center for education and employment at Buckingham University, argued that the word selections reflect the way childhood is moving “away from our spiritual background and the natural world and towards the world that information technology creates for us.”
“We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable,” he continued.

more incarnation

Another heresy emerged in the 5th century, Nestorianism, named after the Patriarch Nestorius of Contantinople. He said that Jesus was a human person and a divine person joined together, so that the divine Logos dwells in the man, Jesus of Nazareth and his Mother cannot be called Mother of God, but only Mother of Christ. Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431), which also affirmed Mary's title of "God bearer" - Mother of God. Nestorianism seems to have emerged from the adoptionist tradition, the heretical view that Jesus was merely a man adopted by God.
Arianism, Nestorianism and even variants of adoptionism still reappear in our times. The Jehovah's Witnesses seem to be crudely Arian, to say the least. But today we face other rejections of a pre-existent Word who took flesh in Mary's womb.

incarnation continued

The most subtle denial of the divinity of Christ appeared in the fourth century, when the priest Arius (who died in 336) taught that the Word is divine but that this divine Son had a beginning. Reinterpreting John's Prologue, Arius said that the Son was not "co-eternal" with the Father. He reduced the Son to a being created by the Father, a demi-god or an emanation from God, an intermediary between God and the cosmos, but not fully God. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373) was the greatest and most persistent foe of Arius and his followers.
The Catholic response to Arius was focussed around the technical term we find embodied in the Nicene Creed, homoousios. In the current English translation this is rendered "of one being with the Father." The divine Son is of one being or one essence with his divine Father. Homoousios affirms the eternal equality and unity of the Father and Son.
These disputes and defining the creed remind us of how God the Word enters our words, how human language becomes the vehicle for divine revelation. Language is the usual way we know God revealing himself in the deeds and words of Jesus Christ. This is why I believe that divine revelation comes to us normally through human language, through propositions.
As the Second Vatican Council taught, there are two sources of the one Word of God - Scripture and tradition, sources of the teachings of the Church, her dogmas and doctrines. This is why technical words were so important when used by the Church to express and protect orthodox doctrine. Homoousios in the Nicene Creed is the supreme example.

incarnation continued

Key idea
But the key idea was set out in that first sentence, "In the beginning was the Word." John was affirming and underlining one of the essentials of the Incarnation, the eternal pre-existence of the Divine Son.
This simply means that the Word, the Son or second Person of the Holy Trinity, always is. He has no beginning or end. He is God from all eternity, one and equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As Catholics we may take this for granted, because it is the Church's own understanding of John's language. However, once we explore heresies that have denied or redefined the Incarnation, we find that Christianity in the 21st century faces errors about the Incarnation as did the era of Saint John in the late first century.
Under pagan Greek influences, gnostic heretics simply denied that God assumed a real human nature and a body that could suffer. Jesus only seemed human. This is known as Docetism. But other, more plausible and more rational, heresies moved in the opposite direction. They struck not at the humanity of Christ but at his divinity, especially by reinterpreting Saint John's affirmation of the eternal pre-existence and divinity of the Son of God who took flesh.

Understanding the Incarnation
Msgr Peter J. Elliott

Many issues are involved in accurately understanding the key Christian truth, the Incarnation. Our key is the majestic opening to the prologue to Saint John's Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word." These words echo the first sentence of Genesis "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But John writes not of the creation of the universe but of its salvation through a unique event, the Incarnation, when God became man in Jesus Christ. Unlike the other Gospels that introduce the Incarnation with a human genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth, John chooses to give us a kind of divine genealogy, the "story of God", if you like. He has a specific purpose in mind.
"In the beginning was the Word" immediately calls for some explanation of this mysterious "Word", or logos in Greek. This language opens the mystery of God being in relationship with God: "and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John goes on to describe this Word who is always with God in the divine act of creation: "He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made."

"Sanctity, then, is not giving up the world. It is exchanging the world. It is a continuation of that sublime transaction of the Incarnation in which Christ said to Man: "You give Me your humanity, I will give you My Divinity. You give Me your time, I will give you My eternity. You give Me your bonds, I will give you My Omnipotence. You give Me your slavery, I will give you My freedom. You give Me your death, I will give you My Life. You give Me your nothingness, I will give you My All." And the consoling thought throughout this whole transforming process is that it does not require much time to make us saints; it requires only much love."
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

A choice

A worried woman went to her gynecologist and said: 'Doctor, I have a serious problem and desperately need your help! My baby is not even 1 yr. old and I'm pregnant again. I don't want kids so close together.' So the doctor said: 'Ok, and what do you want me to do?' She said: 'I want you to end my pregnancy, and I'm counting on your help with this.' The doctor thought for a little, and after some silence he said to the lady: 'I think I have a better solution for your problem. It's less dangerous for you too.' She smiled, thinking that the doctor was going to accept her request. Then he continued: 'You see, in order for you not to have to take care of 2 babies at the same time, let's kill the one in your arms. This way, you could rest some before the other one is born. If we're going to kill one of them, it doesn't matter which one it is. There would be no risk for your body if you chose the one in your arms. The lady was horrified and said: 'No doctor! How terrible! It's a crime to kill a child! 'I agree', the doctor replied. 'But you seemed to be ok with it, so I thought maybe that was the best solution. The doctor smiled, realizing that he had made his point. He convinced the mom that there is no difference in killing a child that's already been born and one that's still in the womb. The crime is the same!