Today, I'm both.
Once upon a time, I blogged about why I love Jesus. You can read that post here. I meant it, and I still stand by it.
Unfortunately, I suk. Heck, I suk like like the interstellar vacuum. I suk like a new Hoover set on high. I can't really describe how much I suk. I suk so bad I can't go to communion.
I was going to go to confession today. I was working on my Examination of conscience, when I realized I did not have a firm purpose of amendment. I was taught, and I believe, that to go to confession without one, to know that you are going to continue in what you are doing, is "Presumption Upon God's Mercy", and a sacrilege. I don't want to do that.
Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins. Along with greed, sloth,pride, lust, envy and gluttony, it will destroy you, and it will give birth to other, lessor things that will erode, and finally destroy, your relationship with the Lord. I've got it, and I don't think I'm gonna let it go anytime soon.
I don't know what to do.
I can't go to communion. I can only adore that which I cannot partake of. Yet I am an
American. I look at our situation, and I'm more than angry, I am more than appalled. I do not want to commit sacrilege, but I don't know how to get around it. I've r prayed, and reflected. I've studied the catechism and looked things up in scripture. I am feeling lost in an moral vacuum so profound as to be an ontological threat.
Liberation theology is an error. Yet I am committed to constitutional rule. Obedience to the civil powers is a duty, yet I find it impossible to do in many ways.
I am torn between either conflicting duties, or conflicting concepts, and I have no one to advise me.
I guess I'm an adult Christian, with the inevitable situation arising, of knowing when and how to act. If salvation didn't depend on responding to the Lord, with keeping his commandments--which are explicated by our Catholic faith--I would be easy about things. But I'm not.
And since Wrath is one of the seven deadlies, it lets it's sisters in. And so here I sit.
I love my country. But as the river flows, I am despising the conflict it has risen within me, and my own role in allowing it.
I think I need a retreat.
To explain something that might be more than feeling, to show what it's like me to be an American now, I'm putting up a link. This is how I think America is now. And I see the 'spell" as something evil, foreign and insidious.
I sometime wish...wish so bad I wish I could cry...that I could go to Judea in the first century and look up Jesus the man, Jesus the God, Jesus the Savior and the New David, and just talk to Him. Just get his counsel. I guess that means I need more time before the Blessed Sacrament, before HIm through who, and for who, all things were made. I guess this means I have to go before the Lord in the blessed Sacrament, pour out my heart, and beg His counsel. And I am terrified of gazing at the Blessed Sacrament! I am so frightened of Him there--the most real thing in the Universe!
I am afraid of seeking the counsel of the Lord, despite his Grace, despite my being a child of God through Adoption, in the waters of Baptism.
Once upon a time, I blogged about why I love Jesus. You can read that post here. I meant it, and I still stand by it.
Unfortunately, I suk. Heck, I suk like like the interstellar vacuum. I suk like a new Hoover set on high. I can't really describe how much I suk. I suk so bad I can't go to communion.
I was going to go to confession today. I was working on my Examination of conscience, when I realized I did not have a firm purpose of amendment. I was taught, and I believe, that to go to confession without one, to know that you are going to continue in what you are doing, is "Presumption Upon God's Mercy", and a sacrilege. I don't want to do that.
Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins. Along with greed, sloth,pride, lust, envy and gluttony, it will destroy you, and it will give birth to other, lessor things that will erode, and finally destroy, your relationship with the Lord. I've got it, and I don't think I'm gonna let it go anytime soon.
I don't know what to do.
I can't go to communion. I can only adore that which I cannot partake of. Yet I am an
American. I look at our situation, and I'm more than angry, I am more than appalled. I do not want to commit sacrilege, but I don't know how to get around it. I've r prayed, and reflected. I've studied the catechism and looked things up in scripture. I am feeling lost in an moral vacuum so profound as to be an ontological threat.
Liberation theology is an error. Yet I am committed to constitutional rule. Obedience to the civil powers is a duty, yet I find it impossible to do in many ways.
I am torn between either conflicting duties, or conflicting concepts, and I have no one to advise me.
I guess I'm an adult Christian, with the inevitable situation arising, of knowing when and how to act. If salvation didn't depend on responding to the Lord, with keeping his commandments--which are explicated by our Catholic faith--I would be easy about things. But I'm not.
And since Wrath is one of the seven deadlies, it lets it's sisters in. And so here I sit.
I love my country. But as the river flows, I am despising the conflict it has risen within me, and my own role in allowing it.
I think I need a retreat.
To explain something that might be more than feeling, to show what it's like me to be an American now, I'm putting up a link. This is how I think America is now. And I see the 'spell" as something evil, foreign and insidious.
I sometime wish...wish so bad I wish I could cry...that I could go to Judea in the first century and look up Jesus the man, Jesus the God, Jesus the Savior and the New David, and just talk to Him. Just get his counsel. I guess that means I need more time before the Blessed Sacrament, before HIm through who, and for who, all things were made. I guess this means I have to go before the Lord in the blessed Sacrament, pour out my heart, and beg His counsel. And I am terrified of gazing at the Blessed Sacrament! I am so frightened of Him there--the most real thing in the Universe!
I am afraid of seeking the counsel of the Lord, despite his Grace, despite my being a child of God through Adoption, in the waters of Baptism.
5 comments:
"...to go to confession without one, to know that you are going to continue in what you are doing..."
As I see it, you're equating two unequal things. What I was taught is that the firm purpose of amendment is not to have to stop doing it, or to promise to stop doing it, but to *try* to stop doing it . . . and depend on Grace from there.
It doesn't seem to me that you like being wrathful, or that you want to continue being wrathful.
Also, please remember there is such a thing as righteous wrath.
God bless!
Old Bob - absolutely. And Aquinas wrote that an unjust law is an act of violence, not justice.
I.R. Jesus got angry, too, with the money-changers, and overturned their tables. St Nicholas felled Arius! St Thomas More had a man who committed sexual assaults in Church flogged.
God bless!
Um...somehow this got posted in the screwing up girls for the future post, but it was meant to come here:
It seems like you really emptied out your heart in this post and I'm not sure what to say that would offer any help or would not sound cliche. You are one of my Rosary intentions for tonight.
Godspeed.
When people ask you "What would Jesus do?" Remember that freaking out and overturning tables, and whipping people is an acceptable answer.
I agree with Old Bob and the Left-footer. The way I best understand it is to relate tm my time in AA. There was one old timer who confessed to initially showing up for meetings drunk. This went on for quite a while and he was ready to throw in the towel, just get down to serious drinking until it killed him. Then he heard another drunk tell of doing the same thing for his first two years in trying to get sober. It finally "took", the desire to NOT drink had finally grown bigger than the one TO drink.
So the man I knew kept going to meetings until it "took" with him. Last thing I knew, he'd be continuously sober for over twenty years.
So as I keep repeating the same sins time after time after time after time, etc., I remember that God is certainly more patient than any group of drunks who might smell fumes wafting off one of their newer members.
If that doesn't help, well I brought up pretty much the same problem to a Dominican my wife is acquainted with. This was some time ago when I was getting disgusted with the sinful merry-g-round I was on. His advice was to keep trying but to remember that God already gives me the necessary grace to resist the sin in question. While I can't say I've become perfect, I definetly HAVE become better.
Hang in there, we're all sinners. Even Paul spoke of a "thorn in his flesh" that he'd prayed for removal. Maybe that "thorn" was something similar to what you're going through.
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