Sunday, April 12, 2015

Broken Promises

 I promised my fiancee I'd have abs about 6 years ago. It was one of those, "oh yeah? I'll prove I can do it" statements that so often you never quite live down. Well here we are 6 years later, I'm still a chubby deer and she the agile doe gracefully slowing down until I catch up. 

I'm reflecting on broken promises as I have already failed to keep my streak of Easter promises. I have not written, or exercised every day of the season but luckily have finished the Divine Mercy novena and I pray God forgives my breaking this other promise. 

I suppose there are two kinds of promises: the trivial and the important. Trivial promises are small ones that break easily and are made to be broken. As Mary Poppins calls them, "pie crust promises: easily made, easily broken". This is my abs and my eating healthier and all those stacks of unfinished screenplays and stopped a week into January New Years resolutions. They exist but are fleeting and flawed and never going to be perfect. In a way, they are our most human promises.

The other kind are different. They are inportant and life changing. These are the big ones- vows, trust, love. Promises, spoken or unspoken that are promised out of love for another person- for it is only in loving another person that we truly can change I think. In the promise we give them, we are transformed by the hope of a new future, closer and more intimate to the beloved. 

This is our identity as Christians, a promised people. We are made new in Christ with our baptismal promises. When we sin we decide to turn against our beloved, against our promise, and against ourselves. And in denying that we sin, or explaining that sin away to ourselves, we actually devolve as people in an attempt to slide back to our old  state before the promise. What we fail to realize is that that is not possible. There is no going back once that promise is made, we are already a new being and cannot become the old self for that part of you has died. We live only in this new promise, a betrothal between God and His church. 

All this is to say, while I may never have the abs I promised, the vows I make on my wedding day will infinitely strengthen me more than any crunches or planks. Gof love you ,

 

Sunday, April 5, 2015

A New blog Mission!

Hello everyone,

Well it's been nearly a year since I last posted. Last easter season my promise was to post once a day about joy, a promise I somewhat fulfilled with lots of gaps. It helped make me more holy in that my writing streak was full of holes. 

What this mission did accomplish was helping me see the light in a dark time in my life- a time of consistent unemployment and personal struggles with sinful habits. The focus of joy was a small way to live out the hope that Christ gives us in Easter. 

I now am making a new Easter goal this year. One that I pray I may faithfully execute that combines my faith with my hope of work. So, here it is:

There a great app that I highly recommend, the Fulton Sheen AudioLibrary (link:  Fulton Sheen Audio Library by As Written Productions
https://appsto.re/us/bfQZx.i). Fulton Sheen has been a great resource for my spiritual life since I was in college and I find it enlightening that Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen may one day be the first saint to have won an Emmy, the highest award in the field I aspire to work in television. For a few well worth it dollars, you get access to nearly 100 talks from the most prominent Catholic on TV before Stephen Colbert came along. 

My goal is to listen to "the Sheen Catechism" - 50 episodes in 50 days. With each episode only being a half hour or so,  it's doable and I pray (with the intercession of Fulton Sheen) will be fruitful to me. Along with this spiritual goal I am making two other goals for my health and work lives, to walk for 30 minutes a day (usually in tandem with the episodes of the Catechism) and to write creatively for a half hour each day. My hope is this simple goal will be accomplishable and help me holistically set up positive routines heading into my married life. 

In addition, I hope to occasionally post reflections on this blog again. Though it is often poorly written and I don't intend on anyone reading it (but if you are reading it, thank you!) it may be a helpful tool in getting down thoughts about my Easter journey this year. 

So, thank you for the time and I hope you have an awesome and fruitful Easter season filled with faith, hope, and love in the joy of Christ's resurrection. 

In Christ's name,
~OCG

HE IS RISEN ALLELUJAH!