Mercy!

 Hello everyone, it's been a very long time! Lots of changes for me, most notably that I have gotten married as of August! I plan on posting a little more this year for the year of Mercy! Which is big news! The year of mercy, not my posting. 

Anyway, to start off, here are the Spiritual and Corporal works of Mercy which I never fully learned as a wee lad. Or as a not so wee lad. Point is, the size of my corpus did not change my ignorance. If only someone had performed the spiritual work of mercy and instructed me! Ah well, learning it now!  Here's the list

• feed the hungry; 
• To give drink to the thirsty; 
• To clothe the naked; 
• To harbour the harbourless; 
• To visit the sick; 
• To ransom the captive; 
• To bury the dead. 

The spiritual works of mercy are: 

• To instruct the ignorant ; 
• To counsel the doubtful ; 
• To admonish sinners ; 
• To bear wrongs patiently; 
• To forgive offences willingly; 
• To comfort the afflicted; 
• To pray for the living and the dead.

I'm going to make an effort to do one of these works each day consciously during this year, may God give us all the grace to expand hearts to be merciful as He is merciful!

God bless! 

~OCG

Blessed are the Salty

I'm a salt guy. I will eat a pretzel just for the salt. And when I'm done? I'll eat all the spare salt. And then eat some cheese, with extra salt on top. 

Aside from leading to future hypertension, salt is a necessary ingredient in our lives. It teaches us the value of hard work as everyone tries to be worth their salt. Salt is also a major part of any recipe, even if it's just a pinch. Sometimes a pinch is enough. 

Jesus tells us that we are the salt of the earth. We are meant to do great things, even if we ourselves sometimes feel less than even a pinch. On those days when you are a dash, or even a smidgen!, you are still a necessary ingredient in whatever God is cooking. 

Our Lord warns us also about salt losing its flavor and becoming useless. What is salt without its saltiness? Small white rocks ? A sugar costume for the youth wrapped in sticky tape on Halloween? Perhaps, but it certainly cannot do what salt is meant to do- make things saltier. 

God also tells us very challenging things in the gospels that sometimes seem impossible- be pure of heart, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Whoa! I'm just a little gradual of salt here man! Not enough to purify any heart, especially not my own. And perfect? I'm not even iodized! 

But that's kind of the point. We aren't perfect; we aren't pure of heart. We are made to be like our Father but fall very much short. Jesus however does not. He is pure of heart, He is like the Father, He retains His flavor. 

Purity demands perfection. You can't have something be mostly pure- it's extreme and demanding by its nature. And purity is demanding because it is something special. Something pure is something set apart. Why does God tell us to be pure and perfect? Because we are special; we are set apart; we are necessary. We are salt, and we must stay salty. 

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 ,

 

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!