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<![CDATA[ Goodbooks Media - RondaView]]>Sat, 04 Mar 2023 06:16:37 -0600Weebly<![CDATA[Her Last Entry Was an Exit, but...]]>Wed, 14 Apr 2021 22:00:07 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/her-last-entry-was-an-exit-but

RONDA VIEW IS BACK AGAIN
(Some years back I used to write a blog called Ronda View for Goodbooks Media. It was illustrated hilariously by Jim Ridley.
I stopped because I was feeling stressed out by too many projects. However, now, at age 83, with absolutely nothing to do except Daily Mass, cherished prayers, eating and sleeping, I thought, why not have Jim Ridley illustrate notes from a journal I have been keeping. I hope these notes reflect truths from the Holy Spirit and not the title I had considered when I started:
Ruminations of a Demented Pseudo-nun!)
Concerning that funny title, a word about self-deprecation. I am told that it is an especially Jewish trait. I converted from a culturally Jewish background when I was 21. The idea is that if you put yourself down, self-deprecatingly, your enemies will run out of steam!
“All right,” you, the reader, might think, “Self-deprecatory you certainly are. But, still, calling yourself a demented pseudo-nun seems beyond the pale.”
Let me explain.
I don’t think I am clinically demented. My doctor gave me a dementia test and I came out 90% okay. However, I am much more uninhibited, and that can look a lot like dementia.
Pseudo-nun? When my husband died some 20 years ago, I started looking for a second husband. After 12 men rejected me, I decided to go for Jesus as a second-bridegroom. He would never reject me. He hasn’t. I tried being a religious sister. It didn’t work.
I tried being a consecrated widow. It didn’t work.

A spiritual director suggested I call myself a dedicated widow, instead, with my own rule of life. With his approval, I promised never to re-marry. I wear blue denim jumpers or other simple blue outfits that can be purchased for next to nothing at second hand shops. That way I can give away more of my small income from pension and social security to the starving via
the Missionaries of Charity. I wear a large crucifix.
Now, I can’t help noticing that some Catholics assume I am a nun.
Hence my self-deprecatory name for myself: demented pseudo-nun.

Another title for the journal I considered was
Home Free!
Here is a little poem I wrote years ago that includes that title:

How shall it be?
Shall those only reach heaven
who have hop-scotched
their way patiently toward the goal?
Or will you suddenly open Your arms
And cry out ‘home free’?

RONDA:
June 7, 2020
On to the journals of my dialogues with Jesus, starting tonight.
(Oh, but first, as I always explain, words from the Lord, sometimes called locutions, are never to be taken as infallible. Since none of my hard-working spiritual directors through the years thought the one’s I SEEM to get are erroneous, I leave it to the reader to decide if they come from Jesus or from my sub-conscious. I think they are from Jesus because they always, always, always seem to me better than my own thoughts.)
RONDA:
Jumpy, up and down happy and uncertain about new plans to move into an apartment complex in Corpus Christi.
Jesus, I surrender all this to You, You take over!

JESUS, MARY, JOSEPH:
We are trying to bring you deeper into our hearts so you will not be picturing yourself so much being friendly with this person or that but reaching out to others from our arms.

]]><![CDATA[A LAST ALAS]]>Sun, 28 Jul 2019 20:53:30 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/a-last-alas

Alas! Here is the announcement I want to make for a final on the Blog:
Dear Readers of RondaView,
It has been many years I have been posting on this blog with the wonderful additions of Jim Ridley’s commentaries and often hilarious graphics.
Alas! I am now 82 and I am finding that I need to get away from pressure such as feeling I have to have fresh insights every week and trying to type correctly, which is harder
and harder.
So, regretfully, I am switching to an oral, occasional, means to share insights
that do come:
Go to WCAT Catholic Radio and listen to Ronda Chervin’s Radio Journal, if you wish….
https://wcatradio.com/rondachervinsradiojournal/ These are recorded and can be listened to whenever.
And, if you don't like radio, you can read more of the many books of mine goodbooks media published. Check them out, especially the last 9 Toes in Eternity!

Love and prayers, Ronda

]]><![CDATA[Absence of Ronda]]>Thu, 18 Jul 2019 15:11:02 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/absence-of-ronda

]]><![CDATA[Getting our bearings by bearing our cross.]]>Sun, 09 Jun 2019 20:44:47 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/getting-our-bearings-by-bearing-our-crossApril 29, 2019
I was reading a manuscript by a lay contemplative woman hermit, Mary Kloska, called Out of Darkness. The meditations and locutions are about having such a bridal love of Jesus on the cross that we will not only bring our own sufferings to Jesus trustingly, but also want to suffer with Jesus throughout our lives until our glorious union with Jesus in Heaven.
I felt deeply moved by these meditations.

Listen to "Ronda Chervin interviews Mary Kloska concerning her book Out of the Darkness (May 16, 2019)" on Spreaker.

I think the first step for me would be to absolutely stop complaining about any crosses small or large that Jesus permits for me. And then to stare more intensely at the woodcut on my wall of Jesus Crucified.

Crucifixion by Otto Dix

April 30

I am doing much, much better on not complaining.
My daughter Diana posted this fact on our family chat: Snails Have Teeth. ... The average garden snail has over 14,000 of them, which are arranged in rows on their tongue. The typical snail tongue, called a radula, might have 120 rows of 100, although some species may have more than 20,000 teeth.
I thought: If they can handle 14,000 I guess God can handle billions of humans.

Snail teeth

May 1, 2019
Jesus seemed to ask me: “Would you be willing to have your usual state of mind be sorrow, laced by joy vs. your past state of mind which was anger and anxiety laced by humor?

May 4
Just as I would die for Carla or any of my children, so would God find a way to die for us.
May 4
I am reading this incredible autobiography of a serial bank robber Held Hostage by Ken Cooper, who took women hostages for a few hours as part of his get-away. He converted in prison with a life-sentence and became a born again Christian. By praying to Jesus he was able to turn around a serial rapist prisoner who had “bought” him as a victim. As he was about to rape him at knife point our hero said suddenly “Your mother and grandmother are praying for you,” and the rapist stopped cold. After that the rapist challenged him to a sit-up contest. When Ken Cooper, the author of this book Held Hostage, did 350 push-ups, the rapist shook his hand and stopped threatening to rape him. In one of the cells he was in, all of them were Christians and prayed every night that the rape would stop in the prison.
It did!

]]><![CDATA[As Easter Approaches]]>Mon, 15 Apr 2019 21:10:52 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/as-easter-approaches

I awoke with a “dream” or vision of my great mentor, the philosopher, Dietrich Von Hildebrand who went to eternity many decades ago. In the vision, he was about 60 years old sitting across legged with a luminous beauty in his eyes.

At a charismatic prayer meeting during the songs of praise, I thought that even though the music is so inferior to classical music, I like it so much because it is a kind of expression of delight love of God. Some of the usual Church worship hymns seem to me more like giving to God His due vs. sheer delight in His beauty and love.

Scruples:
Imagine telling a confessor this:
I enabled a theft from someone who had authority. And following up with this anecdote: We have 3 cats in one house. Mine, Cleo, is on the bottom floor. When I adopted him from the Cattery in Corpus Christi I was told that she only ate wet food and if I couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t adopt the cat! So she gets Friskee’s special. But I give her some dry food, just in case. If I drop dead, she would have to get used to dry food. But the cats upstairs in my granddaughter’s house only get cheaper dry food, except a small wet food on Sundays announced in a hilarious sing-song voice “Sabbath treat-sies, Sabbath treat-sies.
So, there was a new huge bag of dry food upstairs, unopened. I figured it was too hard for an 81 year old like me to open to get a little bowl for Cleo. But it turned out to be really easy to open.
Wrap up the top so that the upstairs cats couldn’t invade it? I slyly decided to leave it open in the bottom of the cupboard and enjoyed watching one of them noticing it, sitting on the top and devouring an unexpected extra portion.
Abetting a theft, I suddenly thought?
A venial sin?
Bring it to confession?
I decided the priest would not like to hear such a confession. Duh!
But my blog master, Jim Ridley would love to illustrate this one!

A wonderful distinction made by the philosopher Stephen Schwarz is between delight love vs. only donation love. I have some pages about this in my book Way of Love. What strikes me most in my old age is how some of us are more into one or the other. For example, I tend more to delight in the personalities of those I love and find it hard to exercise donation love in the form of pesky, physical, helpful tasks as needed. On the other hand, some people are very good at helpfulness and poor at expressing delight and appreciation.

My granddaughter had me watch a Patricia Sandoval video. I had not known of her. She is an incredible pro-life witness. She goes around the world telling of her sins of pre-marital sex leading to 3 abortions and then a stint of working for Planned Parenthood and eventually winding up on the street on drugs and finally almost starving to death. Finally she found her way back to her parents and to becoming a vehement pro-life speaker, especially effective because she has first-hand knowledge of exactly all the evils of abortion and the industry. Google her You-tubes to get fired up even more than before about all this and to think of having at risk friends and family watch.

No daily Mass Wednesday and Thursday of the week of March 18 because all the priests would be at a Bishop’s conference for them. So, I decided to try out the TV Daily Mass from Canada. It was sad to make a spiritual communion, but I felt glad to daily Mass shut-in’s and those who are too poor to get to a daily Mass.

I read this fascinating paragraph about the masculine psyche in a novel by Anthony Trollope:
“The blow to him was very heavy. Men but seldom tell the truth of what is in them, even to their dearest friends; they are ashamed of having feelings, or rather of showing that they are troubled by any intensity of feeling. It is the practice of the time to treat all pursuits as though they were only half important to us, as though in what we desire we were only half in earnest. To be visibly eager seems childish, and is always bad policy; and men, therefore, nowadays, though they strive as hard as ever in the service of ambition –harder than ever in that of mammon—usually do so with a pleasant smile on, as though after all they were but amusing themselves in the little matter in hand.”

You all need to know I have a nifty new web-site. It is part of En Route Books and Media and you can get it by googling The Philosophical Spirituality of Ronda Chervin. This nifty title was devised by Sebastian Mahfood of En Route Books. I like it. There are LOTS AND LOTS of free-e-books of mine on the site. But of course, you should look at my books on goodbooksmedia, this site, because they have Jim Ridley’s famous spoofing illustrations of my doings and thoughts.
https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/rondachervin/

Meanwhile, in a marathon of gusts of hopefully grace-filled energy, I wrote a sequel to my original autobiography En Route to Eternity which ended with the death of my husband, Martin Chervin. This has not yet been published but will have the title En Route to Eternity: Further Along. That is Miriam Press, the Hebrew-Catholic publisher who did the autobiography back in the ‘90’s.’

My daughter Carla was reading this sequel in attachment form and came up with this great poem about it:
Carla Conley March 26, 2019
What girl really knows her mother? Bone of bone sits flesh on flesh
for sustenance, to be devoured, to consume and to refresh.
It’s the stuff of some fantastic fable, mythic monsters come to mind
till girl gives birth to woman, leaving gruesome ways behind.
All the past’s a mystery and truth be told, we chart a course
dark ahead and blind behind. We tap our tales in Morse-
a code will come: continuum. A raven pecks a dove
and maybe it makes sense to some Almighty up above.
Enough of Noah! Back to Mother – she whom no one knows
not even she herself – she chases her own mother’s toes
trip-tropping over bridges where, beware! They’re thick with trolls
with passwords. But the passwords always whisper about souls
and no girl knows her mother’s till one day the mirror shows
a woman most improbably within her mother’s clothes.

A parent I know had to finally resort to threats of a spanking of his 4 year old. It made me think of the words in our Confession:
March 25______________________ Sean and Teresa – finally had to threaten with spanking, reminds the words in our Act of Contrition: because I fear the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, who art all holy. When the child is punished, if the father is loving in many ways, eventually …child feels that it is the loving father she is offending.

Excerpting from old journals writing my sequel autobiography I came upon these poems:
from Good Friday 2002
Carla, my daughter, wrote a poem for Good Friday called Purgatory:
In the domain of stumblers and stones,
His body waits for me like a cross,
A thing to cling to
When twenty shades of hell
Slant down to cover stalwart faces
Lit by hope.
How many slips and sobs till Paradise?
Here, where sorrowful mysteries circle,
Round for sliding feet,
His tongue cries light,
Flies it with the ravens of this night,
Faint as the shine of feathers
Growing wings.

From a Good Friday poem of Jim Ridley:
In your dread thurible of parted Flesh
Let now my timid immolation start.
Throw on the gore-sopped wad of rag, my heart;
Or nail it to the beams of that blazing Tree,
Scrap torn from the flag of the enemy.
Burn this sullied ensign of my surrender
Into the banner of Your Victory, Your hidden Splendor.

More from old journals:

January 15, 2002
I was thinking about how many of us where I teach seek holiness, openly and sometimes almost desperately. How much easier to feign mediocrity of intent so that the gap between wish and reality would not be so obvious and beckoning of critique!
Here I am, Jesus, your failure. But, no matter what, never let me set my sights so low that I cannot fail.

]]><![CDATA[Finger pointing]]>Tue, 05 Mar 2019 17:23:40 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/finger-pointing

Jesus seemed to tell me: do not always be pointing the finger at those whose sins scandalize the Church but make this a time of confession and penance for all our own sins so that we are begging God’s mercy on us all and not acting as if they are the sinners and you are the good guys.

An angle to loneliness that seems important to me is that it is not simply not having enough close family or friends around, but often specific. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote a famous book called I and Thou. Making use of the distinction in German between "sie" meaning you in relation to people not close, and "du" for those in family or close friends, he wrote about how in the I-Thou (du) relationship there is a part of oneself which comes alive in the presence of that individual beloved person. So we can't just substitute another person there. For example, in marriage, the spouse brings out something in me that a second spouse after widowhood wouldn't necessarily bring out.
Now, the point is that we have not an I-it relationship to God where He is real but not close - no, the God who loves us personally brings out things in our soul that are specific to each of us individually. God does not view me as simply one other statistic of Catholics, but as I, Ronda, His beloved child.
So whatever we found springing out of ourselves in relationship to the one we are lonely for, we can find to an infinite degree in our loving relationship to God.

More scandals in the Church also involving nuns as victims of priests. Since I am told that some Catholics are leaving the Church when they hear of the scandals, I thought I should say a few sentences more than I have so far about them. My two favorites are these:

From Frank Sheed, founder of street preaching in England long ago: “When we say the Creed we don’t say “I believe in Father “X” or Sister “Y!” And the word holy in “I believe in the holy Catholic Church” doesn’t mean the people who are sinners, but the sacraments.”

From me: When there was a scandal about a football coach, I didn’t notice anyone stopped watching football.”

More beautifully, Jesus seems to tell me in my heavy prayers when I hear of a new scandal – “there is no safe place on earth for anyone. That is an illusion. Your safe home is My heart – flee into it!”
_______________________________________________
Jesus seemed to tell me when meditating on the Crucifix: If you could see souls leaving purgatory when you offered up sufferings, wouldn’t you wish for more sufferings?
Life is a story, not a syllogism. Could Edith Stein, the great Jewish convert philosopher, imagine her last days on earth would be combing the hair of children of crazed mothers as a Carmelite nun?

Do the souls of those in purgatory expand with gratitude, which prepares them for heaven, when they see that some of us on earth are offering up sufferings without complaint for their sakes?

]]><![CDATA[TWIXT ARKANSAS AND JUPITER]]>Mon, 11 Feb 2019 17:32:28 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/twixt-arkansas-and-jupiterAt the charismatic prayer meeting I go to in Hot Springs, Arkansas where I am now living there are songs played on a tape recorder with the theme of Jesus loving us like a bridegroom loves a bride. I was thinking of the theme of Vatican II as an age of the laity. Here was what I came up with. It used to be that mostly only nuns and monks experienced bridal mysticism…or where known as having this experience, whereas now the thoughts in St. Bernard’s commentary on the Song of Songs are being experienced by lay people, if not conceptualized so beautifully as he does. And that same with Adoration where before mostly only contemplative consecrated had this opportunity, now it is widespread on a parish level where lay people experience these graces without ever having read a word from the great tradition of contemplative writings.

I am enjoying Arkansas style humor. For example, at a big grocery store, an old guy with no teeth and scraggly dirty hair is pushing his cart up to the cashier. The jaunty middle-aged bagger calls out: “Heh, grow your hair a little more and you can curl it!” The old guy grins and says: “Since I stopped working I stopped cutting my hair.” Next the bagger is packing the old man’s cat food cans: “Heh, man, be sure you don’t feed this to your dog or he will bite you bad!”

It is the birthday of my great grand-daughter, Teresa. So much preparation of decorations, gifts ranging from a trampoline to a Cinderella bridal dress and glass slippers. My granddaughter and her husband were exhausted from setting this all up for the party the night before.
I said: Jesus sacrificed on the cross to literally open the gates of heaven. Now the priest sacrifices so much to be able to give us a foretaste of heaven in the Holy Mass. And then you, in the domestic Church, make sacrifices to give your little daughter a kind of foretaste of heaven in this beautiful party.

It happened that someone close to me with whom I frequently argue about Church issues was involved in a pathetic incident where she felt very vulnerable. I had such a rush of love for her because she was vulnerable instead of combative. Then I thought, and I think it’s the Holy Spirit, in purgatory we will be vulnerable – unable to make excuses for our sins and defects, with no bravado left and, certainly not, smugness! And that will enable our “victims” who are also there to forgive us and that will expand their hearts to prepare them for heaven, where we cannot go until there is nothing but love in our hearts.

]]><![CDATA[Resumption]]>Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:18:41 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/resumptionDear Ronda-Blog readers,
One of the reasons I put the Blog on hiatus is not liking the pressure of coming up with good stuff every week. But due to receiving e-mails from people who said they would miss the blog, I thought I would try collecting items on a file and then, whenever they mount up sufficiently, sending them out.

So here are some thoughts since last time:
I was reading something about how pride is behind all sins of the flesh. Here is what came to mind:
Let's take over-eating. When this is an addictive behavior, what is the prideful thought behind it? What would you think of this explanation:
The over-eater feels "I have to satisfy this craving for food because I am miserable in different ways and eating whenever I have a craving soothes that feeling. So, the pride is that instead of humbly praying at that moment something like "Jesus, you know me and love me. You want to give me what I need to be totally happy one day in heaven. You allow sufferings in this world. Please You soothe the sufferings in my life so that I don't choose bad remedies such as over-eating which will one day increase my sufferings because of side effects of overweight, etc. Right now, I offer to you this specific craving by not satisfying it and offering that for the intention that everyone in my family will be saved (or some other spiritual desire.)
A little far-fetched, perhaps, but there is something in it.

From the hymn sung at Vespers on Tuesday of the First week of Ordinary Time:
Grant to life’s day a calm unclouded ending,
An eve untouched by shadows of decay,
The brightness of a holy death-bed blending
With dawning glories of the eternal day.
More and more, at 81, I am wondering why even strong Catholics seem surprised that I am longing for death as a gateway to purgatory. Yet there are so many passages in Scripture and in the Office of Readings that write about how we should have hope in eternal life. Not to get away from the sufferings God permits for us on this earth, but out of desire to be totally with Jesus, forever and ever, Amen.

I have become a great fan of the Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Listening to her playing a Beethoven piano concerto, I am recalling an off-quoted by me line from an English novelist whose name I now forget. The novel involves a pianist who gives up being a concert pianist to raise her children and then teaches them to play different instruments. When they are setting forth into the world, she proclaims to them: “never, never think that life is not as incredible as music says it is.”

]]><![CDATA[My Latest Hiatus]]>Thu, 10 Jan 2019 19:56:39 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/my-latest-hiatusDear readers,
I am taking a hiatus now from writing blogs, but I may be back soon, so check from time to time. I am thankful for your reading of my thoughts. Anyone who wants to write me an e-mail about anything, I will answer asap. chervinronda@gmail.com
Love and prayers,
Dr. Ronda

]]><![CDATA[Coffin Dodger]]>Fri, 21 Dec 2018 23:06:36 GMThttp://goodbooksmedia.com/rondaview/coffin-dodgerIn reading a book about England I find out that the slangy nickname for old folks there is “coffin dodgers!”

I am always wondering why, aesthetically speaking, cat’s are so beautiful – Sebastian Mahfood of En Route Books and Media says that one is reason is because they are like tiny lions who won’t eat us.

Funny incident: The teen-ager I am hiring to take care of Cleopatra, my cat. while I am in New Hampshire for Christmas came to be introduced to the cat, check out the food supply, etc. He is hoping to join a community of charismatic priests someday. He is the son of a charismatic leader of the prayer group I go to. When I saw his father at the prayer group I said "You have a wonderful son." Indeed this teen seemed like an angel in his demeanor - all light and joy. The father said, "Oh, it was mutual. He told me that he thought that you live in a shrine!" Of course, my religious pictures need no upkeep so it is also the laziness of hating furniture because it has to be kept up, but still it was sweet.

Since I can’t drive, except to Mass, I can’t go to the Adoration chapel in Hot Springs which is in hard to get to place. Someone suggested on-line Adoration. I thought I would hate it, but I don’t. I go back to it between desultory tasks for a 10 minute God break.
It is making me more peaceful.

Adoration on line making me peaceful between things.

https://www.ewtn.co.uk/live/adoration

A letter from me to a friend in deep pain because his love for a woman is not requited:

Von Hildebrand says "love is a response to the unique preciousness of the other" and "a joining of God's stream of love for that person."

That is intensely valuable even if the other does not requite your love and is a foretaste of heaven where we will all love each other that way and it will be reciprocated.

But on earth you cannot make anyone requite your love.

Now Jesus experiences unrequited love for perhaps 1/2 of humanity!!!! So you can link your pain in this to his, including his pain for whatever ways you still don't totally requite his love, for example, by not trusting in an eternity of happiness awaiting you because of His love.

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