Blog Archives

At Last

3/31/2014

I am very happy to announce that the wonderful
TV Series I made with some of the late vocation priests and seminarians:
LAST CALL:
TWELVE MEN WHO DARED ANSWER
will be shown on EWTN in May.
Look for it
May 12-15:
3:30 AM and 6:30 PM.

These priests and one transitional deacon have marvelous grace-filled stories. Hope you will be able to see it.

As any of you know who read my blogs I am big into simplicity of life. All I own now fits in 6 mailing boxes. But today I got a new insight:

If too much in the closet is contrary to simplicity of life, then, also, too much to do is not simplicity of life either. Of course I don’t refer to too much to do when it is a matter of working to feed the family and also spend lots of time with them, or spending lots of time in Church. I am thinking of all those extra things that work-aholics, like me, make into necessities by dint of unrealistic deadlines. Some spiritual mentors consider such patterns to come out pride vs. humble acceptance of limitations!

Someone wrote me this adage: "the devil you know is better than the angel you do not know".

The point is that disclosure is much better than passive aggression. What this priest-psychologist means is that sometimes in a conflict putting all the cards on the table is better than just grumbling inwardly and withdrawing from the friend or family member we might be angry at.

“Evildoers….are more pained if their villa is poor than if their life is bad, as though man’s greatest good were to have everything good except himself.” St.Augustine, The City of God.

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sinking periodically

3/23/2014

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Insights coming from Bob Sizemore, Gestalt/Jungian therapist, who is also a spiritual director I am seeing:

We do not get what we could from what is in “the now” if we are always thinking of something else, such as the past or the future. It is wanting the ego to control to want to plan everything even to the last moment of life. Since my mother had dementia around 85 years old, if I live in the future instead of the present I have more fear of dementia!

I am like Peter walking on the water toward Jesus, but then sinking periodically as I take my eyes off Him.

Some of my talents and problems come from my Jewish side but the solutions come from the Christian side. I am a wisdom figure. That is where my gifts lie.

Don’t push the river, let it flow. The walking speed is the right speed. My best is enough, not just in my work but also in daily life. Sometimes the shadow side endears others to us.

Hatred of smug men that I have: the therapist wonders if this is because smug men have no room for bright women.

One of the therapist’s sayings is: “Humor is the oil for the engine of success, for the friction of stress and for the wear and tear of ego.”

We had a wonderful “happening” at the seminary. To raise money for the starving, they arranged a dinner where 10% of us dined in luxury at a table, 30% sat on chairs and ate a bowl of stew and the rest sat on the floor and ate a bowl of rice. We reached into a bowl and picked a ticket. One color of ticket was for the banquet; another for the chairs, and another for the floor. I picked the ticket that put me on the floor. This was accompanied by all sorts of statistics about hunger and poverty and the 30% waste of all food in the world and then we had a talk by a Nigerian seminarian with slides showing this exploitation of the oil with people paid in bullets to ward off theft of the oil, etc. etc.

Spontaneous anger: How is it that we can express anger by a loud voice, a sarcastic retort, banging on the table, against some people but would never spontaneously do that with an authority figure who could penalize us? This used to be described by psychologists with the term “household Hitler” referring to men who had to keep their mouths shut under frustration at work, but then came home and took out their frustrations on their wives and kids. In connection with recent incidents, I decided that it is because it is safe to express anger against people we love who love us, because we expect them to forgive us, whereas the authority figures might not forgive us. It made for an unusually well thought out confession!

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Stay Calm

3/19/2014

4 Comments

I wrote an e-mail to my spiritual director full of worries concerning my daughter’s lymphoma condition, not yet diagnosed as to what stage it is or prognosis. I am not sure at what point to visit her since she is overwhelmed with house guests at this time. I am putting part of his reply on this blog not just because I am a drama queen but because some readers might be able to make use of the same advice:

Ronda,
It's good that you have made some preparations for a potential situation: mental, emotional, arrangements (about your students). But you have to keep telling yourself that this is still all speculation. Nobody knows anything certain, yet. Remember, that you have a tendency to analyze everything, create scenarios and draw conclusions, which may seem real to you but are, nonetheless, still speculation. It's because your mind tends to work on hyperdrive and this just sets your emotions into hyperdrive, which then has the possibility of clouding your judgment.

Slow down a bit. What you are getting anxious about is still only speculation. You yourself wrote that "it might turn out that the diagnosis is less drastic." You still don't know anything certain, yet.
Stay calm. Don't speculate (as much as is possible for you). Pray for her and just wait. Getting worked up before the fact does no one (especially you) any good.

I asked a theologian about the resurrected body of Christ. For no special reason I started wondering if the hand of Doubting Thomas thrust into the wound in the side of Jesus after His resurrection came out bloody or not. I realized I didn’t really know too much about the Resurrected Body of Christ, picturing it as kind of diaphanous rather than concrete.
This theologian responded this way:
Of course, the Resurrected Body of Christ has blood! It wouldn't be a perfect living human body without blood and the Precious Blood that becomes present on the altar doesn't come from the air. If it did, then why do we adore something that is not part of Christ's Body? We say that the Eucharist is the total Christ, "Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity." What becomes present on the altar is the Glorified Body and Blood of Christ as it is in heaven at this moment. It just doesn't make sense to say that His Body would not have blood.

Christ's blood was poured out on the Cross. True. But then, His Body was dead, separated from His soul. But that all changed with the Resurrection. Using your logic one could then say that the Glorified Body of Christ could still be separated from His soul. But no. It's a living human body, just glorified. Glorified human bodies are like our mortal bodies in some respects but they are also different. Therefore, they have properties, which our bodies do not have now.
That fact that Thomas' hand (might have) come out of Christ's side without blood on it means nothing. Wounds in a mortal human body bleed and are painful. They would not be such in a glorified body. Even Padre Pio's stigmata did not bleed all the time.

4 Comments

Dark Night

3/19/2014

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From a letter to a lapsed Catholic agnostic:

Little boy
Hand gripped by old granny
Making the Stations of the Cross
Before he knew the word tawdry
He knew the feel as he tried
Not to look at the ugly plaster figures
On the church wall.
Now in his forties
He only wishes
He could believe
That the fifteenth station,
The resurrection, was real!

To which the agonized sceptic might reply: If your f_____ing God was real he wouldn’t let all this pain go on and on, century after century.

A sage once said: On a scale, the only thing that could outweigh the sufferings in the world would be the crucifixion, resurrection and eternal life.

The report isn't back yet on what stage my daughter’s lymphoma is, but I talked to her on the phone and she made this amazing statement:

Jesus is with me sharing my pain.

I asked: Do you feel His presence or also see Him?

She replied: Both. I see his face in the window and I see him next to me and also feel him. And I feel all this love coming toward me from everyone around and of all those praying for me.

I said: That, in itself, is a miracle.

She replied: Everything is a miracle.

Alice Von Hildebrand is my oldest friend in the world. She played a large role in my conversion when I was 21 years old. Her husband, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, was my intellectual mentor, all of whose philosophy courses I took at Fordham University.

Most of you are familiar with her from her wonderful appearances on EWTN. She is also known for wonderful books, many about the Catholic philosophy of woman. Now that she is over 90, I was not expecting any more books to come forth. But she just gave me her latest. It is a compilation of articles written recently. The major attraction of The Dark Night of the Body is her response to certain errors she has found in the writings and talks of Christopher West. Not denying West’s good motives for his work, she pinpoints, for particular criticism, a lack of understanding of the reverence due to the sexual sphere, created to be experienced in a loving marriage. Especially effective is the way she critiques West’s analysis of the so-called puritanism and dualism of Catholics in the past. She writes that in an age where pornography has captivated 60% of males, puritanism is surely not our main problem.
Written with wit and wisdom, I highly recommend this book to readers of our web with the caveat that I do not agree with one of the articles where she criticizes certain ideas of some Thomists without doing justice to all the greatness in that school of philosophy.
The Dark Night of the Body: Why Reverence comes first in Intimate Relations by Alice Von Hildebrand (Fort Collins, CO 80522, Roman Catholic Books) BOOKSforCATHOLICS.com. $14.50

3 Comments

Plug

3/13/2014

2 Comments

Tired of grungy leaflets for Stations of the Cross during Lent? Do I have a remedy for you!

You can just go to the Book Salon on our goodbooksmedia web-site and check out The Way of the Cross by Deacon Richard G. Ballard, Ruth H. Ballard, and Jody Cole. This exquisite book contains stunning icons by Jody Cole, Scriptures, meditations and prayers that will bring you fresh inspiration. Consider this description of the cross being laid on Jesus for the first time: “The scent of freshly hewn wood fills Jesus’ nostrils. His mind is transported to what seems a distant time and place. As a young man in his father’s carpenter shop, Jesus was accustomed to hard physical labor. There was always work to be done…Jesus went out to find trees and chop them down. He carted the loads back to his father’s shop, where he would help dress them and make them into plants that could be used in the construction of furniture and other useful items. Oh, how he loved the smell of that shop, the fragrance of the freshly cut timber…He even loved doing the heavy lifting for his father. It was a way to show his love for this kind and gentle man…Now he lifted another burden. The burden of the whole world seemed to be resting upon his back. And that scent, the smell of the freshly cut wood, seemed to waft upward, and upward, as if it were incense, an offering of sacrifice.”

If the authors’ names sounds familiar, the Ballard’s were my co-authors on What the Saints Said about Heaven, also to be found on our Book Salon.

I found amazing the pictorials that Jim Ridley found for the heavy written imagery on my yesterday’s blog! I thought, our creativissimo Jim Ridley, now has invented a new ministry: by putting up apt graphics for people’s journal writings, he is soothing us with compassion!

Another Political Correctness Item:

It’s taken me all these years to realize that referring to people as“old” about is now politically incorrect.

When I describe myself as an old hag or even an old woman, or even an old person, even though I am almost 77, many people immediately feel it necessary to insist that I am not old! They say, “You’re as young as you feel,” to which I reply humorously, "Well I feel like 90!"

I am proud to be old, and say I have one foot in eternity, don’t you want to have one foot in eternity, too. So I am making it a campaign to call people on hating to hear the word “old” or hate even saying that “bad word” about others.

Before roasting an "old dog," make sure she is tastefully "seasoned."

The latest hilarious retort from Raul Lozada, the tech expert who works with me on Distance Learning was, “Okay, instead of calling you an 'old dog' I will call you a 'seasoned dog.'”

I bet Jim Ridley will have fun finding graphics of old dogs to match this post!

2 Comments

Blood Knot

3/12/2014

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I am doing some crisis counseling with a Gestalt therapist who is a professor here at Holy Apostles. He asked me what my greatest fear was. I told him that, I think my greatest fear because I am a twin, is being alone. (I am an unidentical twin with my sister and I am the mother of identical twin daughters). So, if anyone seems to reject me in the slightest, I go into an anxiety attack because I equate rejection with abandonment, and abandonment with being alone, and alone with going insane. During the week after the session where this all came up, I suddenly got this ravenous craving for silence and solitude – just to be with Jesus. I think this was a huge grace.

My daughter, Carla, has been diagnosed with lymphoma. She is 50 years old and has 3 children still at home. She is very scared and so are all of us. Since she has her twin-sister visiting and 3 more family members coming in the next few weeks I haven’t planned a trip for now to be with her, but I feel awful that she is suffering and I am not right next to her to hold her and try to console her and lay hands over her for healing. Readers of Ronda-View, please pray for her. She has had the anointing of the sick, but she is not a practicing Catholic at this point.

I woke up from a nap with this image: I am remembering from maybe 35 years ago a play called Blood Knot. It was about male twins in South Africa. One was subservient to the colonial powers, the other a rebel, if I recall correctly. The image that they were tied together with a blood knot stuck in my psyche and it reappeared when I made my dedicated widow consecration as an image of my heart tied to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now, after all these years, anxious about my daughter Carla’s lymphoma diagnosis, I woke after a nap with the image of she and I tied with a blood knot such that even if I am not there with her, everything she is going through is happening within me at the same time because we are tied in a blood knot.

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The Greatest Presence

3/9/2014

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My dedicated widow friend Marti Armstrong, said the following about the value of Holy Mass. “After the Resurrection and Ascension certainly the apostles and disciples had Mass. If that had been the only place of Mass in the whole world, everyone would come from all over the world to encounter Jesus at that Mass."
I liked that more dramatic way of seeing why it has always been our teaching that Holy Mass is the greatest presence of God on earth.

Fr. Dennis Kolinski, our priest from the Canons of St. John Cantius, who teaches and preaches at our Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut where I live and teaching said in a sermon something very provocative. “The Cross is heavier if you resist.”

My spiritual director told me something challenging indeed. Even though it was specifically for me, I think some of you might benefit as well: “The combination of trying to do everything by intellect and will and out of control emotions keeps me from opening more simply to grace, which is neither intellect or will nor your turbulent emotions.”

A new form of “political correctness”: Some think that in evangelization it is intolerant to think in terms of refutation of errors. Instead we might gently address errors, but not talk about refuting them. When I heard this I was incensed. To me it is part of the job of Catholic philosophy to refute such errors as atheism or, in ethics, the idea that abortion could ever be right, etc. However, on the positive side, even if my goal is refutation, I need still to “speak the truth with love” vs. any kind of fierce anger, and certainly not sarcasm!

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At Last

sinking periodically

Stay Calm

Dark Night

Plug

Blood Knot

The Greatest Presence

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