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Greetings from Hot Springs, Arkansas, My new home

8/18/2018

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Many, many blessings. My granddaughter and family are renting on a lake here. It is beautiful and can be seen from an outdoor patio, by going for a swim, or from an indoor glass enclosed patio.  
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Generally I love the ocean best, but lakes are terrific also.
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I am delighted that my arrangement with the family includes dinners cooked by my granddaughter Jenny’s geology professor husband, who is a gourmet cook. In the last year since leaving the seminary dining room, the only way I could swallow the food I cook for myself is by ruminating about how ecstatic I would be to eat this if I was in the gulag!
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The parish is wonderful -  so magisterial that the pastor actually talked about hell-fire as real!  But friendly as can be which is my second most important feature of a parish.
A thought that will amuse some readers is that philosophical types, like me, try to substitute logic for common sense…
as in trying to figure out why my family insists that the 3 year old not climb on the table to run around since they let the cats do it. 
My grand-son-in-law, with common sense, explained that if they didn’t train little Teresa not to do this, she would be considered odd when visiting friends and leaping on their tables!
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A good thought on leaving my pseudo-hermitess existence in Corpus Christi for living with this family, in my own in-law  suite, but still immersed in family life: Mary wasn’t a hermit. Jesus gave her as family John, by analogy like living with Jenny and Sean  and Teresa and new-born Julia.  
 Speculation:  Could it be that  many mother’s-in-law and son’s in-law don’t get along because this is a mother figure who never nurtured him but thinks she can criticize him and give him advice.  And the mother-in-law feels the son in-law is could be doing imprudent things that will hurt her daughter’s future….???
 Some more on the theme of Games Catholics Play. If you didn’t read the blog where I explained this title, scroll down until you find it on the date of August 5!
Another example: You learn from friends and mentors what their worst experiences have been of insult, etc. but then you use these against them years later when you are angry at them!
Still another: old Catholic biddies, such as myself,  who have no one to boss  around can do it virtually on family and other chat boards by expostulating on what everyone should be doing “my way.”
Another:  Someone, usually a woman, loads down gifts on those she wants as friends and then makes them feel guilty for not responding in kind even though said potential friend never wanted our  friendship or our gifts!  Friends are a gift of God not a repayment!
Another: I don’t need spiritual direction because priests are too busy to give such direction, they just give a few words of advice.  This leaves out praying for a spiritual director who can be anyone holier than oneself!
I’m only angry because  everyone else is so obnoxious.  But, how come others remain peaceful in the same circumstances?
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Life in the Old Girl Yet

8/6/2018

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I was at our apartment complex outdoor swimming pool with my scrawny, wrinkled old body doing my breast stroke slowly and watching two 8 year old girls trying to learn to dive.  I thought “I haven’t tried to dive in 40 years – I used to dive sometimes at the Loyola Marymount pool when I took my twins there, but I hated the feeling of the water going into my nose and then my throat.”
Then I thought, maybe I should dive just one last time on this earth.  I hesitated. Finally I decided I would just do it.  A young man who had been swimming laps saw me hesitating at the edge of the deep end. “Do it. I’m supporting you,” he yelled out.
I plunged in. On the way up, I remembered that awful sensation in the nose. But it was worth it. The little girls and the young man clapped. I felt it was a symbol of diving into the adventure of the next part of my life in Hot Springs.
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Games Catholics Play

8/5/2018

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Many decades ago a psychologist, Eric Berne, wrote a book called Games People Play. It became a best seller.  Wikipedia says it has sold 50 million copies!  Part of the metaphor is that we often use childish strategies to avoid blame. Consider the phrase “See what you made me do!” shifting blame from our own free will decisions to someone else.
Through the years I always dreamed of writing a spin-off book called GAMES CATHOLICS PLAY. It would consist of describing situations where Catholics unconsciously manipulate others under the guise of virtue.
I would like to devote some of this blog to instances that come up.  Now most of these are my own manipulative techniques, so you shouldn’t think I am accusing my wonderful readers of such mechanisms, but of course, if the shoe fits!!!!
Here is one that anyone who knows me personally has witnessed all too often:
I can become angry to the point of yelling at anyone who disagrees with me even in public situations.  Of course, I think I am right, but since we are to “speak the truth with love” not with anger most of the time, it doesn’t take long for me to stop yelling and apologize.
It is good, of course, to apologize immediately whenever we do something wrong that hurts or belittles another person.
Here is the game!  I not only apologize publicly but I insist that the victim forgive me immediately.
Usually the victim just looks at me with a puzzled slightly hurt expression on his or her face.
If the victim is a priest I start begging him to hear my confession asap.
Why is this a “game?”
I finally figured it out. I am shifting the attention from my fault or sin onto the victim as if he or she is to blame for not forgiving me profusely and immediately.  I give the victim no time to think about the incident or respond with a refutation of “my” truth.
I become a kind of spiritual drama-queen.
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Now, since I am working with my spiritual director, Al Hughes, on getting to the bitter root of such behavior, this is what I figured out:
Because of my father leaving us twins when we were 8 years old, I have pervading fear of rejection. I am assured, even though I didn’t feel it at the time, that children consider the separation of their parents as somehow their fault, not the fault of the spouse.

Now, symbolically, through the years, I have a need to be reassured of the love of others for me by demanding total public forgiveness whenever I do something wrong.

​So, how would I react differently if I were more sheltered in the love of Jesus for Ronda, the sinner?

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When anyone questions some truth I have enunciated, I need to take these steps: 1. Pause; 2. In a short prayer, bring the incident to Jesus, asking Him for help; 3. Ask for a clear understanding of any truth, even half-truth, my interlocutor was expressing; 4. Start my next words in a calm voice with something like: I think what you are trying to get across is __________________. Now that is true, but, on the other hand, I don’t think it is incompatible with my contention…
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Toe-Hold in Hot Springs

8/4/2018

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The best contemporary spiritual book I’ve read recently is by Father Donald Haggerty, a chaplain of the Missionaries of Charity. It is called Conversion and is published by Ignatius Press. It is an evocation about the graces that await us if go beyond the first conversion that brought us to become ardent Catholics, to a future union with Jesus.  If you fit into the category of ardent Catholic but still feel there is more to come while still on this earth, get hold of this book. 
By the way, I loved, loved, love the O'Connor book The Edge of Sadness about this reformed alcoholic 50's priest.
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Moving

8/1/2018

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NOTE TO READERS OF RONDA’S BLOG:  
RONDA WILL BE MOVING TO HOT SPRINGS ARKANSAS TO LIVE WITH FAMILY THERE.
​THERE WILL BE A FEW WEEKS WITHOUT BLOGS AS SHE SETTLES IN.

If you recall, the funny title I gave to this period of my blog was
Ruminations of a Demented Pseudo-nun. 
In line with the semi-dementia problem I am experiencing I got this happy thought. You know how many spiritual writers tell us with have to stay in the NOW, not live in the past or the future. Well, if I can hardly recall most of the past and I am not even sure what day tomorrow is, then
​THERE IS MUCH MORE ROOM TO LIVE IN THE NOW!!!!
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Pilgrim home

7/15/2018

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I have been thinking about how because I was a pilgrim in a way after becoming a widow, I see the Church as my home and my dwellings as way-stations.  But women who have lived in the same house for years and made it wonderful and beautiful for their families feel very differently.
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 Their homes are kind of cacoons! ​
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One of my daughters had to move out of her 15 year home suddenly.  I thought she now has to make the heart of Jesus her cacoon.
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Technological Composure

7/8/2018

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Jesus allegedly told me years ago that He likes to surprise me.  A big surprise of this period of my life (81 years-old) is that my old enemy
has become my friend.

Here is the story. Having whined about the miseries of tech for 30 years, including having to confess  screaming at the phone or computer, now my PC is giving me a huge  gift.  My whole family in distant parts is on a chat board every day. Now, I used to make fun of facebook saying who wants to know what every friend ate for breakfast?  But, with this intimate  family chat I find it is a way of virtually being together, especially because the younger techies put up
​tiny videos of themselves doing funny things.

So now I am sending up praise-prayers of gratitude for tech.
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On a totally different note, I always picture myself soaring into  purgatory, ante-room of heaven. But the Holy Spirit gave me a different image  - crawl into purgatory on your knees!
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A Santa Claus Tie-in
Probably even younger people than I remember the children’s song Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
Now atheists, such as myself before my conversion at 21, like to say that believing in God is as  stupid as believing in Santa Claus. (Of  course, we never knew that Santa Claus, historically, is based on a real saint Nicholas.)
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However, there is this line in the song that goes: he’s coming to see if you’ve been naughty or nice…with the implication that if you were naughty you don’t get glorious gifts from Santa Claus.
Now, here’s the tie-in. 
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Some theologians seem to not only hope that no one goes to Hell, but even think that there is no one in Hell, contrary to the Catechism which says we shouldn’t think we, personally, can put others into Hell but that Hell, as a real  destination, is confirmed in Scripture.
So, in effect, such dissenters are making Jesus into a Super-Santa Claus figure who doesn’t even care if we are unrepentantly naughty, but brings us to heaven no matter what.  And the reward is not little Christmas gifts but an eternity of blissful union with the Trinity.
It is as if a human father would threaten a child with banishment but then say, “but, of course I’ll never do that.”
So, my take is that even if everyone is saved in the end through God’s mercy and the purifications of purgatory, it is extremely presumptuous
to make hell an empty threat.

And we see the result of such dissent exhibits itself in some priests never talking even about praying for the souls of the dead. In their funeral homilies, such will only talk about whatever was good in the person who died as if
heaven is the only destination.

Jesus on the Cross, dying for our sins, has little resemblance to the Santa Claus of the department stores.
P.S.  After  writing this, I had an uneasy feeling that there was something missing, which came to me after a long nap.
The point is that a really naughty child doesn’t really get the full joy of Christmas even if they get gifts. Why?  Because they are too greedily anticipating and playing with their gifts that they don’t experience the more important thing of the loving hearts of those who gave the gifts.
Similarly, someone said, anyone who really hates God cannot be in heaven because heaven is the experience of God.

Long ago, I got an inkling of this truth.  I was waiting in a Church with my husband for some famous priest healer to bless him (my husband had terrible late onset asthma).  As we waited, I realized I wanted a favorable outcome but didn’t really want that saintly priest to spend any time with me. Why not? I was comfortable with my own state of soul and didn’t want
​such a holy person to perhaps stretch me? 

So, purgatory purifies and expands our souls.  We are not ready to go right from this life into heaven unless we are truly saints. As in the famous poem of  Cardinal Newman (now blessed?) The  Dream of Gerontius, where the dying soul catches a glimpse of God and prays “Take me away!” realizing he needs to be purified first.
Of course, purgatory is not hell, but if we have ever in our lives felt repelled by the holiness of another, we can imagine how there could  be someone who doesn’t at the time of death pray for mercy, but stands its ground in defiance.
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 In Purgatory, the remaining infestation of the beasts of iniquitous vice are expelled from the heart of the penitent soul.
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Nun-sensical

7/7/2018

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Dear readers of my new blog
with the humorous name:
Ruminations of a Demented Pseudo-Nun,

 Due to the hilarious graphics of Jim Ridley, it looks as if I wear a glorious nun’s habit. For  those of you who never met me in person, that is not so.  As a dedicated widow I wear simple blue outfits, many different ones because the Church’s practice is that only those in community can wear habits. I think the reason is that someone bogus could try to collect money as if she were a Sister!
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Evangelization in an off-beat mode:

7/3/2018

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I am sitting at the swimming pool of the apartment complex
I live in here in Corpus Christi.

A little  boy looks at this huge tough black father with a huge head of hair, beard, and braids and says:
“Are you a girl?”
The man grins and says:

“No, braids are neater.”

I smile and say:

“In case you’re a Christian,
I like to ask men why they want to waste good money
on shaving cream and hair-cuts when they can look
more like Jesus with long hair and beards.”

The kid didn’t get it, of course, but the man smiled and said: 
​
“I never thought of that.”

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NEW SERIES OF BLOGS

7/3/2018

3 Comments

 
Having gotten over my gall bladder surgery, a huge success, and all packed with my 10 boxes of possessions for the move to Hot Springs, Arkansas to live with my granddaughter’s daily communicant family…and having finished writing my 65th book, I find myself a  word-monger with nothing to write.
I thought that word puzzles would do it, but it’s not the same!
It seemed as if it wouldn’t hurt to write the next blog series in a comic vein. Probably my graphic artist’s web-master Jim Ridley’s outrageous comic illustrations have finally overcome all my efforts to write like a sage.  My guardian angel seemed to joke with me:
“Well, no one who reads you ever thought you were the 20
th century
St. Bernard you know.” 
 
​

My comic title:
RUMINATIONS
OF A DEMENTED PSEUDO-NUN
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For those who might be new to that blog, the last reference is my being a dedicated widow. If you don’t know what that is, go to www.rondachervin.com and click on widow-options.
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    Author

    Ronda Chervin received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University and an MA in Religious Studies from Notre Dame Apostolic Institute. She is a dedicated widow, mother, and grandmother.
    Ronda converted to the Catholic Faith from a Jewish, though atheistic, background and has been a Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Loyola Marymount University, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is an international speaker and author of some fifty books about Catholic thought, practice and spirituality. One of her latest is LAST CALL, published by Goodbooks Media.
    Dr. Ronda is currently retired and living in Corpus Christi, Texas after her years of teaching philosophy at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
    You can contact her via e-mail by clicking here or by emailing [email protected] directly.

    Visit her websites:
    here and here.

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