Ghostly Counsel

I find this helpful, you might too:

WHO has not sometimes thought: If I could see Jesus Christ as he was on this earth; if I could talk with him, if I could have certainty from those divine lips, and read assurance in those steady eyes, then I should lay hold of God.  So we think, but not so he teaches.  He is in the Supper Room, desiring in that last opportunity to enlighten his disciples' minds and to assure their faith.  But beyond a point he cannot.  He cannot teach them as fully, he says, as the Holy Ghost will teach them hereafter.  It is not so much the word of Jesus knocking at the mind's door that secures his admittance; it is the God within drawing the bolts with invisible fingers.  When your pride, he says, when your self-sufficiency has been shattered by the experience of my death, the Spirit will secure the admittance of all the truth you need to know.  And so it is: after half an hour's repentance before the cross of Christ, the Spirit shows us what years of study cannot discover, and what Christ present in the flesh might not avail to make us see. (Austin Farrer, Crown of the Year)

 

I can't and won't add to that.

God bless,

LSP

Shrove Tuesday

As we're on the eve Lent it makes sense, perhaps, to leave the bracing air of Valentine's Day bears and Lee Enfield projects behind, if only for a time.

Here's some Farrer to get the penitential spirit moving -- from The Crown of the Year.

"CHRIST broke his mysterious body and gave it to his disciples at the Supper without explaining at that time what the breaking and giving would mean. There was no need, the facts would presently make it clear. What, then, was done to this body? It was stripped, scourged, and nailed to a cross: stripped of all dignity and all possession, scourged with the stroke of penal justice, and nailed up like a dead thing while it was still alive. The body you receive in this sacrament accomplished its purpose by nailing to a tree. You are to become this body, you are to be nailed: nailed to Christ’s sacrificial will. The nails that hold you are God’s commandments, your rules of life, prayers, confessions, communions regularly observed. Let us honour the nails for Christ’s sake, and pray that by the virtue of his passion they may hold fast."

Serious business. 

LSP

House Of Gold

As we prepare for Christmas and try to forget the impending fiscal maelstrom and the likelihood of a Deathstar Blockbuster Bonanza strike against Iran, our minds are drawn to the birth of Christ. It's easy, perhaps, for Christians who focus on the transcendent glory of the Word made Flesh to forget the tenderness and intimacy of the event; to say nothing of the Cross and Passion which the Incarnation unfolds into. Austin Farrer holds all aspects together. In The Crown of the Year he writes:

“WHEN Mary laid Jesus Christ upon her knees, when she searched him with her eyes, when she fed him at the breast, she did not study to love him because she ought, she loved him because he was dear: he was her Son. His conception had been supernatural, perplexing, affrighting; it had called for faith in the incomprehensible, and obedience beyond the limit of human power. His nativity was human and sweet, and the love with which she embraced it was a natural growth, inseparable from the thing she loved. She was blessed above all creatures, because she loved her Maker inevitably and by simple nature; even though it needed the sword - wounds of the Passion to teach her fully that it was her Maker whom she loved. The Son of Mary is the Son of all human kind; we embrace him with the love of our kind, that we may be led up with Mary to a love beyond kind, a selfless love for the supreme Goodness, when we too shall have climbed the ladder of the cross.”

I love that.

LSP