All Souls

 

No sooner has the dust settled from All Saints than we arrive at All Souls. For me, the former's exuberant, the latter somber as we recall the souls of the faithful departed who have left this life, leaving a gap in our lives. But where have they gone?

To paradise and the beatific vision, albeit for the most part by way of purgatory, and that's a beautiful thing worth striving for by the grace of God. In light of that, here's this, inspired by LL, Dia de los Muertes:

May they rest in peace and rise in glory,

LSP

Purgatory

 

In a ferocious and possibly unsuccessful bid to escape from the brink of World War III, I looked up Austin Farrer on Purgatory. Many Anglicans and for all I know many of you don't like the doctrine, but it's always made sense to me.  

How could we not pass through purgation on our way to glorification? The chaff, famously, must be burned away.  Anyway, here's Farrer, see what you think:

I say, then, that the teaching of Christ, the nature of our freewill, and the way God deals with us all point in one direction: the loss of heaven is a real danger. Second. I observe that Christ teaches one thing with particular insistence. Men whose moral misery is disguised from them by comfort, pride or success, will find themselves after death a prey to that flame which can surely be nothing but the scorching truth. Third, I see that Christ speaks of the flame as everlasting, as a torment which does not lose its force, or die down. The sinner will vainly wait for it to exhaust itself, or hope to escape from it on the further side. But I do not see that I am forbidden to ask, what then? Cannot everlasting Mercy save from the everlasting fire, or let the irreconcilable perish in it?

The fate of ultimate impenitence is a mystery into which I am reluctant to look. If it overtakes any, I pray they may be few. But looking to myself and the hopes a Christian dares to entertain,  I find conscience and moral reason join forces with Catholic teaching, and forbid me to to claim exemption from the burning of that flame. If Dives needed to be stripped, and to suffer the truth of his condition, do not we also?

Perhaps before we suffer it, we may be assured of mercy; perhaps the sight of mercy will make the torment, when we see what a God we have, and how we have served him; what wounds we have inflicted on the souls of our fellows by our egotism and neglect.

Purgatory was rejected by our Reformers, as undermining the sufficiency of Christ's atonement; for it was taken to be the serving of a sentence by which the guilt of Christians was in some way worked off. Such an objection has no force against the teaching, that we have a pain to pass through, in being reconciled to truth and love. And we may as well call this pain purgatorial, having no other name to call it. It seems strange, indeed, that so practical and pressing a truth as that of purgatory should be dismissed, while so remote and impractical a doctrine as the absolute everlastingness of hell should be insisted on. (Saving Belief, P154-155)

 

Sadly, I'd say that the absolute everlastingness of hell becomes more apparent by the day, but Farrer was focused on Divine Mercy and the white hot, purifying light of God's truth. 

We must all pass through this, surely, on the way to sanctification and the green pastures and still waters of paradise. Such is the progress of conviction of sin, repentance, amendment of life, and absolution.

God bless you all,

LSP

A Sunday Sermon

The Gospel this morning focused on debt, sin and forgiveness in the form of a wicked servant who owed his king the vast sum of 10,000 Talents and was forgiven, only to throw a man into gaol (debtors' prison) who owed him a far smaller sum. The king was justly furious and threw the wretch to the jailers till he should "pay the last penny." This, of course, he could never do.

We get the point of the story on a purely human level, the behavior of the servant "just ain't right." In spiritual terms? How can we,  who owe such a weighty debt of sin to God and have been shown such merciful love by Him, turn 'round in vindictive, merciless fury on people who owe us so much less in comparison.

You don't need to be a world class ethicist to work it out, it just ain't right. And Christ warns us, unless you forgive your neighbor from your heart you'll be thrown into the prison of Hell. That sounds harsh but divine math is clear; a person who harbors merciless, vindictive wrath against another person has no place in paradise. Love and hatred cannot coexist.

So forgive, 70 x 7 or go to Hell. Does that mean we have to like or condone the behavior of people who grievously offend us? By no means, their actions may well be unconscionable and I do not say that lightly. But even so, banish hatred and merciless anger from your heart, it is toxic, poisonous, and utterly incompatible with God and heaven. So hard to do! Especially if we've been on the receiving end of evil, but do it we must. I find this helps, you may too. 

Start with God, reflect or meditate on his person, on his perfection, and on Christ, his character, teaching and, above all, what he has done for us, how he has given his life on the cross that we, utterly unworthy, might be forgiven.

Stand in humility before God, in the humility from which contrition and mercy flow, which in their turn drive out pride, hatred, malice, hardheartedness and a vindictive spirit, all the non-qualities abhorrent to God. Then offer the person or persons who have offended you to Christ, praying that his good will may be done in them. 

Well done, you've made an act of love for the person who's sinned against you and in the process opened yourself up to be a channel of his love in the world.

Having done that, pray fervently that Christ will grant you a forgiving heart. He will hear that prayer, made sincerely, and with it we will be forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us, and find the gates of heaven opened. Yes, even to us who are not worthy ut intres sub tectum meum .

Here endeth the Lesson,

LSP

++++++

Postscript, via Kobiessi Letter:

The U.S. Now Has:

1. Record $17.1 trillion in household debt

2. Record $12.0 trillion in mortgages

3. Record $1.6 trillion in auto loans

4. Record $1.6 trillion in student loans

5. Record $1.0 trillion in credit card debt

The average house payment is about to hit $3,000/month for the first time in history.

All as oil prices are up ~40% in 3 months, mortgage rates hit 7.5% and credit card rates are at a record 25%.

Borrowing more debt is not the solution to high inflation.

This is unsustainable.

Who will forgive this debt? God?  The bankers who issued it at interest? But who cares, maybe it'll all magically disappear and everything will be trans unicorn bathrooms and rainbows forever as we live into our stunningly brave new secular utopia where the debtor will never be punished by their bankster gaolers. Sure, go right ahead and believe that, and good luck to you.

Happy Easter

 

What good Masses at the Missions, full of joy. That in mind, wishing you all the best, new life in the risen and triumphant Christ. The strife, liturgically, is o'er, and so to score the uplift:

Turn it up and blast it out. Satan, Hell and Death is utterly refuted. Stand firm in that and do not surrender, ever,

Christus Surrexit Alleluia,

LSP

Holy Saturday And The Harrowing of Hell

 

Today Christ lays in the tomb and harrows Hell. A Scottish poet, George Mackay Brown, speaks:

He went down the first step.

His lantern shone like the morning star.

Down and round he went

Clothed in his five wounds.

Solomon whose coat was like daffodils

Came out of the shadows.

He kissed Wisdom there, on the second step.

The boy whose mouth had been filled with harp-songs,

The shepherd king

Gave, on the third step, his purest cry.

At the root of the Tree of Man, an urn

With dust of apple-blossom.

Joseph, harvest-dreamer, counsellor of pharaohs

Stood on the fourth step.

He blessed the lingering Bread of Life.

He who had wrestled with an angel,

The third of the chosen,

Hailed the King of Angels on the fifth step.

Abel with his flutes and fleeces

Who bore the first wound

Came to the sixth step with his pastorals.

On the seventh step down

The tall primal dust

Turned with a cry from digging and delving.

Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in a garden.

On the seventh step down the tall primal dust turned with a cry from digging and delving. Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in a garden. Yes indeed.

God bless,

LSP

A Mercifully Short Sunday Sermon

“Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able." (Lk 13:22)

Strive to enter by the narrow gate. It grates against post-modernist Marcusian ears, against the culturally ascendant air we breathe  because "narrow gate" sounds dangerously like narrow-minded, and so bigoted, intolerant and hateful.

"After all," says our Ivy League uneducated friend, "I've got my truth, you've got yours. Coexist!"

What a broad path and it sounds alluring; so free and tolerant, so very narrative. But let's apply this logic to mathematics. Imagine a classroom full of young children, pronouns mixed. Their teacher asks, "You have two rainbows in the sky and you add another two rainbows, how many rainbows are there?"

An impetuous youngster raises zhir hand, "One!" A pensive girl, she/hers, utters "three," another adventurer exclaims four, another eight and an enthusiastic child offers up "eighty eight!" The teacher beams, "Children, all of you are right!" And each receives a delicious unicorn cupcake, don't say Lambeth Conference.

But look what's happened. In the name of freedom, these poor children have been denied the liberty of doing mathematics because they haven't been allowed to go through the narrow gate of correct addition. The logic of salvation's similar.

As with 2+2=4, there's one solution to paradise and that's Christ; He is the gate. Only He unites humanity to God, He alone is true God and true Man. He alone offers the perfect, sinless, atoning sacrifice to the Father for the forgivness of sins and He, and only He, rises victorious from the grave only to give His resurrected life to the faithful.

So to get to heaven, the end or τέλος of desire, we have to go through Christ, the door, the gate of the sheep, the way, the truth and the life. And we must strive to do so, to make the conscious, deliberate effort to conform our lives to His.

The Savior's grace, frightened and gentle readers, will supply the deficiency.

Here endeth the Lesson,

LSP

What Fresh Hell is This?

The Senate did not pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act today, the bill failed 53-44. It would have prevented doctors from killing babies born after a failed abortion, which is apparently legal at the present time. 

Democrats were almost unanimously opposed to the law because they felt it was harmful to "womens health." Several Republicans voted with them and you can read about it here.

There's something stunning, at least to me, about such blatant and unapologetic evil. Hell, if you like, is erupting from the cracks and crevices of the ground we walk on, a ground that used to be Christian and clearly isn't anymore.

The next time someone tells you, "You don't have to be Christian to be good," refer them to the babies that are killed every day with government funding, your funding, right up to the point of birth and beyond. Then watch them twist and turn like a writhing snake in their attempt to justify this horror.

I tell you, Satan openly, brazenly stalks the land. But remember this, the gates of Hell will not prevail against the onslaught of the Church. 

About time she woke up,

LSP

You're Fired!

Well, almost. High flying Episcopal Church lib bishop, Stacy Sauls, has been placed on "administrative leave" by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry because of "possible misconduct." Curry wrote the following:

I need to inform you that on Wednesday I placed on administrative leave Bishop Stacy Sauls, Chief Operating Officer, Samuel McDonald, Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Director of Mission, and Alex Baumgarten, Director of Public Engagement. This is a result of concerns that have been raised about possible misconduct in carrying out their duties as members of senior management of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.

Sauls is notorious for bullying and not believing in the Bible, Hell, or Satan.

Sure about that last bit, Stacy? 

Good riddance.

LSP