A Curious Thing

 

A curious thing happened today. All the people from Mission #2 who like to go the increasingly popular Shooky's of a Thursday evening turned up at Mass first, without any prompting. That's right, with not a word from me, not even an annoyingly jocular clerical bribe, "Hey, there's a 10% discount if you go to Mass first," ha, ha, sorta thing. No, they just turned up.

Well done, team, and it makes sense. Our communion with one another flows from communion with God in the Mystical Body of Christ, nourished, vivified and deepened at the Altar. Get that right and the other follows naturally.

You know, I recall a priest in DC who told me, "We're at the point where the people here don't even think of doing a parish event without going to Mass first." Right on, worship, giving ourselves in love to God, comes first, always. 

It's what we're created for, and we saw a little bit of that North Central Texas this evening.

Stella Maris,

LSP

Uplifting

 

What uplifting worship this morning. The Word of God heard and preached, the Sacrament of the Altar administered and there we were, the local instance of the Mystical Body of Christ in rural Texas. No small thing.

You know, if any of you had told me a couple of decades ago that I'd be ministering out in the missions here in Hill and Bosque counties I'd have laughed. "What do you mean? Neither church has an 8' stone altar and where's all the polychrome?" Well, the joke would've been on me and God's been kind.

up your game, LSP

Speaking of which, many people are asking, "Where can we buy food and drink now that everything's gone full CorpCom Satan Rainbow?" Problem. Luckily Mission #2 has come up with a solution. Every Sunday the people bring food which they've grown and you can take what you want or need.

I tell you, it's like a small farmers' market, with fresh greens, beans, cucumbers, squash, eggs and more, and none of it's cursed by the wretched stamp of gaily hued degeneracy. Result, gotta get back to the garden.

In related news, infamous trans activist Scots goblin Nicola Sturgeon's been arrested. Allegedly the despised dwarven malfeasant was up to some kind of fiscal skulduggery. She's been released, annoyingly.

Cheers,

LSP

Rest in Peace

 

I know this jingoistic and shallow mind blog's mostly about the glory that was the British Empire, rodeo and the perfidy of the Left, but step back and consider this excerpt from a sermon preached by Austin Farrer at the end of World War II:

‘May they rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon them’ - those millions among whom our friends are lost, those millions for whom we cannot choose but pray; because prayer is a sharing in the love of the heart of God, and the love of God is earnestly set towards the salvation of his spiritual creatures, by, through and out of the fire that purifies them. 

The arithmetic of death perplexes our brains. What can we do but throw ourselves upon the infinity of God? It is only to a finite mind that number is an obstacle, or multiplicity a distraction. Our mind is like a box of limited content, out of which one thing must be emptied before another can find a place. The universe of creatures is queuing for a turn of our attention, and no appreciable part of the queue will ever get a turn. But no queue forms before the throne of everlasting mercy, because the nature of an infinite mind is to be simply aware of everything that is. 

Everything is simply present to an infinite mind, because it exists; or rather, exists because it is present to that making mind. And though by some process of averaging and calculation I should compute the grains of sand, it would be like the arithmetic of the departed souls, an empty sum; I could not tell them as they are told in the infinity of God’s counsels, each one separately present as what it is, and simply because it is. 

The thought God gives to any of his creatures is not measured by the attention he can spare, but by the object for consideration they can supply. God is not divided; it is God, not a part of God, who applies himself to the falling sparrow, and to the crucified Lord. But there is more in the beloved Son than in the sparrow, to be observed and loved and saved by God. So every soul that has passed out of this visible world, as well as every soul remaining within it, is caught and held in the unwavering beam of divine care. And we may comfort ourselves for our own inability to tell the grains of sand, or to reckon the thousands of millions of the departed. 

And yet we cannot altogether escape so; for our religion is not a simple relation of every soul separately to God, it is a mystical body in which we are all members one of another. And in this mystical body it does not suffice that every soul should be embraced by the thoughts of God; it has also to be that every soul should, in its thought, embrace the other souls. For apart from this mutual embracing, it would be unintelligible why we should pray at all, either for the living or for the departed. Such prayer is nothing but the exercising of our membership in the body of Christ. God is not content to care for us each severally, unless he can also, by his Holy Spirit in each one of us, care through and in us for all the rest. Every one of us is to be a focus of that divine life of which the attractive power holds the body together in one. 

So even in the darkness and blindness of our present existence, our thought ranges abroad and spreads out towards the confines of the mystical Christ, remembering the whole Church of Christ, as well militant on earth as triumphant in heaven; invoking angels, archangels and all the spiritual host.

I came across it while preparing an obit and found it helpful, I hope you do too. Farrer was a genius and a holy man.

God bless,

LSP

A Good Sunday

It was a good Sunday in the Missions, with everyone coming together well to worship God and enjoy the fellowship that comes naturally from communion in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Speaking of which, there was nearly a disaster over a cake and a flower. That didn't happen, praise God, but I was asked for advice.

"Padre, it didn't seem right. I've had enough," said a barely restrained, decorated Veteran Crew Chief (VCC). I pondered this, it was a moment, defeat and victory hung in balance.

"VCC, think of it as an ambush.You were ambushed by a Pointsettia."

"Ummm, yeah, I guess," replied a polite but hardly convinced VCC.

"So how do you fight through this ambush?" 

Silence, after all, this is dangerous ground.

"You walk around it, Chief."

Laughter ensued and all was right with the world again. The day ended around a fire pit out in the country, where some churchpeople are building a compound and more power to them. 

It was good being out under the stars in the clean country air and away from the NFL.

Were we drinking Old Raj gin? I'll leave that to your imagination.

God bless,

LSP

Christ the King

Viva Cristo Rey!

Christ's kingship is exemplified in the sacrificial love of the cross and it's frightening to see the irrational rage that can evoke in people.  Why? Perhaps because deep-seated wickedness hates to be exposed and reacts first with derision and then with a kind of brute fury against its opposite.

Christ the King

The Church, which is inevitably drawn to the cross, will have to expect more of that as we get further into our brave new secularist experiment. 

Viva Cristo Rey.

LSP