KEEP IT SIMPLE

Saint Joseph of Cupertino

I have come under criticism for being rather simplistic in my online writing. I suppose I could be more sophisticated or entertaining, but I feel that, at times, our appetites for entertainment and soothing words mask a spiritual life that is disintegrating.

If we haven't got the basics under control, which many of us do not, all of the simpering commentary about our deep love for the Lord and the mystical feelings we experience therefrom, are just our own personal propaganda that we use to hide the fact that we are morally corrupt.

Do you lie, cheat and steal without confession and remorse? You can bellow out the words to your favorite hymn at church, cry at the reception of the eucharist, donate all your time to your "ministry", have a vocabulary complete devoid of swear words, and, although the world may cover you with flowers, you may still go to hell.

The Last Judgment

Many people presume upon the forgiveness of the Lord while they are lying, stealing and murdering and do not confess and repent of it. One woman, after I heard her lying to someone on the phone (in order to gain a monetary advantage) told me, "Don't you worry about me, Missy - I am going to heaven!" and "it isn't a lie, it's just a story." Later, she stole from me. Then I saw her stealing the food that was left out at the mailboxes for the food drive for which the postal workers were collecting for the poor. She lied about it later. ("It isn't a lie, it's a story.") It makes me very sad because, without confession and repentance, she will go to Hell, and I do not want anyone to go to Hell. I pray that she confesses and repents so that I may see her in Heaven.

There are also people who put themselves forward as spiritual personalities in order to hide their crimes. I heard of one who killed a wealthy, demented spouse with an overdose, had the body quickly cremated without a doctor seeing it, and collected sympathy cards with a sad air, between giving sappy sermons about the poor man they murdered. While the world rewards them for their spiritual masquerade, God certainly won't. Eternity is a very long time, and their ill-gotten gains won't accompany them after death.

Saint Theresa of Avila, in ecstacy

I love the mystical life. It is thrilling to read stories about the saints who experienced the miraculous, who heard the voice of the Lord and received his embrace in ecstacy. It is popular to focus on this aspect of spiritual life, and it IS a very real manifestation of spirituality, but it isn't what Jesus emphasized.
                                             

Saint Gregory

Jesus told us that he did not come to bring peace, but the sword. He said that our families would be rent apart, with one member against another. He told us that some people, at the end, would call out to Him, "Lord! Lord!" and that He would send them away, telling them that He does not know them. He promised that those who love Him would follow his commandments and would go to heaven.

Icon of the "ladder to heaven"

If you follow the commands of the Lord and live a truly holy life, it will separate you from those who do not follow him. It will make you a target of the evil that lives within the hearts of those who do not really love the Lord. You will suffer on this earth, just as Christ himself suffered. Those who do not obey the commandments of the Lord will lie about you and work against you in every way. They will steal from you and try to punish you for your goodness because evil cannot bear to see the beauty of the Lord that is manifested in one who is following the commandments of Jesus.

We weren't promised financial reward in exchange for a holy life. Some of the modern Protestant denominations promote a scandalous "prosperity gospel" which plays right into the modern love of money. It also encourages prejudice against the poor, which is the opposite of the message of Jesus and his apostles. I have seen it confuse people and pervert their faith. Some mistakenly think that, if they are living a prosperous life, then everything they do must be holy, and that is not the criteria that Jesus gave us.

I write about this topic because I think it is needed. We have plenty of entertaining books and blogs, as well as political writing that pretends to be spiritual but helps to distract us from the basics. I am attempting to direct attention to Jesus and what He said - to the Church and what it teaches - and to the Bible and the guidance it provides, because I have been shocked and saddened to see the large number of people who lie, cheat, steal, and murder while delusionaly believing that they will go to heaven anyway.

Because of love for my neighbor, fellow-feeling and compassion, I would like to see everyone go to Heaven. I am trying to encourage everyone to look to the faith and get their foundation built solidly on the commandments of Jesus that are built on the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament.

In short, stop your lyin' cheatin' and stealin' ya'll!

Silver Rose 

(Sannyasini Kaliprana)

Silver Cottage Ashram Hermitage

Albuquerque, New Mexico

ECCENTRICS OFFER UNEXPECTED GIFTS

For more than 30 years, my grandmother lived in a boarding house situated in a gorgeous old brownstone near the University Hospital, where she was the head night nurse on the psychiatric ward.

Over the years, during numerous visits to Grammy, I came to know and love the others in the house, many of whom were also long-time residents. There was one man in particular who was considered a bit odd because his room was piled high with newspapers.

It wasn't a mean-spirited assessment. I just think that my Grammy didn't know him very well and, on the surface, all those piles of newspapers were incomprehensible to her. It turns out that he was interested in politics, and he went on to become a public servant of some sort. The newspapers made perfect sense in that context.

Whenever I run across the occasional eccentric, I think about that man and his piles of newspapers. I assume that the eccentricities of everyone make some kind of sense in some context as yet unknown to me.

So far, it has been my experience that eccentrics bring valuable, if unexpect gifts, to the table. I make an effort to remember this when I come into contact with people whose behavior is outside the norm. Of course, sometimes they ARE crazy, but, more often than not, they're not.

I am dedicating my prayers today to the eccentrics of the world.

God bless us all.

Silver Rose

TRUTH AND LIES - HEAVEN AND HELL

There is a saying that "possession is nine tenths of the law."

What this means is that our laws mostly have to do with matters of who owns what; nine tenths of the law being an arbitrary number to convey the concept of "most."

What it does NOT mean is that, if you manage to grab hold of a thing it is automatically yours. There is no legal principle or law that even vaguely promotes this idea. Our society recognizes theft as something bad and punishable. Not only will the law require you return the item you have misappropriated, but it will punish you over and above depriving you of this thing that you wanted bad enough to steal.

Even if you find something valuable on the sidewalk, the law will return it to its rightful owner, if the owner can prove that it belongs to him.

People are selfish, however, and they WANT to believe that the law will support their selfishness. A character in a movie I watched recently was expounding that "possession is nine-tenths of the law." I wondered if the screen writer realized his mistake or if he was deliberately making a comment about the point of view of the character, who was a brutal thug.

I once tried to explain this to a woman who takes herself very seriously as a spiritual personality. With her nose in the air, she decreed, "This is what that saying means NOW," as if she could change the meaning of a word on demand.

Just because some people misunderstand a thing does not mean that, by the force of their misunderstanding, some principle becomes altered. No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Something is not yours, just because you manage to get your hands on it. Believing otherwise will not change the law. Just rob a bank and see how much of the law protects your right to do so.

Often, it seems to me, people incorporate lies into their worldview without regard for the damage it does to their soul. People who are not self-reflective, who do not examine themselves honestly, believe and promote convenient lies that cater to their selfishness and darken their souls thereby.

The brilliance of Catholic confession is that helps us root out the darkness that takes root in us when we are not paying attention. Selfish ideas feed selfish motives, which feed selfish acts. This is why Jesus gave the apostles the ability to forgive sin, something which previously was reserved to God alone. Jesus recognized our spiritual weakness, our tendency to selfishness and sin. He loves us enough to give us a method of restoring our souls to the purity of God's original intention for us.

In the examination of conscience before confession, we shine a critical light on our actions. We have to adjust our point of view to the purity of God's perspective. If we struggle in our effort to align our beliefs with those of the church, the degree of the struggle is the degree to which we have wandered away from Him who is all Truth.

Spiritual house-cleaning is essential to our happiness. There is no deception in God and we cannot join with God, on earth or in heaven, if we have joined our souls with the darkness of deception. Lies are of the Devil, and he is the father of all lies. If a lie is coming from us, then we have Satan within us. We must throw him out.

Many people firmly believe that, no matter what they do on earth, they will go to heaven when they die. They ignore the words of Jesus:

"Not every one who saith to me, Lord, Lord shall enter into

the kingdom of heaven, but he that doth the will of my father

who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven."

Matthew 7:21

One of the things that Protestants removed from the faith was formal confession. They believe that you do not need to get forgiveness from "a man" of the church. You can go to God directly. If that was all one needed to do, Jesus would have decreed it. He didn't. He had a reason for giving the apostles the ability to forgive sin. He breathed upon them, giving them the Holy Spirit, and said:

"Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them;

and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."

John 20:23

The brilliance of the Catholic faith is manifest to a great extent in the opportunity of confession. Jesus was the best psychologist we could ever have, in my opinion. He provided a prescription for the reparation of our souls - a divine "do-over," if you will.

Many people do not believe in hell or the Devil any more. I assure them that the Devil certainly believes in THEM. Even if one has managed to reduce God and Satan, heaven and hell, to abstract principles of good and evil, one cannot dispense with the necessity for goodness within ourselves in order to reside with goodness in the hereafter.

Even if you can't make yourself go to confession, or if finding the time or opportunity is difficult, I recommend the process of regular self-reflection, as it has been very helpful to me. If you can keep yourself on the right track by daily self-correction, you'll have less to confess when you finally make it to a formal confession.

It has been my experience that, if I incline my mind toward God, the rest of me follows suit. Here, on the verge of the celebration of Pentacost, I ask for your prayers, that I may grow closer to the Lord. I will pray the same for you.

God bless us all.

Silver Rose Parnell

INTERNET SERVICE IS DEGRADING - BLOGGING WILL BE LIMITED

The internet service I have been using is the cheapest available, but it is no longer working most of the time. It takes me HOURS to get the simplest task accomplished online. The connection gets lost hundreds of times every day, and I have to do the same functions over and over again.

The telephone lines are 30 years old and were not meant to carry internet.  Telephone company repairmen have all told me that, if I was living in a house, rather than a large apartment complex, it would be a simple matter to get the internet directly to the outside wall and bypass the old wires, but I am not allowed to do that in the large apartment complex where I live.

I am not able to afford better service. Comcast pretty much has the monopoly on THAT.

Many years ago, I had responded to a "special" that Comcast was running. I had to subscribe to television service in order to get the internet. It is one of the arbitrary rules that they impose in order to sucker the consumer into purchasing things they do not need.

After the technician installed the equipment, I could not get it to work properly. I could not get very many channels. The internet was slow. The voice remote was not working.

I assumed that it was "operator error" since I am not technologically savvy, in many ways. It was a few months before I finally gave up trying to "learn" how to work the equipment and I called them and had them send out ANOTHER technician. That technician advised me that I had been set up with the wrong equipment, the wrong channels, the wrong service. I had been paying top dollar for what we affectionately call "ghetto cable" here in poor town.

I cancelled Comcast service because of all this mess, and now they claim I OWE THEM $211 ! They owe ME, but it is impossible to get through to them.

I refuse to pay these con artists a single cent for "services" I did not receive. I tried to talk to them about it this morning, but, of course, the woman barely spoke English and just kept repeating that her "system" is telling her that I owe them money. She refused to acknowledge anything I said to her about the previous experience, and just kept repeating the same thing, like a machine. Perhaps I WAS speaking to a machine. I do not know.

Something in the back of my mind also tells me that committing myself to another big bill, even if I were to get enough donations to cover the expenses, is NOT a good idea for an independent religious person.

Being disabled, it is almost impossible to live without cable, but I CAN live with and struggle with the horrible service that I have now, which is at least half as cheap as Comcast. It takes me ten times as long to shop or do anything else on the internet with this horrible service, so I will have to give up some things that are not necessary. Perhaps God wants me to pray more and compute less?

In any case, what this means for the blog is that blogging will be very limited. Do not be alarmed if I do not post for some time. The page is still active. The donation button works. I am still reachable. Feel free to comment. That is the easiest way to communicate with me. Otherwise, you can look me up on Facebook, where I have a presence.

God bless you all. I shall continue to pray for you.

Silver Rose