Right Now:

Outside my window

the wind blows the palm fronds that are just visible from in front of my neighbours apartment.

I am thinking

about how to save the world; or, at least, the culture.

I am hearing

traffic noise and said wind

I am thankful for

the graces I recieve, even though I am totally unworthy of them.

I am learning

about the Culture of Death, the Culture of Life, and, slowly, about myself.

I am creating

nothing, since 'create' is to make something out of nothing.

I am going

to get motivated to write lots about my recent trip.

I am reading

Light of the World, an interview with Pope Benedict XVI (2010)

I am hoping

to act on what I've been thinking about (see above)

Around the house

is pretty spotless; so is my room; we had an inspection this week.

One of my favourite things is

rain drops on roses; no, seriously.

A New Culture and Hope.

An extract from Ecclesia in Europa with a few emphases and fewer [comments].

8. This loss of Christian memory is accompanied by a kind of fear of the future. Tomorrow is often presented as something bleak and uncertain. The future is viewed more with dread than with desire. Among the troubling indications of this are the inner emptiness that grips many people and the loss of meaning in life. The signs and fruits of this existential anguish include, in particular, the diminishing number of births, the decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and the difficulty, if not the outright refusal, to make lifelong commitments, including marriage.
We find ourselves before a widespread existential fragmentation. A feeling of loneliness is prevalent; divisions and conflicts are on the rise. Among other symptoms of this state of affairs, Europe [and the rest of the Western World] is presently witnessing the grave phenomenon of family crises and the weakening of the very concept of the family, the continuation or resurfacing of ethnic conflicts, the re-emergence of racism, interreligious tensions, a selfishness that closes individuals and groups in upon themselves, a growing overall lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interests and privileges. To many observers the current process of globalization, rather than leading towards the greater unity of the human race, risks being dominated by an approach that would marginalize the less powerful and increase the number of poor in the world.
In connection with the spread of individualism, we see an increased weakening of interpersonal solidarity: while charitable institutions continue to carry out praiseworthy work, one notes a decline in the sense of solidarity, with the result that many people, while not lacking material necessities, feel increasingly alone, left to themselves without structures of affection and support.[And are, thus, desperately seeking out such affection and support.]

9. At the root of this loss of hope is an attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ. This sort of thinking has led to man being considered as “the absolute centre of reality, a view which makes him occupy – falsely – the place of God and which forgets that it is not man who creates God, but rather God who creates man. Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man”. It is therefore “no wonder that in this context a vast field has opened for the unrestrained development of nihilism in philosophy, of relativism in values and morality,[Daniel over at incido in mentionem has an interesting post that's almost on this topic here.] and of pragmatism – and even a cynical hedonism – in daily life”. European culture gives the impression of “silent apostasy” on the part of people who have all that they need and who live as if God does not exist.
This is the context for those attempts, including the most recent ones, to present European culture with no reference to the contribution of the Christian religion which marked its historical development and its universal diffusion. We are witnessing the emergence of a new culture, largely influenced by the mass media, whose content and character are often in conflict with the Gospel and the dignity of the human person. This culture is also marked by an widespread and growing religious agnosticism, connected to a more profound moral and legal relativism rooted in confusion regarding the truth about man as the basis of the inalienable rights of all human beings. At times the signs of a weakening of hope are evident in disturbing forms of what might be called a “culture of death”.

An irrepressible yearning for hope
10. Yet, as the Synod Fathers made clear, “man cannot live without hope: life would become meaningless and unbearable”. Often those in need of hope believe that they can find peace in fleeting and insubstantial things. In this way, hope, restricted to this world and closed to transcendence, is identified, for example, with the paradise promised by science or technology, with various forms of messianism, with a hedonistic natural felicity brought about by consumerism, or with the imaginary and artificial euphoria produced by drugs, with certain forms of millenarianism, with the attraction of oriental philosophies, with the quest for forms of esoteric spirituality and with the different currents of the New Age movement.
All these, however, show themselves profoundly illusory and incapable of satisfying that yearning for happiness which the human heart continues to harbour. The disturbing signs of growing hopelessness thus continue and intensify, occasionally manifesting themselves also in forms of aggression and violence.

...

Confessing our faith
18. From the synodal Assembly there emerged the clear and passionate certainty that the Church has to offer Europe the most precious of all gifts, a gift which no one else can give: faith in Jesus Christ, the source of the hope that does not disappoint; a gift which is at the origin of the spiritual and cultural unity of the European peoples and which both today and tomorrow can make an essential contribution to their development and integration. After twenty centuries, the Church stands at the beginning of the third millennium with a message which is ever the same, a message which constitutes her sole treasure: Jesus Christ is Lord; in him, and in no one else, do we find salvation (cf. Acts 4:12). Christ is the source of hope for Europe and for the whole world, “and the Church is the channel in which the grace pouring from the pierced Heart of the Saviour flows and spreads”.
This confession of faith causes our hearts and lips to raise “a joyful confession of hope: 'Risen and living Lord, you are the new hope of the Church and of humanity. You are the one true hope for the human family and for history. Already in this life, and in the life to come you are “among us the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). In you and with you, we find truth: our life has meaning, communion is possible, diversity can become richness, and the power of the kingdom is at work in history and helps to build the city of mankind. Love gives an eternal value to human efforts. Suffering becomes salvific, life will conquer death, creation will share in the glory of the children of God' ”

A Joke and An Apology

So I'm taking my time getting around to posting so here's a joke to make up for it from the Catholic Education blog.

The Human Person, A Brief Introduction to. Part One.

What is Man? That is, what is the nature of Man?
How is he formed and created, and by Whom? Why and for what purpose?
When does the individual Man start existing?

Here I will attempt to answer the Who, What, When, Where and Why questions about Man. The only way that this can be does in writing - ever - is very, very briefly. Indeed, when all the books about the first fully-human Human would fill the whole world, to describe those who are not (or, please God, not-yet) fully human would fill an entire galaxy or the whole internet. It would take eternity to discern what it means to be human; it will take eternity to discern what it means to be human. Thus, this brief post will start with the questions of  the creation of Man, the How, When and by Whom Man is created and then discuss Why he was made. From this we will venture into the nature of Man and What he is. It may take several posts.

This particular post will deal with Man’s Creator: God. [1]

God’s main, in fact only, business is God. The One who holds everything in existence and in Whom all things exist has nothing better to think about than Himself. He is totally worthy of all the thought and attention of an infinite mind, which He possesses. Even while God is only thinking about Himself, He is in fact actually thinking of everything that ever has been or ever will be created since it all exists in Him and He is eternal.[2] Thus, God thinks only of Himself and in doing so necessarily thinks of all that is, was, ever has been and ever will be.

God has perfect intellect, everything that God thinks about - that is, the thought of the thing - contains everything that He knows about it. We already know that God is omniscient (all-knowing) and so we can reason that any idea of God’s will contain in it the totality of the thing itself. That is to say, God’s idea of Himself will (and does) include its very nature. When God thinks about Himself, His idea contains His very nature. His Idea is God; it is the Divine Logos; God the Son. But there is only one God because He is infinite and you cannot have two infinite beings.

God, being so immensely Lovable, loves His Idea which, in turn, returns that Love. Since God is Love, the exchange of the Love between the Father (the One who Thinks) and the Son (the Logos) is in fact another Person, yet still the One God. We call the Third Person the Holy Spirit.

What is God? God. Who is God? Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God is a Communion of Persons.

Man (as in mankind) is created in the image and likeness of God and, yet, is individual. From the knowledge that God created Man in His own Image and Likeness, we can gather that he - that is, Man - is created through, with and in relationship and cannot be as he is intended to be away or apart from relationship, apart from a community that reflects the intimacy of the Godhead. This will be the topic of the second post in this series.

***   ***   ***

1. It is important to note that of all the topics covered in this series, this will be the least complete since we, being finite, can only know a finite amount of anything. That is, if we can know everything it is humanly possible to know about God (Who, remember, is infinite) we still know basically nothing. A finite number taken away from the infinite may as well be taking nothing.

2.Eternal, in this sense, meaning the experience of all of time in the moment.

Saving Babies?

Previously, I said that the reason I was coming to New York was to save babies.
I am not here to save babies; I am not even here to learn how to say babies; I am here to learn how to and to actually save souls, starting with my own.

This retreat, so far, has been both an excellent, intense, eye-opening experience and a rich, positive time for spiritual growth.

The outline of each day is:
0630 - Rise Up
0730 - Holy Mass
0830 - Breakfast
0915-1115 - Presentation
1145-1230 - Presentation
1245 - Lunch
1415-1515 - Presentation
1530 - Way of the Cross
1615-1745 - Guest Speaker
1815 - Dinner
1945 - Movie (on topic)
2115-2215 - Holy Hour (including silent Adoration, Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet and Benediction)
2300 - Retirement

This pattern is repeated Tuesday-Thursday, while Friday’s timetable looks like this:
0630 - Rise Up
0730 - Holy Mass
0830 - Breakfast
0930 - Leave for Abortion Site
1000-1145 - Prayerful Presence outside the abortion mill
1230 - Lunch
1400-1500 - Presentation
1515-1600 - Presentation
1615-1745 - Guest Speaker
1815 - Dinner



As you can see, this is fairly intense and (what you can’t see is that) it is actually more intense because the presentations are particularly dense.

Yesterday, we learnt about the history of eugenics up until today (well, last Friday, when NY passed it’s “gay marriage” legislation, at any rate) and today we further discussed population control and the further implications of the eugenic and contraceptic mentality.

You might ask how there are related and, further how either - let alone both - is related to abortion.

In a future post (or ten) I will outline the history of eugenics, since that shows the link to population control and to contraception; I will then show the link to between this destructive mentality and abortion.
Firstly, however, I want to discuss the human person.
This will be an introduction to the 13 week Anthropology unit that I took last semester (run by Fr Sean Fernandez) which was itself only an introduction to the topic of the human person. In this post, I will discuss the origins and ends of the human person, what makes humans unique, and how this should cause us to act.