Jesus tells us in the Gospels: What God has joined into one flesh, let no man tear asunder. Saint Paul extols: Wives, obey your husbands; husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the Church.
Every wife and husband are joined by God to reveal God's love to the world, bear new life into the world, and provide, protect, and defend hearth, rearing their children to come to know God's breath in them and breath it into the world. Wives and husbands, each in their own way, reveal Christ to each other and are called to be humbly obedient to Christ in each other, running toward Jesus our sweet Christ hand in hand, sharing the delights and challenges of this pilgrims' journey. For each married person the path to salvation is their marriage, serving each other in Christ ... their primary halo, their marriage.
Sin twists our vision like we are wearing a pair of invisible fun house glasses. Our vision is skewed, twisted, topsy-turvy. Instead of “up” being up, we are turned around so we think up is a squiggly line to the lower left; true left as a spiral to the upper right, and so on. Each person’s pair of sin’s fun house glasses distorts reality differently. Thus, if you tell me to turn left, I take an erratic lower right backwards, believing I am following your instructions.
Weird as all this looks to an outside observer, everything seems normal to us nibble-wits on the inside, even if most other people are doing things that make no sense.
How different would your favorite movie or television show be if one, or all, of the characters wrestled with temptation but instead chose virtue over vice? No sex outside marriage (one man, one woman, for life) being a primary example.
Every good Catholic father understands parenting, which is always manful properly done, occurs in moments, which may be any amount of time leading up to now so as to most fully understand now and what single next step is needed to more fully run toward Christ. Parenting, of course, is a type of shepherding, and one I find particularly helpful in illuminating our understanding of this shepherding moment.
To understand this shepherding moment of centuries,
Plashing about in the tidal pool of infinity and then (poorly) striving to describe it leads to unique terms that describe what the Blessed Virgin Mary is trying to get through my thick skull. Here is my best attempt to define these terms I use. (cf) indicates cross referenced terms.
Halo: (1) a group of Saints; (2) any Catholic group of two to twelve people who meet regularly and discuss the joys and challenges of running toward Christ in daily life. For focus, a halo may read from a work by a Doctor of the Church to deepen understanding of our timeless faith and how it applies in daily life.
Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi: “As we pray, so we believe, so we live.”
Over our two-thousand-year history, Catholics learned we become our liturgy. How we pray becomes who we are. Yet, in the years and decades since the Second Vatican Council, our liturgy has become confused. No wonder we Catholics are confused. Our faith, prayer, and lives are not integrated. We live disintegrated from our faith, to varying degrees, because our prayer has become disintegrated from our faith.
The deep, satiating Mass of the Ages, the Vetus Ordo, is frozen in time. The Mass prayed, lived, and loved by nearly all the Church's saints in her history, is no longer
We are called to be leaven in our more local democratic republic
We live in a Catholic monarchy. Jesus our Christ is our King, our Blessed Virgin Mother our Queen. True, in the United States, our local government is, of the moment, if we can keep it, a democratic republic, with regions devolving into anarchy courtesy of modernism's progressivism. Yet, we all, each and every one,