Furthermore…

Yesterday’s meeting was devoted to some degree to consideration of the story last Sunday’s in the gospel according to St. Matthew about the master who entrusted talents to his servants before going away and then, on return, heard the servants’ reports on how well they did. By coincidence, the gospel of yesterday’s Daily Mass was St. Luke’s very similar account, differing in that the master entrusted coins rather than ‘talents.’ Differing also in that the servants are explicitly told by the master to trade with the coins and obtain increase, so the servant who goes and buries his coin is clearly disobedient. I suppose the same imperative is implied in the Matthew story, but I sometimes think of the wicked, slothful servant in Matthew as perhaps being dopey, vacillating, neurotic or something, somehow lacking ‘what it takes’ to wheel and deal in the marketplace, and therefore not totally guilty.

One priest to other:

“I subbed at the charismatic church last Sunday. It was Mass hysteria!”

How often do people say ’sorrowing’ or ’sorrowful’ when the apt term would be ’suffering.’ Sorrow relates to something we deeply regret (such as we feel about Jesus’ suffering). Sorrow can be deep sympathy and feeling of sadness for another; suffering only resides in the victims of painful happenings. It might be accompanied with related sorrow for poor decisions that led to the pain which is being experienced. It is true that one might feel such strong and deep sorrow that it actually becomes a form of suffering; this must have been the case for Jesus undergoing His Passion, who felt infinite sorrow knowing all the sins of mankind.

As chubby people with big bellies file into church hall carrying dishes of food, one volunteer says to other:

“Now I see why it’s called a POT luck dinner!”

I saw a story on my Multiply “Catholic Friends” network about an enormously gifted girl with a great blessing in the form of amazing artistic abilities. I found it particularly fascinating because I am associated with a professional portrait painter in the Chicago area and am getting more and more interested in this line of work. Actually, the story first ran 2 or 3 years ago, but I never caught it.

Akiane Kramarik: Dream Child
This 10-year-old prodigy, who says God shows her what to paint, is using her gift to help the needy.
By Mary Berryhill

from: http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2004/004/7.24.html

Kid, teling about St. Peter sinking into the sea after trying to walk on water:

” Peter yelled ‘Lord, save me! I need a bail out plan!’ “

The theme of the children’s Mass this morning was Love. As I sat there watching the children and listening to Father’s homily I thought about how the kids live in a world of love and care, and they are full of love, although they don’t doll it up in a lot of words, and express it spontaneously with big, worshipful eyes, hugs, giggles and immense trust.

As I sat through the Mass and watched the children, the words of the homily and the little introductory speeches by the children about Love reverberating among the regrets in my 70-year-old brain, I began to think about the degree to which the world is full of powerful traps, shiny, highly tuned and hyped up attractions in their lives that they will be at a loss trying not to ‘love’ — the sins, excesses and flesh pots they will have looming up before them as though they were being force marched through some Satanic house of horrors of the future.

How much is sinking into those little heads as they attend their Masses, and are taught what’s right and what’s wrong in the classrooms of their excellent Catholic school? Will it be enough to counteract the siren corruptions of the world, or at least hold them to a standoff?

Child picking the petals off a daisy:

“I was naughty, I wasn’t naughty, I was naughty, I wasn’t naughty …”

God is merciful, and still, God is just. When we die, He judges the state of our souls, and we are either condemned for all eternity to Hell because of grave sin against Him, or we are granted the privilege of being with Him, His angels, and the saints in Heaven (either right away, or after we have been purified in Purgatory).

Most people lives are made up of a combination of good and bad acts. I always thought of God’s judgement and ‘verdict’ as being a sort of an assessment of the state of one’s soul at the moment of death, so that one person might have been saintly through most of life, only to commit a mortal sin near the end. Another person, alternatively, might have been vile and hateful lifelong, only to turn to God and beg for forgiveness at the end.

I like to entertain in my mind a scenario wherein God considers the unfolding of one’s whole life and can mercifully pick or ‘freeze frame’ a certain moment or period, a kind of cross section of the long sausage of one’s life which hasn’t ‘gone bad’ and on the basis of that good time judges that the person will be maintained with Him in eternity in precisely and only the state of the person that obtained during that “best behavior.” This would result in only a kind of limited presence and participation in the joy of Heaven, and people with more completely sanctified lives of course, would be more fully present and involved in the Heavenly experience.

Unjust steward talking to himself:

“I’m not strong enough to dig ditches, and I’m too lazy to work. Maybe I should go into Christian Praise & Worship music!”