O the deep, deep love of Jesus,
None can tell the reason why
He descended from His glory,
Came to earth to bleed and die;
I, a wrecked and ruined creature,
Sinful, helpless, all defiled;
But the Love of God in Jesus,
Made me God’s beloved child.
Arhivele lunare: septembrie 2022
Jésus rencontre Nathanaël
Évangile de Jésus-Christ selon saint Jean 1,47-51.
En ce temps-là, lorsque Jésus voit Nathanaël venir à lui, il déclare à son sujet : « Voici vraiment un Israélite : il n’y a pas de ruse en lui. »
Nathanaël lui demande : « D’où me connais-tu ? » Jésus lui répond : « Avant que Philippe t’appelle, quand tu étais sous le figuier, je t’ai vu. »
Nathanaël lui dit : « Rabbi, c’est toi le Fils de Dieu ! C’est toi le roi d’Israël ! »
Jésus reprend : « Je te dis que je t’ai vu sous le figuier, et c’est pour cela que tu crois ! Tu verras des choses plus grandes encore. »
Et il ajoute : « Amen, amen, je vous le dis : vous verrez le ciel ouvert, et les anges de Dieu monter et descendre au-dessus du Fils de l’homme. »
Méditation de l’Évangile du jeudi 29 septembre
Jésus a une manière de parler qui témoigne d’une certitude intérieure qui bouleverse ses interlocuteurs. Car dans cette première rencontre avec Pierre, Jésus plonge son regard dans l’âme de Simon.
Et ce regard pénètre si avant qu’il définit l’apôtre et lui donne ce nom qui signifie tout l’être, ce nom que seul Dieu connaît et peut trouver.
Pour chacun de nous d’ailleurs, avec la même acuité, un jour le regard de Jésus plonge dans l’âme et nous donne notre nom, notre définition que Lui seul connaît et nous révèle. Le regard de Jésus pénètre. Il rentre loin dans les cœurs et juge de leur valeur d’un seul coup. Son regard pénètre au-delà de l’homme présent, pour atteindre toute la vie et en définit le rôle providentiel : „Tu t’appelleras Cephas, ce qui signifie : Pierre”.
Après André, Jean, Pierre, il en sera de même pour Philippe, conquis d’emblée par le Seigneur. « Le lendemain, Jésus résolut de partir pour la Galilée. Il va trouver Philippe et Jésus lui dit : suis-moi. Or, Philippe était de Bethsaïda, de la ville d’André et de Pierre »
« Philippe va trouver Nathanaël et lui dit : Celui de qui ont écrit Moïse dans la loi et les Prophètes, nous l’avons trouvé ! C’est Jésus, fils de Joseph, Jésus de Nazareth. Et Nathanaël lui dit : De Nazareth peut-il venir quelque chose de bon ? Philippe lui dit : Viens et vois ! »
Philippe lui aussi traduit sa découverte à Nathanaël avec enthousiasme, reprenant le vieux mot d’Archimède qui explose ici comme un cri de joie et de libération : „Eurêka” -„Nous l’avons trouvé !”. Ils ont découvert, en effet, Celui-là même dont Moïse a écrit dans la Loi, et dont les Prophètes nous ont entretenus. Pour un juif, pétri de toute cette attente, rendue plus lancinante depuis l’occupation romaine, quel beau jour que celui de cette rencontre où le Grand Prophète a laissé tomber ces mots à son égard : ” Accompagne-moi ! „
Jean, André, Pierre, Philippe, Nathanaël font tous partie du groupe de Jean-Baptiste puisque Jésus les rencontre avant de regagner la Galilée. Tous ces jeunes hommes vont quitter Jean-Baptiste pour s’engager avec cet homme dont le regard et les paroles les ont bouleversés. Pour eux, il réalise l’Espérance d’Israël; et leurs sentiments se résument bien dans le cri d’André adressé à son frère : „Nous avons trouvé le Messie !”
Père Gabriel
Cine mai vrea să moară pentru Putin? — PoliteiaWorld
Unul dintre cele mai bune (dacă nu cel mai bun!) articol pe care l-am citit pînă acum despre determinarea lui Putin de a merge pînă la capăt în războiul din Ucraina este scris de Mark Galeotti și traducerea o aveți aici (originalul aici). Autorul său nu mai merită nici o prezentare. Și un excelent interviu…
Cine mai vrea să moară pentru Putin? — PoliteiaWorld
Thomas Kelly: „There is a way of ordering our mental life”
There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.
The secular world of today values and cultivates only the first level, assured that there is where the business of humankind is done, and scorns or smiles in tolerant amusement at the cultivation of the second level – a luxury enterprise, a vestige of superstition, an occupation for special temperaments. But in a deeply religious culture people know that the deep level of prayer and of divine attendance is the most important thing in the world.
It is at this deep level that the real business of life is determined. The secular mind is an abbreviated, fragmentary mind, building only upon a part of human nature and neglecting a part – the most glorious part – of a human being’s nature, powers, and resources. The religious mind involves the whole person, embraces his or her relations with time within their true ground and setting in the Eternal Lover. It ever keeps close to the fountains of divine creativity.
In lowliness it knows joys and stabilities, peace and assurances, that are utterly incomprehensible to the secular mind. It lives in resources and powers that make individuals radiant and triumphant, groups tolerant and bonded together in mutual concern, and is bestirred to an outward life of unremitting labor.
From A Testament Of Devotion
https://fr.scribd.com/document/344048585/Kelly-Thomas-Raymond-A-Testament-of-Devotion
17 Things I Would Do Differently If I Were Fully Convinced I’m Going to Die
Posted on August 21, 2022 | Views: 963
by Eric Jones: 1. I wouldn’t do a single thing differently, but I’d be utterly transformed…
Most everyone around me would notice that I had changed, but they’d find it almost impossible to say how. If pushed, they might say something like, “He hasn’t changed at all, but everything he does he does more slowly, as if he wants to remember the way it tastes.”
2. I would stop doing almost everything I’m doing now, stop working, stop spending long hours indoors typing emails, checking check boxes that mostly go unchecked until I simply cross them out, laying down tasks in the broad afternoon sunlight of each day like a man cutting down flowers so that he can come to the end of the field and finally stop worrying about all those flowers left to cut.
3. I would spend most of my time outside under the sky, which just happens to be blue but could just as easily be another color, couldn’t it?, given how diverse and profligate everything in the solar system and universe is. After all, there are whole giant planets made of gas, Jupiter and Neptune and maybe Uranus, too, plus a giant red cloud storm on Mars as old as a tree and and bigger then the country of Brazil and Czechoslovakia with Rhode Island and Delaware added in for good measure. I would spend more time looking up at the blue sky and marveling that it might have been any other color but this, just this very shade of pale milky blue, with nothing else like it in the known universe of planetary skies.
4. I would almost certainly inhabit my body differently, let it carry me around for the sheer thrill of it, enjoy its self-maintaining, self-tuning, self-healing, self-harmonizing orchestral humming amongst its tens of trillions of cells, plus all the fluid inside the cells, and the interstitial fluid, and not to forget all the ion channels and miraculously facilitated crossings across all the walls and boundaries and borderlands between the trillions of insides and outsides inside our one body, and the trillions of makings and un-makings of origami-folded proteins with their hidden locks and their matching enzymatic keys, all performing with their fail-safes upon fail-safes, their redundancies upon redundancies, the miraculous machinery that ends at the dulled tip of the spear that is my ordinary dissatisfaction with myself.
5. Would I have more sex or less? It would be hard to have less sex than I have now, so quite possibly I’d have more sex, though it’s truly hard to say, since sex seems like something you’d wish you’d done more of when you reached the end of your life, wishing to be free from the pinned to the mattress of your own failing body, the turning of the nurses to avoid the bed sores, the chucks and the cheeks spreading by gloved hands. But maybe not.
6. I think I would go to the places where things are disappearing so that I could kiss them all good-bye before we both go, the barrier reefs of Australia, the polar bears all skin and bones but still ferocious, or especially ferocious, the lobster fleeing Maine’s waters for the cold of Newfoundland, the Right Whales so close to extinction now, their numbers smaller than a single high school graduating class, and the mountain gorillas and snow leopards and leatherback turtles, and then all the insects disappearing into silence, the thawing perma-frosts of Siberia and the Northwest Territories, and the glaciers that are retreating what is likely to be their last retreat for the next half a million years or more. I would kiss them all good-bye for myself and my children and the great grandchildren of the children half a world away I will never meet.
7. I think I would be in love with everyone the way I’m in love with my own son, the way everyone’s hair falls over their heads when they’re sleeping, the way everyone sleeping is like everyone else sleeping, so perfectly and utterly alone and far away and asking for protection. It’s one of the loveliest things about flying or traveling on an overnight train, all the passengers on their secret trajectories falling asleep together as if it were the most natural thing in the world to close your eyes amongst strangers while traveling 500 miles per hour 5 miles above the earth. I would even love their hot animal breath, every widower, every sprawling teen, every mother and father with their children heaped upon them like flotsam, the tender shoot of every him and her and theyness suspended in the darkened cabin. I think what I’m saying is that I would be more like Walt Whitman.
8. I would make up excuses to meet everyone I could to shake their hands and gaze into their eyes before we both disappear forever. “I’m your neighbor from down the street, your neighbor from two towns over, I’m an Iowan, an American, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’m very interested in whatever yard sign or bumper sticker or t-shirt you’ve placed to let strangers know something about you. I’ll bite, I’m biting and asking you please will you tell me more, why don’t you tell me more? I’m here to listen.
9. I think the relationship between my generosity and my greed would flip, and I would give away as much as I possibly could (instead of saving as much as I could) and save as little as I needed to survive. What getting and saving, what safety and security in the $468,234 I and my wife currently have in our 401Ks and 502zs or 403cs when the colonoscopy results take 8 days and you’re waiting to know whether or not it’s cancer and blessedly, just like every other big shoe in your life so far it stays suspended, doesn’t drop, for now, for now. But if I, looking up, could really see the shoe, and knew deep in my bones that it would surely fall, then what savings, what safety, what 95% certainty that I won’t outlive my life savings and have the same lifestyle I enjoy today until I’m 92.5 years old, which is when a financial advisor told me he expects that I’ll die.
Of course, I don’t believe him.
10. I don’t know why I didn’t say it before but I would almost certainly quit my job. Maybe not right away, because there’s good I could do if I were working at my job but also saw clearly and truly that I must and that I will die. But then, after that, how could I not quit my job when I’ve seen and done so little? And it’s not really the traveling that I mean, though that’s what comes first to mind. It’s the deep, deep grooves that I’ve driven into my life by staying at the same job for so long. Even if I never left Iowa, I would have so much more to see, so many more people to meet, so much more to know and be curious about than the little corner of my own tiny business that I’ve been sweeping and tidying for almost half of my life. And I don’t even think I’m particularly good at doing what I’m doing, which isn’t to say that’s the right reason to keep doing something, but it would be one compelling argument, if you were especially suited or especially talented at what you decided to spend 20 years doing.
I would definitely quit my job.
11. If I truly knew, if I were truly convinced in my body that I’m going to die, I think I would hold the largest piece of awakening. Is death denial the primary source of all my distracted, disconnected living? Absent that denial, I would see the drama of this world, the drama of my internal world, as a kind of amusing side-show, a feathery, glittering diversion from the main event of my life. I would know that the place to look would be where almost no one else is looking, or at least no one I know.
12. I think I would spend far more time with animals, and far more time in fields and forests, oceans and streams. When I think about what it might be like to leave this planet for good, my heart longs for animals in the way that a child’s heart longs for animals, and not just in their fanciful anthropomorphized form, but in their true twinned strangeness to our own forked strangeness. Their hearts, their vessels, their brains the consistency of firm tofu like ours, and also their several stomachs and many eyes and ability to find themselves to the very spot on the other side of the planet where they were born many moons ago. They are in a very real way our forgotten companions, the only ones we know about in the entire universe looking at us from their own strange eyes, the only beings that can look at us looking back at them. I miss them now: I’ll miss them when I go.
13. I would be kinder in the most ordinary of ways.
14. I can’t be sure of any of this, of course, because I can only imagine what it would be like to truly be connected to the fact of my own mortality. I can glimpse my own death only in my peripheral vision, as a figure, or is it a shadow of a figure, a flash of darkness, and then I turn to face it and it’s gone, and instead I see just one day after another of this ordinarily charmed and world-never-ending life. Only in dreams have I tasted impending death.
Once in a dream I was shot in the chest at close range, and the pain was the most excruciating I’ve ever felt, the bullet tumbling through my torso and exiting just below my right shoulder blade. Something deep in my animal body knew that the wound was not only catastrophic but that I would die soon, in seconds or minutes. And I’m trying to remember now what dark panic that was, what that full throated realization was as the blood drained from my body and the pain was like a thunderbolt flashed on in my brain without cease. It’s like trying to imagine living on an asteroid. How unlikely the world would seem, and how strange and wondrous I think, if I lived in touch with interstellar death.
15. I fell asleep at the wheel once when I was in college. The details are sad and sordid, but the key fact was that I was driving stone-sober north on Interstate 87 at dawn after having stayed up all night. The sun was just about to come up, and the struggles of nighttime driving seemed to be over, and my guard came down against my own bone tiredness. I was in the left lane of the highway doing perhaps 70 miles per hour when it was as if I giant pair of scissors came and snipped the film of my consciousness clear through and then all went black. In the blessed darkness of sleep, I heard the most horrible sound like the thundering hooves of many horses underneath me, and then I opened my eyes and looked out the driver side window to see us sliding very fast sideways down an embankment. I cranked the steering wheel in the direction instinct told me, and the car seemed to drift upwards the way a leaf lifts from the ground in a stiff gust of wind.
It was at that exact moment that I heard a cool, calm male voice in my head, a kind of scientific, clinical, absurdly neutral voice say, “You are going to die.” I knew the voice was telling the absolute truth. The voice was like water; tasteless, clear, cold, and unimpeachably essential and perfectly real. And somehow, I was the voice. I wasn’t sad, wasn’t afraid, wasn’t anything. When I read the line from Yeats that said, “Cast a cold eye, on life, on death, horseman pass by” I remembered that moment. The tires held, the car leapt back up the embankment, back onto the highway, spun three times around and then came to rest against the guardrail just beside the breakdown lane, as if a tiger had swatted us for sport. If I knew death like that every day, I would be thrilled to be alive, absolutely damn thrilled.
16. What if all my imaginings are plain wrong? It seems I’m suggesting that all terminal cancer patients should become gurus, can see through the veil of self-delusion far more easily than the terminal but undiagnosed. Is it even possible to live in touch with death or is the organism too defended against it, or simply built in such a way that the truth isn’t available for inspection, much in the way that it’s impossible to see the backs of our heads without a mirror.
I can’t even travel too far with that line of thinking. Something in me resists that conclusion with more than logic – deep in my bones it feels like death is buried there, is hidden in every moment. In fact, rather than being convinced that the true reality of death is finally unavailable to me, I might believe that death is one of the only things I know, and that I die to myself 1,000 or 10,000 times a day. I don’t say that to get mystical or abstract – the deaths and births are there to be seen and experienced, but they’re blurred by the narrative in the same way 24 frames per second blurs into a film. Death is all around us, giving birth to new life. And I’m disconnected from both. Disconnection from one is inevitably a disconnection from the other. When I say I don’t know death, I’m also always saying I don’t know life. If I knew death I would know how to live.
17. It’s a remarkable thing to sit with the dead body of someone you’ve known and loved all your life. I want to say the word for the feeling is uncanny, though I don’t know if that would be the right word – it’s just the word that comes to mind. When I sat beside my father’s dead body at the funeral home in South Portland, Maine, I knew more than the fact that he was dead; I also knew that he was absolutely and utterly gone. In that instant, I knew that he had existed within his body like luminescence, like sparks, and the lights had been snuffed out completely and forever. Of course, I don’t know if what I was feeling is correct, but in that moment as I sat or knelt beside his body, I can’t remember which, I held his cold hand and looked at his ashen and bruising face and knew that he had completely and utterly disappeared from the universe of infinite things. The fact that his body was still there without him seemed like the most bizarre magic trick imaginable; he had completely vanished into the black hat of death. Oddly, his total disappearance didn’t feel like a betrayal or make me more or less despondent. It was somehow obvious to me. It seemed like a bare fact that shone light on other facts. Like, my father was a brief flowering of irreproducibility and now he was gone. What was there to quibble with over the life he lived, whether good or bad or neutral? Confronted with the fact that he had existed in the exact form that he had for as long as he had and that now he would forever and ever be gone, as one day would all of his children and his children’s children and their children, what was there left to do but sit in wonder and love and marvel that any of us exists at all.
Eric Jones grew up in New England, moved to Iowa to get his MFA in nonfiction writing in 1999, and upon graduation promptly became a household mover. He’s been moving furniture for the last 20 years, and has moved families to every state in the union except Hawaii. He had taken to describing himself as a “failed writer but a successful mover” until an amazing group of friends helped shepherd him back to writing as a way of deepening his connection to living. And dying. He lives with his wife and son in Iowa City.
Source: Daily Good, Awaken
Sainte Hildegarde de Bingen (+1179)
Fêtée le 17 septembre
Hildegarde était d’une famille noble germanique. Très jeune, on la confie au couvent de Disbodenberg, un monastère double, sur les bords du Rhin, où moines et moniales chantent la louange divine en des bâtiments mitoyens. Devenue abbesse, elle s’en va fonder une autre communauté à Bingen, puis une à Eibingen. Elle voyage, va où on l’appelle, prêche dans les cathédrales et les couvents, correspond avec toutes les têtes couronnées, les pontifes de son temps, saint Bernard et bien d’autres. Elle plaide pour une réforme radicale de l’Eglise. Depuis sa petite enfance, elle est favorisée de visions exceptionnelles. Par obéissance, elle les couchera sur le papier. Ses récits apocalyptiques (au sens littéral de dévoilement des fins dernières) donnent de l’univers une vision étonnante de modernité où la science actuelle peut se reconnaître (création continue, énergie cachée dans la matière, magnétisme) mais qui peut aussi apaiser la soif actuelle de nos contemporains tentés par le « Nouvel Age » : « Le monde ne reste jamais dans un seul état », écrit-elle. L’essentiel de sa pensée réside dans le combat entre le Christ et le prince de ce monde, au coeur d’un cosmos conçu comme une symphonie invisible. Dante lui emprunta sa vision de la Trinité.
Cette multitude des anges a une raison d’être qui est liée à Dieu plus qu’à l’homme et elle n’apparaît aux hommes que rarement. Certains anges, cependant, qui sont au service des hommes, se révèlent par des signes, quand il plaît à Dieu.(Sainte Hildegarde – Le livre des œuvres divines)
Diego Valeri, ”Dimineață de septembrie – Mattino di settembre” — catalinafrancoblog
Diego Valeri, ”Dimineață de septembrie – Mattino di settembre”
În acea zi eram doar noi doi în pădure, tu și cu mine, scumpă copilă, treceam prin neguri și prin lumină, aveam în inimi atâta uimire. Tu printre frunze descopereai zmeură roz, fragi roșii și verzi, te târâiai prin iarbă în genunchi, strigăte mici de mirare […]
Diego Valeri, ”Dimineață de septembrie – Mattino di settembre” — catalinafrancoblog
Jorge Luis Borges, ”Poemul darurilor – Poema de los Dones” — catalinafrancoblog
Jorge Luis Borges, ”Poemul darurilor – Poema de los Dones”
Să mulțumesc, aș voi, divinului labirint al cauzelor și efectelor pentru diversitatea făpturilor alcătuind acest univers singular, pentru motivul că nu va înceta să viseze la un anume desen al labirintului, pentru chipul Elenei și-a lui Ulysse perseverență, pentru iubire, care ne face a-i vedea […]
Jorge Luis Borges, ”Poemul darurilor – Poema de los Dones” — catalinafrancoblog
„Merci, Seigneur, de m’avoir créée” (Claire d’Assise)
Par Joseph Suenens
Il est essentiel que nous sachions remercier Dieu. De quoi ? Mais tout d’abord d’être Dieu ; c’est la grande prière de reconnaissance à son égard. Merci, Seigneur, dit le Gloria de la messe, pour votre immense gloire. Remercier Dieu d’être Dieu, dans la communion à sa joie propre. Charles de Foucauld exprimait sa gratitude en disant à Dieu, au milieu de ses peines et de ses croix personnelles, ce mot qui est un élan d’adoration très pure et une mise en place de toutes choses : « Mon Dieu, votre bonheur me suffit. » Ce merci-là, c’est la charité théologale en toute logique.
Il faut remercier Dieu aussi pour tout ce que nous lui devons. Il y a là un motif permanent d’allégresse et de reconnaissance. On n’en finirait pas d’énumérer ses bienfaits. Qu’il nous suffise de dire qu’il nous faut remercier Dieu d’être notre Père, car nous avons la joie d’être en toute vérité ses enfants : nous sommes des naturalisés divins, des fils d’adoption.
Et remercier Dieu d’être notre Frère, d’être devenu l’un d’entre nous pour que, en lui et par lui, nous entrions dans la famille divine avec pleins droits et part entière.
Et remercier Dieu d’être sanctifiés par l’Esprit « qui fait les saints et les vivants », qui veut nous faire pénétrer dans la profondeur même de Dieu et nous associer à l’élan de son amour.
Il faut savoir remercier aussi pour chaque objet mis à notre disposition : pour cette maison qui nous abrite, cette table, se lit, ce fauteuil, ces livres, cette lampe qui brûle, ce feu qui réchauffe, ces amis rencontrés au hasard de la vie, et mille et mille autres choses à portée de la main. C’est Dieu qui nous a donné cela à travers les causes secondes. C’est vers lui que doit monter la gratitude comme vers la cause suprême de tous nos biens.
Il est souvent intéressant et éclairant de saisir au vol les dernières paroles prononcées ici-bas par quelque âme d’élite. Parfois elles traduisent toute une vie et ouvrent des horizons sur la spiritualité qui l’anima. Connaissez-vous l’ultime prière de sainte Claire, cette âme fraîche et pure qui fit écho si généreusement à l’Évangile ? Sentant qu’elle allait mourir, elle se tourna vers Dieu dans une ultime prière et on l’entendit murmurer ces mots : « Merci, Seigneur, de m’avoir créée. »
C’est le suprême merci que la créature doit à son Créateur, c’est le cri d’une âme qui a compris la splendeur de la reconnaissance.
Rest In Peace, Your Magesty!
23 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Psalm 23, Bible King James Version (KJV)
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