"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
The other day I received an email from a reader who had spoken to a non-Catholic with a rather rare point-of-view, and who asked for helpful suggestions when speaking to him…
During a discussion about the Saints, the Protestant in question made the following statement:
“…no one is in Heaven except Jesus, Enoch, and Elijah.”
This sort of theological position is rarely held by those in mainstream Protestantism, but how might we respond to this?
Hey everyone, this is just a little post to test Google Calendar integration for something I’m working on for a parish website. Below is embedded calendar of the JP2 Group, the young adult community which I used to lead:
Despite what all the tutorials say, it’s not exactly straight-forward embedding a Google Calendar on a WordPress blog. The calendar is shown in an IFRAME which, unfortunately, WordPress automatically removes when you try to save it. To get around this, I installed an IFRAME plugin and this seemed to do the trick. Thankfully, this issue wouldn’t exist on a regular website 🙂
The article Integrating Google Calendar with my Blog first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net
I thought I would do a follow-up to yesterday’s post about friendship…
Since the earliest times, as pilgrims traveled towards some holy site, they would travel together in groups. They would band together for support, encouragement and safety as they journeyed towards their pilgrimage destination. Likewise, in our pilgrimage towards Heaven, good friends along the way can offer us all kinds of support.
Given my personality type, I benefit greatly from time by myself, but in recent years I’ve come to understand how much I need friends. Good, virtuous friends support and encourage, but also tell us the cold, hard truth about ourselves when we really need it.
A while ago I was praying The Office of Readings and read about the beautiful friendship between St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzen. These were two of the three “Cappadocian Fathers” who were Early Church Fathers in Fourth Century Turkey. On Wednesday, in the Eastern calendar, it will be their feast day, the “Feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs“, I thought I’d share an extract from one of Gregory’s sermons where he describes his relationship with Basil.
At last we come to the final chapter of “Mere Christianity” completing my notes for the book.
1. Christ came to transform
“…Christ’s work…is not mere improvement but Transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how Evolution worked”
(a) We are used to transformation through evolution
“…Everyone now knows about Evolution (though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it): everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder ‘What is the next step? When is the thing beyond man going to appear?'”
(b) People have constantly been incorrectly predicting the next step
“…I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did. I should expect not merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change but a new method of producing the change…. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening”
(c) The Next Step is here
“Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction – a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago”
This step has some differences in relation to the past…
“And in fact this New Step differs from all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature but in several other ways as well”
Two days ago, Cardinal Dolan gave his presidential address to the US Bishops. In his speech, he focused on the need for penance and suggested the possible reintroduction of the traditional Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays:
What an irony that despite the call of the Second Vatican Council for a renewal of the Sacrament of Penance, what we got instead was its near disappearance….
The work of our Conference during the coming year includes reflections on re-embracing Friday as a particular day of penance, including the possible re-institution of abstinence on all Fridays of the year, not just during Lent.
It appears that Cardinal Dolan is moving forward with this initiative, since we have just heard on Facebook that the bishops have appointed a new advocacy spokesman, Gollum:
I’ve always been an avid fan of podcasts, but in recent months my habit has been increasing somewhat. Even while I was walking the Camino De Santiago, I’d listen to a couple of podcasts each day, catching up on shows such as The Art of Catholic, The Catholic Man Show, and Hobo For Christ.
Early on in my journey across Spain, iTunes recommended a podcast called “Buffering The Vampire Slayer”. This was a podcast about the popular Joss Whedon show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which tells the story of a teenage girl who fights the forces of darkness who converge upon her town of Sunnydale.
I had seen the movie while I was still a teenager and, although it was a little goofy, I rather enjoyed it. I was initially unconvinced by the subsequent TV adaptation, but I soon grew to like it. Throughout university, my housemate Andy and I would always set aside time to watch the latest episodes, as well as those of Buffy’s companion show, Angel. It’s therefore not much surprise that I decided to heed iTunes’ recommendation and give the podcast a go…
For those of you who are unaware, the Mass in the English-speaking world is soon to change. The text of the current Mass which we’ve used for the last fifty years is a paraphrase of the original Latin, which itself had been in use for the previous 500 years. The English translation is being revised and replaced with a translation which is much more faithful to the original Latin text. You can hear a BBC recording of the new translation here.
