The Lenten season offers us once again an opportunity to reflect upon the very heart of Christian life: charity. This is a favourable time to renew our journey of faith, both as individuals and as a community, with the help of the word of God and the sacraments. This journey is one marked by prayer and sharing, silence and fasting, in anticipation of the joy of Easter.  Read more…

Do not seek the consolations of God; seek the God of consolations.

– St. Teresa of Avila

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Jesus has many lovers of his Kingdom of Heaven, but he has few bearers of his Cross. Many desire his consolation, but few desire his tribulation. He finds many comrades in eating and drinking, but he finds few who will be with him in his abstinence and fasting…But those who love Jesus purely for himself, and not for their own profit or convenience, bless him as heartily in temptation and tribulation and in all other adversities as they do in time of consolation. And if he never sent them consolation, they would still bless and praise him.

– Thomas à Kempis

]]> http://nealobstat.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/eyes-fixed-on-jesus/feed/ 4 drtomneal cross http://nealobstat.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/spotlight-a-new-song/ http://nealobstat.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/spotlight-a-new-song/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:11:17 +0000 Thomas J. Neal, Ph.D. http://nealobstat.wordpress.com/?p=2180 ]]> If I could ever be tempted to idolatry, it would be to idolize a family like the Nixon family – their gifts, their faith, their joy. As a second-best option, I will instead spotlight their wonderful ministry and mission and highly encourage you to send this on to anyone who might find what they have to offer worthwhile.

Details…

The Nixon Family, comprised of Titus, Colleen, and baby Benedict, is embarking on a mission to spread the Gospel’s really good news through story and song.  Titus and Colleen have been married since June 2010, and have felt a calling to share with youth and young adults their story — that they fell in love with God before they fell in love with one another.  They share this message through presentations filled with stories and songs, while offering relevant comparisons with America’s ambient culture.

A large part of the Nixon Family Mission is music — particularly bringing Colleen’s art to many.  By incorporating Colleen’s pop music – songs about life and love – into their presentations, they are able to reach an audience through something that most anyone can relate to:  good music.  Colleen is also the voice and a songwriter of her sacred music project, Marian Grace.

Lent is upon us, and it’s time to prepare the mind and heart for the solitude of the desert as we follow Jesus there to do battle with evil.  Not only will our lives be ravaged by a deepened commitment to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, but we should ask the Spirit now to reveal to us that one Achilles heel that keeps us from growing in our Christian life.  After you have targeted it, precision bomb it with prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  Heal my heel, O Lord.

So, say your heel is compulsive detraction – the revealing, without an objectively valid reason, of another’s faults/failings to persons who previously were unaware of them.  Take my former spiritual director’s prayer-ratio and apply it liberally: for every minute of detraction, ten minutes of prayer for the Detracted; for every person you verbally skewer, a day of fasting for their good; for every irritating relative you lance with your tongue, a secret generous act of kindness toward them.

Even as you still revel today in the pre-lenten joys of Mardi Gras, on Shrove Tuesday also begin to slough off some of your spiritual lethargy and don some fresh passion for perfection peppered with pleading prayers preparing for the parousia of Paradise in the present.

Let’s roll.

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

And there is a fantastic musical interpretation of it by Matt Maher:

Dawn is, in my estimation, exceptionally adept at bringing deeply personal experience and real-time culture into an electric dialogue with the best of Catholic Tradition.  And she manages to do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the integrity of any of these three elements of her analysis.

She ably demonstrates that Catholic sexual ethics offers both an incisive critique of our culture’s moral malaise and a life-giving alternative that is both eminently do-able and exceedingly joyful.

Her manner of treating Catholic sexual anthropology avoids the *hyper* traps of hyper-sensationalizing, hyper-idealizing, or hyper-vulgarizing Catholic moral discourse with shock-jock language.  And being myself one prone to both exceeding hyperbole and exquisite exaggeration, I can learn much from Dawn’s sober reserve.

{side note: I do commend hyperbole and hyperdulia, though, when it comes to the All-Pure Lady}

Her treatment of healing in this book also nicely balances the goals of a uniquely Christian vision of healing — not divine anesthesia, but rather the progressive liberation from interior chains that shackle our freedom to love authentically so that we might be more free to engage in love’s lifelong, virtue-forging struggle.  She powerfully demonstrates the feeling, texture, color, smell, taste, look and contours of that struggle by introducing us to sprightly portraits of very human saints whose sexual wounds were relentlessly invaded by mercy’s Balm.

Must I say that in our sex-saturated culture, sickly Eros needs to be rushed into a trauma center staffed by Doctors and Virgins, Martyrs and Confessors, holy men and women of every age who were apprentices of the divine Physician.

Kudos to Dawn.  Keep following her work, I adjure.

Here’s his triple gig: