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Saturday, January 28, 2012

All Glory and Honor is Whose?

"God has not called me to be successful.
He has called me to be faithful. If I have success, thanks be to God.
If I do not, thanks be to God." Bl. Mother Teresa


It flies in the face of our culture, much like the ascetic paradox St. John of the Cross offers in Dark Night of the Soul:

"To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.
To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing." Book 13

The Carmelite priest continues, ascending (or descending, according to the reader's needs) beyond the shallows of popular Oprah-as-Buddha-thought. New Age spirituality asks exactly nothing of its adherents, so I get the attraction. Cloudiness can be comforting. Both paths suggest solace begins by being needless of this world.

Many Americans are tonight adding prayers for Bella Santorum, the youngest child of Rick and Karen Santorum, who has been admitted to a Philadelphia hospital. Allow me to presume (without sounding too esoteric about their suffering) that God is using these politicians --- the Palins come to mind --- to display family unity and specifically on the life issue, submission to His will.

There are people living similarly all around us, of course, but our fixation on cheap celebrity means we don't notice. May these families know our gratitude for their willingness to be faithful. To shrug off the scorn of this world, and trust in pleasing God alone. As for the families we all see, their campaigns may fail politically, but they're successfully piercing the culture.

3 comments:

  1. OK... FREAKY!

    I almost posted that DNOTS quote from St. John of the Cross, but went with another one instead... JUST LAST NIGHT!!!

    Crazy... talk about synchronicity!

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  2. I was also thinking of Sarah Palin and how her family brought that same reality into our cultural awareness...briefly...until she was obliterated by the press and ridiculed so incessantly.

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  3. Joe, it must be the Northern Lights! Those are the only lines of his work that I know by heart.
    And Mindy, yes ---- I wondered if I could invoke Sarah Palin's name without being guffawed out of the room yet.

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