"He to whom the eternal Word speaketh is delivered from a multitude of opinions."

-- The Imitation of Christ

Back Home Again

Well, I'm home. Sort of. I'm staying with my brother in NoVa while my trailer undergoes repairs at the dealer in Pennsylvania. And looking for a new place to live. I've actually made an offer on a place over on the other side of the Blue Ridge, near Shenandoah and Luray. I think it will be good for me to be away from Charlottesville. There's a Latin Mass Catholic church up in Front Royal, and a traditional Anglican one down in Waynesboro which belongs to the same denomination as the one I attended in Tucson while waiting out the winter in Arizona, so I can go to mass and not have to worry about the issues at the ones in Charlottesville. Also I'd be right between the Shenandoah Forest and River, so lots of things to do.

It's been a good trip, overall. I've seen many things: Niagara, the Great Lakes, Route 66, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Palo Duro Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Mojave Desert, Yosemite, Mt. Shasta, Yellowstone, the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats, Boston, New York, Chicago, L.A., Toronto, and all the stuff in-between. Experienced sweet love, made some new friends, saw some old ones, had a long talk with John Michael Talbot. But the main thing is, and always was, that I went in search of encounters with God, and I found them. I'm not totally healed yet--I didn't get that big miracle which I'd hoped for, but I did get miracles, encounters, and answered prayers, and continue to. But I am glad to be home. It's time to be still for a while, to have a real house to live in again, to have some stability. It's turned out to be a particularly challenging time to be out there blowing in the wind. Also, as beautiful as so many places I've seen are, I don't think any of them are more beautiful than Shenandoah.

"There are persons advanced in the ways of God, who are, as the result of an illness, inclined to exceptional irritability. They are like people badly dressed, because their illness increases, as it were tenfold, the painful impression produced by contradictions, and sometimes the latter are incessant. There may be great merit in this struggle, and great patience in seeming impatience."

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life

"The only thing to be feared [in obedience to spiritual directors] is that superiors may sometimes follow human prudence excessively, and that for want of discernment they may condemn the lights and inspirations of the Holy Ghost, treating them as illusions and reveries, and prescribe for those to whom God communicates Himself by such favors as if they were invalids." -- Fr. Louis Lallement, S.J., La Doctrine Spirituelle

Yellowstone

"Whatever naturalism may say, in loving our neighbor in God and for God we do not love him less, we love him much more and far more perfectly. We do not love his defects; we put up with them; but we love in man all that is noble in him, all in him that is called to grow and to blossom in eternal life.

Far from being a Platonic and inefficacious love of our neighbor, charity, in growing, disposes us to judge him well and to condescend to his wishes in whatever is not contrary to the commandments of God. Condescension thus born of charity makes indifferent things good, and the painful things that we impose on ourselves for our neighbor, fruitful. There is great charity in thus preserving union with all by avoiding clashes which might arise, or by effecting a reconciliation as soon as possible. Charity that grows has thus a radiating goodness; it makes us continually love not only what is good for us, but what is good for our neighbor, even for our enemies, and what is good from the superior point of view of God, by desiring for others the goods which do not pass, and especially the sovereign Good and its inamissible possession. St. Thomas sums up all this briefly:

'Now the aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God. Hence it is clear that it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor. Consequently the habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of our neighbor.'

Thus sight perceives light first of all and by it the seven colors of the rainbow. It could not perceive colors if it did not see light. Likewise we could not supernaturally love the children of God if we did not first supernaturally love God Himself, our common Father.

Whereas justice inclines us to wish good to another inasmuch as he is another or distinct from us, charity makes us love him as 'another self,' an alter ego, with a love of truly supernatural friendship, as the saints in heaven love one another."

-- Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, O.P., The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. 2

Yosemite

I've finally escaped California. I'm at Yellowstone right now, last on my list of must-see for this trip; but that reminds me that I never got around to posting my pictures from Yosemite, which I managed to visit just as everything was beginning to shut down. So here they are.

On the Anniversary of Our First Meeting

One year ago you came into my life
I was not thinking to find you
in the woods that day
Nor was I thinking, when we met
to find in you a partner, a lover
a girlfriend, or a wife
I hoped only to meet a friend
and perhaps find an end
to loneliness
If only for a little while

But there you were
lost on the trail
cold and alone
wounded and frail
and lonely too
And you became more to me
than I had ever imagined
or hoped
or dreamed
that you could, or anyone would

And so this is to thank you
for the year of your life
that you've given to me
and what you've made this year
of my life to be

For making me pasta
and holding my hand
for sharing my prayers
and traveling the land
For talking and laughing
for listening and crying
for music and movies
for dancing and lying
in my arms
and in my heart