I just had to add it as it both shows the wonderful effect of
the use of touching the painting up (oo that makes me tingle)
with a soft gell (gloss), as well as how viewing work from different
angles can give us a whole lot more than we would think when
we only look at a work from one perspective!
Greatings my brothers and sisters. I didnt know if I was going to be able to post this, as my computer wouldnt let me log into google in the normal way. So I got on the internet via firefox! Blessings and love to you all.
Feel free to skip this writing below and go straight to the artwork. This writing is intended for those who visit the site and like me are interseted in a more metaphysical dimension to existance.
The words as often are those which I share come to you through me, but are yet not of me. From me to you now, yet from another to me beforehand. This is why I shall carry on from yesterdays blog firstly the other way around, by saying to you to skip this writing and scroll down to see my latest painting, if that is you primary reason for visiting my blog. Hey, believe me I am not knocking you if this is the case. You will be in good company, as my eldest sister - who i do love dearly - is not one for spiritual reading.
Its just that I need to grow in denying my`self ` more. So if you read the word sin, or sinner lower down, do not be put off from reading this. The word sin represents any thought, word or deed, which is not done in our life with the presence of God in our mind and heart. Well thats the main way I understand it for me. Now my brothers and sisters. As I said, these words I am sharing with you, were mostly written way before I was born by Gerald Vann.O.P. In an old book which LORD PAKENHAM said was one of the finest books of the century. This book which cost two shillings and sixpence, is entiltled `The Divine Pity`
Gerald Vann OP was born in 1906 and died after a long illness in 1963. He was a British Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. He joined the Dominican order in 1923, was ordained a priest in 1929. Writing more than twenty books before dying after long illness. Well my brothers and sisters, I have just lit a candle for him and it is also for my late wife tracy. Also my Aunt Rita who died last month.
I shall carry on now where I left off yesterday, with the proviso that those of you without need to read this spiritual meat of the blog can skip to the desert, which is my art below.
The sacrament of penance should make us humble and gay and largehearted: humble because of the sense of sin, gay because pettiness keeps us isolated from God and self-centred, but the life and the freedom are given us that we mey serve God and His family and live in God`s love of His family. But we have to be humble and gay and large-hearted precisely in our mourning; if we obey the Spirit it is these things we shall find in the discipline of the confessional and the sorrow that attends it: it is because, through the power of the sacrament and the gift of the Spirit, we can learn to choose discomfort that we learn these family virtues; and so the family ties bind us more strongly and our love grows and the negative side of penance turns quickly into the positive, and we learn gradually the key to the christian paradox, we learn to love not just the utility or the pleasantness of some things for us but the goodness and beauty of all things in themselves.
It is this idea of the growth of true love as opposed to false or partial love that gives us the clue to the christian doctrine of mortification. To say "Happy or they who mortify themselves and take up their cross daily", but we go astray and forget the beatitude unless we remember that mortification must be based on a real love and awareness of things within the framework of the love of God and Hiss will, and that detachment in general is not insensitivity but love - real love, the love that is defined and measured by Love.
We must be ready to choose discomfort when Love demands it. And of course Love does demand it, first of all because the self-seeking which is so deeply rooted in us is an offence against love.
The first use to which we must put suffering in general and mortification in particular is known as asceticism: training ourselves to be obedient to God by denying our own desires, so that flesh may become less rebellious to spirit and the whole being may, therefore, be free for its service of God.
Secondly, suffering helps us to expiate: we right the balance of justice which our sins have upset, by voluntarily suffering something for the love of God; and indeed this function of suffering need not be confined to stisfying for our own sins merely but may have its share in helping to expiate for the sins of the world. Nor may we allow ourselves to think that, as is sometimes said, this whole idea of expiation fy suffering is a practical assertion that pain is something good in itself, something in which God delights for its own sake: there is a deep-rooted instinct in us which makes us feel that those who, by cruelty, have made others suffer should be make to suffer themselves, and it is an instict which is supported by theology. To be cruis is to increase the evil in the world, to increase the total of violent self-assertion; and it must be put right by a corresponding act in the opposite direction, an act in which the proud self is humbled and made to accept what before it rejected, the existence of an absolute standard-of justice and goodness and love-to which man must conform. So it was that the total self-assertion of the world in defiance of God was expiated by the total self-dedication, the total obedience, of Christ; and it is in this act of expiation that those who suffer now may share-and , if they are living in the love of God, will want to share.
For, thirdly, it is part of love to want to share in the sufferings of those we love (just as the fact of sharing others` sufferings can cause us to love them, or to love them more). If we can grow sufficiently in the love of Christ we shall begin to want to share in His sufferings simply because they are His sufferings, and incidentally, through this loving and redemptive pain for the world we ourselves shall grow in our love for that world in and for Him.
St. James tells us that trials should be a joy to us because they are the material of patience, which is the "perfect work." Your asceticism should make you patient with yourself; not worrying about your lack of progress, though sorrowing over it; doing the best you can with the ordinary humble things God gives you to do, and leaving the rest to Him. And it should make you humbly patient, therefore, towards the Providence of God in every detail: learning to accept in peace and calm whatever things come to you, precisely because they come as part of that inclusive Providence - learning, therefore, more and more to care and not to care.
So the effect of mortification, of the sacrament of penance, so the gift of knowledge, will be not to crush the personality but to free it, and to fill it with strength and peace and joy, and so enable it to seek God more whole-heartedly, to begin to live in His love. At the same time it will be, not to crush your love of creatures, but, on the contrary, to make it more real and deep. It will be, finally, not to withdraw you from God`s family but to make you love and serve it better and better for His sake and in His sight; till at the end you can say of the whole world the words of the psalmist: "I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwelleth."
That is the end part of chapter five. Firstly I shall say that one thought which came to me whilst typing this to share with those of you who read this with me, is that like the monks of old who typed out copies of the bible and other holy writings, it seeps into a deeper part of the mind of the one who is both reading and more so the one writing/typing, than if one was to just read, or listen! Secondly they would be copying it again and again until they had to move on to different work. Just as repitition of bad habits can become ingrained, much greater for us is learn and repeat good habits. I once awoke not too long ago from sleep and was speaking in my sleep the Lords prayer and so of course I finished it off awake!
My beloved brothers and sisters here we are at last to share my latest artwork.
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Yep. This one below is untitled. If it had one then - O I painted this a few hours ago and have only just now seen some stuff going on in it which I really like and hadnt seen before. Its got action and adventure, horror, drama. Plus passion and romance. I know some smart alec will say what about the comedy? I reply, `You got me, I shall have to, oops, you may find a slice amongst the other stuff going on in the one below!
Blessings peace and love to you all and know that I am so happy to be able to have painted these works and typed the blog. My thanks to you for letting me present it to you. Know that you are loved and pass this on.
Your bro Peter.
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