Fish on Friday
Good day brothers and sisters. May the love of God bless you and always be light to your heart, soul and mind. Welcome to today's blog.
As usual, you are first after God and me to see these pictures.
I used along with some paint on the paper, decorators caulk, to give it the three dimensional aspect.
I may be moving from painting using a transition of other media, back to sculpture. Who knows for sure, not me! All I know for sure is that we are all loved and our true goal should we accept it or not is to realize this love and express it.
For one who desires to approach God, it is necessary to become the enemy
of His enemies; and, as I find nothing that is worse than myself, nor that is
more inimical to Him, I am compelled to hold myself in more aversion than
anything else whatever, and will even despise myself and count it to be
worthless. And, on the other hand, I will detach my spirit from all the goods
of both this world and the other, which I will henceforth regard as if they had
no existence. I have implored God neither to suffer me to rejoice interior
nor to grieve over any created thing, so that I may never be seen to shed a
single tear. And I have begged Him to take away from me the freedom of my will,
so that I may no longer do what pleases me, but only what is according to His
pleasure: all these things I have obtained from his clemency.
I see
clearly with the interior eye, that the sweet God loves with a pure love the
creature that He has created, and has a hatred for nothing but sin, which is
more opposed to Him than can be thought or imagined.
That which man judges to be perfect, in the
sight of God is defect. For all the works of man, which appear faultless when
he considers them feels, remembers, wills and understands them, are, if he does
not refer them to God, corrupt and sinful. For, to the perfection of our works
it is necessary that they be wrought in us but not of us. In the works of God
it is he that is the prime mover, and not man.
Oh, what peril attaches to sin willfully
committed! For it is so difficult for man to bring himself to penance, and
without penitence guilt remains and will ever remain, so long as man retains
unchanged the will to sin, or is intent upon committing it.
There is no doubt that, if man could
perceive the many difficulties thrown by self-love in the way of his own good,
he would no longer allow himself to be deceived by it; and its malignity is the
more to be dreaded because it is so powerful that were but one grain of it in
the world would be sufficient to corrupt all mankind. Wherefore I conclude that
self-love is the root of all evils which exist in this world and in the other.
Behold Lucifer, whose present state is the result of following the suggestions
of his self-love; and in ourselves it seems to me even worse. Our father Adam
has so contaminated us that to my eyes the evil appears almost incurable, for
it so penetrates our veins, our nerves, our bones, that we can neither say nor
think nor do anything which is not full of the poison of this love - not even
those thoughts and deeds which are directed toward the purification of the
spirit.
When I see and contemplate what God is, and
what our own misery is, and behold the many ways by which he seeks to exalt us,
I am transported beyond myself with astonishment. On the part of man, I see
such a perversity and rebellion against God, that it seems impossible to bend his
will except by the lure of things greater than those he enjoys here in this
life. This is because the soul loves visible things, and will not renounce one
but with the hope of four. And even with this hope, she would still seek to
escape, if God did not retain her by his exterior and interior graces, without
which man, whose instincts are naturally corrupt, could not be saved; for we
are naturally corrupt, could not be saved; for we are naturally prone to add
actual to original sin, and to continually tend toward earth for our
satisfactions.
Oh,
Love! let me remain thus, that I may be submissive; for otherwise it
would be impossible that I should not do something wrong. Oh, how good
and admirable is the knowledge of a soul, which, being all protected,
united, and transformed in God, her felicity, sees clearly, on one side,
her own inclination to all that is evil, and on the other, how she is
restrained by God, that she may not commit actual sin! One thing is
certain; namely, that never is the soul so perfect that it does not need
the continual help of God, even though it be transformed in him. It is
true, that the nature of the sweet God is such, that he never allows
these souls to fall, although the soul, left to herself, could fall if
she were not thus restrained. But he only preserves those who never with
their free will consent unto sin; and allows those to fall who do
voluntarily yield assent thereto; for truly, having given us free will,
he will not force it. Consequently, those who fall into sin do so by
their own fault, and not by that of God, who is ever ready to aid the
soul even after her fall, if she will allow herself to be aided, and
will correspond to the divine grace which never ceases to call her,
saying: "Turn from evil and do good, and be converted to me with your
whole heart.
I am prepared to defend mysticism against a very common charge, one brought
often by scientists and others who prize rational thought. This charge is that the
mystical vision is irrational. I believe that this criticism is misdirected. On the face
of it, there is nothing logically incoherent about a view that reality is an
undifferentiated unity. In fact, the Greek philosopher Parmenides, the only pre-Socratic
thinker who had a clear grasp of the principle of contradiction, used logic to attempt a
proof of absolute monism. Mysticism is not necessarily irrational; rather, it is just
highly improbable given what we know about the world. The other aspect of this charge is
that mystical experiences are irrational because they cannot possibly happen. With some
exceptions of course, I believe that we should believe mystics when they claim that they
have had these experiences. It is the interpretation of the experiences that we can
challenge, and I believe that we can do that very successfully. I am personally convinced
that the total unity they experience is in the mind and not in reality.
Whether going out into the
the world, or inside heart
and mind of what we for sake
of convenience, we call our
self.
Know that there can really be
no separate self from all
that is, was and shall be.
We are all one and some
of us get to realize
this `being` and
attach less
importance
on doing!
Bless
Peace and love to you and all beings, from bro Peter G Kimble ps
Please pass this on.
e
