Fish on Friday

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.