Per Ipsum

 Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. Matthew 5: 3 This one is both obvious and subtle. I scanned various writers for ideas and found a sea of things: Hands full of gold cannot reach for God. In other words, filling ourselves with wealth as our aim and goal leaves no room for God in our hearts and souls. Greed is a form of idolatry.  Overabundance, while others go hungry, is a sin against charity. If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man who has no shirt. (That gem is from Saint Ambrose) Wealth isn't in and of itself evil, it is the heart of man that is the problem. Greed is the great American sin. I refer to the CEOs who take multi-million dollar bonuses while laying off workers.  I refer to those who refuse to tax the rich and call attempts to help the poor "socialism." But I also believe it infests us all on every economic level-the striving, the focus on "security," the striving for promot...

  "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?"                                                   John 6:9               Aside from the Resurrection, the feeding of the 5000 is the only miracle recounted in all four gospels. It is interesting to me that it is about feeding the hungry. Generally in this story and its commentary (such as the homily at today's Mass) the focus is on the apostles and their relative faith or lack of it, on their questioning. It struck me this morning that my position is more like the boy with the fish. He didn't understand the big picture He knew he couldn't solve the problem of 5,000 hungry people He knew he couldn't fix the world around him He wasn't an apostle or any sort of important official BUT He didn't sit quietly feeling helpless ...

  Their end is destruction whose god is their stomach, whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.  Phillipians 3:19 What do you think of when I type GLUTTONY? A morbidly obese person as in the picture? A Roman orgy with people gorging on rich foods and purging so they can eat more? Think again. What about the second slice of pie? The third glass of wine? The extra pork chop your brother was eying? And where does excessive dieting fit? Here or in pride? We live in an era in which body image is such an obsession people stop thinking clearly about food. Health can be an obsession that leads to dietary compulsions and fixations as well. I suspect that whenever we focus on eating as an end in itself for whatever reason we've crossed into the gluttony zone. That last line in the quote strikes me as critical. The problem is not what we eat or how much but the extent to which we set our minds on earthly things, making food or drink an end in itself. We obvio...

  For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.   1 John 2:16 In my last post, I spoke of the underlying habits of action and thought that keep us full of the world and the flesh and prevent us from emptying ourselves to allow God to enter into us and fill our souls—the big seven that separate us from God. Lust isn't as destructive as pride for instance but it is pervasive, and the one many people obsess on, and/or accuse the church of obsessing on, so it seems like a good starting point. I begin with a definition from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:  Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes. Legalistic that, full of careful adjectives. Clearly, it doesn't refer to all desire or all sexual pleasure, but the specific list of sins related to lust is...