published on July 12, 2014
PAGE TOPICS
To Be Children of God
Colorful Thought About Being Children
The Soul Tester
Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that we all ought to be like children, for in Heaven there are no adults. Do you and I truly believe to be children of God? This is a question many of us fail to meditate upon, with the consequent risk of becoming adults.
Every adult was once a child. No man who has ever conquered the world, or who has ever built an empire, or who has ever become a Pope or an alcoholic or a journalist was born an adult. What Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte and Leonardo Da Vinci all had in common, apart from being men, is that they all played with toys as toddlers.
And just like them, our God Became a child, too.
The Family and Home of the children: Born in a simple family, this Baby was destined to open the Gates of Paradise to the lost generations sprung from Eve's womb. As a grown man, Jesus Christ called God by the name of Abba as the most intimate way of relating to the Almighty. Abba means "daddy".
His openly displayed use of such word was perceived as blasphemous by those who revered the God of Abraham as a distant entity burning in a bush; but Our Lord introduced something so revolutionary as to change all generations after Him: He Told us that we are children of God.
We should remember that Our Savior never grew up from that very first moment when He exited His Mother's Holy Temple to enter into the dirty manger that is this world. Because His purity, meekness, innocence, knowledge, obedience and grace were eternally begotten of the Father, a world most dark like ours could not have either increased nor decreased His uncreated and unchangeable virtues.
This tells us the reason why our Redeemer would refer to the Creator as Abba in His full adultness which was solely consisting of His corporal appearance – as the all-knowing divine and human duality were unchanged from birth. Indeed, when speaking to the doctors of the law, He would confidently affirm His full memory of the Heavens not as acquired knowledge in temporal time elapse, but as the eternally present full knowledge of all seen and unseen.
John, the youngest among Jesus' Apostles, wrote the following extraordinary words:
"See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him"
While it could take years of reflection to peel off the layers beneath this statement, we can simply perceive the evangelist's joy of realizing the great love that the Father Has sent upon us. You and I, as well as the Apostles, were bestowed the gift of being called His children through, in and with Jesus Christ Himself who is the Gift also.
This means that through Him, with Him and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, a new Fellowship was born: through His Teachings and His Sacrifice on the Cross, our Elderly Brother established the new Covenant which reopened the portal to the Father's realm: our Home.
To be children of God means to know and live the Truth given to us by and in our Blessed Brother, who Was sent by the Almighty Father through the Holy Spirit in the Womb of the Immaculate Mother.
This, my dear friends, is our Family. We are now conscious of having a Father, a Brother and a Mother in the Home we are destined to live forever, world without end.
The Church for the children: In the meantime, a gift within this gift was created for us, poor banished children of Eve living in Satan's reign. Indeed, it is in the "Our Abba Prayer" that the words "Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven" tell us of an obedient fellowship established upon by the Word (in order to know) and in the Flesh (in order to live): this is the Catholic and Apostolic Church founded on Peter's Tomb and of which branches shall bear much fruit. There, we shall receive the Gifts of the Word and of the Eucharist, along with the Seven Sacraments. The also called "Mystical Body of Christ" had Its very foundation in Christ's Death on the Cross, although formally inaugurated on Pentecost, when as promised, He Sent the Holy Spirit upon His Mother and Her children: the apostles.
St. Paul speaks of all Christians as members of Christ, so that with Him, they form one Body, although such term does not appear in his writings.
The Church is also formed on three levels:
The Church Militant here on Earth. The name militant is due to the condition of Its children in struggling against the world, the flesh and the devil.
The Church Suffering in Purgatory. The name indicates the state in which are found the souls of those who died in God’s merciful grace and friendship, but who are still in need of purification in order to enter Glory.
The Church Triumphant in the Glory of the Heavenly Realm.
The unity and cooperation of the children of the Church on Earth, in Purgatory and in Heaven is also called the Communion of Saints.
As mentioned above, the Church on earth is constantly battling in the midst of this world's dark hurricanes just like a lamb among the wolves.
In John's passage there is the mention of the term "world", signifying the spirit of this soon ending realm in which you, me, and the Bride live. The world does not know the depths of this wondrous gift bestowed upon us – and which dwells inside of us – because it does not know Christ, Who is the Way and the Truth rejected and killed on the cross by it. Its spirit is of Satan, who governs it from the depth of his everlasting pit of misery and in bottomless darkness in the hope of incinerating Christ's Church into his kingdom's fires.
"For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him"
True Peace for us children: When Christ Tells us, His children, "I give you my peace, My peace I give unto you", He did not mean for us to be in peace with our own sinful selves, or with the sins of the world and all its evils, or with our going to church while ignoring the needy, or with our daily robotic praying while remaining superficial or selfish. This is rather the insensitive passivity born from our defective tendencies to self involvement, to a false sense of security in a mental faith rather than a fruitful practice of it, and to the forgetfulness of our role in serving God through, also, a horizontal love toward our neighbors as the outcome of an interior grace manifested in the suffering for others' precarious spiritual (and physical) needs. Not to mention that such attitude results in the omission of charity: and for a Christian soul, charity is a pure vessel to witness unto others for the solely purpose of sharing the Truth of Christ as the only mean to salvation (which we often mistakenly believe to be for us only, privileged chosen souls who are already saved by an "idea of salvation" which has been conveniently molded upon our own needs).
That true peace can only germinate within us by taking up our cross to then follow Our Teacher on the road to holiness, which comes at the price of our stillness in not committing what all those around us – of the world – instinctively commit on any given Friday night or maybe daily, by living with the person they unlawfully consume with because divested of the seal in the Sacrament of Marriage. These, of course, are only two common and practical examples of an endless list of what today's secular society deems as normal, if not requirements needed to be considered a "healthy individual".
Peace, my dear friends, comes at the price of denying our sinful pleasures as well as our own standards, our own thoughts and our own opinions, as we only have the standards, thoughts and opinions of God while being unaffected by the standards, thoughts and opinions of others. This is called obedience to His Laws, which according to Christ, is the only way you and I are ever able to declare our Love for Him. While tasting the salt and sand of penance in our mouths, the serpent wraps his unctuous skin around us in order to create a new movement as to break our firmness in faith.
My dear friends, peace and joy are the fruits of obedience and self-denial of our sinister desires, vainglory and pleasures of mind and body; it is one of the fruits of holiness, and to be holy as the Father in the Heavens Is Holy, we must be separated from the world, its spirit, its temptations and sins as well as from our own selves.
This means that I, no longer I shall live, but Christ in Me as I am now dead to myself.
It means that no longer I eat, sleep, talk, think and walk, but it is Christ who now fully lives and operates through me, merely an instrument of dust with its mortal organs and faculties.
It means I shall be united with Him;
It means I shall let go of my own identity as a XXI century individual;
It means I shall see with His eyes and share the pain of His suffering in witnessing the sins and injustices of the world and of myself.
It means that I shall ache with loneliness while fenced within the protective boundaries of a now new nature, which instills in me an almost instinctual rejection of former passions through God's grace.
It means that to be united with Christ we are to only serve one Master, all others excluded (unless their authority and/or requests meet the Verb's).
This unity will comfort us when being in His company and isolate us from those brothers and sisters who, by failing to comprehend the sweetness of such intimacy, will be divided from us through His spade.
It means I am now alive because I'm entwined with Him as He descends into my depths and lifts me up towards Himself at a point of meeting.
What John is speaking of is inherent to a world which cannot know those who don't let themselves be known by it, as they no longer belong to death but found new life, in Christ Jesus, by way of Resurrection. Is this the First Resurrection that Our Lord Spoke of? We, then, might consider each morning a new resurrection as we come to life, pick up our cross, follow God and be dead to our own selves until, each night, we rest in peace. And so it goes on and on and on, day after day, in the joy of freely giving up our own will to do the one of the Father. This is the way to Eternal Life as we are living already our life eternal, from this very now until the never-ending ecstasy. We are alive because of our living in Christ and not in the world, as He Is alive in you and in me and within the very depths of our being, sharing all our joys and challenges whether we are aware of Him or not.
We, then, shall forget our own names to all be called by the same title: Christians.
After all, if Our Lord's language of love is now our language also, we shall be as blessed as Peter when they said to him "…for thy very speech betrays thee".
A COLORFUL THOUGHT ABOUT BEING CHILDREN
If you have suffered through my writings, which contain nothing new to be revealed but only that which is confirmed, I would not be surprised if you asked "What has this to do with being children?"
To that I would answer that it has everything to do with it.
First, I would like to briefly recapitalize our history:
God Created us from the nothingness of time immemorial and for reasons unknown to us other than what we know already: He Does not have to make things outside His Own Will.
One day and long ago, our race betrayed and offended Him by letting Satan's mud stain His Image and Likeness which was stamped upon our garments. After Adam and Eve were banished from the Terrestrial Paradise, Our Creator started speaking through the Prophets because of His generous Love for us. After what could either be thousands of years or a blink of God's eye, He Sent His only Begotten Son to die for us, just like a Lamb to the slaughter, in order to reopen the Gates of Ecstasy Forever Eternal.
The Father, Abba, Is indeed very serious about our soul as to let us, unjust and ungrateful children of this earth, murder Him. Christ Came, Taught us, Performed miracles, Transfigured, Instituted the Eucharist, Founded His Church, Was betrayed, unjustly Judged, Tortured, Killed. He Resurrected three days after His Death and Ascended into Heaven in Mind, Body and Soul.
For two thousand years the Catholic Church as well as all those who honor Him from without It, have maintained the Word alive in the world.
And here we are, in 2014, still loving Him.
Ladies and gentlemen, this condensed truth is the story of God and His long-lost children.
This, along with His next-to-occur Second Coming, is to take us all into a Kingdom of unfathomable beauty where He, the Father, His Son and His Holy Spirit, will dwell among us.
For those of you who do not believe this, it is more than understandable: Jesus Said "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" as to understanding the doubts of us men and women – and of this time especially.
But for now, I would like to invite you to play a fun little game with me. We'll call it "The Soul Tester"
If you could choose between these two images, which one would you pick?
And where would you rather be, or live in?
Taste, of course, is taste. And the fact that I, personally, prefer the feeling of the second location remains just that: my personal choice. I would like to make a note: the first rendition shows an average building made today and by the hand of men, while the second one is a reproduction of what men could never make out of nothingness: mountains, rivers, trees, grass and animals. Those were on this planet long before man appeared to start raping its soil, waters and air. God is the author of this landscape which, undoubtedly, transmits a deep sense of peace and awe.
Now, for those of you that might prefer the first illustration: I would like for you to think back at the time of when you were a child. Which image would you have picked? Without any so-called logical adult reasoning, which was boring to us back then, wouldn't have you chosen the nature image, even though there's no building where to sleep? We adults can be so preoccupied with planning for a future that may never come, or with having a roof over our heads at all times, or having to reach a certain social status. Shouldn't we think of our time of death, instead, when we will realize that all we accomplished will remain here on earth? Probably, the regrets will be about not having lived enough with our hearts open to the beauty of creation and, above all, to the greatness of its Maker.
Here are two larger images. I would ask you to not scroll down until you have looked at the first one really well. It is the same collage posted at the beginning of this page as to symbolize childhood and what attracts the imagination of those pure angels before the world begins consuming their innocence. Once you're done looking at this first composite, you can scroll down to admire the second one, under which there will be some thoughts. See you in a bit…
Now that you had the opportunity to look at both, you can scroll back up and try to look at both collages at the same time (even if only partially) just to truly make a comparison.
What do you think? As someone who has watched dozens of horror movies throughout his life, I still have to admit that the comparison is absolutely shocking. In the second image, so many of us will be able to recognize famous movies and/or images that we have seen before but which we would not be able to place in time and space.
This is the subconscious bombardment under which we are constantly exposed. The thousands of images we see everyday on television, in movie theaters, on billboards, on buses, on buildings, on subways, on magazines, on the Internet and in all other possible places is, to say the very least, incredibly overwhelming to our brains, our state of being, our thoughts, our conscious and subconscious minds, our language, our memory, our hearts and souls.
Sometimes it is a good thing to wonder why adults enjoy watching things that reanimate our worse fears and most horrific nightmares. Why are we so attracted to darkness? Have you ever wondered? There are reasons, my dear friends, and they all reside in the human mind (which is so prone to darkness) and in the human soul (which is either barricaded in self-protection against the obscurity entering through our minds or left wide open just like a castle being invaded during a battle as its fortifications were demolished).
The constant use, in the Media world, of imagery portraying evil, murder, rape, violence and all other forms of sinisterness has undoubtedly paid off: homicide, hatred, mental illnesses of all kinds and crime have increased exponentially during the last few years and the numbers are certainly not going down anytime soon.
Now, do you think that a child would enjoy the view of those horror movie billboards? His or her reaction could easily be that of tears and screams as their vulnerable core is being violated by ugliness, death, despair, blood, deformities, possessions, murder, violence, rage, isolation, death, anguish, desperation, insanity, hurt, fear and as many more words of darkness as the number of miles between Cairo and Paris .
All this accounts for one thing: EVIL.
We see that word so much these days, my dear friends. Its four letters have been played with by reversing the word into LIVE, but we know (or at least we should know) that there is no life in evil. No life, no love, no kindness. Not one inch or one dot or one atom of goodness is contained in evil. Evil is eternal death and only death can come from it.
Evil spreads like an oil drop into water; it grows like the spider web built for the sake of trapping other creatures to then feast on them; evil is just as contagious as a deadly disease to which we shall not expose ourselves unless proper precautions were taken.
Evil, inspired by those demons residing in the deep darkness of Hell's pits, are of cunning nature and perverted ideas. They know that the only hope they have in being able to accomplish their task – it being of global control and of global soul-holocaust – is by corrupting the souls of those humans who – thirsty of power, filled in greed, and driven by unlimited ambition – are willingly selling their souls to the king of lies. It is because of their allegiance to Satan that evil has grown to almost reach its peak in the history of this world.
This is in disobedience to God and His sacred Laws. This is what adults do. This is what bad children do (or try to do). The good child, instead, obeys his parents: he's moldable and pure. He wants to please his father and believes what his mother tells him. There is no wanting darkness for himself or others but, rather, light and peace.
The photograph on the left is a simple, common representation of the daily world seen by the average person, the school teacher, the factory worker, the secretary or the policeman. This is the world made by adults for the adults, or as we often mistakenly name them, for the mature people. This, on the left, is the view of maturity, the world of grown ups, the embodiment of man's ambition: jammed freeways, geometrical office cubicles, dark underground tunnels to transport people and barbed wires to divide the lands of this world. Is this the vision you and I had while reading of some hobbits in Middle Earth or when playing in some park's playground among two hundred year old trees? Those who built these roads and laid these fences were once children; those who designed such structures once played with some toys while dreaming of being astronauts; and those controlling the system from the top of a global pyramid were once fed by their mothers' breasts while wrapped in candid white sheets and warm love. What changed, we might ask? Why do we become so cold, detached, self-obsessed, dark, proud and materialistic once we grow out of childhood? What is that draws us towards ugliness, division and darkness? What is the appeal of gossip, of money, of worldly ambitions and of social status? We, surely, were not born with all such and, while never perfect, our innocence once distinguished us as noble creatures who would only dream of a higher form of happiness reigning above the small illusions of this "adults' world". We can only remember the long and boring conversations among those grown-ups and our parents: politics, money, work, gossip, clothes, health, food or sports were just a few of the subjects discussed on a street sidewalk while our free hearts would, instead, take our attention to a bird right next to us or to the dark clouds which, being reflected in a puddle, would make us wonder if a whole world was to be found in its unexplored depths. Back then, time was never an imposition or a money-making opportunity to be used for our own glory but the simple present enjoyment of just being. The knowing of our smallness made us great as we felt contained within a larger place of unexplored places which stimulated our creativity in always unpredictable ways. Our hearts built thousands of imaginary worlds no one would ever know but ourselves and the One who Made us: God, the Maker of all things and, therefore, the very Origin of our fantastical journeys to places and times now buried by the daily pursuits of our mortal earthly existences. Isn't this our prayer? Aren't these the places where we want to live? Prayer, my dear friends, can only be from one's heart in hope and joy; prayer builds the bridge between us and the Father who, in His infinitely tender heart, died for us on the same day His Son Jesus Christ died in the flesh on a man-made cross. This God does not think like us, selfish adults in a gray world. Just look at a few examples of His infinitely colorful imagination:
All this He Has Made for us, His children. Look at His Creativity: this is the work of an Infinite Genius. No coincidences nor Big Bang Theories could even begin to create one feather of a chicken under a splendid star called Sun. If we compare the collage above with the one here on the left, it is easy to notice that God has created the world for children. The vivid colors and endless variations of shape and structure present within it makes it closer to the 'children compositions' we posted onto this page. What makes God's touch incomprehensible in its greatness is the mysterious ability to make LIFE. Only God can create out of nothingness; only God can make one elephant and five thousand ants coexist within a few square feet of land while a lion's roar travels through miles of hot air under a red-painted African sky. What can we say about this miracle of creation? There are no words nor the mere understanding to describe the breathtaking mind of our Father in Heaven. We, children, must contemplate on His beauty and generosity. We must remain humble and small in the same way we did when obeying and respecting our earthly parents. We must never let go of our innocence, a treasure so rare to be found in today's gluttonous society. We must not run from the Lord, my dear friends; in this imperfect garden we live, we have the illusion and opportunity to escape from our God's Presence by cooping ourselves up into the darkness of a remote corner here on earth just like Adam and Eve did in the Eternal Eden. But one day soon we will open our eyes and, in the midst of that dark forest, light will be cast on the thick trees' shades: Christ will be standing in front of each one of us, staring into our eyes; there will be no more dark bar or luxurious cruise to escape to, but the only path in front of our very feet will lead to Him only as He will be waiting for us to run and hug Him as His children. Why will this happen? For one reason: because He Is madly in love with each one of us – world without end. Amen ~
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