predication.net

What is it about? Every average person can know with certainty the existence of the Supreme Being, on whom everything depends and ho is not dependent on anyone. We call this being God. According to the Book of Wisdom, a man who does not know God is empty, worthless, who does not even deserve the title of man. Such a man is unwise. St. Augustine beautifully develops the words of the book of Wisdom. Nature obeys, the whole universe obeys, and the unbeliever does not want to be convinced. Why do you turn away and forget the one who created you so great, who created the heavens and the earth this whole beautiful temple of nature for you, without your slightest merit? What is created says in clear words about its Creator.

The sky is calling. I am not God because if God were not a single cloud, he could not afford to obscure my beauty, nor would darkness cover my clarity.

The sun says. Man, how come you bow to me like God? Can’t you see that I’m going out and going? God neither comes out nor falls. I am indeed great and admirable, but I will obey the one who created you and me, and if you worship me for my light and warmth, which will serve you only because you do not know the true God.

The moon and the stars speak. Do you not see man, that we are only allowed to shine at night, that we must not cross the boundaries set for us by the almighty Creator .

The sea calls with everything in it. I am not God. I am following the order I received. I allow ships to travel to the port on time. And even such ships that pursue only wealth. If I do my duty so consistently, why do you forsake the God who created everything?

The earth is calling. About a man like us, can you appropriate divine power? Did you forget that I was the same as you? You are taken and formed from my clay, except the soul that surpasses me. Do you not know that you were taken from my bosom like other creatures, over whom God has made you king? You forgot about the truth. You no longer understand this because you have given up your heights and fallen to the level of unreasonable animals that you are similar.

The human soul is the eternal source of life, the principle of constant activity. The human body is subjected to the natural conditions of food, rest, sleep, and the like. The body wears out, ages, passes into fatigue, natural sleep. At the same time, it still relies on the supply of food to gain new strength and re-operate. One cannot know oneself directly, but only as long as the body is capable of action. By resting the body, the soul passes from the activity of the subconscious to the movement of the conscious. If a person falls into natural deep sleep or sleep caused by anesthesia or into unconsciousness, sensory activity, that is, the activity of deliberate action, is excluded. It seems to us that the soul is also inactive in this state. However, this is a big mistake. The soul is never wholly idle. The human soul is itself an activity in which there is no passivity. In a soul that is created according to image and form, there can be no imperfection. Indeed, it is not perfect, as God because it is dependent on God. Our human cognition is imperfect. He knows the mind through the senses and can only infer from the concepts thus acquired. His judgment is done brutally. The reason can think of only one thing. He will never know thousands of items. Understanding the soul is much more perfect. The soul knows in a single action everything where it is spatially present. The soul immediately knows everything we would naturally need for years. To know us, the object must appeal to us, engage us. It is a difference whether we see the thing by light or by darkness. Such is not the knowledge of the soul. The soul in cognition is not dependent on sunlight or darkness. We recognize by concepts. We know many ideas. For example, a dog, a bush, and a crow do not know everything these terms contain. The knowledge of the soul is perfect. In a single action, he knows everything that can be known about things. The soul can also know the deeds it will once perform of its own free will. This knowledge of the soul is timeless. The human soul has this knowledge. The human soul also has other abilities and qualities. It can be active in creation. Not at creation.

1. Live in the present
Such an invitation may seem unexpected, if not paradoxical. Presence is perhaps not defined as the period in which are we moving? However, when we think about it, we can attribute little value to the moment we experience? This moment is fragile, insignificant, and not graspable between two immense realities – the past and the future. Man according to his age, temperament, and character inclinations more or less indulge in dreams about the future or with, on the contrary, it deals with the past. Others would like to live a dream life, carry out his plans while his grandfather remembers the past youth.

We do not appreciate the present moment. We accuse her of tearing us from the past, which we are sorry for, or of covering our future. Until it happened, he longed for me alive. As soon as it passes, we want to detain her, and in one thing the moment we have the opportunity to grip it, we forget to give it for the time it is supposed to have, we do not fill it with what it should contain, we will not let the fruits it bears ripen. After all, if he has presence too much to hit us, we hastily fall into the old way of thinking and experiencing time. We do not think about the presence, or very little. This neglect of the present moment is nonsense, a lack, so seriously it deprives us of the unity that some individuals have tried in various ways to prove the need to live in the present.

2. Pagan conception
Already in ancient times, Kyren morality preached pleasure insatiably
longing for pleasure. According to the founder of this morality, Aristides and his pupils need to take advantage of the enjoyment that is offered; for tomorrow I could die now, and it would be a shame to miss this pleasure. Pleasure is also the goal of Epicurean morality (only with which variants in the way to achieve it). Horatius sums up this idea in a famous sentence: Carpe diem (= Enjoy the day). In the Renaissance, this theme again became part of the period thought. De Ronsard put it in a charming poetic verse: Collect the flowers of life, if you believe me, don’t wait for tomorrow. Note that experiencing the present tense is considered enjoyment in the present; I use the time to my advantage as a sequence of moments. More recently, A. Gide professed an open soul to all that the present moment brings to her; Unfortunately, he wanted to benefit from the expansion constantly offered only. All these theories, certainly only pagan, count on enjoyment, but there is some truth in them. After all, already a Roman Seneca, though the pagan himself, he noted that the common mistake is that people do not do what they have to do, or do something wrong then they have done. Let us now look at the Christian concept of the present.

3. Christian conception
When we open the Gospel, we find a statement about how to live in the present moment. Our Lord spoke directly at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow
will have its worries. He has had enough of his suffering every day (Mt 6:34). Every day is understood here as a time we should not worry about … We can talk about the duty to be carefree. In the prayer of our Father, which our Lord gave us as a model, He is the notion of the present moment is once again applied in the Gospel: Give us this day our daily bread (Matt. 6:11). We ask for our bread every day, and we only need to accumulate as much as we need today. The Church, the bride of Christ, remains true to this idea. Also, in the suffix she attached to the angelic greeting, she emphasizes the word now: pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Moreover, in prayer, Hail the Queen experiences the Church present, a moment par excellence. In a way, this prayer brings us to the moment that will precede our death. Because of me, I will not experience my death. I won’t die, the psalmist says, but I will live (2 \ 118,17).
In the Liturgy of the Hours, there is a different prayer for each time of day: praise is not the same as complete. Also, every holiday is celebrated in one’s spirit. St. Paul also draws attention to the present moment, which we must not escape: I heard you in due season, on the day of salvation, I helped you. Behold, now is the time; Behold now is the day of salvation (2 Cor 6: 2). The saints experienced the present for a moment wonderfully, to the image of God, with whom everything is happening now, and not in the past or future. When he speaks to his son, he says: I have begotten you today (Ps. 2: 7). This is God today in eternal presence. Similarly, Theresa of the Child Jesus said in her time after the last illness: But I see only the present moment, I forget to the past, and I protect myself from thinking about the future.

Atheism is gaining ground, and its mass spread to all impresses. It is no longer the privilege of an enlightened minority, but it expresses the expected standard of all strata of society. The whole civilian consciously built on the rejection of God, more precisely to deny any dependence on extraterrestrial reality. Science does not need the hypothesis of God. And on the other hand, theoretically, either God is not omnipotent because He does not remove evil, or if He wants to avoid removing it, He is not loving.
Atheism, thus built on denial, has none own metaphysical content, no constructive philosophy. Rarely it is usually announced explicitly; its predominant, democratically widespread form is formless practical atheism. The philosophical after the wish came only in the second round to justify the attitude and provided an alibi. His reasons are never and cannot be genuinely rational because they would not survive; they are empirical, vastly practical, and pragmatic. This fact explains that the problem ceased to interest a person; the more he cares about politics or economics, and religious faith no longer matters to him, does not say. This attitude is reinforced by the often justified distrust of philosophers who abandon their skepticism.
And betray their social function. St. Paul was well aware of what he was doing when his sermon focused on what immediately provoked a violent reaction of contemplative reason. For human thought, the Incarnation will always be the fool of novelty and offense. This thinking by its historical critique Vladimir Soloviev – Epochs of spiritual life demythologizes, distinguishes between the historical layman and Christ dogmatic statements of faith. The archaic state of knowledge of the past arouses the distrust of every scientist today and makes him less willing to consider the alleged “revelation.” There is no certainty whether an event happened, and the truth, hidden in the centuries, is for contemporary actual ism; either way, she is unacceptable. It is a need to distinguish verifiable facts and texts that are based on myth. It is inconceivable, even insulting, that God enters time and entrusts its truth to a handful of suspicious disciples and the fragile transmission of several texts written twenty centuries ago. Jesus’ life then appears as an anecdotal event without any guarantee of objectivity. How can it be that historians hardly? Captured fact will hit a man’s heart from the streets of the 20th century? How can an event fix in time and space claim eternal value, the authority of God, and the broad reach for the salvation of every person? To the critical mind, this is monstrous disproportionate,  even unbearable. Man, Jesus could in Pales quite well and exist well. Nor does it seem unacceptable, so the deification of man Jesus by his disciples, rather than the humanization of God. Moral ideal, philosophical concept, maybe in the extreme eventually get the divine title. Still, the philosopher rejects the dialogue between man and God-man, rejects God who speaks as a man, a God who has a human face. So, it crumbles to dust the apostolic authority of the witnesses and with it the authority of Scripture. For the lack of listeners, it is more than ever a voice that screams.

A person who claims to be God is unacceptable to the Jews, a God who is becoming a man is an outrage to the Greeks. The Old Testament knows God but does not know God  before the state; Greek mysteries and knew a giant from a suffering god, but he did not know a God. The New Testament reveals both.

 Meeting
in the historical emptiness. Just like the Athenian sages once did today, a street man rejects every sermon: “We’ll hear about it, but sometimes “(Acts 17:32).
This genuine difficulty needs to be paid attention to be clear about what faith requires from our spirits, and know the reason for this claim. Unfortunately, believers and unbelievers profoundly deepen each other they ignore; they do not understand because they belong to different anthropological types. Already for St. Gregor of Nazian, man, an age not governed by the Holy Spirit, is a unique human species.
Believers naively make the argument of fear of the Court or metaphysical fears of death. Still, at the current level of development
resurrection from the dead and the whole classical issue of religion, they do not touch the atheist consciousness because, in this state of advanced degeneration, their traces are no longer even in the subconscious. We observe a profound transformation of the human substrate.
It is essential to understand this because the existence of the real spiritual life, the fact of a holy life, the presence of a saint the man above the always formless crowd will be for atheism, which wants to be systematic, spiritual, and totalitarian, an unbearable thorn in the eye. Sooner or later, it will become impossible for dynamic faith and militant atheism not to know each other or coexisted peacefully. Messianic proclamations will reach a limit on which they will stand sharply against each other and be eliminated. And indeed, there is already a clear and evenly authoritative one a way to present the problem of faith and to put atheism into error, a specific confrontation that does not allow any fraud, no escape, no “asylum ignorance.”

Encourage believers to live the faith
The discovery of the anti-rabies drug, Pasteur said: “I would like to believe how. He was a Breton and knew the belief of the women of this region that they had firm, steadfast, steadfast faith.
To the Gospel women, Jesus says, “… your faith is great. Whatever happens to you,  want” (Mt 15:28).
The Canaanite woman was from a different nation than the chosen nation. She was from the remnants of the original Palestinian population that the Jews were to exterminate and were not allowed to come into contact because, in connection with foreign nations, Jews often lost faith in the God of Israel. Jesus rejects the Canaanite woman and emphasizes that she is sent to the sheep of Israel. But rejection does not end the whole matter. A woman, stranger, cannot be disgusted. She didn’t feel offended and humiliated when she heard the words about children and puppies. She did not leave with anger, but testified to her faith and trust in him. He glorifies him as the son of David; that is, as the Messiah and steadfast by faith, he asks for deliverance from evil for his daughter. And it is this woman’s faith that is significantly different from the infidelity of many people in Israel. After all, let’s just notice how the Lord often reproaches his disciples for their weak faith.

What is our faith? We don’t sometimes find it too difficult and almost
impossible, or do we resist the consequences that result from believers, or do we despise her? Faith is a gift, and we must protect that gift and develop. Faith needs, like all living things – food to grow. Therefore, we must continue to deepen our faith and devotion to Jesus Christ. At the same, we will also have to overcome various crises with her to mature. Faith in Jesus as Savior, faith in Jesus as the one who will set man free from inner evil, is the good faith in the Messiah. Jesus not only responds positively to such a belief in the case of a Canaanite woman, but always. “Woman, your faith is great! Leave you
it will happen as you wish” (Mt 15:28). The great faith of a woman is the main reason why Jesus healed her daughter. Jesus can also heal us from all that is internally bound and enslaved. It’s up to us to believe that Jesus can heal.
Lord Jesus, we want to believe in You, hope in You, and above all You
love.

 Different meanings of the word world It seems that the Church in the last time has significantly changed its attitude to the world and its values, especially after the Second Vatican Council! These are questions or objections that we often hear. They are not the rest new and cannot be said to be simple, not mature phrases. Man’s relationship to the world and God is a fundamental religious problem. We seem to be standing from the beginning before the dangerous choice between the two options. Neither looks promising. Either we are looking for God in the world, then we face the dangers of pantheism, monism, materialism, or declare that God is fundamentally different from the world. But then, we can’t avoid the objection of materialists that religion distracts from the world. After all, Christian Asceticism say this clearly: “Love for God and Love for the world are irreconcilable. » In the Gospel of St. John, this idea comes often back and emphatically. If you were of the world, the world would love what is his, but because you are not of the world, that I have chosen you out of the world, the world of you hates (Jn 15:19). And yet we read the same.

Gospel: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believed in him should not perish, but to have eternal life (Jn 3:16). Christ is the Savior of the world and sends his disciples to the whole world (Mt 16, 15) to be the light of the world (Mt 5:14). It is also interesting that when we speak about the «world,» we think more about its size, space, the «living world.» In Aramaic, in the word of Christ, the expression alma. The world also means a certain period, some time, about as when we say “today’s world,” in the “Roman world.” etc. From this, it can be seen that the word “world” can have several meanings. The four most important are the following:

1. the visible and invisible world, that is, all that God

created;

2. visible nature (what illuminates the sun, light;

«World» originally means light);

3. human society (“life in the world,” “coming into contact with the world”);

4. corrupt society, lousy environment, temptations

(«To warn the world»), that is the world in a moral sense.

The visible world

«Only Christianity liberated the material world from prehistoric times damnation, »rightly writes a modern theologian. Nevertheless, neither philosophy nor religion has sufficiently resolved the relationship between God and the world. They weren’t, all systems are radically dualistic to see in matter all evil. Either, God will deal with the world, but he will be dependent on the planet and not be an almighty and happy God.

Or he does not deal with the world; he is entirely improper, as Aristotle thought. But then the value of the world is small, and it does not remain, only to flee from it to God. In his beautiful homilies on Hexameron (i.e. work of creation in six days according to the Bible) shows St. Basil, how this gap between God and the world bends the word of Scripture zero, In the beginning, God created … (Gen 1: 1) not God, earth, plants, animals … all this is not against God nor outside of God, but it is his work. And God saw it good (Gen 1:12). The whole visible world is presented here in the image of a beautiful garden, prepared for the one who has it to inhabit, t. j. man the image of God (Gen 1:27). In this sense, of course, there is no point in speaking about «escape from the world.» Spiritual books say the opposite about the proper «use» of the world, about the «use of creatures.» The example we read right in the first meditation of the Exercises of St. Ignatius:

“Everything on earth is created for man to help him achieve the goal for which he was created.” Right now, then, the basic rule of «world use» is expressed: as much as we can, and we must use as much as we can for good. If the world is “good,” then it can only be a means for good. Everything else is not using, but abuse. Western authors like to show how everything can be used

for a good deed: field, house, money, health, etc. Eastern writers, who are more prone to contemplation, speak with tremendous enthusiasm about the beauty of the world, its harmony, colors. All this is then to serve us, to remind us of the size and beauty of the Creator. Nature then becomes the “school of the soul,” the book we read about God. Modern authors add new considerations. They talk about the responsibility of today’s man for nature, for the shape of the earth, to remain a clean and dignified abode to all people.

“The visible world is beautiful,” writes St. Gregor Naziánus, «consists of heaven and earth …, each amount is tasteful, but the most harmonious and the total harmony deserve praise. Everything is in the right proportions. It is a perfect universe, order, beauty. »

St. Thomas Aquinas says that faith brings us closer to knowing God. When we have a share in God’s life, we begin to see and evaluate everything as if it were God’seas – omnia quasi octilo Dei intnemur (In Boeth. de Trinitate, q. 3, a. 1).
Participation in God’s life through faith causes us to become a new person; we begin to understand reality anew, see both God and the early truth surrounding us. Through faith, we begin to see the effect of the first in the early reality Causes – God. We notice his Presence and influence both in ourselves and in the world, nature, or history. We find out that he is the author, the creator of all that we perceive only humanly, with a worldly view; it is not whole reality, but vision purely external, a vision of mere secondary causes that God uses.

Faith is a virtue that allows contact with God and is the basis of the supernatural of life. Because it is at the foundation of all supernatural activities, it happens to everything through it. The difficulties of spiritual life are always connected with weak faith. They decide on the action of the magical life, strengths and weaknesses of our faith. Faith is an essential virtue because it allows us to participate in God’s life. Faith is a participation in God’s thinking; it is as if the supernatural reason, embedded in natural forces, enables us to think of God as ourselves and everything we encounter. Therefore, to believe means to reconcile one’s thinking with God and to identify with oneself him.

The difference between natural knowledge and knowledge through faith is not a difference of degree, but essence. Faith brings union with God’s mind and inner participation in a light in which God knows himself. In this sense, it leads to contemplation and introduces the future knowledge of God in eternity. Before we enter into God’s life through faith, the life of Jesus Christ, God in it is through us that our life begins. The goal of our faith is to think Jesus Christ, allow Him who lives in us through our dedication to bringing us he used, he felt in us, he lived in us. Thanks to faith, the current way of seeing, thinking, feeling, experiencing. Faith reshapes our mentality, leads us to build God continually.

In the first place, focusing your whole life on God’s goal interprets the entire world in the light that comes from God. Then they are all ours
judgments, evaluations, desires, and expectations illuminated by the light of faith. And so on, it realizes a communion of faith that reaches its fullness only in love. The created world that surrounds us is a kind of voice that speaks to us. If we have weak faith, then this voice causes distraction, distracting us from God and concentrates on himself. As confidence grows, the opposite process occurs. Then to us, the outside world begins to talk about God, focusing us on him, drawing us to him; it becomes a sign of his Presence, it helps to contact him; in short, it becomes for us a place where we meet God. Faith allows us to transcend deceptive appearances, notice the primary causes after the secondary causes. It allows us to see that what is happening around us is not happening by human force. Faith allows discovering God’s footprints in creation. It allows us to see in the phenomena and
events an expression of God’s will, to see in events a sign that it is passing through God.
Recognize a loving Presence.
Every moment of our lives is imbued with a Presence that loves and distributes. To live in faith means perceiving this Presence, which loves us and still us presents. Thanks to the dedication, Christ gradually becomes a light that illuminates the whole human life, illuminates the world. He becomes a living, active Presence in life
their disciples. Every moment of life brings us his Presence. It’s time
Presence written in capital letters – the Presence of Christ in our lives,
the personal Presence of God, who appears as the one who expects something from us. God seems to us through His will. But what is his intention? Always what is best for us, for God is love. Every moment of your life is a moment when you meet this loving Presence. Someone said that time is a sacrament, the encounter of man with God. In this sense, every moment is a hryvnia from the gospel because it is the Presence that calls for something. God connects with every moment
of grace, whether it is an easy or difficult moment. St. Paul says we live in God, we move, and we are (cf. Acts 17:28). So from him, we receive the gift of existence and the advantage of breath, food, friendship, and the gift of every moment of life. Statement of St. Theresa of the Child Jesus that everything is grace (“tout est gráce,” cf. Le Carnet Jaune [Yellow Notebook], p. 36) means everything in your life is associated with some form of grace. God comes to you in the form of a gift, in the form of grace, in the form of challenge – in this sense, everything is grace. God wants that everything may become, for you, the capital “of good. He also tries to extract sound from evil. Evil
cannot be grace, but God can also benefit from God in His omnipotence and infinite mercy. The consequences of evil can bear fruit In the form of large opportunities for conversion. So “everything is grace,” and everything is hryvnia because the Lord tells you constantly and everywhere gives you a chance. You must believe in that volatile and the manifesting Presence in various ways. This moment, every moment, brings love, as Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński said. Grace is a manifestation of love, and so every moment is connected with God’s grace. Even when you sin greatly, Christ is with you and loves you. If you remembered that, if you did, he believed that you were constantly immersed in the merciful love of a God who never made you do not leave; you certainly would not fall. Everything that meets you is connected with the love of God, who loves you and desires your good. He is present in your life no matter what you do. Time is your sacrament meeting God and his mercy, his love for you, and his desire to give you everything that could be used for good so that all your guilt becomes “happy guilt.” (felix culpa). If you looked at every time you experienced like this, you would be born in spontaneous prayer to you. It would be a constant prayer because the Lord is with you, he still loves you. Every moment of your life is imbued with this love, A presence that constantly surrounds you.
God’s footprints in the world Faith allows us to see traces of God’s work everywhere, to understand that He is present.

Encourage believers to count on God
Did you prepare a bigger feast already? So, you know what time it costs, effort, finances … What do the organizers experience when the unforeseen occur? difficulties. The gospel says something like that. “The place is deserted and time has advanced. Dissolve the multitudes, and let them go into the villages to buy food ”(Mt 13:15).
Crowds followed Jesus to a deserted place. They followed him to listen
words that gave meaning to their lives. They were so impressed with his words that they were as, they forgot everything else. They even forgot about food supplies and didn’t have one options where to buy it. A desolate place is just a desolate place and a presence of around 5,000 men, in addition to women and children, have made the situation even more difficult. We know about that, imagine what so many people need to eat? When it was evening, the disciples were aware of a serious situation, they came to Teacher with a warning: “The place is desolate and time advanced. Dissolve the multitudes, and let them go into the villages to buy food ”(Mt 13:15). Jesus, he tests the disciples, and therefore tells them to let them eat. The disciples are very much well aware of their possibilities. They have only five loaves and two fish. Of that, after all, they cannot satisfy a large crowd.

Like the disciples, we are often worried about the difficulties and how to handle it all. Our subjective view would guide us to disgust and pessimism, to forget the great hope we have from the Christian vocation. As certain folk wisdom says: “He who in he forgets God in his calculations, he will not be able to calculate correctly. ” The disciples, they calculated all their possibilities very well. They quantified the number of breads precisely and the fish at their disposal. But they forgot the most important fact, on Jesus Christ, who with his divine power could entirely change the whole situation.
Jesus did not create here as God the Father in the creation of the world, when he created everything out of nothing. But he received a small portion – two fish and five loaves, which someone had renounced for of others. Jesus performed the miracle of the multiplication of the bread by His divine power. Immediately after reproduction, he will employ his closest or disciples. By whom the crowds sit comfortably on the grass, they are in charge of the whole organization saturation of the people. The disciples did not become those whom Jesus would have preferred, or provided them with some benefits. Unless we really want to be Christ’s As disciples, let us not seek for ourselves, but consider brothers and sisters, who is around us. Many people suffer not only from physical hunger but also from hunger spiritual – lack of love, respect, understanding, …. And so let’s be careful and open to the needs of others who need to experience the miracle of satiety.

Lord Jesus, every Holy Mass is a miracle of satiety. Bread and wine are at the Holy Mass is transformed into the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ, which are food for eternal life and satisfy the hunger of the whole man. Come, Lord Jesus, and satiate us.