Iris Proctor was fantastic last night–the only speaker we’ve had to get a standing ovation. Not to worry if you couldn’t make it, just click here and you can listen. Or if you would like to download and burn a CD, you can go here.
To forgive
I just read this amazing story of love and forgiveness and want to share it with you:
For years he nourished only his narcissism: money, brand name clothes, perfumes, luxurious cars, parties, in short. a trivial evil. Then he was tempted to the point of folly: to kill his parents and acquire his inheritance. He tried to kill them first with gas bombs which should have exploded and would have also killed his two sisters. He then tried to tamper with his father’s steering wheel. He thought of using rat poison and mixed it into beefsteaks as a blunt weapon.
In the end, on April 17, 1991, he with his face bare and three friends with carnival masks and false hair, waited for his parents, Antonio and Rosa. He beat them with an iron pipe butchering and killed them – with inexplicable ferocity. According to psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli who prepared the report , it is a case of “narcissistic hypertrophy” with the “father and the mother perceived only as a money-box, from which to take when necessary and to break if the need required it.”
In the book “I Was the Evil,” written by Raffaella Regoli, and published by Mondadori, Pietro Maso says “They have written about me, about us, who killed to have a good life. We wanted to enter into life. And instead, staining myself with the most terrible of crimes, at nineteen I entered the tomb together with Mom and Dad.”
You can read the rest here.
On Corpus Christi
On Corpus Christi, Before the Blessed Sacrament
You languish in the darkness like
a criminal imprisoned
a sick man quarantined
an eccentric, babbling uncle, hid away.
Are they so afraid of You?
Are we so ashamed of You?
This is Your pageant day!
Where are Your holy calvacades
Your solemn ranks of soldiers
with their Captain at their head?
Your festal, fair processions
winding through the curious crowds
who marvel at the sacred spectacle?
In the quiet I hear echoes
from the stones of ancient streets
crying out with praise to shame us
for our silence.
In the blackness I see faces
of a multitude of children
looking down the ages, wondering
to see so plain a feast.
For the glory due Your name,
how long, O Lord,
must You wait?
~Paul Thigpen
Grace for the day
A young couple speaks about their love for their young child with cancer. A powerful 12 minutes and 48 seconds. This will increase your faith: Meet Joel.
“My weakness in mothering”
I have counselled a number of mothers whose children have disappointed them in some way or another. Most of them have the same first response as Lysa TerKeurst : “And you know what I’m tempted to do as a mom? Draw a straight line from my child’s wrong choice to my weakness in mothering.”
If you’d like to know more of her thinking process about this, go here. It’s worth the read.
Christians and depression
Bill, over at Unshakable Hope, has a very timely and interesting post: Why are So Many Christians Depressed? Most of the comments (and his responses) are very good. You can find my own among them. I will direct you over there today. I’m sure there are some of you, including myself, who deal with (or have dealt with) depression and struggled with “What does this mean about me and God? Am I failing him somehow?”, etc.
And, by the way, if you haven’t already, read Bill’s story while you’re over there. (Under “About Bill“.)
Know that you are all in my prayers. And keep him and his family in yours.
You cannot be too gentle, too kind . . .
“You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others.” ~ St. Seraphim
Wrapped in silence
Words fail me tonight, O Lord,
But wrapped in silence,
My heart speaks its adoration with every beat
As my gaze meets yours
And I’m held captive within that single glance.
Jeanne Kun
Having a bad week?
Christ and Adam (and you and me)
“Christ & Adam at Chartres. This is a stone carving over the north porch of the cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres, so small and among so many other carvings one has to look carefully to see it. It is for me one of the most powerful religious images I know of. Creation as an act of love. Adam (and thus all of us) bearers of God’s image.” (Jim Forest)
Witnesses to Hope 