Private Vows in The Laity/Spirituality

[Guest]

Hi Pax - The video at the end of this post is is a favourite of mine that I do identify with - but only the chorus, which is far too repetitive. Don't think much of the verses either.  But the chorus speaks to me loudly. I will get around to reading Maya Angelou's poem........doing it a bit rough at this point:

On 5/25/2021 at 5:47 AM, Pax17 said:

I learned to speak up, and to "give as good as I got."

Good upon you - do keep up the good work and I feel you will.  I can speak up too, Pax - but have to admit only when I am manic, which is a bit of a concern.  I have well and truly put my foot in the pie when manic.  I have learnt to hold off and if I still want to do so, to speak up but only after the episode, if I can hold off that is.  So many times I have spoken up when manic, and I very largely have lost my good Catholic reputation.  Outside an episode I am in command of myself and try very hard to be credible - not that it gets me anywhere nowadays.  Phatmass has been a pure Gift to me - in many ways, so many ways!!!   Our previous last two Archbishops too have been a real blessing to me, pure Gift, and totally out of the blue, not expected even slightly.  Don't know at all our new current Archbishop.

My religious and priest spiritual director and confessor - many many years ago now, said to me:

"Girl, be credible"

I replied: "Father, if I am not credible does that mean I am incredible?"

He was not amused but angry but kept it inside.  It was written all over him.  He was the most holy priest religious I have ever met.  But man oh man, Father could not tolerate one little bit, the fool - and well known for it.  I used to say that I was his penance.

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by BarbaraTherese

[Guest]

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One thing really struck me more than ever before and lingered in my mind watching the movie above.  Nah! I would need formation in the religious life to final vows and after to ever be that good - short of the miraculous always.  AND a miracle it would be - no two ways about it.

Cause for Sr Clare sainthood to open on fifth anniversary of death https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2021/02/01/news/cause-forsr-clare-sainthood-to-open-on-fifth-anniversary-of-death-2205134/

Sr Clare, please pray for us.

[Guest]

    

Can't sleep.  This pain medication doesn't put me to sleep like Tramadol would. Not as good a pain-killer as Tramadol either.  I see my GP next Tuesday.  He wants me to give him feedback after two weeks of taking Palexia (new anti-pain medication).  I think I just might be better on an increased milligram Palexia.

I am going out for a smoke and decaf coffee.   3 mins off 2 am here.  The real blessing is that tomorrow and Sunday I won't have visitors and any phone calls are minimal. Problems, big problems, with my last episode, my older persons' mental health have asked me if I would see someone specifically in the PTSD expertise.  I agreed but she wanted to speak to my psychiatrist first and I can understand and appreciate that.

Something tipped my balance and I got extremely anxious and panicky.  I decided to take up the cigs again rather than added stress trying to stay off them.  I had not smoked for 10 years until shifted here.  So have done it a couple of times, i.e. take to the smokes and then decided to give them up.  It is quite difficult for me for probably 3 days, but after that, I have given them up again again.  I really have to give them up due to financial situation.

That last episode in latter part of 2019 has knocked me all over the place and continues to do so every day. After 14 years free of all that.  Even my psychiatrist said she cannot understand it either.  It was totally different to an episode requiring hospitalization in the past.  Totally different and far more severe too.  But my senior Older Persons' Mental Health worker called earlier today.  She assessed that I was have a real struggle - but that I was nowhere near needing hospitalization.  Deo Gratius and Laudate Dominum.  It is The Lord working through her.

 

 

Edited May 28, 2021 by BarbaraTherese

[Guest]

                  

 

I wanted to say the following before going to bed and hopefully, to fall asleep.  When I am in the early stages, as now.  Going to bed can raise my anxiety right up to the roof because of what I have experienced after lights out and bed.  I am afraid it might happen again - but usually only at some points or stages of my brand of bipolar episode.  Faith is my engine for one only - but at times like now, I just cannot feel it.  Rather, invest in what I know The Church teaches and cling to it like my saving rock from drowning completely - and it is because of what Jesus said to Peter :  "thou art Peter, The Rock, and on this Rock, I will build My Church - and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it".

My eyes fell tonight on dUSt's statement as to what Open Mic was all about.  Ah well, I can try anyway.  If I manage to hit dUSt'S bar now and then and even if only inadvertently - a big consolation....VERY BIG.

Edited May 28, 2021 by BarbaraTherese

[Guest]

 

 

 

[Guest]

 

............and just to lift the mood.............

 

 

[Guest]

  

I am still around.  Had a fall (nothing serious Deo Gratius Laudate Dominum) and ye olde body is a bit sore and lacking get  up and go ,,,,,,, it just got up and went on me .

This too shall pass.

[Pax17]

Glad to hear that you're OK.  The dear husband and I have both fallen in our new house...I am still looking for fluorescent safety tape to use in the garage so I can see where the heck I'm going!

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Pax17 said:

Glad to hear that you're OK.  The dear husband and I have both fallen in our new house...I am still looking for fluorescent safety tape to use in the garage so I can see where the heck I'm going!

LOL.  I am still trying to get in to the optician and get new glasses (spectacles), because I need to see where the heck I am going.

Do be careful, both of you, a small fall even in a healthy much younger person than I, can attest to that.  She cannot get over that such a little thing could cause so many problems (her knee) - 2 surgeries later and her Hope is that the last surgery will be the last with no guarantee.  Take care.  I hope you will be able to get fluorescent safety tape to use in the garage very soon.

Thank you so much, Pax.  It is always a Joy to see you make a contribution every now and then either in this thread or elsewhere on Phatmass Forum.  A real Joy!...........warm regards.........Barb

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"There is no success like failure, and failure is no success at all" (Bob Dylan:  "Love Minus Zero/No Limit")

 

Bob Dylan's website - lyrics to "Dont Think Twice Its All Right"

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Following put out by Bob after he became Christian - later decided to dig into his Jewish Roots.  Nowadays, your guess is as good as mine....like.....um, err.......nix!  (Lyrics to "You Gotta Serve Somebody"

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After that, I came across de Mello's "Awareness" - I read it taking out what I thought was meaningful, forgetting the rest.  He does need to be read with awareness of what The Church teaches.  I believe that in his later years, de Mello 'got into' eastern type religions, something like that.  The Vatican does issue a rather detailed warning https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19980624_demello_en.html (Cardinal Josef Ratzinger - later Pope Benedict XVI).  It was approved by Pope John Paul II.)

There were things in his above mentioned book that I found were gems of wisdom and valuable to me personally - but not all he wrote for sure, and certainly nothing contrary to Church Teaching.  If there were (as in places), The Church and Her Teaching would have trumped by a long shot.

Duty calls.

[Guest]

                       

https://www.phatmass.com/phorum/topic/153655-prayer-please/

 I have been writing on and off lately into the above thread, titled "Prayer Please", in Open Mic, while  nothing in this thread on Private Vows in The Laity/Spirituality.  I will pick up the latter at some point or other unknown to me.

Quote

 

Ecclesiastes

Chapter 3 - another valuable and important guiding Chapter, not lengthy either https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__PKY.HTM

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.............A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces. A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak...............

............And I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to rejoice in his work; for this is his lot. Who will let him see what is to come after him?"

 

 

[Guest]

                  

............seems is operative............I am always a bit stunned when things go my way or as I had hoped if things went my way, which I sincerely doubted  they would - yet, it does speak to the fact that The Lord does not hesitate to stoop to His very least ...........

This morning I could not connect to the internet.  I tweaked here and there before deciding I was probably making the situation worse.  I switched off my computer deciding it would be best to contact my go-to IT expert on Monday (Saturday here today).  It costs, but he has proved himself every bit worth it to this computer dummy, no exaggeration.  I returned about 2 hours later to my computer and decided to switch off and then on again power to the computer for some reason.

Lo and behold, I connected to the internet ok.

Deo Gratius, Laudate Dominum.

[Guest]

                                                   

Reading from Vespers - Monday 12th July 2021

Quote

 

James 4:11-12 

Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who slanders a brother, or condemns him, is speaking against the Law and condemning the Law. But if you condemn the Law, you have stopped keeping it and become a judge over it. There is only one lawgiver and he is the only judge and has the power to acquit or to sentence.

Who are you to give a verdict on your neighbour?

 

 

[Guest]

                              

Still struggling with health - physically and mentally.  But nothing too dramatic thankfully.

[Guest]

 

                                    

Since my bout of pneumonia triggering the most serious episode of bipolar I have ever experienced, I have had one drama after another (the last one last night) - dramas not caused by illness, rather by human beings.  Hence, I am still not really over that most serious episode of bipolar, which seems to repeat with every drama - a senior mental health workers feels that I could be suffering PTSD.  I see my psychiatrist this coming Thursday.  I am having a lot of trouble with my eyes too and cannot sit on the computer for long before my eyes water followed by headache.  My appointment with my optician had to be cancelled as my transport did not show.

I am writing the above as a reason I am not contributing as much as is my usual habit.  Someone said to me that we never know what the future will bring.  I replied, "Nor can we know what the past could create".

I am hopeful for the future, however.  It is just that I am going through now a difficult and crazy stage in the overall and not on Phatmass as much, nor as I would prefer.  I no sooner seem to work through one drama, than another is on my doorstep ..... in a continual progression for months now.

I am amazed at how people who do not believe in God and/or those who do not grasp our Catholic theology and especially that of suffering and difficulty,  manage to work through life's sh**.......um.........er........idiosyncrasies. 

[Machine_Washable]

On 8/1/2021 at 2:45 AM, BarbaraTherese said:

 

                                    

Since my bout of pneumonia triggering the most serious episode of bipolar I have ever experienced, I have had one drama after another (the last one last night) - dramas not caused by illness, rather by human beings.  Hence, I am still not really over that most serious episode of bipolar, which seems to repeat with every drama - a senior mental health workers feels that I could be suffering PTSD.  I see my psychiatrist this coming Thursday.  I am having a lot of trouble with my eyes too and cannot sit on the computer for long before my eyes water followed by headache.  My appointment with my optician had to be cancelled as my transport did not show.

I am writing the above as a reason I am not contributing as much as is my usual habit.  Someone said to me that we never know what the future will bring.  I replied, "Nor can we know what the past could create".

I am hopeful for the future, however.  It is just that I am going through now a difficult and crazy stage in the overall and not on Phatmass as much, nor as I would prefer.  I no sooner seem to work through one drama, than another is on my doorstep ..... in a continual progression for months now.

I am amazed at how people who do not believe in God and/or those who do not grasp our Catholic theology and especially that of suffering and difficulty,  manage to work through life's sh**.......um.........er........idiosyncrasies. 

May God make it easier for you. 

[Guest]

  

Thank you MW.  The dramas (nothing major thankfully) keep on coming but very thankfully again, my psychiatrist and GP are back at their desks and I have face to face appointments are on the way. 

I had a phone consult with my psychiatrist and she is of the opinion that because I am an old/mature woman with a mental illness, I am being dismissed in some quarters.

The Lord indeed supports and sustains us - sometimes in strange garments.  I am not a hospital case, nor even an urgent psychiatric case, but have broken out in stress rashes.  These Covid days have turned all our lives upside down.  We are indeed blest here in South Australia where the epidemic is concerned!  I am especially conscious of those countries where Covid has exploded out  of control or near on out of control at this point.

Thank you for  your Post, MW, it has reminded me to not focus on the dramas and  my itching, rather on counting my blessings with gratitude.  Thank you very much again  NOwadays it is called redirection psychology.  I have known it as a shift of awareness.  Wikipedia, of all things, has an entry under "Cognitive Shifting" and it is rather good, although I did not read all of it.

I have just, at this point, lost my usual ways and motivations.  There is a time for everything in The Lord's Plans.
 

[Guest]

  

I I I have mixed with all sorts of people in my time.  I have lived a way of life I never planned to live nor was I raised to live it, far from it.  I have mixed with criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers and bikies, the poor and the outcast, rejected - these immediately come to mind.  I was amazed at the virtue I found in them all.  Amazed and edified.  Initially, I could be shocked.  But if one 'hangs in there' and hears their story, their journey, the virtue will shine through.  Well anyway, I have never met anyone, with thanks, that I thought completely evil.  I imagine that such does exist.  If I did meet a person I found as evil, I would run from them as fast as I could.  It would terrify me, I know.  But then I recall what my confessor and SD said to me when a teenager in a monastery "Unfailingly, you can depend on The Lord to give you Grace to cope with everything in your life.  But He does not necessarily grant Grace to deal with imagination".

One bikie, president of a bikie group, who happened to be my brother (dec'd at 29 in a car 'accident'), said to me "You have a great gift, you can make God, Jesus, Religion - the whole bit - understandable to the man in the street.  What are you going to do with that gift?"

Me:  "If I have a gift, God will show me the way to use it".

Since childhood in primary school, my heart has gone out to the underdog with compassion and concern - even if their underdog-ness was through their own fault and choice.  This would put me on the outside as well.

I used to try very hard to do my best in the way of life I called Bethany.  It kept unfolding in my path, in my journey.   From time to time I would have paroxysms of self doubt in all spheres and then scruples hit as well.  A general confession cured me of scruples in what I felt was a near on miraculous manner.  Then I read what St Mary of The Cross MacKillop had said:  "Do what you can and leave the rest to God"  At long last, I was able to let go of striving to do my best.  I was never aware of what my best was anyway - it always seemed somewhere ahead in the unknown.  Thanks to St Mary MacKillop, I was able to do what I could and then peacefully leave the rest to God and it has never deserted me.

Now I am in the last stages of my life at 75.  Again, I am living a life I never planned on living, far from it.  Both my parents were fully active up to the day they passed away.  I though I would be the same.  God has other plans - and gratitude and thankfulness does not come easy and resides in my will alone.  That is, I want and desire to be grateful and thankful - but I cannot, for the life of me, feel it.  In fact I feel anything but grateful and thankful, rather I feel the opposite i.e. cheated and resentful.  I desire ardently to be on the road I planned in this late stage of life.  I cannot do it for the life of me!

But, again with gratitude, I know that feelings really are like windmills in that they will shift here or there in the slightest breeze.  We do have control over what we might want and desire - but rather often control over feelings escapes one.   I know all this intellectually as fact - but it brings no feeling of consolation and support whatsoever.  Feelings per se are not sinful.  It is what one does with negative feelings that introduces either good or bad, morality, into the situation.

So I plod along literally in life now, labouring and short of breath with a heavy burden on my back ... all as it were ... - this is the way I feel. 

Feelings in part can tell me who I am, but they are not the whole of me nor of anyone. 

I do what I can, the rest I can Peacefully leave to God......as can every person.

   

[Machine_Washable]

On 8/10/2021 at 7:24 AM, BarbaraTherese said:

  

Thank you MW.  The dramas (nothing major thankfully) keep on coming but very thankfully again, my psychiatrist and GP are back at their desks and I have face to face appointments are on the way. 

I had a phone consult with my psychiatrist and she is of the opinion that because I am an old/mature woman with a mental illness, I am being dismissed in some quarters.

The Lord indeed supports and sustains us - sometimes in strange garments.  I am not a hospital case, nor even an urgent psychiatric case, but have broken out in stress rashes.  These Covid days have turned all our lives upside down.  We are indeed blest here in South Australia where the epidemic is concerned!  I am especially conscious of those countries where Covid has exploded out  of control or near on out of control at this point.

Thank you for  your Post, MW, it has reminded me to not focus on the dramas and  my itching, rather on counting my blessings with gratitude.  Thank you very much again  NOwadays it is called redirection psychology.  I have known it as a shift of awareness.  Wikipedia, of all things, has an entry under "Cognitive Shifting" and it is rather good, although I did not read all of it.

I have just, at this point, lost my usual ways and motivations.  There is a time for everything in The Lord's Plans.
 

You're welcome. I'm glad you are getting support. It's good to focus on your blessings. It is sunnah for us to say alhamdulillah whenever we are asked how we are no matter what is going on. This means "praise be to God". It helps remind us to be grateful. It's ok to get down and have low moments of bitterness or despair. But always remember that optimism is a sign of the believer. Learning to see the good in any situation and remain grateful to God is a habit of the believer. Good luck and may God bless you.

[Guest]

  

 

On 8/12/2021 at 5:30 AM, Machine_Washable said:

You're welcome. I'm glad you are getting support. It's good to focus on your blessings. It is sunnah for us to say alhamdulillah whenever we are asked how we are no matter what is going on. This means "praise be to God". It helps remind us to be grateful. It's ok to get down and have low moments of bitterness or despair. But always remember that optimism is a sign of the believer. Learning to see the good in any situation and remain grateful to God is a habit of the believer. Good luck and may God bless you.

                                         

[Guest]

  

 Solemnity (in Australia and other countries) of Our Lady body and soul into                                                                        Heaven - 15th August 

https://www.bpl.org/blogs/post/origins-and-practices-of-the-assumption-of-mary/

More about this Feast: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture//liturgicalyear/overviews/feasts/Assumption/assumption_feast.cfm