You Won't Turn (Jeremiah 2)

How late I came to love you,

O Beauty so ancient and so fresh,

how late I came to love you.

You were within me,

yet I had gone outside to seek you.

Unlovely myself,

I rushed toward all those lovely things you had made.

And always you were with me.

I was not with you.

All those beauties kept me far from you –

although they would not have existed at all

unless they had their being in you.

You called,

you cried,

you shattered my deafness.

You sparkled,

you blazed,

you drove away my blindness.

You shed your Fragrance,

and I drew in my breath and I pant for you,

I tasted and now I hunger and thirst.

You touched me, and now I burn with longing.

St. Augustine

Choir of Royal Holloway: AUTUMN (Gjeilo)

 https://substack.com/@jordanbcooper/p-148448356

Why RC is not compelling 

Daniel Hope - Spheres - Ludovico Einaudi: I giorni (Radio edit)

 Years ago the BBC had a program entitled “Desert Island Discs” in which celebrities were asked to compile a program of music they would want to have with them in the unlikely event they would be 

marooned on a desert island. I would suggest that the texts of today’s liturgy would be a good choice for any sojourn in such a setting. They present us with a single, coherent message about the absolute and unconditional mercy of God. Although the children of Israel were stiff-necked and recalcitrant, God withheld the punishment that was their due. Although David was an adulterer and a murderer, God washed him from his guilt and cleansed him of his sin. Although Paul was a blasphemer who persecuted the Church and was the foremost of sinners, God treated him mercifully and gave him the grace to be an apostle. The good news culminates in the reading from the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. God relentlessly seeks out all those who are lost. Some of us are like the lost coin, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others of us are lost because, in our native stupidity, we have left the common path and wandered off on our own. And some of us are in trouble because we have willfully abandoned our Father’s house and squandered our birth right in self-indulgence. Whatever the reason for our finding ourselves far from where we want to be, we can be sure of one thing: God is actively seeking us in our misery, wanting nothing else but to bring us to that place of joyful reconciliation, where whatever is lost is recovered and sinners are welcome to celebrate in the eternal banquet hall of heaven.

-Fr. Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk of Tarrawarra 

Abbey in Australia, is a well-known retreat master 

and lecturer, and the author of many books on 

spirituality

 “Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 A) soulless dystopia is the society that our rulers have engineered. They want children stripped away from loyalty to their parents as much as possible, which they accomplish through public education. Loyalty to parents is severed, and loyalty to (usually) popular culture is mediated through peers or, in the worst cases, the ideology of the regime mediated through teachers is established. From there, most go to college to be physically separated from their parents totally, in addition to being spiritually and emotionally severed. There they are presented with a Pleasure Island where hedonism and sexual exploration are the carrot to the stick of ideological cajoling by leftist, anti-Christian faculty. The individual, who was once part of an organic whole, part of a family, a people, and a place, is now separated and stripped bare of all other loyalties and loves and made a tabula rasa, a willing vessel for the religion and culture of the globohomo world order.

From here, he is released into the wild. He takes a job filling a space in a cubicle, filling a spreadsheet and sending emails until he drives home, in a sea of cars full of lonely people just like him on the freeway, until he gets to his home, fills his belly with industrial slop delivered by Door Dash, watches porn, browses social media (especially Reddit), plays Xbox, or binges a show until he goes to sleep to repeat the process all over again. This man has been reduced to a bug in a hive. He is something less than a human being. He is a drone, waiting in his pod until it is time to fulfill his duties as a member of the hive. The things that give his life meaning are all products for him to consume, products that give him a temporary dopamine rush, that sustains the meaninglessness of what his life has become. He is divorced from all other meaning, he is isolated from meaningful human relationships, and his moral formation has been shaped by pop culture. Such a person can be easily manipulated, reduced to his baser appetites. Whatever he must do or believe to preserve his comforts he will do. It therefore should come as no surprise that the Wuhan flu lockdowns were so readily embraced by these types. If you are already conditioned to enjoy life inside a twelve-by-twelve cell so long as you have enough anesthetizing, consumerist products, you will submit to any slavery that provides this to you. Even more so when indulging your pathetic appetites can be celebrated as a virtue! He is dehumanized, reduced to an animal in a cage.

-Andrew Isker, 'The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation'

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

-Christina Rossetti, 'Up-Hill'       

Rachmaninov - Symphony No. 2 Op. 27 III. Adagio: Adagio (LSO)

Multitudes Of Christians Are Asleep | Derek Prince Bible Study