May 2023 – Pathology: the Study of a Path

Posted on 2023-05-312023-05-22 by Kurt Bodling

the Holy Spirit is given in faith

“Faith creates godliness and drives out all sin, grants strength in sickness, enlightens in all blindness, heals all evil inclinations, guards against sin, and performs every good deed. In brief, the fruit of such faith is that never can there remain any frailty; for in faith the Holy Spirit is given, and thereby a man loves God because of the abundant goodness received from him. A man becomes cheerful and glad to do all that is good without the compulsion of the law and command.” (page 175)

Luther, Martin. “Sermon on the Worthy Reception of the Sacrament” (1521) Luther’s Works Vol. 42. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969.

Posted on 2023-05-302023-05-22 by Kurt Bodling

growth in Christ

“We increase and deepen our participation in the life of the Body by the activity of our minds and wills, illuminated and guided by the Holy Ghost. We must therefore keep growing in our knowledge and love of God and in our love for other men. The power of good operative habits must take ever greater and greater hold upon us. The Truth we believe in must work itself more and more fully into the very substance of our lives until our whole existence is nothing but vision and love.

“What this means in practice is summed up by one word that most men are afraid of: asceticism.” (pp. 9-10)

Merton, Thomas. “The White Pebble.” (1950) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

Posted on 2023-05-292023-05-22 by Kurt Bodling

the Holy Spirit, mystics, and Church

“It can be said at once that the inspirations of the Holy Ghost are seldom completely at variance with the sanely traditional norms of religious societies. However the history of the saints is full of examples when those led directly by God fell under the furious censures of professionally holy men. The trial of St. Joan of Arc is a case in point.

“The life of a contemplative is apt to be one constant tension and conflict between what he feels to be the interior movements of grace and the objective, exterior claims made upon him by the society to whose laws he is subject. The tension is heightened by the realization that false mystics are always ready to claim exemption from social norms on the basis of private inspiration. And the society itself, speaking through its most articulate members, will not be slow to remind him of the fact.” (pp. 76-77)

Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003. [Merton wrote this in 1959]

Posted on 2023-05-282023-05-22 by Kurt Bodling

the Holy Spirit and unity

“I am sad to see how much we abuse the Holy Spirit. In their imagination and in disregard of the will that intends that we be one, some men, on their own initiative, create their own churches, their own theologies, and their own beliefs, which in fact are only petty subjective opinions. The Holy Spirit has no opinions. He only repeats what Christ taught us in order to lead to the whole truth.

“I say this in all seriousness: The absence of the Holy Spirit in the Church creates all the divisions. Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God. Where the Spirit is, there is the Church.” Thought 213. (p. 111)

Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. [including some conversation with Dom Dysmas de Lassus, the Father General of the Carthusian Order at Grande Chartreuse.] San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017.

Posted on 2023-05-272023-05-22 by Kurt Bodling

true self – false self

“The self that appears to be weighed down by its love and carried away to material things is, in fact, an unreal thing. Yet it retains an empirical existence of its own; it is what we think of ourselves. And this empirical existence is strengthened by every act of selfish desire or fear. It is not the true self, the Christian person, the image of God stamped with the likeness of Christ. It is the false self, the disfigured image, the caricature, the emptiness that has swelled up and become full of itself, so as to create a kind of fictional substantiality for itself. Such is Augustine’s commentary on the phrase of St. Paul: scientia inflat. ‘Knowledge puffs up’.” (pp. 60-61)