Puzzlement

" To him who hath, more shall be given. To him who hath not, even that which he has shall be taken from him. " More puzzling and enigmatic that any Zen Koan. If practicing a faith imbues meaning, then the decision to find Faith without meaning produces the same results. Quantum physics, choose faith, get faith. Choose meaninglessness and relativity, get same…

"To abstract from the appalling moral and physical evils which beset the Church in every country throughout the world today and look only at the state of Catholic belief, what impresses is the extent of the influence of the heresy of Modernism--the movement to conform the teaching of the Church to the standards of the atheistic and secular world. This heresy is universal, a universality only matched by the extent to which its existence is denied or ignored amongst the faithful. There is no mention of the heresy or of the encyclical which condemned it, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (September 8th 1907), in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There is no mention there either of the Pope who condemned the heresy, the only Pope to be canonised in 400 years, St Pius X.
Above from- http://www.superflumina.org/leo_xiii_&_the_100_years.html

When I taught woodworking to adults I had a sign, “I practice fine woodworking, like practicing law except the tools are more fun.” Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, the day when our sins are shriven, removed from us. Today is Ash Wednesday. I only remember the observances dimly from childhood. Yet observance and practice are twinned as verbs. Without practice, the observance evaporates into merely noticing the date. Our squeamishness with religious Holy Days, themselves morphed into holidays, and expressed so cheaply by the phrase,”The Holiday Season”, (which holiday I always loudly ask) is profound. And that other voice quickly jumps in, “Oh, don’t give me that word sin. How parochial. Adultery, fornication blah, blah, blah.” I do not think sins means only our acts. It is a failure of awareness, a state of consciousness, as hell is a state of consciousness. (The inverse of Thomas Aquinas’ ens? ) Does this imply if we are not always conscious of Heaven, than what we are unconscious of must be hell? Don’t know. When I look about, too often it seems I see C.S. Lewis’ gray town in the Great Divorce. Eleven-year-old girls dressing like 28 year olds, 56 year olds behaving like 11-year-olds, all of us fallen short. If we do not deliberately, consciously choose to pursue Heaven, are we choosing to live in Hell? Just beyond the corner of the eye of my awareness I sometimes sense a very odd thing. I sense how terribly unreal and synthetic ismost of what exists around us. The pop culture is the most obvious example, but it’s as if all I see is that mundane and trivial, created from unconsciousness.
Also from Superflumina:
"It is said that after he had celebrated Mass in the presence of some Cardinals and members of the Vatican staff on October 13th, 1884, Pope Leo experienced a vision of the future concerning the Church in which the power of Satan would be unleashed for a period of 100 years. He was so shaken by the spectre of the destruction of moral and spiritual values both inside and outside the Church that he composed a prayer to St Michael the Archangel which he ordered to be said at the end of each Mass throughout the Catholic Church. This is the prayer--
St Michael the Archangel defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God restrain him, we humbly pray, and do thou, the prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen

This may seem irrational and out of date. But look around you and ask which is the more irrational, prayers, or the times? With whom would you prefer to ally yourself, a world of gliterati, or the Kingdom of Heaven?