Fasting.
“Your fast ends in quarreling and fighting, striking with wicked claw.”
The prophet Isaiah reveals to us the kind of fast that is acceptable to God: “Releasing those bound unjustly,/ untying the thongs of the yoke,/ setting free the oppressed,/ breaking every yoke;/ sharing your bread with the hungry,/ sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;/ clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.” - Isaiah 58, Friday after Ash Wednesday.
Taking these words to heart, I decided to take down some of my more controversial posts. The critical spirit can be so harmful it can create even more division amongst souls. What is much worse is that it can alienate others, and I don’t want to do that any longer. I will try to live my faith and write from that perspective, which if the Holy Spirit desires, he can use to teach, instruct, or admonish - myself first, others second. But I am not a teacher, it is not up to me to say who should or should not be doing this or that; everyone has the commandments, and we have a hierarchy and teaching magisterium to take care of these things.
If I were “locked up” in a monastery I most likely wouldn’t know what was going on in the world, I would never read a blog or watch TV, no one would ever know how or what I think, and the world would continue on. There is only one thing necessary, and if I am converted and seek that, and God-willing find that, I want everyone else to find it too.
Thoughts from Dostoevsky.
“Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he too is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him.”- Fr. Zosima, Talks and Holilies, The Brothers Karamazov
“If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you too are guilty…”- Fr. Zosima
“No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do, and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse.”- Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi
