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Category Archives: Thought for the Day

Thought for the Day

The Definition of American Politics

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Fr. Moore in Thought for the Day

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Philosophical Terms

This post comes from something I just read. It seems to me that American politics can be defined with one word – vagueness; specifically, vagueness as defined in the philosophy of Phenomenology.

Sometimes the material we are talking about is beyond us; we really do not understand what we are saying. Much of what people say about politics, for example, is like this. Much of what they say is vague: slogans are repeated, favorite ideas are trotted out, statements made by others are stated verbally but without comprehension. Most public opinion polls measure vague thinking. The human power of speech, the noble power that give us our dignity as human beings, also makes it possible for us to seem to be thinking when we really are not. This is a specifically human way of failing to be what we should be, and it is very important in human affairs.

Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, p. 105

Of course maybe the politicians really are thinking, but then if that is the case then they are in error about that which they believe to be true. Maybe it is really Americans in general that suffer from the malady of vagueness. Many Americans just jump on various bandwagons – like “marriage equality” – that they hear proclaimed by politicians and the media, assuming that what they are hearing is true and then not really thinking it through.

But I must admit, as Sokolowski points out a few pages later, that I too suffer from vagueness. In fact we all do at one point or another. We cannot begin to learn anything at all unless we start from vagueness and move toward understanding. And that is exactly what we need to do – move toward understanding. Do we really understand the various things that we profess to believe? Or do we just parrot back what we hear others say?

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A Prayer against Discouragement

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Fr. Moore in Thought for the Day

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Becoming like Christ, Confession, Cross

I went to confession yesterday. The priest is a friend of mine but it is the first time I have been to confession with him so I found his penance interesting (and that is why I am posting it). As my penance he instructed me to compose a prayer against discouragement and to pray it. Below is the result of my effort, although I wish I could say it like Aquinas or Newman.

O God our times are in your hands. Ever mindful that we can do nothing without your help, we ask that you grant us the grace to not lose heart amidst the constant storms of this mortal life. You have given us your Son as our guide, and even though He stumbled and fell on the way to the Cross, He did not turn back and did not give up. It is your grace that we need to do the same. We ask this you this through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Sharing Christ’s Life

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Theosis, Thought for the Day, Transformation in Christ

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Becoming like Christ, Union with God

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

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…walk as children of Light

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, Thought for the Day

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Light of Christ

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis

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The Missing Part

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Thought for the Day

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Search for Truth

Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, ‘This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony’. Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and ‘pull them together’. Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter. But if it were genuine then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere. Something like this we must do with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Here, instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.

Miracles by C.S. Lewis

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The Voice and the Word

14 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Liturgy of the Hours, Saints, Thought for the Day

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Office of Readings, St. Augustine

Below is a quote from St. Augustine. It captures beautifully my own understanding of writing and delivering a sermon. It is from today’s Office of Readings if you want to read the whole thing.

In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine.

From a Sermon by St. Augustine

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The Difference between Need and Want

05 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Eternal Life, Free Will, God's Will, Pope Francis, Salvation, Submission to God, Thought for the Day

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Becoming like Christ, Dying to Self, Heaven, Obedience

People…have become used to an image of God handed down to them as very conerned, even jealous, about receiving the honor and glory due him, as though he somehow needed this for his own sake. But this is a serious misunderstanding, both philosophically and religiously. God does not need anything from us to maintain his own happiness. His only wish is to share his own happiness with us as richly as possible. But on our part, for our own sake, we must honor and glorify him as the best way to turn ourselves toward him and render us open and attentive to receive his gifts.

The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (p.238)

I will write only briefly in order to explain my title. As Fr. Clarke expresses so well above, God does not need us for His own happiness. But, out of His infinite love, He sincerely wants us to be with Him. And of course to be with God is what we were created for – it is our end, our goal. But in order to reach that goal we must turn away from our selves and turn towards Him. “We must honor and glorify him” and the only way to do that is by willingly doing as He has asked us to do. And what is that ultimately? We see the answer in the words spoken by God’s own Son, “not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42)

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Lewis on Chance

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Thought for the Day

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Chance, Divine Providence, Free Will

Now as to your other story, about Isaiah 66? It doesn’t really matter whether the Bible was open at that page thru’ a miracle or through some (unobserved) natural cause. We think it matters because we tend to call the second alternative ‘chance.’ But when you come to think of it, there can be no such thing as chance from God’s point of view. Since He is omniscient His acts have no consequences which He has not foreseen and taken into account and intended. Suppose it was the draught from the window that blew your Bible open at Isaiah 66. Well, that current of air was linked up with the whole history of weather from the beginning of the world and you may be quite sure that the result it had for you at that moment (like all its other results) was intended and allowed for in the act of creation. ‘Not one sparrow,’ you know the rest [Matthew 10:29]. So of course the message was addressed to you. To suggest that your eye fell on it without this intention, is to suggest that you could take Him by surprise. Fiddle-de-dee! This is not Predestination: your will is perfectly free: but all physical events are adapted to fit in as God sees best with the free actions He knows we are going to do. There’s something about this in Screwtape.

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

(An alternate opinion on ‘chance’ from a Catholic philosopher will be offered later.)

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In Regards to the Fall

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Salvation, The Fall, Thought for the Day

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Free Will, Heaven, Hell

The doctrine of the Fall (both of man and of some ‘gods,’ ‘eldils’ or ‘angels’) is the only satisfactory explanation. Evil begins, in a universe where all was good, from free will, which was permitted because it makes possible the greatest good of all. The corruption of the first sinner consists not in choosing some evil thing (there are no evil things for him to choose) but in preferring a lesser good (himself) before a greater (God). The Fall is, in fact, Pride. The possibility of this wrong preference is inherent in the v. (very) fact of having, or being, a self at all. But though freedom is real it is not infinite. Every choice reduces a little one’s freedom to choose the next time. There therefore comes a time when the creature is fully built, irrevocably attached either to God or to itself. This irrevocableness is what we call Heaven or Hell. Every conscious agent is finally committed in the long run: i.e., it rises above freedom into willed, but henceforth unalterable, union with God, or else sinks below freedom into the black fire of self-imprisonment. That is why the universe (as even the physicists now admit) has a real history, a fifth act with a finale in which the good characters ‘live happily ever after’ and the bad ones are cast out. At least that is how I see it.
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II

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Niceness and the Need of Salvation

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Salvation, Thought for the Day

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Dependence on God

‘Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to pro- duce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

 

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Fr. Moore

Fr. Moore

Parochial Vicar Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, Texas FrMoore@truthwithboldness.com

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