Cardinal Dolan discusses religious freedom on CBS This Morning in his trademark style.
Mad World popped up in my music queue the other day, and I thought, “This reminds me of something. It’s familiar. What does this remind me of?” Turns out it has the same chords as Foster the People’s Pumped Up Kicks. (I realize there are probably a bunch of other songs with this progression, but Pumped Up Kicks is the one of most recent memory and familiarity to most of us.)
So, naturally, I immediately searched the web for mashups of the two songs. And I really love this one.
God’s Story
New video I made based on an old post (for those of you who have been around since the beginning!), about God’s plan to reveal his love for us through salvation history. Please share and a blessed Triduum to all!
This is fantastic.
“So that all the world might know the great power of my Love cannot be killed.”
My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you?
Atonement. The Great Thing, the thing that had to be done or else nothing could be done, has been done. On a certain Friday afternoon at about three o’clock, when the children were going home from school, when the Lamb of God cried, “It is finished.” Let me not love thee, if I love thee not now. Let me not trust thee, if I trust thee not in this. Atlas, foolish and failed, kneels to venerate the wood of the cross, on which hangs our every hope, by which all that we must and cannot do has been done. Let me not love thee, if I love thee not now. Let me not trust thee, if I trust thee not in this. How strange that in this end should be our beginning. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
The first blood mentioned in Christ’s Passion comes not from the whips, nor the thorns, nor the cross, but from His anguish of Love. Gethsemane, the garden where the Lord began his Passion, literally means “oil-press.” And here Christ, the first-fruit of God, was squeezed. “In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.” (Luke 22:44).
[…]
And so Love sweats blood. In stark contradiction to the pretty shape our modern world would have us draw, Christ offers us a heart of meat, ventricles and arteries pounding. Let’s together cease pretending Love is anything else. Let us cease splitting Love from it’s meaning — wanting the ultimate good of the other — and thus from suffering. Let us instead look to Christ’s Agony in the Garden, and beg God to set us ablaze with His uncomfortable, aching Love, the only kind worth having.
(Source: patheos.com)
Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Holy Week.
What’s missing here? Simply the essence of Christianity, which is not the Sermon on the Mount. When Christianity was proclaimed throughout the world, the proclamation was not “Love your enemies?” but “Christ is risen!” This was not a new ideal but a new event, that God became man, died, and rose for our salvation. Christianity is first of all not ideal but real, an event, news, the gospel, the “good news.” The essence of Christianity is not Christianity; the essence of Christianity is Christ… The Sermon on the Mount not only comes from Jesus but also leads us to Jesus. It does not divert us from Jesus to a set of abstract ideals, but its ideals lead us to Jesus, who alone can fulfill them in us, if we let him. The sermon is an arrow and Jesus is the bull’s eye, not vice versa.
(Source: acceptandembrace)
It is worth contemplating why it is that conservatives who believe the government is incompetent in most areas of its agency are willing to assent credulously to its unerring competence when it comes to exercising the ultimate power over its citizenry: killing them.
(Source: realclearreligion.org)
