(no subject)

[highlyeccentric]

Sometimes, I feel like Julian of Norwich.

...And he showed me more, a little thing, the size of a hazlenut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, 'What is this?' And the answer came, 'It is all that is made.' I marvelled that it continued to exist and did not suddenly disintegrate; it was so small. And again my mind supplied the answer, 'It exists, both now and forever, because God loves it.' In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God. In this 'little thing' i saw three truths. The first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God stustains it. But what he is who is in truth Maker, Keeper and Lover I cannot tell...
-Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5, trans. C. Wolters.

most of the time I don't.
besides which, i'm not so keen on the idea of physical suffering as to pray nightly for a visitation thereof. and i could do without the stigmata, really. and without a near-death experience.

Comments

[daiskmeliadorn.livejournal.com]

aw, come on! how can you hope to be "beautiful with the beauty of true innocence" - like Blessed Maria Assunta, Franciscan Missionary of Mary, who i was reading about in a 1950s Catholic pamphlet today - without a few hardships along the way?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

can you remain innocent through hardships?
unless they mean virgin, in which case pfft.

[daiskmeliadorn.livejournal.com]

gasp i never realised that "hardships" was a euphemism until now!

but don't worry, another pamphlet i read reminded us that even mary magdalen became a saint, so you can do anything you like, and just go to confession afterwards, ok? actually judging by the pamphlet i'm reading now, you might need "Mary the spotless" (that's Jesus' mum) to "open her immaculate heart" to you if you want to be clean, because that's what happened to ol' magdalen. very confusing all this mary business...

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

or, on the protestant side, i could become a born again virgin (http://www.drdrew.com/article.asp?id=513)

all in all, i think the catholic version is more appealing. at least it has confession involved, so some form of carthasis or something.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

hmm. that's not really a very good link, but seems to be all there is on the interwebs about born again virgins.
which is really a *good* thing, since it's a hideous doctrine.