FRIDAY OF SIXTEENTH WEEK OF ORDINARY TIME
Feast of Bridget of Sweden, Religious

Dear Beloved:

It has been awhile since I have posted in my Journal. It has been a very busy time as we have moved our entire website to a new server with a new database system and programming language. It will take a long time to get the more than 10,000 pages updated, but most of the most popular areas and interactive areas are close to being done.

As I reflect upon various readings today I came across an observation from Pope Paul VI that he made in an Address on April 8, 1966:

(We have to be ever watchful, since) "the orientation of modern culture is tending towards a kind of hedonism, a headlong pursuit of the easy life, marked by a desire to erase the cross from the aspirations of peoples."

The more I contemplate our Lord the more I want to withdraw from the world, the more T.V. I watch the more I want to be in silence, the more I see the profound worldly thinking of supposedly good Catholics on the Internet the more I want to be cloistered away in hermitage. But I cannot do as I want. I guess that is the point that all of us must face.

We are not our own, we were purchased by Christ at a payment of His own Blood. Our "wants" need to blend into His "wants", our desires need to be for Him, our pursuits need to be for His glory.

We live in a world where people always WANT what they want. They want the easy life of hedonistic freedom (which is actually an oxymoron), of indulgence, and of incontinence. Somehow we think such things bring us freedom and that happiness is found in such individualism. Freedom will never be found in that way.

Happiness and freedom is only found in God and in the order and discipline God calls us to follow. Chaos and unrestricted indulgence really enslaves us, it does not free us. While the world protests slavery, it is on a bullet train into slavery; such a paradox.

True freedom is in the Truth. Jesus tells us that we shall know the TRUTH and the TRUTH shall make us free. It is not individualism that makes us free, it is not the ability to freely choose one thing over another that makes us free, it is not insisting upon our "rights" that makes us free, nor is it living in a democratic society that makes us free. There is only one way to freedom and that is TRUTH, and TRUTH is God.

Perhaps that is why our world is going headlong into their own slavery. Perhaps slavery is preferable to freedom when freedom comes at the cost of self-denial and self-sacrifice. The famous proclamation, "give me liberty or give me death" is true enough. We demand liberty on our terms or we demand death instead of life.

We will get our wish. We can demand a liberty that is on our terms or we can accept the genuine and true freedom that comes only from God. To rephrase that proclamation to fit the world's desire: "Give me the liberty to do as I want, or give me eternity in hell."

Many will get their wish.

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