Here I am Lord
I have brought the world and my day with me
What a motley crew arrayed before You
But not in vain.
We come with a clatter
My noise, our noise,
To the Silence.
The deafening roar
To the hallowed stillness.
Whisper in the chamber of our meeting
Where we tent with You,
Hope for the dying,
Faith to the listening,
Love to the willing.
High on Your Cross,
All the world lay at Your feet,
Broken!
The Body of the Christ is broken,
Broken for us.
The Body of the Lord is broken,
Broken to redeem.
The Father has placed under Your Feet,
Your enemies,
His enemies.
You, broken on the Cross,
Embrace Your enemies,
Willing to Love them into Life.
Inviting my free will to choose Him Whose Heart
Breaks for me.
The Earth quaked at Your Dying,
To open and receive Your Blood.
Grace, all Grace!
High on Your Cross,
With me at Your Feet,
My heart breaks to receive You.
Broken Body of Jesus,
One with me in Redemption,
Mine.
Lord, You have been growing me.
It’s been 75 years plus a bit, since my conception.
All those years and not one day without love.
Not one day without the play of wind,
Or warmth of golden beam,
Or sustenance given though unseen.
Not one day without a kiss of sun,
Or breeze,
Or butterfly.
Not one day the more or less than You decree,
Simply the glee
Of being me.
Lord, You have been growing me.
I count my days blessed and witnessed from above,
The stuff as given and mysterious as stars.
When I am fully grown,
Incline to lift me from the earth,
And with Mercy’s parting splendor,
Render one last touch.
© 2016 Joann Nelander
–
What have I, My Lord,
But my beating heart,
My pulsing blood,
My seemingly useless toil,
The tears and sweat,
That mark my life?
Yet, I persevere,
I fight,
I cry,
I shout through the Night.
Though in the tumult,
And the rancor of holocaust,
My screams scarcely rise above a whisper.
I make of my heart a sanctuary,
A resting place for my God.
I long to comfort You,
For my wounds pierce Your Heart,
And tear Your Most Innocent Flesh.
It is You Who are rejected
In the womb of the world,
Women crying,
“Get out you untimely thing.”
Men forsaking love once declared.
Come here to me.
I will cry with You.
I will tend Your wounds,
Hold Your Hallowed Hand.
Each morn anew
I will embrace my lot.
My thoughts will meet ridicule,
But the stripes,
Fall anew on You.
Soldiers of the heart
Swell Your growing ranks,
As mere men take arms
Against Legion.
Each a knight born of a Revelation,
Your Love,
Your Faithfulness,
Your Victory.
© 2016 Joann Nelander
Cords of sorrow draw me.
I am witness to the plight,
Man become beast,
Without wisdom or wit,
Licking his own blood,
Hungry, harrowed,
Stunned in horror.
The knots of revenge entangle,
Cry for evermore blood,
Ever more abasement,
Ever more widows,
Ever more orphans,
Ever more refuse and waste.
A crying child becomes hundreds,
Then thousands,
Then millions,
Left to wander,
Left to dissipate and hate.
Vengeance is sweeter than food,
To one who chooses to live
Without Love,
Without Light,
Without the Holy and the True,
For such is the abode of Sin,
And many the roads
Leading to its gate.
Bestial brutality,
Raging insanity,
Now reigns the malignant.
The disconsolate refuse all solace,
Wounds of the heart,
Wounds of the mind,
Wounds of the body of Man.
Look to the high mountain,
Eyes to the heavens,
Wake the long dead,
Who await the promised Banquet,
Those, who now know,
They are one Family of Man,
Divested of tribal allegiance,
Awaiting the One,
And coming, King.
Offer a sacrifice of prayer.
Pour forth the balm of Gilead.
Speak, in the tongue of angels,
The comfort of peoples,
Hope in the Darkness.
Humanity’s ties are stronger than its sins,
More numerous than the cords
That draw it down in the Dark Night.
For its One God
Is Father Forever.
by Joann Nelander
“Father forgive them they know not what they do.”
Lord, Most High,
Most Good,
Most Holy,
As an eagle, soar our nation’s skies,
Look down and take pity on a people losing their way.
See us as we struggle.
See our deceivers.
See our cherished deceptions.
See our broken law.
The weight of haughty deception,
Oppresses a people,
Fearing the gift of Life.
It is hard to juggle our many gods.
To our folly,
Mammon has supplanted our love for You.
Resisting Your Love.
We choose Death
As an answer to Life.
We think the blessing, a curse,
And the curse, a blessing, nay, a right,
Negation the same as something, someone.
Give Your People Your eagle’s wings,
To scale the heights
With You.
Carry us on Your strong pinions
To safety in the clefts of the Rock.
Hide us in Your Sacred Wounds.
With an Eagle’s talons,
Swoop upon the Enemy
Who carries off our young.
Lord, Most High,
Most Good,
Most Holy,
Carry us on eagle ‘s wings
To the safety of Your bosom,
Your Truth.
©2016 Joann Nelander
A desert You prepare for me.
In solitude You allure me.
An encounter awaits me,
Your heart waiting for mine.
A thousand betrayals,
Hasn’t dimmed Your vision
For Love’s elect.
©2012 Joann Nelander
Here I am,
Your poor one,
Your lowly one,
Your empty one,
Kneeling in adoration..
You spread out Space and Time,
Knowing You would call me forth.
And then You did.
You called to me,
Forming me from the Earth,
You Who played among the Pleides,
Stooped to play with me.
You kissed me,
With the Breath of Your Mouth,
You filled me,
Shaping me,
Empowering me,
Placing in me a formless hope.
Hope grew with the babe,
And sought with fingers of my senses.
Peeling back the covering of Mystery,
Revealing treasures hidden in the earth,
And dancing in the heavens,
Witnessed with wonder in the Night,
The Universe invited me to You,
To join You in the dance,
For which all Time and Space,
All days and all nights,
All mystery had poured forth,
With Your Cry for Light.
Your Heartbeat created the rhythms of the constellations,
The ebb and flow of cosmic seas.
Your Heart beat for Your dream of Man,
Your dream of me.
You, given as gift,
Hidden from blind eyes,
Hidden among the stars,
Spreading across Your Time,
Filling all Your Majestic Space,
Slowly whispering Your secrets,
And revealing truths,
Revealed Ultimate Truth.
You in Your Way spoke to me.
There was more than matter wrapped in my being.
Secreted without shape,
Without form,
Without stuff,
With only the power to will,
And, thereby, to Love,
To know,
And, thereby, to seek and search,
That, in living, I might come to discover You,
With me, beside me and all around me,
Waiting for me to love You.
You, Who always knew me,
And loved me,
In my ignorance,
In my blindness
And in my very being,
Even while Sin entered in to obscure Your work,
And the wonder of me,
Graced me with a soul.
I didn’t know You.
I couldn’t see You.
I didn’t know to seek after You.
Until I saw You hanging there,
Crossing the abyss,
Above the world,
Suspended and told throughout Time,
Now, at long last, I pray,
And gasp for You, my Breath.
You are the shape of me,
Saved for an eternity
Beyond gaseous matter,
And starry night,
A Day created by the One Uncreated,
And lived in the Wedding
Of Love, of soul and Spirit-being.
For this I will,
With my indomitable will,
Keep praying.
Copyright 2015 Joann Nelander
A drop in the ocean of the Lord,
Minuscule,
Tear-sized,
Hardly felt upon the cheek,
Brushed away
To fall into the river of Your love.
Once alone,
Barely a something,
Really “a nothing”,
A lonely singularity,
But felt upon a Heart.
The tears of others,
Conjoined,
Confusion,
Profusion,
Holy joy in headlong rush,
Whisked over rock and rubble,
Carried by unseen arms,
Pressed on
By force of a Holy Will.
Cascades’ roar arousing fear,
Bewilderment,
Mingled vigor,
Hope rises to the surface
And churns the deep.
Fate creates a splash
And a rivulet of escape,
An instant of choice,
Puddle or precipice?
I hang upon a prayer,
Borne aloft in new fall,
Truly free fall,
Onto the rushing stream,
And weeping humanity prevails.
One drop,
Now millions,
Energy,
Direction,
Momentum,
Kinetic kaleidoscope,
Mirroring Divine power.
The tide of many waters,
Convergence,
At the edge,
And then the fall,
Not like the first,
In free abandonment.
One drop,
Transformed by divine law,
Holy Obedience.
Tumultuous streams
Carve the land without,
And all within.
Fertile flood of holy tears,
Serve now His Plan,
A drop in the ocean of God.
Copyright 2014 Joann Nelander
,
Joann Nelander
lionessblog.com
by LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD May 11, 2016
Let us first, dispense with the pretense.
Every notion we in the West have adopted in terms of dealing with Muslims, both individually and collectively, is wrong.
It is a policy based more on political correctness than on rational analysis, more on a misunderstanding of culture than religion.
The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought, a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them, similar to the tactics used by the political left, when they hurl the accusations of “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe” and “hate-speech.”
It became the role of Islamist lobby organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to depict themselves as civil-rights groups speaking out on behalf of a Muslim American population that was allegedly besieged by outsiders who harbored an illogical, unfounded fear of them and regularly accusing the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. Of course, FBI data on hate crimes show that such allegations are nonsense.
Contrary to the propaganda, Islamophobia is not what Muslims feel, but what radical Muslims hope to instill politically and culturally in non-Muslims cultures, that is, intimidation and fear. Thereby, they can, not only further their goal of a global Caliphate, but gain a type of “respect” to which they would otherwise not be entitled based on an absence of convincing arguments or constructive contributions to society.
Danish psychologist, Nicolai Sennels, who treated 150 criminal Muslim inmates found fundamental and largely irreconcilable psychological differences between Muslim and Western culture, which makes effective assimilation at best serendipity and at worst urban myth.
For example, Muslim culture has a very different view of anger. In Western culture, expressions of anger and threats are probably the quickest way to lose face leading to a feeling of shame and a loss of social status. In Muslim culture, aggressive behaviors, especially threats, are generally seen to be accepted, and even expected as a way of handling conflicts. ( * Cmt: Absolutely true.)
In the context of foreign policy, peaceful approaches such as demonstrations of compassion, compromise and common sense are seen by Muslim leaders as cowardice and a weakness to be exploited. In that respect, anger and violence are not reasons to begin negotiations, but are integral components of the negotiation process itself. ( *Cmt: Also true as is duplicity )
According to Sennels, there is another important psychological difference between Muslim and Western cultures called the “locus of control,” whether people experience life influenced by either internal or external factors.
Westerners feel that their lives are mainly influenced by inner forces, our ways of handling our emotions, our ways of thinking, our ways of relating to people around us, our motivations, and our way of communicating; factors that determine if we feel good and self-confident or not.
In Muslim culture, however, inner factors are replaced by external rules, traditions and laws for human behavior. They have powerful Muslim clerics who set the directions for their community, dictate political views, and provide rules for virtually all aspects of life.
The locus of control is central to the individual’s understanding of freedom and responsibility. When Westerners have problems, we most often look inward and ask “What did I do wrong?” and “What can I do to change the situation?” Muslims look outward for sources to blame asking: “Who did this to me?” Sennels noted that a standard answer from violent Muslims is often: “It is his own fault that I beat him up (or raped her). He (or she) provoked me.” (*Cmt: Not matter what happens they say “Allah wills” — they had no control over what they did.)
As a result, Muslim culture offers a formula for perpetual victimhood. ( *Cmt: the LEFT and Muslims have victimhood in common)
With a decrease in feelings of personal responsibility, there is a greater tendency to demand that the surroundings adapt to Muslim wishes and desires, infiltrating rather than to assimilating into a Western culture. (*Cmt: More than that the Quran demands they do so)
All of this does not bode well for the logic of any proposal to increase Muslim immigration into non-Muslim cultures or the success of any foreign policy involving Muslim nations by applying current Islamophobia-based misconceptions.
Sennels offers a harsh, but realistic prescription:
“We should not permit the destruction of our cities by lawless parallel societies, with groups of roaming criminal Muslims overloading of our welfare system and the growing justified fear that non-Muslims have of violence. The consequences should be so strict that it would be preferable for any anti-social Muslim to go back to a Muslim country, where they can understand, and can be understood by their own culture.”
It is not from ” Islamophobia “ that we suffer , but from “Islamonausea”, a natural reaction to something culturally abnormal.
by Erik Rush
Source: This Is The Real Goal Of the LGBT “Rights” Movement
“The press coverage and rhetorical tempest over North Carolina’s HB2 (the new law which prevents individuals who identify as “transgender” from using public restrooms based on their chosen gender identity) and the widespread activism on the part of homosexuals in recent years has a lot of Americans wondering why there is such a high degree of concern on the part of the political left over the so-called rights of an assortment of mouthy sexual deviants in the first place. It’s even more baffling to those unfamiliar with the dynamic behind it all, given that this faction represents less than 4% of our population.The answer is simple: The so-called “struggle for LGBT rights” in America has never been anything more than a pretext for the complete disenfranchisement of Christians. Leftist leaders have always known that a socialist state must be the sole arbiter of morality, and that this cannot come about in a moral society – one in which citizens honor and obey God over the state, which is of course comprised of fundamentally flawed human beings.The scenario that has been framed by the left wherein Christian doctrine is manifestly oppressive to homosexuals, transvestites, and assorted sexual deviants is a ruse, and the said oppression of these people is nonexistent. To be fair, things might have played out differently in a Christian theocracy, but we do not live in a Christian theocracy.Ultimately, the constitutionally-guaranteed religious liberties once enjoyed by Christians will be negated via the courts. Christians will be severely stigmatized, and their position will become untenable. The Church will be all but driven underground, as in Britain and Canada. Once “God is dead,” as it were, the State will be free to impose its own secular doctrine – one that is more conducive to its control and manipulation of the populace in perpetuity.This methodology need not be relegated only to the eradication of religious groups or even a majority faith. The same tactic is in fact being used, for example, to dilute the political power and civil liberties of whites in America (another majority) by characterizing them as bigoted and oppressive toward other ethnic groups. In the secular realm, the political power and civil liberties of heterosexuals and, more importantly parents, are again being supplanted by the counterfeit “rights” of those who advocate aberrant concepts of family, sexual deviants being chief among these.The reason that such a vigorous campaign was marshaled to target Christians is because Christianity was the second greatest impediment to those advancing the socialist state, the first being the Constitution itself, specifically, the Bill of Rights.Anyone who has been exposed to concepts of Natural Law (to which American students no longer are exposed since the study of Civics was abandoned) knows that these were a fundamental basis for the Bill of Rights. Natural Law was revered by our nation’s founders as a basis for the set of liberties they recognized as being granted by God; without these acknowledged and/or codified into the law of the land, individuals remain ill at ease, and society founders. These are the liberties for which so many have fought against their governments through the ages, even if they were ignorant of these concepts as such. Recognition of Natural Law and its incorporation into law, as so many over the years once recognized, was the height of wisdom, and why the United States prospered so conspicuously for so long a time.These concepts of liberty as understood by America’s founders were distilled into what became the law of the land in America from a broad and studious view of history, the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment (which was ongoing at that time), religious texts and doctrines, British Common Law, and yes, even such things as Freemasonry (whose basis in philosophy rests largely in the foregoing).The secular humanist view to which socialists ascribe however, holds that it is our exalted and refined intellect itself that will ensure moral behavior; thus we need not worry that humanity will descend into chaos or tyranny. This of course ignores the fact that in a society which universally adopted this worldview, there would be as many codes of morality as there were people, with many of these being wildly divergent and in inevitable conflict.Inasmuch as that worldview is little more than a profoundly dishonest marketing ploy based upon human conceit and calculated to empower socialist leaders, it is no wonder that socialism has failed to do anything save for exalting socialist leaders, and why it led to the deaths of nearly half a billion human beings during the last century.”
<blockquote>
At the heart of all temptations … is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion – that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.
Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation. It does not invite us directly to do evil – no, that would be far too blatant. It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism: What’s real is what is right there in front of us – power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs.
God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he? Is he good, or do we have to invent the good ourselves? The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence.
* This excerpt is from “Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration” by Pope Benedict XVI</blockquote>
<blockquote>First of all, the desert, where Jesus withdrew to, is the place of silence, of poverty, where man is deprived of material support and is placed in front of the fundamental questions of life, where he is pushed to towards the essentials in life and for this very reason it becomes easier for him to find God. But the desert is also a place of death, because where there is no water there is no life, and it is a place of solitude where man feels temptation more intensely. Jesus goes into the desert, and there is tempted to leave the path indicated by God the Father to follow other easier and worldly paths (cf. Lk 4:1-13). So he takes on our temptations and carries our misery, to conquer evil and open up the path to God, the path of conversion.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>In reflecting on the temptations Jesus is subjected to in the desert we are invited, each one of us, to respond to one fundamental question: what is truly important in our lives? In the first temptation the devil offers to change a stone into bread to sate Jesus’ hunger. Jesus replies that the man also lives by bread but not by bread alone: without a response to the hunger for truth, hunger for God, man can not be saved (cf. vv. 3-4). In the second, the devil offers Jesus the path of power: he leads him up on high and gives him dominion over the world, but this is not the path of God: Jesus clearly understands that it is not earthly power that saves the world, but the power of the Cross, humility, love (cf. vv. 5-8). In the third, the devil suggests Jesus throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem and be saved by God through his angels, that is, to do something sensational to test God, but the answer is that God is not an object on which to impose our conditions: He is the Lord of all (cf. vv. 9-12). What is the core of the three temptations that Jesus is subjected to? It is the proposal to exploit God, to use Him for his own interests, for his own glory and success. So, in essence, to put himself in the place of God, removing Him from his own existence and making him seem superfluous. Everyone should then ask: what is the role God in my life? Is He the Lord or am I?</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>Overcoming the temptation to place God in submission to oneself and one’s own interests or to put Him in a corner and converting oneself to the proper order of priorities, giving God the first place, is a journey that every Christian must undergo. “Conversion”, an invitation that we will hear many times in Lent, means following Jesus in so that his Gospel is a real life guide, it means allowing God transform us, no longer thinking that we are the only protagonists of our existence, recognizing that we are creatures who depend on God, His love, and that only by “losing” our life in Him can we truly have it. This means making our choices in the light of the Word of God. Today we can no longer be Christians as a simple consequence of the fact that we live in a society that has Christian roots: even those born to a Christian family and formed in the faith must, each and every day, renew the choice to be a Christian, to give God first place, before the temptations continuously suggested by a secularized culture, before the criticism of many of our contemporaries.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>The tests which modern society subjects Christians to, in fact, are many, and affect the personal and social life. It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, practice mercy in everyday life, leave space for prayer and inner silence, it is not easy to publicly oppose choices that many take for granted, such as abortion in the event of an unwanted pregnancy, euthanasia in case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos to prevent hereditary diseases. The temptation to set aside one’s faith is always present and conversion becomes a response to God which must be confirmed several times throughout one’s life.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>The major conversions like that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or St. Augustine, are an example and stimulus, but also in our time when the sense of the sacred is eclipsed, God’s grace is at work and works wonders in life of many people. The Lord never gets tired of knocking at the door of man in social and cultural contexts that seem engulfed by secularization, as was the case for the Russian Orthodox Pavel Florensky. After acompletely agnostic education, to the point he felt an outright hostility towards religious teachings taught in school, the scientist Florensky came to exclaim: “No, you can not live without God”, and to change his life completely, so much so he became a monk.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>I also think the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she found Him looking deep inside herself and wrote: “There is a well very deep inside of me. And God is in that well. Sometimes I can reach Him, more often He is covered by stone and sand: then God is buried. We must dig Him up again “(Diary, 97). In her scattered and restless life, she finds God in the middle of the great tragedy of the twentieth century, the Shoah. This young fragile and dissatisfied woman, transfigured by faith, becomes a woman full of love and inner peace, able to say: “I live in constant intimacy with God.”</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>The ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: “I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how much searching for myself in all this!”. The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points out: “It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer … “. God guided her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>In our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after a Christian education, perhaps a superficial one, moved away from the faith for years and then rediscovered Christ and his Gospel. In the Book of Revelation we read: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then] I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me”(3, 20). Our inner person must prepare to be visited by God, and for this reason we should allow ourselves be invaded by illusions, by appearances, by material things.</blockquote>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<blockquote>From Ash Wednesday General Audience 2-13-2013</blockquote>
The weakness of people in the Church in leadership positions encourages Isis and Islam.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLAKncejiHg&w=560&h=31
"Dialogue hasn’t saved a single Christian" Robert Spencer
The weakness of people in the Church in leadership positions encourages Isis and Islam.
“Dialogue hasn’t saved a single Christian” Robert Spencer
Into Stillness 