Must Love Our Lady

I came across this excellent and inspiring page where we can take a minute to spend time with our Blessed Mother, as we ought to. Daily. And for a much longer time than what the page asks for (you love your Heavenly Mother more than that!).

But this site has got me thinking about love for the Blessed Virgin. Perhaps it should be one of the criteria for selecting a future mate. To truly and fully love the Blessed Virgin Mary is to love obedience, humility, and most of all, purity. Being our Lord's masterpiece, and in the most eloquent words of William Wordsworth, "our tainted nature's solitary boast", nobody is as pure as the Mother of our Lord. Ladies, a man with such a deep reverence and devotion to Mary will surely value and pursue purity and holiness in the woman he loves. And a woman who loves the Virgin Mary genuinely and completely will surely strive to follow Her excellent example of chastity, total obedience, and complete abandon to the will of God, unfazed by any great suffering it might entail. Such a woman is sure to be ever loyal, ever loving to her beloved no matter what the cost to her.

But most important of all, love of the Lord's Mother is love of our Lord Himself.  Even those who begin loving Mary for Mary's sake alone,  cannot remain thus if they truly loved our Lady. Let's not forget that our Lady's last recorded words in Scripture point eternally to Christ, "Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye."

Our love for the Blessed Mother naturally flows from the love of our Lord. Our Lord was formed in her womb. We cannot love our Lord without loving the woman He loves dearly, the woman who had been closest to Him. She carried Him in her womb. She is precious to me, just like everything my beloved touches becomes almost sacred. I love her like I automatically love my beloved's family.  I want to be close to her, in the same way that my heart trembles as I hold with utmost care and reverence the letters I receive from the man I love because the same pages were held by him. We are deceiving ourselves if we still choose to believe that Our Lord came into close contact, was intimately united, with His mother and left her unchanged and empty, without leaving something of Himself in her. That does not sound like our Lord, who has revealed Himself to be relational beyond all measure and expectation, with a love that defies human comprehension  yet is supremely and undeniably Love. That could not be our Lord, who gave Himself  completely to us and continues to give Himself to us in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

My fellow romantics,  we expect our significant others to love and respect our earthly, biological mothers who are human and (therefore) imperfect. How can we not expect greater love and deep reverence for the Mother of our Lord, our Heavenly Mother, who is immaculate and free from sin? God made it easy for us when He made her as perfect as can be.

So how do you know you've found an exceptional man or woman of God? Find someone who loves our Heavenly Mother. Other people strictly say 'must love dogs'. Let's say, must love Our Lady.

"What It's Like to Be in Love"

Instead of the usual social commentary, I saw this pleasantly surprising blog post at National Review's The Corner, which describes quite eloquently the experience of being in love:

. . . being in love transforms not only one’s view of the love-object, but also of oneself and of the whole world. To the person in love, the whole world seems to come into a brighter and clearer focus, and inspires a sense of omni-competence: Anything I didn’t do before, out of laziness or lack of motivation, I am now able to do, and want to do.

Read the rest.

Does that ring true for you?

Real Men

They get it. Watch and learn.



For more info on the documentary, please visit the website: http://www.menaintboys.com/

H/T The Art of Manliness

Quotes of the Day on Chastity

"Purity is not something negative; it is not just an unopened bud; it is not something cold; it is not ignorance of life. Is justice merely the absence of dishonesty? Is mercy merely the absence of cruelty? Is faith merely the absence of doubt? Purity is not merely the absence of sensuality; it is selflessness born of love and the highest love of all."

- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

This is an echo of what Chesterton said prior to that about virtue, which I happened to read today as well:

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. 

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours;  but He never paints so gorgeously. . . as when He paints in white. [emphasis mine]

These brilliant and eloquent words are important, because these days, many try to downplay the virtue. And many are just all too happy to embrace any kind of reasoning that concludes chastity to be unnecessary. In fact, many already have. "It's too difficult", they say or "it's unrealistic", or "it's impossible". Well, it is tough, but nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. This virtue was important to pursue then. It's just as important now, no matter what the world tells us. The One who called us to chastity then still calls us to it now. The only thing that's changed is that somewhere down the line, many of us stopped listening.

It's Good To Talk

Often, we hear guys complain about how much their girlfriends talk. I usually do not see this as a good sign. If you want your significant other to talk less, or if you want to talk less with your significant other, then how do you expect to stay together happily for a long time?

Now, the criticism here lies not with guys alone. Many times, when guys complain about their girlfriends 'yakking', it's because the girls very rarely say anything worth listening to. I've spoken with such people myself. I have worked alongside girls who talk non-stop about Twilight and I don't know what irritates me more - the fact that these people applaud such poorly written trash or that they seem convinced that I would buy into it, too. And that's not even mentioning the many girls I've known who considers Perez Hilton's blog leisure reading. Some people are just thoroughly uninteresting. I hear ya. But I must raise this question: why are you with someone who doesn't interest you? With whom you don't enjoy conversing for hours?

Let me tell you one of the many things that led me to believe that my beloved was truly the one I wanted to be with. When he and I were just friends, we found ourselves chatting for hours and emailing often. One day, as I was responding to his emails, a thought occured:

I could do this for the rest of my life.

I felt that he and I could talk and talk for the rest of our lives without ever running out of things to talk about. I found him incredibly interesting. Our conversations in the beginning were rarely about ourselves or our personal lives. They were about politics, religion, philosophy, literature, and so on. Every time we talked, I grow in my understanding of things, and inadvertently, in my understanding of him. Things made more sense. We were exploring the world of ideas together, seeing things in each other's eyes. I never considered myself intelligent enough to interest him, but my interactions with him have certainly helped sharpen my mind. As our friendship developed, we eventually began talking about ourselves and asking about each other - what did you do today? What kind of music do you like? What's your family like? And so on and so forth. A whole new world has opened up; we were plumbing new depths. We were getting to know each other as persons. It was exciting.

And it still is six years later. I know we will never get bored with each other. We have life, the universe, and everything to talk about. There is still so much to learn about each other. So many things in my beloved's endlessly fascinating mind for me to discover. And this is not even mentioning the many shared experiences we are looking forward to that will connect us further and more deeply.

So please, please find someone you love talking to. And perhaps equally important, be someone worth talking to. Read more, think more. Take interest in things that matter. Faith, love, beauty, morality, living the good life, meaning, purpose, and so on. If you take a genuine interest in these things, the rest will follow. Soon, you will be looking at theology, philosophy, politics, religion, etc. We weren't created with a rational mind in order to lose it on intellectual laziness. Why is this important? Because it is important to be a whole person before we are joined with someone. And we can't demand great qualities from somebody that we don't even try to achieve ourselves. Before we seek somebody interesting, we need to be someone whom they would be interested in.

Marriage hopefuls, you have friends in high places.

One of the beauties of being Catholic is having recourse to the prayers of our Saints and all Heavenly Hosts. Prayer intentions can range from finding employment to - yes, that's right - finding your future mate! I know for people who want to find good Christian spouses in such a fallen world, the search often seems hopeless and in vain. But I would advise you to keep the faith, and never settle for anyone less than a godly man or woman with dignity, depth, and who simply radiates the love of Christ. Remember, that only people who know and love God can truly love.

Most important of all, pray. Pray for guidance that you may be led to the right vocation, be it marriage or otherwise. Pray that, if God has intended you for marriage, He would lead you to the right person. Pray that you will always be open to God's plan for your life. And to help your chances, enlist the help of the Saints and Angels, particularly, St. Raphael, who is the patron saint of finding your special someone.

 © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

As is written in Scripture 365 times, "be not afraid." The world is clearly in a bad way, but don't worry - you have friends in high places.

Marriage - You're Doing It Wrong!

Every once in a while - okay, most of the time - I encounter a blogger who has so many more wise and interesting things to say than I could. This is one of those times. Jennifer Fulwiler at National Catholic Register makes a plea to her readers not to read Khalil Gibran's well-known poem, On Marriage, on their wedding day. She summarizes the very sad and destructive approach to marriage prescribed by the poem:

1. Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
2. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
3. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
4. Stand together yet not too near together.

Read more

Fulwiler has a more fitting title for the list above: How to Have a Difficult Marriage.

How to Fail at Marriage could work, too.

Using the Via Negativa tradition, if you want to understand love, romance, and marriage, sometimes it's good to know what they are not. That is the only purpose that Khalil Gibran's On Marriage serves for the married and marriage hopefuls such as myself. The only useful thing it tells us is what marriage is not. The 'advice' listed should be seen as red flags - if our thoughts start to mirror the ideas of the poem, we should know at once that something is wrong. And fix it. FAST.

We can do better than what this sad, modern culture offers us. So let's.