CowPi Journal

May His love, peace, and energy touch you in faith

About a year ago, this prayerful mantra of three words, “love, peace, energy” came to me at a retreat. For what ever I was doing, love and peace were obvious words associated with God, but I felt that a third word was needed to complement the three persons of the Trinity. A moment later, energy popped into my head. It worked. It literally felt right.

Energy is not a word that one usually hears within religious context, but it is there. Other words imply it. Listen for it. Sometimes I wish the mantra had a few other words like mercy and heal, but I think those words get summed up within love and peace.

At various times, I find myself using these words in prayer. Usually I will direct the prayer toward other people with “May he/she/you feel His love, peace, and energy.” About a week ago, I thought I could start using these three words somehow in signing letters and emails and stuff. I needed a verb to go with them.

On Wednesday night, Fr. Ken gave me the perfect ending at RCIA when he was discussing the Eucharist. He said that if you looked through the four gospels, nearly every healing miracle has Jesus physically touching someone; or, if He is not doing the touching, then they are touching Him. BUT, it must be a touch in faith. See the story of the man with leprosy as just one example. The Roman soldiers also touched Jesus when they nailed Him to the Cross, but it was not with faith, and so were not healed. You must touch Jesus with faith to be healed.

If you like it, please feel free to use it. Do not give credit to me. All glory and praise goes to Him.

Fr. Scott was filling in for line duty during lunch the other day. Line duty is basically standing around outside the door to the cafeteria making sure that students do not crowd the hallway, block traffic, and prevent others from cutting in line. He likes to do line duty because it gives him a chance to talk with students in an informal setting.
At one point, Father had his back to the doorway into the cafeteria. One of the students next to him in line said, “Father! Somebody just cut in line up there.” The student was probably hoping that Father would yank the cutter out of line, give them a lecture on the Golden Rule, and send them back to the end.
Since he did not see the transgression, Father replied to the student next him, “Now you have a chance for forgiveness. What are you going to do about it?”

There have been certain temptations I have managed, by the grace of God, to avoid while writing this web journal. One of them has been not to look at the statistics of visitors to this site. A big part of me does not want to know how many people read my journal for fear that it might change my style and purpose of writing. A harder temptation has been not to look at the referrer logs. I am, by nature, a very inquisitive person. I am curious how visitors find me, but again, part of me does not want to know. I fear that I might start pandering to other interest in an attempt to gain readership.
Finally, I nearly succumbed to temptation on one little, queer issue. Back in April, I wrote a short, ironic piece called “New Car Technology”. It really has nothing to do with new car technology, but rather my frustration with an inconsiderate driver. Every now and then, I get an amusing little comment posted by seeming random persons with limited vocabulary, usually consisting of what a “happy” young fellow I am and how I am going to burn in eternal fire. One or two have been much vulgar and crude. I did not want to wade through the referrer log to find the source of the latest “amusing little comment”, so I tried a simple google search. To my big surprise, my link appears at the top of a list of 4,360,000 results (as of today). Wow! Imagine that, me at the top of a list at Google. Have I made the big time or what?
Now, I do not like deleting comments from visitors, but I do have my standards to keep. After all, my family, friends, and some of my students read this journal. This web journal, like most weblogs, is not exactly a public forum for debate and rhetoric. It is an outlet for me to share my reflections on life, and specifically my faith journey. As the quote on the side reads, “Life is a gift, not to possess, but to share.” Differing opinions and values do not bother me. I welcome them open heartedly, and hopefully, open mindedly.
I guess the writers of these “amusing little comments” don’t use their turn signals either.

We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share a life which was begotten, not made, which has always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came into this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing more.

— C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity