Pages from the Past: Spiritual Warfare

From Dom Augustin Guillerand, O Cart. I added paragraph breaks to make it more readable. In my journal I did not keep track of which of his books this excerpt is from. (Sorry!)

St Michael, defend us in the battle!

Creatures—and the devil who uses them—do not let themselves be ousted without a struggle. The life of prayer calls for continuous battles…. The human heart is a city; it was meant to be a stronghold. Sin surrendered it. Henceforth it is an open city, the walls of which have to be built up again. 

The enemy never ceases to do all he can to prevent this. He does this with his accustomed cleverness and strength with stratagem and fury. He puts before us such happy thoughts (and occasionally useful ones), pictures so attractive or frightening, and he clothes it all with reasons so impressive that he succeeds all along the line to distract us and entice us away from the divine presence. 

We must always be starting again. These continual recoveries, this endless beginning again, tires and disheartens us far more than the actual fighting. We would much prefer a real battle, fierce and decisive. But God, as a rule, thinks otherwise. He would rather we were in a constant state of war….He is love and this continuous warfare calls for more love and develops that love still further.

"Pages from the Past" are randomish excerpts from my old journals. I process things in writing, so there were a lot of volumes, but here and there I found notes that were still pertinent or helpful. I got rid of the books (hello, shredder!) and typed up the things I wanted to save, whether for myself (mostly) or to share. 

Pages from the Past: Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!

Invitatory Psalm: Come, let us sing to the Lord and shout with joy to the rock who saves us. 

Tintoretto: Moses drawing water from the rock (Wiki Commons)

Just about every day, the Church begins prayer with Psalm 95 and this invitation.

This is exactly what the Lord is hinting that I should make the foundation of my whole attitude; this needs to be my default position, my typical status, my “return to zero” as it were. And the theme of “rock” struck me (!) in the book I am reading on the Psalms.

Jerusalem is the rock.

The Temple is the rock.

God is the rock. 

"They drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ" (1 Cor 10:4).

The same rock, and the same one that brought forth water in the desert and continued to do so as Jerusalem, where water from the Temple rock filled the pool of Siloam. Was it the same water Ezekiel saw mystically flowing from the "right side of the Temple," that symbol of the pierced Heart of Jesus, from which "blood and water flood, and an eye witness has testified...that you might believe"?

"Pages from the Past" are randomish excerpts from my old journals. I process things in writing, so there were a lot of volumes, but here and there I found notes that were still pertinent or helpful. I got rid of the books (hello, shredder!) and typed up the things I wanted to save, whether for myself (mostly) or to share.