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THE ZIG OF CAIN AND THE ZAG OF CHRIST ~ 8

                                         As I begin this it is the 20 th commemoration of 9/11 today and those of us old enough to remember that day will never forget the evil horror. Each of us, even if we ignore the truth of Genesis or reduce it to mythology, are hard pressed, if we look honestly at our own life choices, to be unaware we, all humanity and creation in general, cannot escape the stark reality all creation, the human family in particular, experience the brokenness which is ours, which is humanity’s, because of the choice made by Adam and Eve to believe satan, the liar, rather than God our truth-speaking, loving, Father. The first experience by human beings, starting with Adam and Eve, after by sin if not rupturing completely certainly fracturing our relationship with God and His Trinitarian love for us is fear, followed by God not seeming to recognize us, and that is because sin distorts His image within us, thus we are unrecognizable as the person He has created.
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THE ZIG OF THEORY AND THE ZAG OF FACT ~ 7

                                         Theories according to the dictionary are suppositions intended to explain something, so they are not facts. Facts are things that are known to be true. A very simple example of theory and fact: In university I had a philosophy professor who argued that things only exist because we believe they exist, his proof being, pointing out the window to a tall, steel, piece of modern art claiming it existed because we all agreed it did, but should we all agree it did not it would vanish. A wag in the class got up and asked the professor if that applied to everything and everyone. The professor assured us it did. The wag lit his lighter and moved it towards the professor’s hand. The professor jumped away from the flame and the wag. The professor had a theory, the wag a flame, it is a fact fire burns. We live in an age where we are drowning in conspiracy theories to the extent even provable facts are doubted by many, many people. The result is we liv
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THE ZIG OF HURT, THE ZAG OF FORGIVENESS ~ 6

                                      The first example in Sacred Scripture of how poisoned thinking morphs into out-of-control emotions of jealousy, anger, hatred and explodes into hurting, through lashing out verbally, physically – or simply choosing the punitive option of distance and silence – towards the one[s] who have directly, often indirectly because we have imagined it to be so – hurt us, is that of Cain and Abel. [Gn.4:1-18] When we cling obsessively to actual or perceived hurt inflicted upon us by another/others, sometimes even God becomes the target of our blaming hurt. There is within most people a seeking, aided, and abetted by satan, to find any means to cauterize the pain. Cain’s choice was to murder his brother. There is a holier alternative to punitive action against those who hurt us: asking for and embracing the healing grace of Christ. Without such healing we will never be complete as a person. Without such healing we will both remain prisoners in the darkness
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THE ZIG OF LIFE, THE ZAG OF DEATH AND BACK AGAIN~5~PART 2

                      In the weeks since I last wrote about being taken seriously ill [non-covid just to clarify] death has come unexpectedly, though not unusually, to many of our brothers and sisters in the US through mass shootings, seven in this month alone, with forty people either killed or seriously wounded. As I pray for the victims and for their grieving loved ones left to live the rest of their lives with the proverbial empty place at the table, St. Paul’s teaching comes to mind, applicable to the Baptized members of the Body of Christ, the Church on earth, but in solidarity with every human being, applicable to each member of the human family. St. Paul uses the analogy of the human body: If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it [1 Cor.12:26] I know from experience, such as my near-death sickness now almost a year ago, most particularly, by their words, by their bringing me back here when I was released from the hospital and all they did for me during the long wee
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THE ZIG OF LIFE, THE ZAG OF DEATH AND BACK AGAIN ~ 5 ~ Part 1

    No human being exists apart from the entire human family. True, many people experience rejection, isolation from a close relationship with family or friends, and in their pain have no sense of being beloved, much less of belonging. Nonetheless we all exist within the human family, a species unlike any other on earth, for we alone have been created in the image and likeness of God, we alone are endowed with an immortal soul, which itself gives form to the body, and is the actual “I” of our being, thus while the body does die the “I” does not. Communication, the ability by word, gesture, to communicate with at least one other human being throughout the day, beyond merely, for example, asking for a coffee in the coffee shop, is critical to alleviate the isolation and loneliness of living without the intimacy of love, of being of some import to another human being. Besides hobbling our emotional, intellectual, physical health, loneliness impedes spiritual development as well. How
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4

                             AN INTERRUPTED ZIG, A WASTEFUL ZAG, A RENEWED ZIG Recently I was asked by my spiritual director: why Zig Zag? Zig Zag refers to abrupt turns to left or right, that is deviating from a straight line or path. In the context of these essays to zig means to return to the right path and to zag means to deviate from it. The path, for all the baptized, is to respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow Him and we do so with the help of the Holy Spirit by following Jesus’ footsteps which is to follow Him through each moment of life, through the doorway of death, into the heart of the Holy Trinity, when our pilgrimage life on earth will be ended and, indeed, we will have eternal rest. Eternal rest not being a lack of activity for within the Communion of Saints, until the end of chronological time, we will intercede for our brothers and sisters still on pilgrimage and also, we will, with all the Angels and Saints be actively adoring, lauding, loving with absolute joy
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3 - ICE, SNOW, FIRE

                                                        Time is a great mystery. Try and pin down exactly what is meant in the opening of Genesis where reference is made to God naming day as the period of light and night as the period of darkness, then the Sacred Writer begins to enumerate the days of creation, and we are confronted with the pitfall of assuming ‘day’ in this context means our understanding of a day being the sequence of hours over a twenty-four-hour period. It would be millennia before that latter concept would be accepted and then it would take centuries more to agree on things like time zones! St. John Paul teaches that: In Christianity time has fundamental importance…..In Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is Himself eternal…..[from the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, II, para. 10] Time can flow like a gentle stream or rush like a torrent. Time is illusive, non-material, tangible mostly by what w
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