Your Lord is seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven. How then is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or rather its content, how is it His Blood?
These elements are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is perceived by the senses and another thing by the mind. What is seen has bodily appearance; what the mind perceives produces spiritual fruit. You hear the words “The Body of Christ,” and you answer “Amen” [so be it].
Merciful Lord, who turned Augustine from his sins to be a faithful bishop and teacher: grant that we may follow him in penitence and discipline till our restless hearts find their rest in you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Faithful God, who strengthened Monica, the mother of Augustine, with wisdom, and through her patient endurance encouraged him to seek after you: give us the will to persist in prayer that those who stray from you may be brought to faith in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Italian researchers have used a new X-ray technique to demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin dates from the time of Jesus Christ.
Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).
They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in.
They deduced that the shroud was kept in conditions maintaining a temperature around 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it was brought to Chambery, France, in the 1350s; thereby taking the shroud’s chronology all the way back to the time of Christ.
If it had been kept in conditions with a different temperature and relative humidity, the aging of the flax cellulose and resultant dating would have been different too.
“The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel,” said the study in the journal Heritage.
The samples were also compared with similar linens from the 13th and 14th centuries but none was a match.
Dr Liberato De Caro, one of the scientists involved in the study, dismissed a 1988 test which concluded that the shroud was probably a Medieval forgery and only seven centuries old as inaccurate because “fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot be completely removed from the dated specimen”.
He added: “If the cleaning procedure of the sample is not thoroughly performed, carbon-14 dating is not reliable. This may have been the case in 1988, as confirmed by experimental evidence showing that when moving from the periphery towards the centre of the sheet, along the longest side, there is a significant increase in carbon-14.”
[On V-J Day 1945] my Dad shot this film along Kalakaua Ave. in Waikiki capturing spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender. Kodachrome 16mm film: God Bless Kodachrome, right? I was able to find an outfit (mymovietransfer.com) to do a much superior scan of this footage to what I had previously posted, so I re-did this film and replaced the older version There are more still images from this amazing day, in color, at discoveringhawaii.com
On this, the 79th anniversary of V-J Day (Victory Over Japan Day), a wonderful snippet from time. Watch it all and remember. Give thanks as you do for the greatest generation who have largely passed from our view.
Today marks the 79th anniversary of Victory Over Japan (V-J) Day and the end of World War II (the formal, unconditional surrender was not signed until September 1, 1945). Stop and remember the brave men and women who fought against the evil of Nazism and Japanese militarism in the 1940s.
Remember too our brave soldiers today who are fighting against another form of evil and keep our soldiers in your prayers.
My fellow Americans, and the Supreme Allied Commander, General MacArthur, in Tokyo Bay:
The thoughts and hopes of all America–indeed of all the civilized world–are centered tonight on the battleship Missouri. There on that small piece of American soil anchored in Tokyo Harbor the Japanese have just officially laid down their arms. They have signed terms of unconditional surrender.
Four years ago, the thoughts and fears of the whole civilized world were centered on another piece of American soil–Pearl Harbor. The mighty threat to civilization which began there is now laid at rest. It was a long road to Tokyo–and a bloody one.
We shall not forget Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese militarists will not forget the U.S.S. Missouri.
The evil done by the Japanese war lords can never be repaired or forgotten. But their power to destroy and kill has been taken from them. Their armies and what is left of their Navy are now impotent.
Father in heaven, whose Son Jesus Christ was wonderfully transfigured before chosen witnesses upon the holy mountain, and spoke of the exodus he would accomplish at Jerusalem: give us strength so to hear his voice and bear our cross that in the world to come we may see him as he is; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Do you wish to see the transfiguration of Jesus? Behold with me the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him be simply apprehended. There he is beheld both “according to the flesh” and at the same time in his true divinity. He is beheld in the form of God according to our capacity for knowledge.
Would that all bishops, priests, and deacons heed this warning, especially the bishops, and especially the bishops of the Church of England who are the most recent ones to lead their denomination down the road to perdition. These men and women took an oath to God to defend the faith against all kinds of heresy. But no, they couldn’t be bothered to do this. Why? Because most don’t believe their own Story in the first place! And as Saint Cyprian has warned, heresy is so dangerous because it inevitably leads to apostasy and apostasy leads to eternal destruction.
Nor are the bishops of the CoE the only ones who have led their denominations down the path of destruction. Just look at the Episcopal and United Methodist Churches. It makes the heart sad and angry. Lord have mercy on us.
Heresies have frequently arisen and continue to do so because of the fact that disgruntled minds find no peace and faithless rabble-rousers undermine unity. But the Lord allows and endures these things, while not touching our freedom, so that when our hearts and minds are examined by the norm of truth, the sound faith of those who are approved may clearly stand out. This is foretold by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle when he says: “There may even have to be factions among you for the tried and true to stand out clearly.”
Thus are the faithful approved, thus are the faithless detected; thus even here, before the day of judgment, are the souls of the just and the unjust set apart, and the chaff separated from the wheat. This explains why some, of their own accord and without divine appointment, set themselves over daring strangers, making themselves into prelates regardless of the rules of ordination, and assume the title of bishop on their own authority, although no one confers the episcopate on them.
In the Psalms, the Holy Spirit designates these as sitting in the chair of pestilence; they are the plague and disease for the faith, serpent-tongued deceivers and skilled corruptors of the truth, spewing forth lethal venom from their poisonous tongues; their speech resembles a creeping cancer and their preaching injects a fatal virus in the heart and breast of everyone.
Against such persons the Lord cries out, and from these he restrains and recalls his wandering people, saying: “Listen not to the voice of your [false] prophets, who fill you with emptiness; visions of their own fancy they speak, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say to those who despise the word of the Lord: ‘Peace shall be yours’; and to everyone who walks in hardness of heart, ‘No one shall overtake you.’ I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. Had they stood in my counsel, and did they but proclaim to my people my words, they would have brought them back from evil ways and from their wicked deeds.”
It is these same persons whom the Lord designates and censures when he says: ‘‘They have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” Although there can be only the one baptism, they think they can baptize: and although they forsake the fountain of life, they still promise the grace of life and saving water. People are not cleansed by them but simply made foul; and sins are not taken away but only accumulated.
Such a ‘‘new birth’’ does not bring forth children for God but for the devil. Born by a lie, they do not receive the promises of truth. Begotten by perfidy, they lose the grace of faith. They cannot attain to the reward of peace, since they have broken the peace of the Lord with the madness of discord.
Would that we have bold leaders like this in the Church today.
Now, with regard to this rule of faith—that we may from this point acknowledge what it is which we defend—it is, you must know, that by which we believe that there is one only God, and that He is none other than the Creator of the world, who produced all things out of nothing through His own Word, sent forth before all things; that this Word is called His Son, and, under the name of God, was seen in various ways by the patriarchs, heard at all times in the prophets, at last brought down by the Spirit and Power of the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, being born of her, went forth as Jesus Christ; thenceforth He preached the new law and the new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was crucified, and rose again the third day; then having ascended into the heavens, He sat at the right hand of the Father; sent in his place the Power of the Holy Spirit to lead such as believe; will come with glory to take the saints to the enjoyment of everlasting life and of the heavenly promises and to condemn the wicked to everlasting fire, after the resurrection of both good and evil, together with the restoration of their flesh. This rule, as it will be proved, was taught by Christ, and raises amongst ourselves no other questions than those which heresies introduce, and which make people heretics.
—On the Prescription of Heretics 13. CCL 1, 197-198
A Christian lady who had this feeling was once expressing to a friend how impossible she found it to say, “Thy will be done,” and how afraid she should be to do it. She was the mother of an only little boy, who was the heir to a great fortune, and the idol of her heart. After she had stated her difficulties fully, her friend said, “Suppose your little Charley should come running to you tomorrow and say, ‘Mother, I have made up my mind to let you have your own way with me from this time forward. I am always going to obey you, and I want you to do just whatever you think best with me. I will trust your love.’ How would you feel towards him? Would you say to yourself, ‘Ah, now I shall have a chance to make Charley miserable. I will take away all his pleasures, and fill his life with every hard and disagreeable thing that I can find. I will compel him to do just the things that are the most difficult for him to do, and will give him all sorts of impossible commands.’” “Oh, no, no, no!” exclaimed the indignant mother. “You know I would not. You know I would hug him to my heart and cover him with kisses, and would hasten to fill his life with all that was sweetest and best.” “And are you more tender and more loving than God?” asked her friend. “Ah, no!’’ was the reply; “I see my mistake. Of course I must not be any more afraid of saying, ‘Thy will be done,’ to my Heavenly Father than I would want my Charley to be of saying it to me.”
Better and sweeter than health, or friends, or money, or fame, or ease, or prosperity, is the adorable will of our God. It gilds the darkest hours with a divine halo, and sheds brightest sunshine on the gloomiest paths. He always reigns who has made it his kingdom, and nothing can go amiss to him. Surely, then, it is only a glorious privilege that is opening before you when I tell you that the first step you must take in order to enter into the life hid with Christ in God is that of entire consecration. I beg of you not to look at it as a hard and stern demand.
—From The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
The Lord shows in the gospel how a person will rise again… For when the Lord went to the sepulcher [of Lazarus, John 11.1-44] and loudly cried out: “Lazarus, come forth,” what other meaning is there in this except that he wished to give visible proof of our future resurrection?
Where the power of a divine command was operating, nature no longer followed its course [of all dying and staying dead], but obeyed the divine will.
If anyone is astonished at this, inquire who gave the command and your astonishment will cease. It was Jesus Christ, the Power of God, the Life, the Light, the Resurrection of the dead. The Power lifted up a man lying in the grave; the Life made him walk; the Light dispelled the darkness and restored his sight; the Resurrection renewed the gift of life.
—Second Oration on the Death of his Brother Satyrus, 77-81
In the Resurrection of Christ with its promise of new creation lies our only real hope for all that ails us. Why then do so many reject or ignore this great gift from God the Father? For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
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