Lese majesty E-Book

Timothée Mercier

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Christ paves the way to peace. The all-encompassing love for the Creator, His Messiah and one's neighbor is the most sustainable path to irrevocable inner liberation. Christ opened wide the gates to hope and taught trust in His and His Mother's unyielding love for the Father and mankind in His past life. His work of redemption, reflected in the sacraments, means life in God, to have life in abundance and to have it eternally. Those who have fallen out of practice should convince themselves that repentance or gratitude only costs overcoming and is far from being a punishment.

Leseprobe

Faith & its rules made easy!

"Does the word speak a foreign language, since foreigners understand it but not their own people?"

A biography

~

about the imponderables

a church in deficit

from

Sense and nonsense

a "true" religion

"Will your proud spirit not shaken by such questions, that rise to the realm of truth and come ever closer to it and which only find an answer in a humble heart find an answer in a humble heart full of faith?"

Table of Contents

Part III

Testimony

Prologue

All Beginnings are difficult

Freedom & Liberation

Dowry

A ghost is on the loose

Growing Pains

Ransom

Note

Paragraphs in italicsare originally taken from the 12-volume workGottmenschby Maria Valtorta, as Jesus Christ gave it to her in visions during a long life on her sickbed.Gottmenschis published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by Parvis Verlag in Switzerland and has been recommended by a few personalities in the Catholic Church. Please note that the English translation created by artificial intelligence is based on the German Version and have not been taken from the original English version ofGottmensch (The Poem of the Man-God).

Part III - Testimony

Prologue

Introductions to the Passion of Jesus Christ

Jesus turns to Maria Valtorta:... "It will be a long road that we must travel together, for no pain has been spared me. No pain of the flesh, of the spirit, of the heart, of the soul. I have tasted them all, fed on them all, quenched my thirst on them all until I died from them.

If you could put your mouth to my lips, you would still notice the bitterness of these many pains. If you could see my humanity in my now so radiant robe, you would also see that these rays emanate from the thousand and thousand wounds that covered my limbs, torn, bled, bruised and pierced for love of you, with a mantle of living purple.

Now my humanity shines. But there was a day when it resembled that of a leper, so battered and humiliated was it. The God-man, who as the Son of God and the woman without blemish possessed all the beauty of the body in perfection, was then abominable in the eyes of those who looked at him lovingly, curiously or contemptuously: a "worm", as David says, the scorn of the people and the most despised of the people.

Love for the Father and for the Father's creatures drove me to abandon my body to those who beat me, to offer my face to those who struck my cheeks and spit on me and who thought they were acting meritoriously when they tore out my hair, pulled my beard and pierced my head with thorns. Even the earth, and what comes from it, they have made accomplices to the torments inflicted on their Savior, for they have dislocated my limbs, laid bare my bones, torn my clothes from my body and thus inflicted the greatest torment on my purity. They have beaten me to the wood, hung me up like a lamb bleeding to death on the butcher's hook, they have followed my death throes with slavering scorn - a pack of greedy wolves made even more furious by the smell of blood.

Accused, condemned, killed. Betrayed, denied, sold. Forsaken even by God, for the crimes I had taken upon myself lay upon me. I was poorer than a beggar who had fallen among thieves, for I was not even spared the garment to cover my martyred, shattered nakedness. I was not even spared the shame of being wounded beyond death and slandered by my enemies. Covered by the filth of all your sins, plunged into the deepest night of pain, without the light of heaven meeting my dying gaze or a divine voice answering my last plea.

Isaiah names the reason for so much pain: "Truly, he has taken all our suffering upon himself; he has borne our pain."

Our pain! Yes, I have borne it for you! To ease your pain, to soothe it, to end it, if only you had been faithful to me. But you didn't want to be. What did I get in return? You looked at me like a leper, a man beaten by God. Yes, the leprosy of your infinite sins was on me like a penitential garment, like a penitential girdle; but why did you not see God in his infinite mercy through the garment in which he clothed his holiness for you?

"Pierced for your sins, bruised for your iniquities," says Isaiah, who with his prophetic gaze saw the Son of Man as a single wound, for the healing of the wounds of men. And if only my body had been astonished!

But what you wounded me much more was my feelings and my spirit. You made both the one and the other the target of your mockery, and through Judas you trampled underfoot the friendship I had given you. You broke the loyalty I had hoped for from you by denying Peter. You hurt me through the ingratitude of those who cried out to me: "Die!" after I had delivered them from so many evils. You wounded me in love by the suffering inflicted on my mother, and in religion when you called me a blasphemer; me who, out of zeal for the cause of God, delivered myself into the hands of men by becoming man, suffering all my life and abandoning myself to human cruelty without saying a word or complaining.

One glance of my eyes would have been enough to destroy the accusers, judges and executioners, but I came willingly to make the sacrifice, and as a lamb, for I was the Lamb of God, and I am so for ever. I was led away to be stripped of my clothes and put to death, so that my flesh might become life for you.

When I was raised, I was already consumed by nameless pain, pain of all names. I had already begun to die in Bethlehem, when I saw the light of day, which was so terrifyingly different for me. I also died in poverty, in exile, in flight, at work, in all my troubles, the lack of understanding, the betrayal, the hurt feelings, the torments, lies and blasphemies. Man inflicted all this on me, on me who had come through in order to reconcile him with God again.

Mary, look at your Savior. He does not wear a white robe and does not have a blond head. He does not have the sapphire-colored eyes you know. His robe is red with blood. It is torn and covered in dirt and saliva. His face is swollen and disfigured and his gaze is veiled by blood and tears, and he looks at you through this crust of blood, tears and dust that covers his eyelids. My hands, you see, are already full of miracles, waiting for the final wound.

Look at me, little John, just as your brother John looked at me. My steps leave bloody traces. The sweat wipes away the blood that drips from the wounds of the hostage blows, and the blood that still covers me from the fear of death in the Garden of Olives. The parched, shattered lips speak this word in the distress, in the grief of a heart already dying in nameless agony." ...

... "The pure, the humble, the one detached from all the riches of the world, could not help but feel disgust at this snake. I also felt revulsion. And only I, the Father and the Spirit know how much it cost me to endure him, Judas, in my presence." ...

... "You have learned about all the pain that preceded the actual Passion. Now I will show you the pains I endured during the Passion. Those pains that grip your spirit more and more deeply the more you contemplate them." ...

Testimony

The strange cuckoo child falls out of its nest

All beginnings are difficult

It was probably God's providence of an unusual kind that I was placed with a foster family in an idyllic place as a child aged 6 from a broken family background. My subsequent childhood there was noticeably characterized by the unanimity of a tranquil village, which was significantly influenced by the spiritual life of the local monks. As a child who understood little about God, I was able to experience the deep peace of life there at times. Even if they were only tender shoots of faith, the faith of the local community could be seen as a kind of maturity that made me feel quite protected. Perhaps I shouldn't write too much about this wondrously mythical place, so as not to attract moreZuagroistswho would demystify the divine mystery with their human curiosity.

However, I didn't realize that for many years of my childhood, I was only able to share this personal happiness with my fellow human beings in isolated cases. I was trapped in my own little world, because the reality around me was actually a different one that I couldn't or didn't want to see. This may have been because I had previously escaped hell on earth myself. In my ignorance of its origins, I had unfortunately taken the profound sense of security in many respects during my childhood far too much for granted, so it was just as far from my mind to question it more closely.

Jesus replies to Peter: "I will tell you in your own words from just before. One leap and you are on the peaceful, flowery island of spiritual life. But you have to have the courage to take the leap and leave the shore, the world; to leap without caring whether someone might laugh at our clumsy leap or laugh at us because of our simplicity, because we prefer a small, lonely island to the world. You have to jump without fear of hurting yourself, getting wet or experiencing disappointment. We must leave everything behind and seek refuge with God, go to the island isolated from the world and leave it only to distribute to those who remain on the shore the pure water and flowers that we have gathered on the island of the spirit, where there is only one tree, the tree of wisdom. Near it, far from the noise of the world, you understand every word and become a teacher, even though you know you are a student. This is also a symbol."

The light-heartedness left me all the more abruptly as I could have recognized who or what had left me with the new stage in my life of my training as an electrician. As I loved doing handicrafts as a child, I used to imagine a future as a carpenter or television technician. I also thought about becoming a gardener or a chef, neither of which were far from my mind. However, I'm not weatherproof, not even today, and nobody thought I was capable of baking and cooking, although today I actually like to conjure up quick, tasty menus as a contrast to the sometimes bland canteen food at work. As the master carpenter subsequently turned me down, my foster father finally put me in touch with his long-time sports friend who owned a large craft business.

At the age of 15, I found myself with a huge impact drill that was almost as heavy as I was, working on a building shell without windows and in wintry temperatures, drilling countless holes for empty conduits with a diameter of around 2 cm in the concrete ceiling. It was wet and dark everywhere, dripping from the autumn rain and behind me stood a grumpy Kapo who told me to work faster. It didn't take long to become acquainted for the first time with depression, which had haunted me for many months during the prime of my youth. Only those who have experienced this horror know how inescapable this condition is. Regularly on Sunday afternoons, when my foster family were visiting their relatives or friends and I stayed at home, I would be overcome with anxiety and fall into a deep black hole of feelings from which there was no escape. The more you touched on the apparent reasons that could trigger this frustration, or felt that you had been caught out, the more you were overcome with fear and heaviness in your heart. All you could do was wait until the mood mercifully showed itself to calm down again, until the next bout of emotional desolation.

Old Testament - Ecclesiastes,Limits of Knowledge12,1 Remember your Creator in your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near, when you will say, "I do not like them"; 12,2 before the sun and the light, the moon and the stars become dark, and the clouds return after the rain; 12,3 at the time when the keepers of the house tremble and the mighty are bowed down, and the millers stand idle because they have become so few, and when those who look through the windows become dark. 12,4 And when the doors of the street are shut, and the voice of the mill is hushed, and when it is lifted up, as when a bird sings, and all the daughters of song bow down; 12,5 when the high places are feared, and the way is troubled, when the almond tree blossoms, and the locust loads itself, and the caper breaks open; for man goes where he will remain forever, and mourners go about in the streets; - 12,6 before the silver cord is broken, and the golden bowl is shattered, and the bucket is broken at the spring, and the wheel falls broken into the well. 12,7 For the dust must return to the earth as it was, and the spirit must return to God who gave it. 12,8 It is all vain, says the Preacher, all vain.

Religion was out of the question and had no meaning for me in everyday life at that time, quite the opposite. As I have already mentioned, I was unfortunately only able to form a vague idea of God in practice based on the stories from the Gospel of the Church, although I had already received all the sacraments as a Christian. At that time, I even developed the ritual of pretending to go to church, when in reality I was hanging out in town or with friends. So I had no remedy for my dissatisfaction with the course my life was taking and had to accept that anxiety would regularly catch up with me. I wanted to drop out of my apprenticeship, but a few sensible colleagues, to whom I was well-disposed and am very grateful today, strongly advised me against it and recommended that I at least complete my degree.

Followed by the already long-lasting religious disagreements in the foster family, this was the moment when I broke out emotionally at home. My great discovery was lust. As a pure pastime or a welcome instrument for coping with frustration in hopeless situations and for drowning mental pain in it, although I gradually developed into a narcissist through this frequent ritual of preoccupation with myself. I was mainly interested in women when they flew at me. I sought recognition and promised satisfaction, because that's what I was good at. It wasn't long before I realized that girls my age were also insatiable in this desire. As romantic as the relationships were at first, disillusionment was not long in coming, with a few exceptions, which became a burden that I discarded like a second-hand garment.

We were certainly all of great delicacy and youthful innocence, we were like-minded people, so we played this game and millions of people around the world played it to the last person. One fine day, a few years later, I stood in the shower and felt disgusted with myself. The constant intimate touching by some strange body made me feel dirty despite frequent washing. The reason for this was probably of an internal nature and from then on the attraction was over. The sexual act, which already carries the risk of seductive and soul-destroying lust, therefore always remains a balancing act for Christians. Consequently, it is not a playground and, with good will, should only be reserved for procreation. This can be learned and, lo and behold, it is good for the soul. As a Christian and the redeemed, you must not shy away from this sacrifice. In order not to suffer shipwreck, one must have conquered the lust within oneself with faith before entering into a marriage. This is definitely advisable for everyone so as not to systematically undermine the partnership or each other and themselves.

Do not be afraid to say: "Father, I have sinned,

But if you want, you can heal me."

I only learned to overcome the shame of dealing with my body very late and also in connection with the memory of a healing experience in my foster family. To be more precise, it was my foster mother's relatives who took me in as a boy on their farm for two consecutive summers. Not an easy task for the family of five with an untamed former foster child from the city. For me, however, this experience was a decisive one because it was the first time in my life that I had seen and experienced how people secured their livelihood and their own survival through the hard work of their hands in combination with the fruits of the earth. There was so much to discover on a farm. The many types of animals such as cows, pigs, cats, rabbits, bees; the many hiding places and a cousin my age who was already physically involved in the daily work and duties of his parents. There was never a dull moment. I was almost infatuated with my cousins, who were both a few years older than me, the older one lively, already of age and with an entourage; the younger one very romantic in nature and withdrawn but always loving in her dealings with those close to her. I remember spending many hours in the fields "sharking" in the sweltering summer heat and having many a lively conversation.

In any case, this family practiced the ritual of washing in the bathtub on Saturday evenings. When it was my turn, I used to hide my body, as I was used to doing with my foster family. At the end of the bath, however, my aunt would lovingly wrap me in a large towel and accompany me out of the bathroom and into the adjoining room. That was strange to me. I was already in puberty and she dried my body with the towel without any reservations. Of course, I was embarrassed at first, especially as the others were all watching TV, but no one was interested and in the end I felt very comfortable in this atmosphere of unconditional acceptance and carefree treatment of my body. Many years later, after the death of my foster uncle, who was also to become my godfather, I remembered this and said to myself that if the Mother of God had bathed her son Jesus, she must have done it with the same innocent intention.

From then on, I had a different relationship with the Mother of God in prayer, because I found the necessary courage to overcome my shame because of the charms of my body that I had lived out wrongly in the past. There is no doubt that bliss can be brought about en masse at any time by inflaming the body. But how long does it last and at what cost? To want to balance or even determine life with its ups and downs solely by means of sexuality would mean taking oneself hostage. This is because the definition of one's own self could certainly be reduced and linked exclusively to the strategy of physical signaling. Anyone who sees themselves in rose-tinted glasses in this way does not shy away from doing the same with the other person or from wanting to see the definition of the self determined by others as an increase in inexhaustible physical impulses.

The obvious danger here, however, is that the heteronomy that is becoming a habit is also spreading to other instances without us being aware of it. For example, it is easy to be overwhelmingly taken over by a church that is clearly going astray in many places. Or unmanageable consumerism, which in turn makes you dependent on a high income. And before you know it, as a market soldier you are a component of radical economic liberalism. Does that make you happier? On the contrary, the hopelessness is intensified and the spiral of subjugation becomes all the more mechanical, which in turn leads to new desires that are often linked to the desire to change partners.

This illusory greatness of physical satisfaction is countered by a contentment that has its origin in the soul of man, provided that attention is paid to it. Contact with the eternal in faith is decisive for the motivation to love actively: God, oneself and one's neighbor. The extent of happiness or its increase only plays a subordinate role. Those who feel with the heart of the spirit see the injustice that surrounds them and that could emanate from themselves in the all-numbing intoxication of selfishness. For someone who goes through life with an alert eye, happiness does not dwell on this earth. Rather, it can be seen as an eternal good that needs to be defended and increased for eternity with the armor of faith and the weapons of the spirit in order to come into its possession.

Freedom & Liberation

The decisive outlet against the depressive moods of my budding youth was music, especially the current charts with American or English pop music. Public happiness, emotionally binding and sometimes even melancholic; this rhythm in combination with the very simple English language had become a familiar access to my soul in all moods and thus a welcome substitute religion. It was the continuation of life in a bubble, as I was used to as a child, but with human means, which is why it was only a make-believe world and an illusion of happiness. I sought the timeless atmosphere of discotheques and, for the same reason, detested hard rock and places that celebrated it, even though it was very popular with many of my peers.

The next morning, of course, came the hangover, the day turned into night and the night into day, because people naturally wanted to sleep late. But there was another reason for this, because at night the spirits of adults were tired, while the free spirits of youth could blossom. The young generations of today don't handle the absurdities of the world any differently in order to be at least emotionally superior to the hopeless confrontations in life. This episode was an additional stress test for my foster parents, because I had already come of age, was traveling in my own car and didn't come home at all at weekends to go out or even spend the night with my girlfriend. My foster father, visibly shaken, took heart to complain about my "lifestyle". Meanwhile, there was not the slightest cause for concern, on the contrary, life was showing me its sunny side.

He couldn't explain where all the money he had earned himself was going and even suspected that we were regularly going to a brothel. This only made us even stranger to each other, because he had no idea how expensive the evening life was in the cities we were visiting, along with evening wear, gas money, etc. My patience was wearing thin, because the product of his duplicitous concern could make me very angry and emotionally upset, so that he only got me deeper into trouble every time. How little did this man know me, who thought I could do things I couldn't even imagine in my wildest dreams? I was just looking for fun to balance out the hard week at work and like-minded people and didn't even use unfair means like drugs or alcohol, like many other young people do.

But what dirty fantasies surrounded him to want to throw this filth at me? I don't want to denigrate the fate of many prostitutes at this point and I'm not trying to start a vendetta against my foster parents, because they certainly didn't have to forgive me any less than I had to forgive them, but the point is to make it clear how deplorable the practice of religion is in the eye of the beholder if it is only practiced half-heartedly or with half-knowledge. In this way, it serves only as an end in itself and glorifies the so-called believer, for whom it is of little use after all.

Matthias the shepherd to his companions: "... if you did not remember the words of your first master(John the Baptist), he would really be dead to you. A master lives as long as his teaching lives on in the disciples, even if he is then replaced by a greater master. And the disciples of Jesus, the Master of all masters, are never allowed to forget the words of the former, which prepared them to understand and love the Lamb of God with wisdom."

The relationship with my foster parents had now reached a low point. I had cut off my foster father in particular. For me, he was the symbol of superficiality. But it started very early on as a child. I remember him dutifully dragging me and my foster sister to church services. Really everything in these services was alienating for me, except for the sermons of the young priests, who were obviously in love without being married. Their intelligent demeanor and versatile commitment in public or in the speeches from the pulpit could touch me deeply and had left me with a first impression of wisdom and strength. But there were also the other high gentlemen from the monastery, whose pride was as hollow as a rotten tree that would fall over in the next storm, and accordingly their sermons had bounced off me as a fortress of intellect.

Nevertheless, in my youth I had never been able to see Christ as the Son of God, but as a child of God, as we all are, and as a completely normal person, but with a special mission from God, for which he had to atone on the cross. At that time, after my early experiences as a child from a precarious family background with residential care, I had already trusted people to do this. However, the fact that He had also atoned for my guilt on the cross was, of course, foreign to me, as was the whole of His greatness and that of His religion. At this point, I must add that I never really found confession difficult as a child with the image of my religious education teacher at the time, who was a confessor and of course also a monk in the monastery. He associated a wheelbarrow full of selfish deeds or sins, which I certainly recognized in myself, and which could simply be unloaded - before God, of course.

Accordingly, I feel lighter after each reception of the sacrament of penance to this day, although I carelessly neglected this remedy for many years. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a confessor who inspires confidence. The confession interface tempts the clergy to bind the lay faithful to themselves with confidence-building psychology. Conversely, the clergy are tempted by their clientele to meet with sentimentalism and self-pity on a maudlin level. This is not yet repentance. After all, absolution is also a certificate of maturity. Imagine confession without Christ, the Redeemer, then there really would be no need for any penance. It is one of the greatest and most widespread evils in the Church and can be seen in the long queues due to many a bloated session in the confessional.

This is even worse than the rhetorical feats from the pulpit, in which the intellect and thus the self-confidence of the believer can be served, but the penitent is not expected to repent. This is a contradiction in terms and has fatal consequences for self-acting faith, favoring a flimsy construct of mutual human dependence. Every reasonably professional psychologist takes care to maintain a discrete boundary to his patient in order to achieve a sensible treatment outcome, not only for the benefit of the patient. The task of the pastor is undoubtedly not to empty the wheelbarrow by appeasing, but to lead to God and help the sinner to recognize the pitfalls of sin. In this way, the believer is in the fortunate position of being able to permanently untangle the knots on his own. After all, the pastor has spent years studying theology for this purpose. So why doesn't he deliver? It doesn't make sense to me that he himself might be trapped in a disastrous system of egocentricity.

A master lives as long as his teaching lives on in his disciples.

When I returned to the bosom of the church after many years, I had the habit of reciting every single sin from my passive time as a believer in the confessional. Although the individual pastors despaired of me, no one explained to me plausibly why this was unnecessary. Only after many years did I realize that repentance is not a short burst of insight in the confessional or during the service to ease the conscience or empty the wheelbarrow. Rather, it becomes a basic attitude of faith and a lifelong act of humility and gratitude that goes hand in hand with the joy of being a Christian, which can also defy the harshness of everyday life. This small but constant overcoming is logically not a punishment, but is due to the fact that the cleansing of the soul through the sacrament of penance is also granted for ever and ever. This is countered by the euphoric excesses that sprout up everywhere, which are praised as the spirit of God, but are more akin to the desperate circumstance of mechanical submission in an attitude of expectation than to that of redemption and can be found in so many denominations, above all in Catholic or Protestant places of worship. They seriously obscure the facts of genuine spiritual liberation.

Just as fidelity to self-control in dealing with remorse or gratitude equally creates the conditions for a successful and flourishing faith, so, conversely, the frivolous fantasy of euphoria is the basis for disordered passions and rebelliousness. The inflating mania in euphoria seeks a suitable and decelerating outlet so that it does not tip over into a negative mood or one is not thrown back on oneself in a depression. Such an outlet could, for example, seem to be naturally reflected in an exuberant sex life, because sexuality appears to be almost always within reach. At least that is how people today learn it through all channels from childhood onwards. A fruitless lifestyle that tramples on or disregards the needs of the soul and man's vocation for eternal life naturally favors a vicious circle like euphoria. Today, even marriages are fatally based as a life plan on the origin of euphoria. One fits the other and vice versa. At the end of the day, countless cases of abuse in all areas of society have been in the spotlight for several decades, which means that one fits into the other and the overall picture makes perfect sense, even if it is of a demonic nature.

In this sense, inner liberation through persistent insight and conversion can only last in the long term in an environment of inner and outer peace. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end when pastors or believers indifferently pray the rosary in public: "Jesus, who was crucified for us." This inevitably leads to a misinterpretation of faith, as can often be seen in the commemorative culture of worship in all Christian denominations. In keeping with the times, it should read: "Jesus, who was crucified for us at the risk of your life."