Friday, March 02, 2007
CATHOLIC SPIRITUALITY OR LAW OF ATTRACTION ?
Michael Brown at Spirit Daily has posted some comments which he titles "When the Enemy Slings His Arrows, Get Rid of them with the Spirit of God's Joy" which he has apparently taken from a book by Fr. DeGrandis. As I read through them, hints of "The Law of Attraction" kept coming back to me. The closing paragraphs read as follows:
Stings spring from jealousy and are the devil's attempt to steal the joy we have in God.Don't let them do that. Maintain your peace. Keep your joy. Grab onto it and don't relinquish it! Slough off insult.
How do we stop it?
By blessing them. By blessing those who curse us. When you respond to an attack with love, it loses its power.
We also do it with joy. Simply ignore the attack and put yourself back in a frame of mind that is joyful. Joy is closeness to God and sweeps away the fiery darts. Joy sweeps away the darts like leaves. Have you ever noted how -- when we let leaves decay -- they can stain even cement?
More than peace, joy is the marker of God. Look to the Rosary, where we see first joyful mysteries and then the ones of sorrow but finally those that are luminous and glorious.
What starts with joy ends in glory.
Couple it with blessings.
"The words we are pronouncing say much about ourselves," said an astute Croatian priest. "A word can wound and heal, it can kill and bring back to life. This is why it is important to overcome what is bad and evil within us with what is good, pure, and blessed.
"Whatever is blessed brings blessing. Bless a thing and it will bless you! Curse it and it will curse you! Whatever you judge in your life will come back to you and hurt you. If you bless a situation, it has no more strength to hurt you and, even if for a time it causes you trouble, little by little this trouble will disappear, and the blessing coming from a pure heart will become a blessing for others. When you bless, you become ready to receive blessing. Blessing is the strength and the light for our paths. Through the blessing, light and peace enter into us. As soon as someone starts to bless instead of curse, wishing good to others instead of cursing them, he becomes healthy, happy, and saved from the hands of the enemy."
"Let joy reign in your hearts," said the Blessed Mother of Medjugorje. "I wish only that you would be happy, that you be filled with joy, that you be filled with peace and proclaim this joy. I desire that through you the whole world may get to know the joy of God."
What do you think? Is that an example of the Law of Attraction and the "Don't be negative" command that is so popular today, or am I way off base here?
