Quote: (04-15-2019 10:40 PM)Teutatis Wrote:
If God works in mysterious ways how can you know what is that God intended? It's very presumptuous of you to think you know what are God's reasons and plans, actually you just sound like another prophet of the apocalypse, something horrible happens and it's because God wants to punish us sinners.
It's the concept of Divine Omnipotence. God Wills everything: the mysterious nature of it means it won't make any obvious sense to our worldly judgement of what constitutes 'good' and 'evil', which is broken by concupiscence: we will always choose the comfortable evil of our passions - thereby becoming enslaved by them - rather than the uncomfortable good of denying them - freeing us from our state as their prisoner.
This means what appears to you to be Suffering is allowed by God under strict conditions because it offers you the best chance of achieving personal sanctification.
What did the Priest say this morning about the fire which struck me? "There can be no resurrection without death." What I understood in that simple sentence is knowing that the old self has to be consumed and burnt away to be replaced by the new man. A common scriptural analogy for our state of existence on this world is that we are tested and purified by fire. If you fail the test, by choose to stay enslaved by your passions, you are given over to the Devil as being his Lawful Property, with the standard pattern of existing as 'subjective reality; dead eyes; reeeing at the world; consumed by lust; trite, superficial concerns; inability to suffer; rejecting logos; sexual / physical / emotional disorder'. I've spent years on here thinking I was writing about Sociology and Psychology when I was just seeing Spiritual Reality.
You can easily detect these qualities in those who don't know the Father. The disorder spreads like rot. What you're seeing is a preview of the state of the soul in Hell.
So, say you see a Cathedral burning down as either an Evil Act or Random Chance. I see a Cathedral that only existed because God willed man to build it, which couldn't have been completed except for that He willed it, that only existed as long as it did to give Him glory, and that the destruction of which will somehow bring Him - not us - greater glory. The 'mysterious ways' simply means walking in faith until experience reveals His greater plan via Infused Knowledge: this is how you learn the virtue of Hope.
Understanding this is incredibly-freeing, because you come to discover that you're never put anywhere and given anything that can't be used for your personal sanctification in that moment, most of which is just a constant stream of little positive sacrifices that gradually refine your behaviour. I wrote a post somewhere in the Orthodox Thread about it.
You might dismiss it, but The Father showed me how to use this to repair both my Sigma Nature and my Melancholic Temperament, because He is Infinite Good, and will only ever show you Truth. I'm also repairing my mate Bill the same way - teaching him charity and mental discipline, which is contrary to what everyone on the forum said would happen - that he'd teach me to be a self-interested bad boy:
"I saw your point, you know? I don't have to
start by going nuclear now. It gives me somewhere to work up to."
What is starting to happen in the same thing that happened to me: he's no longer
consumed by certain people aggravating him at times. About eighteen months back, I gradually-theorized that Gamma and Sigma are just sexual polarities of the same innate dysfunction. The Father graced me to show me how to undo the dysfunction. He always wants to repair what is broken.
Bill is now starting to say, when people annoy him: "They are what they are." What you're increasingly-left with by operating like this is exactly what you are promised by Jesus: internal peace. Because He only speaks truth. So, a Cathedral can burn down, and I'll suddenly see that the Hedonistic, the Socialist, the Prot, the Atheist and Pagan alike are, effectively
disturbed by the deep wrongness of the Societal Collapse they have all been effectively-advocating for, but not knowing how to process it - since they don't know The Father - they lash out randomly at any and every target.
I warned someone back in December that what God had effectively done for me over the last year was made me able to exist in a very harsh reality without retreating into fantasy constructs or dysfunctional-destroying myself as coping mechanisms. I can see an Icon of Western Civilization burn down, and not get upset, because what is coming will be much worse, and I'm prepared for the level of Suffering required that He wills for me. As such, he's repaired me to endure the times without going mad or giving up, and I suggest those who see the writing on the wall the way I have been:
get under the protection of the Natural Law, because the societal disorder is accelerating very quickly.
If you need to discover your Primary Fault: pray to Our Lady Of Sorrows and ask her to reveal it. You'll know it when it happens, because it will be fully-delivered, and it is an undeniable, uncomfortable truth that you previously were unable to see about yourself. (I'm incredibly-proud of Aurini recently for facing what was revealed to him head on, because it's similarly-creating positive behavioural change in him, even though it initially would have appeared to him - as mine did - incredibly-frightening to confront).