OBSESSED WITH THE GODESS OF YOUTH AND PHYSICAL BEAUTY

 

I know a ravishingly beautiful young woman with Hollywood good looks. For the sake of anonymity, let me call her Aphrodite, after the Greek goddess of beauty.  Aphrodite’s statuesque beauty takes men’s breath away when she enters a room. Her physical beauty may seem like a blessing to the casual observer, but in actual fact, it has become her biggest curse.  

 

She does not know adversity. A life without adversity is a life without challenges. A life without challenges is a life without the opportunity to develop character. Saint Paul commented that troubles and trials produce human qualities like endurance which produces strength of character (Romans 5.3-4). Aphrodite’s character development is so stunted it verges on a disability.  

 

Aphro’ rarely hears the word ‘No.’ All it takes is a slight quiver of her perfect chin, a misty look from her stunning aqua-blue eyes, and the answer shifts to “Oh, all right.” The hint of feigned sadness disappears from Aphrodite’s angelic face.

 

Aphrodite’s exceptional beauty ensures she is doted upon by everyone she meets. It has been this way since she was a small child. Her divine beauty ensured she was spoiled and doted upon beginning with her first step.

 

Aphrodite always gets the best seat, the largest and sweetest candy bar, the most extravagant Christmas presents. She is vain, shallow, self-centered and mean. Beneath her perfect physical beauty bubbles a cauldron of resentments, selfishness and bitterness.  Yes, Aphrodite’s exterior beauty has made her ugly inside and that is why her blessing is her curse. 

 

People don’t like Aphrodite (she thinks it’s because they are jealous).  There is something sad about Aphrodite. She has the depth of crackers and her life is without meaning.

 

The problem is that physical beauty is a commodity of diminishing returns.  Beauty peaks at about twenty-two years then slowly begins to decline. In the end, it will be consumed like a moth. The day will come when men will no longer look at Aphrodite rather past her or through her to a new younger beauty walking behind her.  Aphrodite will be plain ‘Jane’ which was her real name all along.

 

Western society is obsessed with youth and physical beauty.  It is a poverty of the age in which we live. Youth fades, so does physical beauty. Yet so much attention and investment is dedicated to clinging to their memory long after youth and beauty have faded away.  Botox and collagen injections, tummy tucks, face lifts, volumizing vitamin fortified shampoos, conditioners and gallons of hair colour to hide the grey become increasingly desperate and sad.  Meanwhile, the true inner self – heart, spirit and soul – are starved of attention and important eternal development! The spiritual soul is the very thing Jane neglected as long as she was Aphrodite.  

 

A physical body will surely wither and die but the spiritual soul is immortal.  The Bible tells us that a human life is but a breath of time: “[Y]ou have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow. You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.” (James 4:14)  The Psalmist compared us to grass that flourishes  in the morning and in the evening is cut down and withers. (Psalm 90.5-6). 

 

The Church teaches that the human body is animated by its spiritual soul. The body and soul together form a profound unity and single nature made in “image of God.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 364-365). Though body and soul are separated at death they will be reunited at the Final Resurrection (CCC. 366).

 

We must have reverence and respect for our physical bodies. (Even a broken body like mine is a gift from God.) Sanctity of the body is the Scriptural concept. Having reverence for the body is different than worshipping it. 

 

Saint Paul said, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19).  He went on to exhort us to glorify God in our bodies. This happens when we follow Christ. Jane can glorify God in her body ― Aphrodite can not.

     

Did you know it is impossible to believe in Jesus Christ without sharing in his Spirit? It is the Holy Spirit who reveals who Jesus really is.[1] (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 152, 154, 683).  

 

Life in our physical body is series of ‘teachable moments”; the holy Spirit is the divine teacher. Aphrodite’s is not a student, her ego ensures that. But Jane can be a student of life, if she allows it. If Jane turns her spiritual ears to the leading of the holy Spirit then even adversity, trials, and sorrow become teachable moments. The divine teacher will become the divine Counselor and Comforter.

Jesus said “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor ^to be with you forever ― the Spirit of truth, ^which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14.16-18.)

The “Counselor” is the holy Spirit. He will reveal Jesus Christ as the great I Am, God made man, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of world. Unlike Aphrodite, Jane can be a child of God through believing upon Jesus as Messiah (John 1.12).  Through faith in Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross she can be reconciled to God. Life will become a rich source of “teachable moments” in preparation for eternity.

 

With the holy Spirit abiding within Jane, living a prayerful, repentant and sacramental life for Jesus, receiving his body in the Eucharist, Jane’s heart, spirit and soul can be nurtured to blossom into something beautiful and lasting. Outwardly she may age and diminish but inwardly she will be renewed and spiritually grow.

 

Goodbye Aphrodite, hello Jane.

 

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[1]1Corinthians 12.3.





ESSENTIAL CHRISTIAN GROWTH OF TAKING UP YOUR CROSS

 

My wife and I spoke to Edmonton’s Catholic Renewal Services group. They are affiliated with the Charismatic Renewal movement. They are on fire for the Lord. My wife and I loved them! 

 

We sang songs of praise to God, we prayed, had breakfast together, laughed and fellowshipped together. The presence of the Holy Spirit filled the room. 

 

When it came time for us to speak, LaRee and I shared our life story which included abortion, post-abortion grief, acquiring serious degenerative disability and the fears (sometimes downright terror) that comes with it. We spoke about a journey that began with sin and broken hearts, anger with life and God, then gradually moved toward acceptance, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. It was only then, with God’s tender leading, that we began to receive a renewed understanding about life, love (both human and divine), and something about what our Lord meant by taking up our cross daily (Luke 9.23). It was not an easy presentation because it required us to be vulnerable and brutally honest ― but we were among Christian friends. 

 

This is not unique to us. Everyone must take up a cross of one sort or another. Sometimes it is obvious to other people and sometimes it is not. But each of us is called to take up our cross and carry it. In his classic Christian book The Imitation of Christ, the fifteenth century priest Thomas à Kempis wrote about the universal calling of taking up one’s cross: “No man’s heart can experience what Christ endured in His passion except the man who suffered as he did. ... The cross is, therefore, always in readiness for you and everywhere awaits you. Wherever you choose to run you will not escape it because you always take yourself with you and you will always find yourself.” 

 

Taking up your cross will turn you toward your interior self. It is a critically important decision you must make every day. Taking up your cross involves the essential work of Christian growth. The daily struggle and suffering under the weight of your cross is where personal purification occurs. Bearing the cross requires you to chastise your will and body and bring them into subjection of God. It is not easy but it is necessary. Like I say, it requires work and suffering. Some people will refuse the cross ― but they can not escape it. As Thomas à Kempis reminds us, the cross is always before us and waiting because we cannot escape ourselves. 

 

The sick or disabled must face and accept their affliction. The lonely must face their loneliness; their cross may change it to sweet solitude.  The addict must face his addiction demons. Bearing the cross may be different for each person, but they must face it, and face it each day. In extreme cases, they must decide every hour to take up their cross. 

 

What’s your cross? Don’t be surprised that it requires suffering (emotional, spiritual or physical). Suffering can have a refining effect as with gold in fire. Saint Paul said in his letter to the Romans that he considered ^ “the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.” Later in 2 Corinthians he reflected, “^ For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,^ as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.”

 

For those who allow the cross to conform them to Christ crucified, they will find it is the way that leads to the Kingdom of God.  

 

A consolation of the cross you take up is that Christ will walk with us under its weight. Your individual cross – no matter how onerous or burdensome it may be – is never heavier that the cross  Christ endured. Remember that you are not alone. Christ is there just as He has been with Christians throughout history who took up their crosses. 

 

If we unite our lesser sufferings with Christ’s Passion , crucifixion and Resurrection, we will discover a strange yet wonderful internal transformation is beginning to occur that's drawng us closer to Christ and away from ourselves. 

 

 

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FEAR HAS BEEN A TERRIBLE MOTIVATION IN MY LIFE

https://youtube.com/shorts/8BryvILG1MQ?feature=share

EVERYONE IS AFRAID

 

I read about a young man paralyzed in a freak accident. The story gave a glimpse of his grief and sorrow. The terrible prospect of permanent disability is beginning to sink in and it's breaking his heart. He told the reporter, "It's really, really hard." And so it is. Life with catastrophic disability is a hard journey. I know, I've lived with degenerative multiple sclerosis for over 40 years. Unexpectedly, yet wonderfully God lifted my paralysis in 2018 and I stood and walked away from my electric wheelchair. The Holy Spirit told me not to forget how deep my sorrow, fears, and sense of isolation became in my grieving physical loss.

At the deepest point of grieving, life can seem like an endless series of disappointments, accommodations and compromises, lost opportunities, and inexpressible sorrow. One can feel totally alone, even in a crowded room. 

Such a loneliness

Disability is a lonesome journey. It's not that friends are unkind - just hard to find. Then there are those dreaded moments at the end of each evening and one must make his way to the terror of the bedroom. It's in there that the darkness awaits to engulf a grieving person in fitful sleep-wake torture. 

A chorus of despair, self-doubts and fear whisper, "You are alone. Nobody understands." 

It is there, in the middle of an endless night, lying wide-awake staring into darkness, that a bed can become a rack. The horrible truth of life's misfortune can seem too great to bear. A human soul lays open like a gaping wound. Whimpers break into sobs of raw, pulsating grief. 

Grievers beware! Emotions are unreliable, they are apt to intensify the feeling of isolation out of all proportion. Tears obscure vision and grief distorts perceptions of reality. 

There is no such thing as an endless night. It only seems that way. The longest night must eventually give way to dawn. It is only fear and grief that tell us otherwise. Even the pitch black of arctic winter days will, in due course, transform into a peculiar summer midnight sun. 

Many people with profound disabilities have risen above their predicaments and abyss of intense grief to incredible spiritual heights and human achievements-sometimes in spite of their disabilities and sometimes because of them. 

Transcending disability

Perhaps the most famous example is Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827). Most of his vast contribution to the world of music were written in either partial or complete deafness. 

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759) suffered from manic depression. His beloved Messiah was written at the end of a depressive bout. 

John Milton (1608-74) was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost (1667). Paradise Lost is generally considered to be the greatest epic in the English language. (Remember that John Milton also wrote Paradise Regained.) 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an "invalid and a recluse" to use the phrasing of one biographer. There was nothing invalid about her - her gift for lyric poetry is with us to this day. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was physically crippled from polio at the age of 39, yet as America's 32nd president he led an entire nation through most of the Great Depression and the Second World War. 

Grief, sorrow and fear are not unique to people with disabilities: they are common to the human experience. Everybody is acquainted with sorrow. Everyone is afraid. 

With the exception of babies and small children, everyone has fears from the past and fears of the future. 

Most people are afraid of serious self-examination lest they come face to face with inner demons, character flaws and emotional handicaps. They might be challenged to go through a difficult process of change. Some people fear being forgotten while others fear being remembered. 

We are afraid of committing ourselves wholly to love yet afraid of being unloved. Many people are afraid of committing themselves to lives with purpose - yet despise those who do. 

Some people are afraid of dying outside God's grace yet they are afraid to truly live within it. We may be afraid being seen as extreme yet afraid to venture outside mediocrity. 

But there is a question that has always been deep within you that must be asked. What is within you and I that can help us to transcend ourselves from fear to live a life of purpose and serve God?

Mark Davis Pickup

THEIR BABY WAS CONCEIVED IN LOVE, ... OR SO SHE THOUGHT

 

She laid in her bedroom stunned at what her boyfriend said. He had told her he loved her and now she was carrying their baby inside her. She didn’t understand his coldness. Their baby was conceived in love ... or so she thought. Although they were only eighteen, she wanted to get married and raise their child. He wanted her to have an abortion so he could party with his friends.  Alone, unsupported and emotionally abandoned by her boyfriend, condemned by his mother, and her grandmother pushing her toward the abortionist, she gave in and aborted their baby. Six months later they broke up and she moved back east. Little did they know that was not the end of their story—not by a long shot!

Mark Davis Pickup

(A scene depicted from my screenplay TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love. See the screenplay website here )

CHRISTMAS WITH AN EMPTY MANGER

Years ago, my town held a community church Christmas concert at the local catholic church. Outside in the chilly winter weather was a nativity scene. Inside was garland, ribbons, another nativity scene, poinsettia’s, candles and a general reverence for the Advent Season. I specifically remember a young woman from the Pentecostal church singing a beautiful rendition of “O Holy Night.” 

 O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining 

 It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth 

Then we were in for a real treat! A hefty woman from the apostate United Church of Canada (UCC) came sliding across the front of the church, snapping her finger to the beat of the music, and delivered an off-key version of “Rockin’ around The Christmas Tree.” 

Rockin' around the Christmas tree 

At the Christmas party hop 

Mistletoe hung where you can see, Every couple tries to stop. 

When Rotunda finished, she took a bow and scampered away whispered to herself, “Nailed it!” The over-crowded church sat in stunned silence at the spectacle they just witnessed. What was that? A comedy routine? I whispered to my wife, “United Church theology.” 

SAD LEGACY

There was a time when the United Church of Canada was the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. But beginning in the heady 1960s, they decided to try and be relevant and hip, abandoning the uncompromising Gospel of Jesus Christ for liberal trendy tolerant worldviews. They became tolerant to the point of tolerating sin, then accepting it, then celebrating it. The pews emptied. 

Now the UCC is just a sad relic; they are little more than a secular organization—like a social club cloaked in religious vestments. Ironically, they sought to be relevant and became irrelevant. 

The fact is that people do not need soft soap and the tasteless gruel of a liberal social gospel devoid of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He is God made man, fully human yet fully divine, the only Messiah and Redeemer of the human race. When individuals surrender their lives to God’s will, repent of their sins through faith in Jesus Christ and cleansed by His blood shed at Calvary, they find unspeakable peace, joy and purpose.  

DOESN'T FIT THE NARRATIVE

But this doesn’t fit with liberal woke narratives dating back to the 1960s. The United Church of Canada (and other liberal denomination) abandoned crucial tenets of Christianity such as the biblical creation account, the miracles, the Virgin birth, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (except in some metaphorical sense) and the inerrancy of scripture as our final authority in all matters of faith and conduct. 

Their clergy have even denied our Lord’s unequivocal words: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14.6). This is so offensive to the United Church of Canada (and many other liberal Protestant churches)! It offends  because of the exclusivity of Christ’s claim. In the Book of Acts, Saint Peter says the same thing about Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:11-12.) 

Jesus is the only way to God, not a way. This is untenable to liberals—there must be many ways to heaven. Christ and the Apostle were not inclusive according to post-modern liberal sensibilities and that is utterly unacceptable. 

Now they come to Christmas. How do liberal churches, like the United Church of Canada, face the truth that the timeless One entered time when they have denied Him, His power over life and death and the foundations of Christianity?  Over the past 70 years they have chosen comfort over the Truth. Their manger is empty.

Pray the blinders be removed from those who have compromised the Christian faith or abandoned it completely and come back to Christ and His holiness and seek to become more like Him. 

MDP

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair.” — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

CANADA'S WAR ON CHRISTIANS

 

I am old enough to remember a previous Christian moral consensus that governed western culture for hundreds of years. It was the foundation of the family and the community.  It was a time when most people knew the 10 commandments. They may not have followed them, but they knew they should have. That has all been swept away. We are entering the cruel rock-hard edge of a New Dark Age.

That former Christian ethos can still be reclaimed and restored against its enemies, whether it be in the halls of power, on the streets of our nation, or standing against unbiblical leaders in our churches seduced by the spirit of the age.

My country of Canada is anti-Christian. What are Christ’s followers to do? Remain faithful to Him and the holy Scriptures, even in the face of withering opposition. Ultimately, there is no neutral ground between truth and falsehood, right or wrong, good and evil. Christ IS the Truth (John 14.6). Remember, He warned His followers, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15.18.) The servant is not greater than the Master (John 13.16).

The Truth of Jesus Christ and the previous Christian moral ethos is being actively and intentionally swept away from the public square and public discourse. Civil society is not civil when it comes to Christians. The common good is not common. Christians are decried and despised in politics and the media.

Canada has replaced the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob with a brutal liberal God of nihilism, perversion and corruption. A grotesque and secular new entity has emerged that pays to kill unborn children, the sick, the disabled, denies natural sexual order, natural law and burns down Christian churches.

Christians of various denominations must come together to stop this new and deviant version of Canada that has emerged. It is no time to be docile or timid! Stand up for all that sacred and good, beautiful and true. What is source of goodness, beauty and truth? Jesus Christ!

Mark