today's lesson begins with the letter "C"

CORREGGIO
Allegory of Virtue
about 1532-34
Oil on canvas, 149 x 88 cm
Musee du Louvre, Paris

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CAPITAL SINS: Sins which engender other sins and vices. They are traditionally numbered as seven: pride, covetousness, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, and sloth (1866). also known as The Seven Deadly Sins

must all of my disordered *things* be crucified at once?

i'm just wonderin'.

if God is showing me places where i need to change and i decide, quite willfully, not to do so, then i am in a state of sin and must show immediate repentence. how often, say, should one repent when eating a meal? after every bite? after every sip?

how about when my thoughts tend to go astray? what then? i'd be repenting all day (oh, don't act like you are surprised or even immune from same...)

i feel like over the last two days i have had a window opened to my core and it is one that needs more than a little windex.

CARDINAL VIRTUES: Four pivotal human virtues (from the Latin carbo, "pivot"): prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The human virtues are stable dispositions of the intellect and will that govern our acts, order our passions, and guide our conduct in accordance with reason and faith (1805, 1834). See Virtue. (again, taken from Our Catholic Faith, link above)

virtuous. who would not want to be that?

i want to be a woman of virtue, a woman of integrity, honesty. when i engage in my various *favorite* sins, i find that i am not being virutous which is what i truly desire. i truly desire to live for God and my family and not for my SELF. isn't that what sin truly is? when we are focused entirely on our selves, our desires, our needs, our wants, that is what our focus is - inward, instead of outward - is it by coincidence that in the middle of the word sin is an I?

i cannot tell you how many times i have at least thought in my head over my innermost transgression, when i am told NO in my Spirit even though i know it is a NO before i even get to the place where my desires are out of control (which doesn't take very long, quite frankly), where my response has been: God, this is so not fair, this sucks, this hurts so bad, why God? why me? i don't understand this.

it simply hurts.

another thought from my anonymous pastor friend:

God working through pain

One of the primary ways that God works is to put us in a situation where we are forced resort to all of our wrong understandings, defense mechanisms, and escapists sins in order to deal with the difficult situation. The problem is that God has custom designed a trial for us that crushes all of our wrong understanding, renders our defense mechanisms defenseless, and even overindulging in our favorite escape sins will not make the pain go away.

The result? Incredible pain.

All of our wrong understanding, defense mechanisms, and escapist sins are ways of avoiding pain. It is not until the pain threshold of our self-deception exceeds the pain we are trying to avoid that we are forced to come to the realization that these things that seemed to help us avoid pain are actually self-destructive behaviors that keep us in a state of deception and denial and distance and even harm others relationally.

Pain custom designed by God is a primary means God uses to change our hearts. (emphasis added)

i guess back to our original topic, the letter "C" -- when you Crucify your flesh, it does hurt. the only way to get to the other side of the pain is to go through it, regardless of how we *feel* about it.

the pain will eventually subside, won't it? i am thinking it is only when we choose to accept our pain, accept our situation and walk through it to the other side will we actually do something God wants us to do:

Change.