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To: Mad Dawg; mlizzy; Kolokotronis

One of the points that Kolokotronis has made to me before is that there is an element of emotional attachment involved with ‘Mariology’ that A) I obviously do not relate to, and B) makes it counterproductive to discuss.

I need to learn to avoid the temptation...for what I write is generally received right up there with “Your Mama wears combat boots!” and kills any productive discussion. It isn’t intended that way, but its like a happy mother showing you a picture of her baby, and you replying, “Looks like a little red faced dwarf!” True or not, you don’t advance anything.

Maybe someday I will learn...

;>(


28 posted on 12/12/2009 8:09:15 PM PST by Mr Rogers (I loathe the ground he slithers on!)
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To: Mr Rogers
Maybe someday I will learn...

Maybe someday Mary will appear to you in a dream ... (to quote a famous line from Angels in the Outfield, "It could happen.")
29 posted on 12/13/2009 3:25:23 AM PST by mlizzy ("Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person" --Mother Teresa.)
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To: Mr Rogers
Looks like a little red-faced dwarf!

Gotta love it! NOT how to make friends and influence people.

I think that you are pointing out the other side of the alleged "good" that I am trying to describe. The "personal" relationship that we think we experience with the saints, and with Mary in particular, requires of us feelthy papists a certain emotional self-discipline if we're going to discuss the whole Mary and Saints thing with people who think it wrong or at least questionable.

And, if it ain't true, it does follow that it's a pretty remarkable sort of self-induced psychopathology. And that's sort of unsettling. The nice thing about being a convert is that I had to work through all that from the outside in. Yeah, it COULD be a sort of projective technique, substituting icons for ink-blots, but after a while I decided to dare to hope that it wasn't, that the "one body", "communion of the" saints stuff was worth believing in, with all the bells and whistles.

Lame analogy: I gave someone I am "sponsoring" into full communion two encyclicals by J2P2. I handed them to him at the "Enquirers Class" (Hereinafter RCIA, Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) last week, explaining that I didn't have the time even to do what I called "Guy gift wrapping" - namely: leaving them in the paper bag they came in.

People in general, guys in particular, like to cut to the chase, the bottom line, the final score. When we think about Christian stuff, we think that way. "Okay, 'Jesus is Lord, He loves me, He has saved me;' how could I possibly need to know anything else?" Guy gift wrap is quite enough, since what really matters is the present.

So try giving your wife something in guy gift wrap. Call me when you get out of the hospital.

The wrapping, the frills, all that is, to some of us (mostly of the female persuasion,) a sign that every single aspect of the present, was filled with thoughts of not only supplying your need but delighting you, filled with love and wanting you to know that you are loved.

(Of course, a lot of this is just proof the women are aliens.)

Well, I might suggest, that's all, just a suggestion, that maybe "need" is not exactly the right way to look at it. The thrill of the Song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" is that all the guy asked for, all he NEEDED, was ONE yellow ribbon, and his beloved's response was to festoon the place with hundreds of them. One would have been quite sufficient, and had one been all that he got, he would have been a fool to ask for more.

So, sorta kinda in the same vein, the gift, the sufficient gift, the all we need gift, is being grafted into the Body. But God makes it spectacular, with little fillips, and curls and flounces and braids and sparkles and rainbows and fireworks world without end!

One of my wise-guy lines (rapidly becoming obsolete) is "Being Catholic is just like being Christian, only in Technicolor!"

Again, this is meant to be a kind of description. It's not intended to be polemical or persuasive.

33 posted on 12/13/2009 8:44:38 AM PST by Mad Dawg (Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.)
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