.
My wife and I never had a daughter. Our daughter Rachel died in utero of a cord accident about a week before her due date.
God gave me a daughter in another way -- when the Vietnamese family moved next to us years ago, I think in 2004, their 4 year old daughter, little Nhu, introduced herself to me, and in short order we were "as thick as thieves." I loved that kid! I still do. I regarded her as a daughter. She sometimes jokingly called me "Dad." She was such joy in my life, and I still thank God for having known that little one.
One day, I was driving her past my house to her own, when little Nhu said, "Mr. Peter! Look! There's a turtle walking away from the tree on your lawn! For Vietnamese, that's bad luck, Mr. Peter!"
We jumped out of the car and ran to the turtle, and picked it up to keep it from going into the street and being squished by a car, and put it in my wife's garden.
I took Nhu to her house. She went back to her bedroom to change, while I stayed in the living room, tinkering with her family's piano.
Suddenly I heard an urgent knock at the door. My son Josh saw that I was calm, and said, "Dad, didn't you hear the thump?"
I said, "No, Josh. What are you talking about?"
He said, "The giant oak tree on the front lawn just collapsed and slammed into the front of the house!"
From her bedroom Nhu, who had been listening, yelled, "There's your bad luck, Mr. Peter!"
It was bad luck, all right -- about $16,000.00 in damage.
Nhu's parents roared with laughter, when they heard about the turtle followed by the bad luck.
.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Things to Not Talk About on a Date
.
I have read two roach-in-the-soda-bottle cases. In one case, the soda company's defense attorney held a dead roach in the air above his mouth in front of the jury, smiled, and popped it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed and smiled.
In the other case, the roach was alive when the lawyer did it!
I think that if I saw such a demonstration, I would award $1,000,000.00 to the "victim"!!
Remember those blurbs here and there in the media along the lines of, "The average person eats 13.2 spiders in his life, in his sleep"?
Well, it's at least somewhat true. Once last year, in the middle of the night, I awakened with start, choking and gagging. I jumped out of bed, ran into the bathroom, so that I did not wake my wife with the choking and gagging sounds, inhaled carefully over the sink, and coughed as hard as I could.
A little projectile fired out of my mouth into the sink. I carefully flushed it with water, and there it was -- a very traumatized spider.
.
I have read two roach-in-the-soda-bottle cases. In one case, the soda company's defense attorney held a dead roach in the air above his mouth in front of the jury, smiled, and popped it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed and smiled.
In the other case, the roach was alive when the lawyer did it!
I think that if I saw such a demonstration, I would award $1,000,000.00 to the "victim"!!
Remember those blurbs here and there in the media along the lines of, "The average person eats 13.2 spiders in his life, in his sleep"?
Well, it's at least somewhat true. Once last year, in the middle of the night, I awakened with start, choking and gagging. I jumped out of bed, ran into the bathroom, so that I did not wake my wife with the choking and gagging sounds, inhaled carefully over the sink, and coughed as hard as I could.
A little projectile fired out of my mouth into the sink. I carefully flushed it with water, and there it was -- a very traumatized spider.
.
A Simple Rule to Follow
.
Everyone, especially teenagers, follow this rule in life: Make the people around you smile. It really is that simple. When you die, and it is judgment time, God will ask, "Peter, what did you do to make the world I placed you in a better place?" In effect, He will be asking, "How did you leave them smiling, Pete?"
(1) Sense of humor. This is really the hardest thing you will ever do.
(2) Work.
(3) Be positive (but not to the point of lying!).
(4) Surprise the world around you, with forgiveness.
(5) Let people see you honoring God.
.
Everyone, especially teenagers, follow this rule in life: Make the people around you smile. It really is that simple. When you die, and it is judgment time, God will ask, "Peter, what did you do to make the world I placed you in a better place?" In effect, He will be asking, "How did you leave them smiling, Pete?"
(1) Sense of humor. This is really the hardest thing you will ever do.
(2) Work.
(3) Be positive (but not to the point of lying!).
(4) Surprise the world around you, with forgiveness.
(5) Let people see you honoring God.
.
Fighting MRSA -- Again
.
A few people have asked me to re-publish my MRSA advice. Here it is...
Please pardon the extremely personal details, here. The disease MRSA unfortunately gets into our most personal nooks and crannies. To fight it successfully, we have to "get personal." Sorry.
About 8 years ago, my wife worked in a privately-owned parolee supervision facility in Camden, New Jersey. She shook hands with a parolee fresh out of Camden County Jail, she scratched an itch on her hand, and within 48 hours she had a MRSA infection.
We did not understand MRSA well, then. The disease quickly spread to our 3 sons, probably via sweat left behind on the toilet seat.
About a year later, I finally got the disease, and I got it big time. It just about killed me.
We have learned a lot. Here is what we learned.
The disease has one great goal -- to eat the iron molecule in your hemoglobin. Its processes, in doing so, dissolve flesh. So, MRSA boils tend to bleed like crazy when they pop -- like giant bullet wounds. If one pops, try to get it to pop in the bathtub. You will understand why when it happens. There will be blood everywhere.
Doctors tell you, "Don't try to pop them!" They are afraid that if you squeeze, they will break on the underside -- into your flesh. This causes a very fast moving, extremely dangerous infection called "cellulitis." If you don't stop it, you will die. (Once I came with about 24 hours of dying. A neighbor of ours -- who did not get it from me -- did die.)
MRSA kills. The variety I had had a 15% death rate -- 1 out of 6 people. Years ago, a client died after I caught it and I sent her a letter without realizing how dangerous it was and how easily it spread. I always wondered, Did I cause that, though the mail?
When, after I, myself, nearly died of cellulitis, I sat down with an infectious disease specialist. He explained that my skin was probably infected with huge invisible patches of MRSA bacteria which were 90% washed off every day I took a shower, but which rejuvenated themselves during the day every day so that by night I had fully reconstituted patches of MRSA all over my body, ready to infect me through a break in the skin, or to similarly infect others. He recommended that I shower 2 to 3 times a day, every day for a year. He prescribed pHisohex as a shower soap.
At first I showered thrice daily with pHisohex, but I started getting sick, and I realized that I was poisoning myself with the pHisohex. 3 times a day is too much. So, I switched to the cheapest soap on the shelf -- Ivory. Every day, three times a day, I soaped myself head-to-toe with Ivory -- scalp, hair, skin. The "dark places" were critical -- armpits, crotch, scrotum and anal area. Complete soaping and rinsing was absolutely necessary.
It worked. After I became "the world's cleanest human being," I clearly became non-communicable.
Except in two ways: Sex and potty.
At one point the MRSA entered and attacked a testicle. The doctor said, "IMPOSSIBLE! THE pH IS WRONG!!!" But then he saw my swollen testicle, fell quiet, and asked me if I would agree to castration, to save my life!!!!!!!!!!
It was at that point, in my raw desperation to save my masculinity, that I discovered, on my own, the most effective treatment of MRSA -- POWER WALKING.
At that time, I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. So, I forced myself to walk at a forced march rate -- 4 mph -- 9 miles a day, 6 in the early morning, 3 at night, with hard breathing, to work on the depression.
Immediately -- and I mean "immediately," within 24 hours -- the terrifying MRSA infection in the one testicle began to clear up. I thought to myself, "That's too fast a result for the walking to be strengthening my immune system." My theory is that MRSA invades my corpuscles through the same oxygen receptor point on my hemoglobin that oxygen uses in the lungs, in effect lodging a kind of "molecular fat man" in the doorway to the kitchen, literally starving the MRSA to death.
MRSA's average life span is 20 minutes. In a random colony there's going to be substantial front-end and back-end generational overlap. So, to effectively attack the MRSA, the power walking probably has to be a full hour at a bite, at least, to cover "grandparents," "parents" and "kids."
My family doctor, DO Leonard Kabel ("Mr. Castration") was amazed at the results of just walking every day for a week. After 7 days, my giant inflamed testicle had shrunk to below normal size. (Damage. The testicle has taken about 5 years to go back up to normal size.)
Word spread. A pediatrician called me and asked what I had done. He almost cried as he told me about infants in his practice that had died. I told him about the showers and forced march walking, and suggested hyperbaric oxygen for invalids and babies.
So, I had two weapons now -- Ivory soap showers, and a forced-march walk to super-oxygenate the blood. (My fingertips turned bright red after each walk, due to the super-oxygenation.)
Problem solved? No. I could tell, from break-outs after sex, even when sex immediately followed a very, very thorough shower, that I carried MRSA (despite the bad pH) somewhere in my reproductive tract -- probably in the undoubtedly-internally-severely-scarred testicle.
We thought that condoms might help. (My wife is no longer ovulating. So, no life-interest was invaded by condom use, while I protected what Catholic theology calls the "unitive interest.") But, surprisingly, condoms made little difference! I thought, "What??????!!!!"And then I realized that the MRSA bacteria were in my sexual sweat.
I also read that MRSA tends to be enteric -- in the feces in the bowels. What a perfect hiding place!, I thought.
But then I had an idea: Tums. Those disgusting little MRSAs could take testicular pH, and urinary tract pH -- but could they take a cloudburst of Tums?
So, secretly, I decided to risk calcium poisoning.
I bought a large bottle of Tums (I weighed 222 pounds) and, on a Friday (so that I could afford to get very, very sick) I ate 1 Tum every half hour, from sun-up to bedtime. (About 6 a.m. to midnight -- over 30 Tums!!!) I ate plenty of well-masticated food and drank plenty of water mixed with psyllium fiber -- Metamucil -- all day, to drag the Tums into every dark corner of my bowels. (The psyllium fiber kept the calcium from giving me terminal constipation.)
And I got very, very, very sick that night -- the mother of all bellyaches. I was in agony for hours, bent-over double in g-i tract pain.
I recovered by morning, and forced myself to do a power walk, to top it off with a good heavy load of O2. Gradually, we dispensed with the condoms. I even got Rise's permission to dispense with showers before sex, as an experiment. Nothing. So far, so good -- until last week. Pop. One popped-up on my thigh.
But then I saw that one son had an outbreak on his neck. Did I get reinfected by him, or did he get reinfected from me?I don't know. The jury is still out.
Are your boils MRSA? Test: MRSA has a distinctive smell -- a very sweet smell in your armpits and in the crevices to the left and right of your crotch. If it smells wonderful there, in those places, while you are suffering from really nasty boils, in my opinion you've got MRSA.
Another test: Sit in the bathtub, with water pretty hot (and a quarter of a cup of bleach in the bath water). The hot water immediately drives the MRSA out of your skin into the form of little teeny whiteheads. These are incipient MRSA boils. If your bathwater is hot, and if it has the one quarter cup of bleach in it, take a raspy sponge, and dipped it in bleach, and very gently rubbed the whiteheads open. Gently. Gently. (Otherwise, you'll just reinject yourself.) Rinse the sponge like crazy in the bleachy water after each opening.
In any event, 3 Ivory Soap showers a day, being careful to get those dark places.
And walk, walk, walk, walk, like a crazy person, for an hour at a stretch.
With those weapons, you can control it -- if you're lucky, until your immune system finally overwhelms it.
It occurred to me that if your skin can't take the beating of 3 soapy showers per day, there's always the cancer-causing tanning booth.
I'll risk cancer to fight flesh-eating MRSA any day of the week.
No matter what, I've described a personal odyssey, here, some of it pretty darn foolish.
If you have MRSA, print this piece and take it to your doctor, and ask him what his opinion is, before you do anything. Please. That Tums thing was really dangerous!
.
A few people have asked me to re-publish my MRSA advice. Here it is...
Please pardon the extremely personal details, here. The disease MRSA unfortunately gets into our most personal nooks and crannies. To fight it successfully, we have to "get personal." Sorry.
About 8 years ago, my wife worked in a privately-owned parolee supervision facility in Camden, New Jersey. She shook hands with a parolee fresh out of Camden County Jail, she scratched an itch on her hand, and within 48 hours she had a MRSA infection.
We did not understand MRSA well, then. The disease quickly spread to our 3 sons, probably via sweat left behind on the toilet seat.
About a year later, I finally got the disease, and I got it big time. It just about killed me.
We have learned a lot. Here is what we learned.
The disease has one great goal -- to eat the iron molecule in your hemoglobin. Its processes, in doing so, dissolve flesh. So, MRSA boils tend to bleed like crazy when they pop -- like giant bullet wounds. If one pops, try to get it to pop in the bathtub. You will understand why when it happens. There will be blood everywhere.
Doctors tell you, "Don't try to pop them!" They are afraid that if you squeeze, they will break on the underside -- into your flesh. This causes a very fast moving, extremely dangerous infection called "cellulitis." If you don't stop it, you will die. (Once I came with about 24 hours of dying. A neighbor of ours -- who did not get it from me -- did die.)
MRSA kills. The variety I had had a 15% death rate -- 1 out of 6 people. Years ago, a client died after I caught it and I sent her a letter without realizing how dangerous it was and how easily it spread. I always wondered, Did I cause that, though the mail?
When, after I, myself, nearly died of cellulitis, I sat down with an infectious disease specialist. He explained that my skin was probably infected with huge invisible patches of MRSA bacteria which were 90% washed off every day I took a shower, but which rejuvenated themselves during the day every day so that by night I had fully reconstituted patches of MRSA all over my body, ready to infect me through a break in the skin, or to similarly infect others. He recommended that I shower 2 to 3 times a day, every day for a year. He prescribed pHisohex as a shower soap.
At first I showered thrice daily with pHisohex, but I started getting sick, and I realized that I was poisoning myself with the pHisohex. 3 times a day is too much. So, I switched to the cheapest soap on the shelf -- Ivory. Every day, three times a day, I soaped myself head-to-toe with Ivory -- scalp, hair, skin. The "dark places" were critical -- armpits, crotch, scrotum and anal area. Complete soaping and rinsing was absolutely necessary.
It worked. After I became "the world's cleanest human being," I clearly became non-communicable.
Except in two ways: Sex and potty.
At one point the MRSA entered and attacked a testicle. The doctor said, "IMPOSSIBLE! THE pH IS WRONG!!!" But then he saw my swollen testicle, fell quiet, and asked me if I would agree to castration, to save my life!!!!!!!!!!
It was at that point, in my raw desperation to save my masculinity, that I discovered, on my own, the most effective treatment of MRSA -- POWER WALKING.
At that time, I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. So, I forced myself to walk at a forced march rate -- 4 mph -- 9 miles a day, 6 in the early morning, 3 at night, with hard breathing, to work on the depression.
Immediately -- and I mean "immediately," within 24 hours -- the terrifying MRSA infection in the one testicle began to clear up. I thought to myself, "That's too fast a result for the walking to be strengthening my immune system." My theory is that MRSA invades my corpuscles through the same oxygen receptor point on my hemoglobin that oxygen uses in the lungs, in effect lodging a kind of "molecular fat man" in the doorway to the kitchen, literally starving the MRSA to death.
MRSA's average life span is 20 minutes. In a random colony there's going to be substantial front-end and back-end generational overlap. So, to effectively attack the MRSA, the power walking probably has to be a full hour at a bite, at least, to cover "grandparents," "parents" and "kids."
My family doctor, DO Leonard Kabel ("Mr. Castration") was amazed at the results of just walking every day for a week. After 7 days, my giant inflamed testicle had shrunk to below normal size. (Damage. The testicle has taken about 5 years to go back up to normal size.)
Word spread. A pediatrician called me and asked what I had done. He almost cried as he told me about infants in his practice that had died. I told him about the showers and forced march walking, and suggested hyperbaric oxygen for invalids and babies.
So, I had two weapons now -- Ivory soap showers, and a forced-march walk to super-oxygenate the blood. (My fingertips turned bright red after each walk, due to the super-oxygenation.)
Problem solved? No. I could tell, from break-outs after sex, even when sex immediately followed a very, very thorough shower, that I carried MRSA (despite the bad pH) somewhere in my reproductive tract -- probably in the undoubtedly-internally-severely-scarred testicle.
We thought that condoms might help. (My wife is no longer ovulating. So, no life-interest was invaded by condom use, while I protected what Catholic theology calls the "unitive interest.") But, surprisingly, condoms made little difference! I thought, "What??????!!!!"And then I realized that the MRSA bacteria were in my sexual sweat.
I also read that MRSA tends to be enteric -- in the feces in the bowels. What a perfect hiding place!, I thought.
But then I had an idea: Tums. Those disgusting little MRSAs could take testicular pH, and urinary tract pH -- but could they take a cloudburst of Tums?
So, secretly, I decided to risk calcium poisoning.
I bought a large bottle of Tums (I weighed 222 pounds) and, on a Friday (so that I could afford to get very, very sick) I ate 1 Tum every half hour, from sun-up to bedtime. (About 6 a.m. to midnight -- over 30 Tums!!!) I ate plenty of well-masticated food and drank plenty of water mixed with psyllium fiber -- Metamucil -- all day, to drag the Tums into every dark corner of my bowels. (The psyllium fiber kept the calcium from giving me terminal constipation.)
And I got very, very, very sick that night -- the mother of all bellyaches. I was in agony for hours, bent-over double in g-i tract pain.
I recovered by morning, and forced myself to do a power walk, to top it off with a good heavy load of O2. Gradually, we dispensed with the condoms. I even got Rise's permission to dispense with showers before sex, as an experiment. Nothing. So far, so good -- until last week. Pop. One popped-up on my thigh.
But then I saw that one son had an outbreak on his neck. Did I get reinfected by him, or did he get reinfected from me?I don't know. The jury is still out.
Are your boils MRSA? Test: MRSA has a distinctive smell -- a very sweet smell in your armpits and in the crevices to the left and right of your crotch. If it smells wonderful there, in those places, while you are suffering from really nasty boils, in my opinion you've got MRSA.
Another test: Sit in the bathtub, with water pretty hot (and a quarter of a cup of bleach in the bath water). The hot water immediately drives the MRSA out of your skin into the form of little teeny whiteheads. These are incipient MRSA boils. If your bathwater is hot, and if it has the one quarter cup of bleach in it, take a raspy sponge, and dipped it in bleach, and very gently rubbed the whiteheads open. Gently. Gently. (Otherwise, you'll just reinject yourself.) Rinse the sponge like crazy in the bleachy water after each opening.
In any event, 3 Ivory Soap showers a day, being careful to get those dark places.
And walk, walk, walk, walk, like a crazy person, for an hour at a stretch.
With those weapons, you can control it -- if you're lucky, until your immune system finally overwhelms it.
It occurred to me that if your skin can't take the beating of 3 soapy showers per day, there's always the cancer-causing tanning booth.
I'll risk cancer to fight flesh-eating MRSA any day of the week.
No matter what, I've described a personal odyssey, here, some of it pretty darn foolish.
If you have MRSA, print this piece and take it to your doctor, and ask him what his opinion is, before you do anything. Please. That Tums thing was really dangerous!
.
The 1188 Battle of the Cutting of the Elm
Supposedly the following is a true story. I turned this into a bedtime story for my sons when they were young.
In the Middle Ages, it became customary for the Kings of England and France to try to avert war by meeting and negotiating under an 800 year old elm tree in the middle of a large field near Gisor, France. The elm was enormous, and provided the only shade in the vicinity.
In the year 1188, the English under Henry II and the French under Philippe II made arrangements to negotiate under the tree. It was a terribly hot day. The small English army arrived first and gathered under the tree in the shade, following a kind of "first come, first served" rule. The French army arrived shortly afterwards, and waited in the sun, while the leaders negotiated.
The hours dragged on. As the sun rose higher and higer in the sky, the the French army sweltered, while the English enjoyed the cool breeze under the elm. The French soldiers grew impatient and demanded their turn out of the sun, in the cool shade under the boughs of the tree. The English army refused to budge.The negotiations were going nowhere fast.
Finally, a cocky Welshman in the English army responded to the anger of the sizzling French in a singularly unwise fashion. He loaded an arrow onto his bow, fired it over the heads of his English friends, and, THUNK, it pierced the chest of a French soldier.
That was too much, of course. The two armies exploded. The French began to yell, "Cut down the tree! Cut down the tree!," and they began to hack their way through the English army with swords and axes, to gain access to the tree trunk.
The English soldiers began to strip off their armor and wrapped it around the tree's trunk, to protect it.
The angry, disgusted French soldiers succeeded in getting to the trunk, and they began to chop away, while the English fought to save the tree. Suddenly, the trunk groaned loudly, and the tree fell.
The two armies, exhausted, and thoroughly disgusted, packed-up and went home.
In the Middle Ages, it became customary for the Kings of England and France to try to avert war by meeting and negotiating under an 800 year old elm tree in the middle of a large field near Gisor, France. The elm was enormous, and provided the only shade in the vicinity.
In the year 1188, the English under Henry II and the French under Philippe II made arrangements to negotiate under the tree. It was a terribly hot day. The small English army arrived first and gathered under the tree in the shade, following a kind of "first come, first served" rule. The French army arrived shortly afterwards, and waited in the sun, while the leaders negotiated.
The hours dragged on. As the sun rose higher and higer in the sky, the the French army sweltered, while the English enjoyed the cool breeze under the elm. The French soldiers grew impatient and demanded their turn out of the sun, in the cool shade under the boughs of the tree. The English army refused to budge.The negotiations were going nowhere fast.
Finally, a cocky Welshman in the English army responded to the anger of the sizzling French in a singularly unwise fashion. He loaded an arrow onto his bow, fired it over the heads of his English friends, and, THUNK, it pierced the chest of a French soldier.
That was too much, of course. The two armies exploded. The French began to yell, "Cut down the tree! Cut down the tree!," and they began to hack their way through the English army with swords and axes, to gain access to the tree trunk.
The English soldiers began to strip off their armor and wrapped it around the tree's trunk, to protect it.
The angry, disgusted French soldiers succeeded in getting to the trunk, and they began to chop away, while the English fought to save the tree. Suddenly, the trunk groaned loudly, and the tree fell.
The two armies, exhausted, and thoroughly disgusted, packed-up and went home.
Second Reading for Mass, May 9, 2010
Reading 2
Rev 21:10-14, 22-23
This is an unusually clear reading from the Book of Revelation. For a few reasons which we will get to, it is clear that the selection is a portrait of the afterlife.
The angel took me in spirit to a great, high mountain
The hills of Jerusalem are not "great, high mountains." They are small, relative to their geographical context."Mountains," on the other hand, are the Bible type, or symbol, for "God's dwelling place."
and showed me the holy city Jerusalem
coming down out of heaven from God.
So, this Jerusalem is one from God!
It gleamed with the splendor of God.
Its radiance was like that of a precious stone,
like jasper, clear as crystal.
"Stone" = the Rock type which is the type, or symbol, of "the Church."
It had a massive, high wall,
with twelve gates where twelve angels were stationed
and on which names were inscribed,
the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites.
"Twelve" is the number type, or number symbol, meaning, "all of the tribes of God's people."
There were three gates facing east,
three north, three south, and three west.
"Three" is the number type, or number symbol, meaning, "the will of God." "Gate" or "door" is the type of symbol referring to "Christ." "East" means "Christianity." "North," like "mountain," means "God's dwelling place." "South" means "the ungodly." I believe that "west" is the type, r "sybol," for "sin." So, it looks like the intent of this portion of the picture is to tell us, "God's will" ("three") "is that the Christians" ("east"), "the Godly" (north"), the sinners" ("west") "and the ungodly" ("south") should enter Heaven by Christ" (gates").
The wall of the city had twelve courses of stones as its foundation,
on which were inscribed the twelve names
of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
"The wall" = "the Church," I am sure.
I saw no temple in the city
for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb.
"Temple" is also the type, or symbol, for "the Church." No church is needed in Heaven.
The city had no need of sun or moon to shine on it,
for the glory of God gave it light,and its lamp was the Lamb.
"Sun" = "a testing presence of God." "Moon" = "the lesser light which rules the night" -- Lucifer. No "testing presence of God," no Lucifer, will be in Heaven, either.
Rev 21:10-14, 22-23
This is an unusually clear reading from the Book of Revelation. For a few reasons which we will get to, it is clear that the selection is a portrait of the afterlife.
The angel took me in spirit to a great, high mountain
The hills of Jerusalem are not "great, high mountains." They are small, relative to their geographical context."Mountains," on the other hand, are the Bible type, or symbol, for "God's dwelling place."
and showed me the holy city Jerusalem
coming down out of heaven from God.
So, this Jerusalem is one from God!
It gleamed with the splendor of God.
Its radiance was like that of a precious stone,
like jasper, clear as crystal.
"Stone" = the Rock type which is the type, or symbol, of "the Church."
It had a massive, high wall,
with twelve gates where twelve angels were stationed
and on which names were inscribed,
the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites.
"Twelve" is the number type, or number symbol, meaning, "all of the tribes of God's people."
There were three gates facing east,
three north, three south, and three west.
"Three" is the number type, or number symbol, meaning, "the will of God." "Gate" or "door" is the type of symbol referring to "Christ." "East" means "Christianity." "North," like "mountain," means "God's dwelling place." "South" means "the ungodly." I believe that "west" is the type, r "sybol," for "sin." So, it looks like the intent of this portion of the picture is to tell us, "God's will" ("three") "is that the Christians" ("east"), "the Godly" (north"), the sinners" ("west") "and the ungodly" ("south") should enter Heaven by Christ" (gates").
The wall of the city had twelve courses of stones as its foundation,
on which were inscribed the twelve names
of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
"The wall" = "the Church," I am sure.
I saw no temple in the city
for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb.
"Temple" is also the type, or symbol, for "the Church." No church is needed in Heaven.
The city had no need of sun or moon to shine on it,
for the glory of God gave it light,and its lamp was the Lamb.
"Sun" = "a testing presence of God." "Moon" = "the lesser light which rules the night" -- Lucifer. No "testing presence of God," no Lucifer, will be in Heaven, either.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Psalm for Mass on May 9, 2010
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8
R. (4) O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May God have pity on us and bless us;
may he let his face shine upon us.
So may your way be known upon earth;
among all nations, your salvation.
One of the really wonderful things about God is that if you go to Him and ask for help, He will not ignore you. He always answers -- maybe not in the way you want, but rather in the way you need. The last two lines funtionally assures us that His help covers not only "salvation," but also our "way on Earth."
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May the nations be glad and exult
because you rule the peoples in equity;
the nations on the earth you guide.
Americans have to remember that God does not follow the biggest guns. Napoleon said that -- and look what happened to him.
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May the peoples praise you, O God;
may all the peoples praise you!
May God bless us,
and may all the ends of the earth fear him!
Fearing God" does not mean "fearing" God. It means respecting God enormously, in thought and deed.
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:R. Alleluia.
Ps 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8
R. (4) O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May God have pity on us and bless us;
may he let his face shine upon us.
So may your way be known upon earth;
among all nations, your salvation.
One of the really wonderful things about God is that if you go to Him and ask for help, He will not ignore you. He always answers -- maybe not in the way you want, but rather in the way you need. The last two lines funtionally assures us that His help covers not only "salvation," but also our "way on Earth."
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May the nations be glad and exult
because you rule the peoples in equity;
the nations on the earth you guide.
Americans have to remember that God does not follow the biggest guns. Napoleon said that -- and look what happened to him.
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:
R. Alleluia.
May the peoples praise you, O God;
may all the peoples praise you!
May God bless us,
and may all the ends of the earth fear him!
Fearing God" does not mean "fearing" God. It means respecting God enormously, in thought and deed.
R. O God, let all the nations praise you!
or:R. Alleluia.
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