Thanx for everything you do ED, HAPPY EASTER!

KittyLowrey on April 10, 2009 at 9:48 PM

OK, thanks for the input. I’ll give it a shot.

Christos a inviat! (Christ is risen in Romanian)

bandarlog on April 11, 2009 at 2:55 AM

Nabuhay si JesuCristo! –in Tagalog (my wife is Filipino)

Thanks for the good wishes Ed and I hope you, AP, Michelle and all air heads have a great and loving weekend.

Thank you Jesus for your love and sacrifice/accomplishment.

The one time it didn’t was the scene where Satan held an oddly aged baby, which symbolized, I suppose, the world to come.

I would agree with Anti-Madonna imagery here but the baby is certainly meant to be the Anti-Christ. Just as Jesus exhisted prior to being born to Mary, David does say “My Lord said to My Lord”, so too does the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ literally comes into being at the time Jesus becomes Christ. So yes, it is a glimpse of the world to come.

It is good to remember our Lord’s suffering this day.

But Happy Easter to all.

I pray that preachers explain how one isn’t saved merely by repeating some canned prayer an evangelist told them to say, but rather by making Jesus the lord of one’s life, to hate the things God hates, to love the things God loves, to continually examine themselves to see evidence of God’s sanctification in their lives.

Send_Me on April 10, 2009 at 8:34 PM

Allow me to share from the writings of a mystic I discovered a couple years ago:

It is a pity that the beautiful Christian metaphor “salvation” has come to be so hackneyed and therefore so despised. It has been turned into a vapid synonym for “piety” — not even a truly ethical concept. “Salvation” is something far beyond ethical propriety. The word connotes a deep respect for the fundamental metaphysical reality of man.

…

We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world”. And we must be saved above all from the abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual.

The free son of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises.

To be “lost” is to be left to the arbitrariness and pretenses of the contingent ego, the smoke-self that must inevitably vanish. To be “saved” is to return to one’s inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God.

…

Every movement of my own natural appetite, even though my nature is good in itself, tends in one way or another to keep alive in me the illusion that is opposed to God’s reality living in me. Even though my natural acts are good they have a tendency, when they are only natural, to concentrate my faculties on the man that I am not, the one I cannot be, the false self in me, the character that God does not know. This is because I am born in selfishness. I am born self-centered. And this is original sin.

Even when I try to please God, I tend to please my own ambition, His enemy. There can be imperfection even the the ardent love of great perfection, even in the desire of virtue, of sanctity. Even the desire of contemplation can be impure, when we forget that true contemplation means the complete destruction of all selfishness — the most pure poverty and cleanness of heart.

-Thomas Merton

I wish they’d show something like Passion or Jesus Christ Superstar on TV over Easter — as much as I love me some Ten Commandments. To think of Christ’s torment in the garden, His willful choice (“may this cup pass from me – but Your will be done, not mine”), His torture at the hands of the Romans, and of course His ultimate resurrection, THAT’S the true story. When I was in high school I belonged to a youth group that would perform a Passion Play at various parishes every Lent. To this day, I’ve never felt closer to Our Lord then during those shows.

Happy Easter! May the blessings of the Risen Christ be with you!

Never seen it. Doesn’t it degrade the Lord, make him out to be a clown or something?

jgapinoy on April 10, 2009 at 8:18 PM

It may not be your cup of tea so I don’t know if you’d like it but I find it wonderfully moving and inspirational. It really hews in most places to the Gospels but in 70′s rock lyrics. I love it. It does NOT degrade our Lord.

It opens with Judas decrying Jesus not overthrowing the Romans:

Too Much Heaven on Their Minds

later Simon Zealotes implores Jesus to do that:

Simon Zealotes

Those are my two favorites, I’m going to go listen to the whole thing.

Peace. :)

Undoubtedly, though, the language in the film adds to the artistry of Passion

At least they don’t give everyone British accents.

Send_Me on April 10, 2009 at 8:34 PM

I like you.

ctmom on April 10, 2009 at 8:36 PM

OK, maybe I heard that about Godspell or something else. Sorry.

jgapinoy on April 10, 2009 at 8:18 PM

Oh my no! It is wonderful! Ted Neely is awesome! The perfect Jesus!

Depends on whether you’re God or not.
baldilocks on April 10, 2009 at 5:26 PM

Please explain.

I’ll probably watch “Jesus Christ Superstar” too.

Never seen it. Doesn’t it degrade the Lord, make him out to be a clown or something?

Ubetcha.

Let’s hope we pick off one or two of them for the good guys during the rest of this year.

Is the friend AP?

Seriously, I hope he comes back to the Faith. We need you to work on him.

Friends don’t let friends drift off into LGFism without a fight.

Everybody have a great Easter too.

Remember Pascal’s wager too while you’re at it.

Jesus of Nazareth is by far the most seen film in the world. Missionaries take generators and projectors to the remotest parts of the planet, set up a sheet as a screen, and show the film to the natives. It is their single most powerful evangelical tool.

John the Libertarian on April 10, 2009 at 4:44 PM

That’s my father threading the reel, with the sheet tied to the wings of his Cessna 180 parked on a hand cut runway in the jungle of Oaxaca. Great memories.

Happy Easter!

-