Green Shakes

We have been into "green shakes" or "green smoothies" depending on your preferred terminology. Lauren recently picked up what she had believed to be a recipe book from the library over the weekend. Turns out it was a chronicle of some woman that fell in love with green shakes. She provides insights, recipes, health benefits, etc.

The following are a few of the shakes we have had this week:

Monday:
spinach
lemon
cilantro
banana
apple
strawberry
ground flax seeds
water
silken tofu


Tuesday:
spinach
parsley
basil
banana
strawberries
frozen cherries
ground flax seeds
soy milk
silken tofu


Wednesday:
romaine lettuce
fresh mint
cucumber
lime
banana
honey
ground flax seeds
silken tofu


Our blender is doing a surprising job of liquifying all of the ingredients. The author of the book, and her name escapes me right name, burned through blender after blender. Apparently the greens eventually work down the motor. Or the blades get dull and it can no longer handle the greens. She uses a Vitamix. They cost $440. So I don't know about that.

But, so far so good.

Holy

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.

Love is my true identity.  Selflessness is my true self.  Love is my true character. Love is my name.

If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or joy.  

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.  And to enter into His sanctuary I must become holy as He is holy, perfect as He is perfect.

How can I even dare to entertain such a thought?  Is it not madness?  It is certainly madness if I think I know what the holiness and perfection of God really are in themselves and if I think that there is some way in which I can apply myself to imitating them.  I must begin, then, by realizing that the holiness of God is something that is to me, and to all me, utterly mysterious, inscrutable behond the highest notion of any kind of perfection, beyond any relevant human statement whatever.  

If I am to be "holy" I must therefore be something that I do not understand, something mysterious and hidden, something apparently self-contradictory; for God, in Christ, "emptied himself."  He became a man, and dwelt among sinners.  He was considered a sinner.  He was put to death as a blasphemer, as one who at least implicitly denied God as one who revolted against the holiness of God.  Indeed, the great question in the trial of and condemnation of Christ was precisely the denial of God and the denial of His holiness.  So God Himself was put to death on the cross because He did not measure up to man's conception of His Holiness...   He was not holy enough, He was not holy in the righ way, He was not hoy in the way they had been led to expect.  Therefore, he was not God at all.  And, indeed, He was abandoned and forsaken even by Himself.  It was as if the Father had denied the Son, as if the Divine Power and mercy had utterly failed.

In dying on the Cross, Christ manifested the holiness of God in apparent contradiction with itself.  But in reality this manifestation was the complete denial and rejection of all human ideas of holiness and perfection.  The wisdom of God bacame folly to men, His power manifested itself as wekness, and His holiness was, in their eyes, unholy.  But Scripture says that "what is great in the eyes of men is an abomination in the sight of God," and again, "my thoughts are not your thoughts," says God to men.  

If, then we want to seek some way of being holy, we must first of all renounce our own way and our own wisdom.  We must "empty ourselves" as He did.  We must "deny ourselves" and in some sense make ourselves "nothing" in order that we may llive not so much in ourselves as in Him.  We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there.  We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment.  This is holiness.

None of this can be achieved by any effort of my own, by any striving of my own, by any competition with other men.  It means leaving all the ways that men can follow or understand.

I who am without love cannot become love unless Love identifies me with Himself.  But if He send His own Love, Himself, to act and love in me and in all that I do, then I shall be transformed, I shall discover who I am and shall possess my true identity by losing myself in Him.

And that is what is call sanctity.

~ Thomas Merton

New Seeds

It is 9:42pm Pacific Standard Time on a Friday night.  Currently, I am drinking a white russian and watching the big lebowski.  Lauren is asleep next to me on the couch.  I am full, tired and satisfied. I had three bowls of a delicious seitan chili that Lauren made for dinner.  

I have been making good money lately.  Overtime has been available to me.  I have been working approximately 45 hours per week at Yahoo!  And the hours have been trickling in to me from my union research job.  They even gave me a raise recently.

I do not, necessarily, turn in hours to the union job any more.  I perform some research for them, create excel sheets, reports or whatever is needed and receive a check twice a month.  They send me a check for a certain number of hours.  On average, I have been making out well in this arrangement.  They had been paying me $14.00 per hour.  Last paycheck I received I was making $17.00/hr.  That is a 20% raise.  And they did not even tell me.

Lauren and I currently have over $13,000 saved for a house.  We are currently weighing our options.  We are tempted to buy this year.  If we buy before December 1, 2009 we will receive $8,000.00 back in tax credits.

We were planning on waiting until at least next year.  But it is hard to pass up an offer of $8,000.00.  We think we can have up to $25,000.00 saved by September if we continue our current pace of saving.  

And housing prices are low right now.  We are looking at house in the $175,000 - $185,000 range.  $25,000 is not quite 20% but it is close.  With a little savings and the $8,000 tax credit we would be able to pay down on a mortgage so that we owned 20% of the house.

We were hoping to have 20% down on a house before we bought.  We prefer not to buy private mortgage insurance.  But with aggressive savings and the tax credit we should only have to pay pmi for a few months.  It is a tough call.

Buying anything for $175,000 kind of makes me dizzy.  And I will probably throw up before it is all over.  More to come on that later.

Lauren and I have been attending a catholic church.  It is something that I have been thinking about since I read thomas merton's 'seven storey mountain' several months ago.  The book is merton's autobiography written after a recent conversion to catolicism.

He spends alot of time berating the protestant churches that he was raised in and comparing them to the fullness and richness that he found in the catholic church.  At times, his analysic can be harsh.  He wrote it immediately after a long, drawn out and profound conversion.  He would later back down from a hard lined approach.  In fact, he even became well known for inter-dialogue between christians and buddhists.  However, he remained a monk and true to the catholic faith until he died.

I remember in one section, and I know that I am butchering this, but he was talking about how personalities dominate the protestant churches.  He was remember all the various churches that he attended as a youth.  In each one the driving force, and the only thing he could vividly remember was either the pastor or some other charismatic leader.

He immediately juxtaposes this with his experience in the catholic church.  It is the liturgy that he remember.  It is the eucharist.  It is god.

The book planted a seed.  A few months later I started listening to some catholic radio on the way to and from work.  Then I started listening to it at work.  I was, and have been, listening for catholic radio for up to three hours per day.  I started reading online resources on the faith.  I read articles from catholic apologists and theologians.  I read scott hahn's 'reasons to believe'.  I am currently in the middle of another of merton's works 'new seeds of contemplation'.

As I started listening and read and learning what the catholic church had to offer I started to be converted.  I started to go back.  

We started going to catholic mass about a month ago.  It was hard to leave imago dei.  We were in the middle of a theology class.  And we were in the midst of deciding if we wanted to become much more deeply involved and join the church.  However, when it came down to it, the things that we really liked about the church, and there were many of them, did not have to do with god or theology.  We liked pastor rick.  We liked the music.  We liked being around like minded people our age.  So on and so forth.

It is hard to pinpoint an exact reason as to why I felt drawn in to the catholic church.  These things are often hard to explain.  The catholic church contained all that I was looking for when I originally started going to church.  They actually had all that I had been looking for for years.  And I never knew.

I remember years ago, my attraction to buddhism.  I was drawn to the serenity and peace of meditation.  However, I was never able to stick with it.  I lacked direction.   It was always something that I felt imago dei lacked.  But here was a church, right under my nose, that had a tradition of meditations that dated back almost 2,000 years.

I also became very interested in biblical history.  The more I learned, the more that I began to believe that the catholic view and teaching is the one that falls inline with the historical record of the church.

The protestant dogma of "sola scriptura" did not sit right with me.  The more that I learned about christianity and the history of the early church, the less sense that it made.

As I learned more I was able to dispell or cast aside many of the traditional rumors that go on about the catholic faith among christian circles.  The catholic church does not teach that the pope is perfect or a prophet.  Nor do they worship idols.  Mary and the saints are not worshipped in the least.  All glory is given to god.  True, they do believe in transubstantion.  In fact, it is the core of their faith.  

The masss itself is also much more centered and biblicaly based than anything else that I have experienced.  This does include the eucharist.  But it also includes the three bible readings (that are carefully select to relate), the beautiful liturgy, the prayers and more.

I am working on learning all of the finer points of the faith.  We went out last week and picked up a copy of the catechism of  the catholic church.  I hope to have it read by the end of the year.

We have been in talks with father bob about getting back in full communion with the church.  This would include, amont other things, convalidation of our marriage and going to confession.

As part of our study Lauren and I have been folllowing a bible study program for lent.  For each of the 40 days we have several bible readings.  We are also keeping a daily journal on the readings.

In addition I have been working on a prayer book.  I have written down everything that you need to know for the rosary.  I wrote a whole page on each of the five sections of all for of the mysteries.  I have also written down all of the prayers that are said at the beginning, the middle and end of the prayer.  I have also taken out a rather large book from the library on prayer.  I am writing down as many as I can before I return it.

Lauren and I have a most exciting weekend planned.  Tomorrow we are thinking about going for a walk in the tree arboretum.  We have to stop by a bookstore and pickup a catholic bible.  We are also looking to go to a local coop to pick up some local honey for our shakes.  I also plan on spending some time tomorrow relaxing.  I have been working overtime the past few saturday.  It will feel good to sleep in.

On sunday we have church.  After that we are going to farmers market.  We just found out about a small neighborhood one that runs year round.  This will tide us over until the big one starts at the end of the month.  I have also been trying to go for a good bike ride every weekend; overtime or not.

Finally, we got a new cat.  He is black.  He has big cheeks.  His name is Thomas.  Lauren wanted a new kitty so bad.  I obliged.  He stole our hearts at the shelter with his little "meep" meows and head rubbing. Getting him and Alice to get along has been a struggle.  But we have made significant progress.   

It is now 10:41pm Pacific Standard Time.  I have been meandering between reading and watching my movie.  My drink is about gone.  And it is far past my bedtime.  I am going to wake lauren up.  I am going to bed.