"She Went by Gently"

1)                  This shows in the midwife’s treatment of the girl in how the midwife didn’t have to help her and many people thought that she shouldn’t. The pregnant girl did nothing for her and got pregnant outside of marriage. According to the midwife’s husband, the girl did deserve the help that she gave and the effort she went through to get to the girl. When the midwife gets there, the girl doesn’t even treat her nicely. The girl talks back and looks down on herself. The midwife not only helped her with the child but also was very kind and forgiving to the girl.

2)      When she says that she saved him, she means that she saved him from Hell. An unbaptized person is not a part of God’s family or Church and therefore cannot go to heaven. She baptizes the baby in its brief moment of life so that it could join God’s family before it completely died. She saved the child from death just as Jesus saved us. She did not save his life but she saved his soul and that was what mattered to her the most. She was happy with what she had done and did not feel sorrow for the baby.

3)      From the rest of the story we get the thought that this woman is a very nice, Christian person. The author tells about her going home as a way to show the reader just how devout this midwife is. She thinks about how God blesses the world with light and beauty with the new dawn. She talks about her husband which gives a further example of her deep love of others despite who they are. The author was trying to convey just how special, kind, and loving this one woman is and how that has allowed her to change the lives of the people around her.

Holy Ghost Gifts

1)                  The gift from the Holy Spirit that I feel is most at work in my life is Counsel. Throughout the day everybody faces many choices and you need counsel to make the right decision. If I didn’t make some right decisions I wouldn’t be as far in life as I am now. I need counsel everyday if I’m going to be a good person and Christian and live as I should. The second gift that I use the most is Understanding. When dealing with a lot of people on a daily basis you really need understanding. Understanding allows me to bring my knowledge of the scriptures my knowledge of others into my life. It affects how I deal with certain people or problems. The third gift that I use the most is Fear of the Lord. Everyone needs this gift throughout their life as it keeps them from continuingly committing sin. It keeps me and others from committing those small sins that there aren’t any laws against. All of these gifts work together in a way. You can use each one to handle a person or situation in the right way and live a good life. These gifts and the others have always been a part of my life and have kept me knowing where the right path is.

2)      The gift that I need most in life right now is Fortitude. There are many things going one in my life right now and I need strength to get through them. This time in life is a time of temptations and struggles and no one can get through them alone. Seghers says that fortitude is the power to be patient, brave, and gives us the determination to persevere. With all the things that life throws at me, I need all three now. Nothing is more important at this point than to have the will to keep going. Many might give up and sometimes it feels like you need the power of God himself to keep going and that’s why I need fortitude. I have always used the other gifts throughout my life and they have all had their times but this is the time when I need fortitude. Certain moments may appear where I need more understanding than usual but fortitude is the overall gift that I need these days. I will continue to use the others and will always need them so that I can be the person that I want to be but I need fortitude so that I can continue to use these other gifts within my life. 

"Are Sacraments Narrow?"

1)      Ludwig’s problem is that he believes that the sacraments are not necessary for God to bestow grace upon someone.

2)      When the Church is thinking about “sacramentality” it is not thinking that the sacraments deny God’s universal love and will the save everyone and does not think that unbaptized people are necessarily denied salvation.

3)      When the Church is thinking about “sacramentality” it is thinking about how salvation is a relationship with God and relationships require both people to participate and work with each other.

4)      God reveals and gives his grace through His creations. He works through them.

5)      The Christian doctrine, the incarnation, is the foundation for the Sacraments.

6)      Gobs of modern “spirituality” tell us that God would never bother Himself with the crudeness of matter since he doesn’t dwell in the physical world.

7)      The Christian repudiation is that God likes matter a lot since he declared it “good” when He created it, manifested Himself through it, and took on a physical body.

8)      No. God became man so that he could bodily rise from the dead and give us a second life as human beings and not disembodied beings. It brought us to the freedom of being children of God.

9)      This means that the sacraments impart grace as the physical extensions of Jesus just as Jesus’s actual hands heal when he was man.

10)   G.K. Chesterton said that the sacraments don’t limit God’s grace but only focuses it.

11)  Grace allows God to come down from heaven and touch us.  

Sacraments

A Divine Sense of Humor:

You can’t understand the sacraments without it. You have it if you can “see through” things or look beyond a thing’s basic meaning or appearance. Jesus brought this to us and the only thing he took seriously was the soul because it was the only thing he didn’t teach through parables. Jesus revealed that the universe was sacramental. A sacrament combines the visible and the invisible. Handshakes and kisses are a kind of sacrament. Men live in a world that is too serious with no divine sense of humor. Without it the world lacks beauty in its structures and there is no meaning behind anything. Courtesies, amenities, urbanities, and gentility are also gone. Life is a vertical dimension expressed in the soaring spire. Two errors can hinder our understanding of the natural world: taking out God or blending God in with His creations. Sin turns the poetry of the world to prose.

The Bible is a Sacramental:

It is a sacramental because it has a foreground and a background. The foreground is the natural and the background is the supernatural like God’s presence. One example of this relationship is when God used a brazen serpent to heal everyone that was bit by one. God used that as a symbol of trust or faith in Him. Jesus, like the serpent, “would be lifted up on the crotch of a tree, a Cross.” He would heal the poison of our sins and the poison of the serpent, Satan. The word “sacrament” in Greek means “mystery” and Jesus has been called “the mystery hidden from the ages.” He is both Man and God. Because of Jesus’ union with divinity he was able to our savior. Jesus was the sensible sign of God and the sacraments are the sensible signs of grace. Man works best when he can see the material as the revealer of the spiritual. It’s not the thing that matters but what it represents. Man both has a spiritual destiny and a physical body.

What the Sacraments Bring to Man:

The sacraments bring divine life or grace. Jesus came to bring the divine life back to man. This life is called grace because it is “gratis or a free gift of God.” Those who don’t go obtain the divine life ignore the beauty if it. Men live at three levels: the sensate, the intellectual, and the divine. The sensate are only interested in the material world and the pleasures in life. The intellectual are men that “brought to a peak all of the powers of human reason and human will.” The divine are illuminated by truths that you can prove, strengthened by something beyond the physical, and entranced with love that never fails. The Church shows Jesus’ divine life just as it was when he walked the earth Jesus had two types of contact with humanity: visible and invisible, touching and from a distance. The second foreshadowed how Christ now has contact with us from heaven through the sacraments.

Seven Conditions of Life:

The physical life requires seven conditions, five refer to the individual, and the other two as a member of society. You must be born, nourish yourself, mature, have his wounds healed, diseases must be driven out, must live under government and justice in human relationships, and must propagate the human species. There are also seven conditions for living a Christ-life. You must be baptized, participate in the Eucharist, grow spiritual maturity, heal the wounds of sin, participate in the Anointing of the Sick, participate in Holy Orders, and get married. Every sacrament has a visible sign. Three things are required: instituted by Jesus, be an outward sign, and bring grace.

The Power and the Efficacy of the Sacraments:

They derive this from the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Life is in blood and sin so blood needs to be shed to erase sin. Blood is also the best symbol of sacrifice because it is the life of a man. The blood of Jesus has infinite value since he is divine. Jesus’ blood sanctifies our mind, will, and conscience.

The Application to the Sacraments:

Calvary is like a reservoir of divine life or grace and releases the sacraments because they are in contact with Jesus. The blood of Christ has different results when applied at different times in life.

The divine sense of humor is seeing through all of the things that God is in like Jesus.