A Jubilee Year Meditation: The Holy Door of Your Life

This is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life!

As I contemplated my impending trip to Rome, where I will pass through the Holy Door in Saint Peter’s Basilica, opened specifically for the Jubilee Year, I realized that right now in my life, I am walking through another door.  A door of change, in several ways.  A door of newness that takes courage and discipline.  A door of challenge.  I know I am not alone.  Perhaps all Catholics this year, are called to do the same thing, whether or not they can get to Rome or another place with a Holy Door (apparently, all cathedrals have one).  It’s not the door that really matters, it’s what it symbolizes.  It’s the change it encourages in one’s life.  Holy Church invites us to cross a great threshold of holiness in this year of graces, at a time when it is most needed.

Of course, the spiritual is of greater importance than the temporal.  However, it is often mundane matters that require the analysis and discipline which leads to spiritual growth.  So we might wish to ask these types of questions:

What is my door?

What are my goals?  What must I change in my life?  How hard am I willing to work?  (Maybe it won’t require working harder, but smarter.)  What needs to shift?  What must I let go of?  What’s working in my life?  What isn’t?  What obstacles need to be removed?  What structures need to be built? 

“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.”

Frances Willard

3 years ago, late at night, I slipped in the doorway between my kitchen and the hallway and received a bad concussion.  It was life-changing, not only because of the physical and mental effects (some of which I still suffer from), but because of how it challenged me and was part of a spiritual transformation in my life.  Every night I walk through that same doorway on my way to bed and remember that rite of passage.  That doorway hurt me but it also mysteriously helped me. 

“And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.”

Romans 8:28

Life has many doors…reminds me of Mary Hopkin’s beautifully haunting song, “Water, Paper and Clay.”  Water representing Baptism, paper representing the wedding day and clay, burial…universal, speaking to the deepest parts of us.  Each of these doors creates instant change.  But the kind of change we must initiate through force of the will and maintain, is difficult.  The Holy Door concept gives us the encouragement and motivation we need.  We can all traverse our own Holy Doors, whether they are actual ecclesiastical doors, or something more personal.  Holy Church during this privileged Jubilee Year beckons us all to a renaissance of the soul…a resurrection in some way resembling Our Lord’s, bringing us closer to Heaven.

Meditation on the Resurrection

From EWTN Vatican, with brief commentary and stunning photos…

Pilgrims From All Over The World Pass Through Holy Door Of St. Peter’s Basilica

From Pilgrimaps, a respectful article on the Holy Doors, including history, symbolism, and the universality of such passages across cultures (sorry about the flashing thing on this website, but it’s worth reading)…

The Holy Door:  The Meaning of Crossing the Threshold

“I am the Door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures.”

John 10:9

Thought for the Day

We are now immersed in an omni-front attack vector world. This is war. Just getting through the day is now a military-grade evasion operation. If you don’t understand this, you have not been paying attention and you need to get up to speed really fast.

And if you don’t believe the world is that dark, just take a look at Our Blessed Lord upon the cross once again.

Thought for the Day

“If you’re not in control, something else is. And that’s dangerous.”

Lisa Kyle

Trad Youth in Rebellion?

“The Tridentine Mass will return because youth is always in rebellion.”

Laurence Lesser

No, Mr. Lesser was not famous. He was a family friend of my parents, who we always called Uncle Larry. I became close to him later in his life and would visit him in a nursing home upstate, NY. We would correspond, and in one of his letters (early 90’s, only several years after Pope John Paul II liberalized the old Mass and I started attending it), he wrote the above quote, which I have never forgotten. I found him a rare encouragement in the Faith and particularly in my interest in the Tridentine Mass. The very last time I visited him, he said he had lost his Rosary beads in the nursing home. I had a pair of white plastic ones in my car and ran out to get them. It was a very short visit, as we were pressed for time. I remember placing them in his hand and then saying “Goodbye.” What a beautiful memory and I feel so blessed to have been able to do that for him in his final days.

As we see young people flocking to the “Mass of the Ages,” looking for something with true meaning, it would seem Uncle Larry was a prophet. They are indeed rebelling against a culture of narcissism and nihilism. They want happy, faithful marriages. They want children. Quite frankly, they want a normal life. I personally know many of these young people. I’ve seen them grow and blossom as they practice a truly devout Catholic life. I’ve seen them lovingly holding their children in their arms. I am always captivated by the babies at Mass, knowing it is to them, that I have a responsibility-that is why I do this work. I have only to look at these holy innocents and it is enough of a motivation.

As modernists see their “utopic” vision vanishing before their very eyes, they are unleashing their final attack. They can’t quite handle the cognitive dissonance that the great “Age of Aquarius” they were mind-controlled into slavishly working toward…is dead and dying. They just can’t face up to the fact that their whole lives were a mistake…and that they fell for a lie. Modernism bore no fruit-it had no roots. The plant itself is withering. Who knew that those who despised tradition would one day cling with draconian rigidity to their own traditions? The future belongs to those of the counter-rebellion.

“Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them.”

Matthew 7:20

That doesn’t mean we are in for a cakewalk. But it does mean there is hope and certainty, in fact…that what was purchased with the Blood of Christ will prevail, because it must.

Please keep dear Larry and his family in prayer-much thanks. Please know we do take prayer requests and will post them if you like.

Thought for the Day / Yeats' Famous Poem

“The Democratic Party — like the EU’s warmonger parties — has nothing left but violence against anything that looks like nationalism and traditional values.”

James Howard Kunstler

From recent article “The Widening Gyre”

Literate and consummate writer James Howard Kunstler evokes William Butler Yeats great poem “The Second Coming” in his most recent article about the emerging chaos of geopolitics. Here’s the poem…

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Surely some revelation is at hand

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight, somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds

The darkness drops again, but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming

Thoughts for the Day

“This is the first day of the rest of your life!”

I love this quote. You can change everything whenever you want. It’s very inspiring. And it goes hand in hand with this one…

“I can do all these things in Him who strengtheneth me.”

Philippians 4:13

And there’s this one, which is sort of related…

“What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.”

…Hey, ever wonder why the same people who always talk about diversity love to criticize the Tridentine Mass? This betrays their hypocrisy and true agenda. Let us pray for our traditional Catholic brethren in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, as they are undergoing an horrendous persecution right now. Let us pray for His Holiness Pope Leo XIV to eradicate “Traditionis Custodes” (what an ironic title for this Motu Proprio, please don’t get me started).

Thought for the Day

Integrity must be extremely strong when one is alone with oneself, when one is alone with one’s own thoughts and being. Because out there, all the winds and slippery streets, will tend to cause us to lose our footing.

Thought for the Day

The Devil at his worst, is at his most self-defeating.

Thought for the Day

“A phenomenon takes on meaning out of expectation.”

Michael Wann

Great Ayn Rand Quote

“[Man] is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival. To a living consciousness, every is implies an ought. Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.”

Ayn Rand