"She Went By Gently" Questions

1.     The Women’s treatment of the girl and having the ability to love others just like God loves us was shown through her taking care of the girl while they were hiking through the mountains. The mother cooked for her when she needed to be fed. After dinner, she gave her a bath gently and with care by using warm olive oil and rubbing it on her body in a rhythmic way. Another special moment for Maura (mother) was when Sadie crept into her arms and told her that she had never had a mother. This moment, I think Maura realizes that she is truly a mother to Sadie in the sense that she has been caring but most of all, nurturing.

2.     I think what she means when she says, “I saved him” was that after all of the hardships they went through during their trip, he ended up changing and turning around into a giving and loving person. God wants us to be this way. In the beginning of the story, he did not really help a lot with Sadie and support his mother. I think the turn around of this was after the mother gave Sadie a bath and they crying started, he was enlightened. Frank taking the initiative to baptize Sadie was a big moment. It enabled her to stop crying but proved to be successful. This moment really shows how Frank changed and wanting to purify the little girl and give her new life.

3.     The purpose of this story is to show that people who are not necessarily loving and caring all the time can become enlightened and experience the love of God and spread it to other people. God was looking down and smiling at the women for everything she had done. She embodies who Christ is and what he wants us to do as Christians. The conveying of the women throughout the story was to show of course her love and being a mother role to the little girl. She also was influential for the son because in the middle of the story he suddenly decides to baptize Sadie. He representing her and taking on the responsibility of being a spiritual educator to her. I think it just symbolizes how much of an influence someone can have on you and that spreading the love of Christ to other people is powerful.

Confirmation Essays

1.           The gifts of the Holy Spirit enable us to live our Christian lives to the fullest and the way God wants us to live them. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Fear of the Lord. All of these gifts are working endlessly in my life day in and day out. Honestly, senior year has been tough. Balancing college applications and schoolwork has been a challenge. My time management skills have been tested but my faith in the Lord has certainly been at work and uplifting. Fortitude, Counsel and Knowledge are keeping on a straight path of obedience and doing the right thing, whether at school or during the weekends.

  I see Piety mostly through my work in Girl Scouts. Helping others allows me to do his work with love and content, in knowing God is smiling down on me because all of the work that I have done to help other people in need. In society, its hard not to want to conform into something or someone that your not. Wisdom is at work in my life to help me understand that the certain actions or decisions that I make should be through Christ and not through what other people say and do. Celebrities and friends can be influential in a negative or positive way. There are times when I feel ungrateful for what I have or the way I look because that person looks better or has something that I want. Wisdom is showing me to be happy and accept the life I have because things could be a lot worse.

2.           Fortitude is one of the gifts that I need the most in my life right now. Specifically under the Fruits of the Spirits, Patience and Faithfulness relate to Fortitude. Senior year has been stressful and intense. So many things to do in a short amount of time and I am starting to realize that time is moving. With college applications and personal struggles that I am facing during this quarter, my strength to rely on God one hundred percent and not ninety percent is hard. I feel as if so many things that have turned negative are just not going to help me in my life. Change can be difficult for me, so I tend to fear a lot because I do not know what to do or I cannot control what is happening. But prayer allows me to comfortable during those times.

When I fear, I know my faith is lessened because God tells us not to be fearful. It’s weird that my faith in God working in my life is everything but ten percent. It childish and contradicting that ten of one hundred percent of my trust is lost because I’m worried about what’s going to happen; yet I truly believe in God and love him for everything he has done for me. I guess its because when a situation goes wrong in the moment I break down and fail to realize that God is going to work in my life. It’s going to take practice and most importantly patience to have one hundred percent instead of ninety percent and let go knowing that God is never going to fail and disappoint. However, through these times that I struggle, I need fortitude extensively, knowing that I have to depend on God’s strength one hundred percent in such that he is going to help me no matter what I am up against.

Sacrament Story Questions (Distance Learning 3)

1.     What is Ludwig’s Problem?: Ludwig’s problem is that he does not understand what it means when people say grace is imparted through the sacraments. He thinks of Grace as just something that is literal and simple, not deep and complex.

2.     Explain what the Church is not thinking about when it comes to “sacramentality”: The Church does not propose sacraments to deny God’s universal love and will to save. It does not hold that un-baptized people of good will are necessarily denied salvation simply because they missed out on the “magic spell” of baptism.

3.     Explain what the Church is thinking about when it comes to “sacramentality”: The Church has repeatedly spoken with great force to stemly condemn any doctrine which would limit the scope of God’s redemption to anything less than every last soul God has created.

4.     “How does God reveal and give each individual human being his universally offered grace?” God reveals and gives each individual human being his grace through the Church’s sacraments, which are extensions of his power and work in the world.

5.     Which Christian doctrine is the foundation for the Sacraments?: The foundation for the Christian doctrine is the Incarnate Son of God.

6.     Explain what the gobs of modern spirituality tell us: For such spirituality often speaks as though God is a sort of extended, to be spiritual is to be more or less disembodied, to dwell in the realm of intuitions and concepts and secret mindset, it is a sign of regression to barbarism that the Christian God should employ physical means like blood sacrifice to communicate his life and power to us.

7.     Explain the Christian repudiation of “such spiritual snobbery”: God likes matter—a lot. He declared it “good” at the beginning of creation, but he continued to manifest himself through it right up until the times that he took upon himself a real, live physical body of matter and united himself.

8.     “But that was so that he could put this gross body of flesh to death on the Cross and revert back to pure spirituality, wasn’t it? Explain and answer: No, it was for him to rise from the dead boldly. And thus boldly resurrection has vast implications. It means not only that we shall live again, but that we will do so as human beings not as disembodied spooks floating.

9.     Explain: “That is why the sacramental worldview sees more than just a symbol in a sacrament.”: It means that Christ causes creation, by his grace not merely to display, but to participate In his work of redemption as a kiss incarnates love.

10.  Explain what G.K. Chesterton said: The difference between the sacramental Real Presence in the Eucharist and the universal grace of God is the difference between saying “The spirit of Jehovah pervades the universe” and saying “Jesus Christ just walked into the room” Sacramentality derives, not from the odd nature of Christianity itself with its stubborn insistence that the world was saved when God, who had always been omnipotent and universal, became small and “local” so that he could touch us and call us by name.

11.  What does Grace do?: Grace allows us to come face to face with God so that we can experience him and all he has to offer.

Sacrament Summaries (Distance Learning 2)

Sacraments Introduction:

·      Being able to look past something for more than what it is means that you have a “divine sense of humor.”

·      Just looking at something for what it is on the surface is not having a “divine sense of humor.”

·      Our Lord has a divine sense of humor because he revealed to us everything he created as something we should worship on Earth.

·      A sacrament can either be visible or not visible; a kiss or a word is a sacrament because a kiss is something physical u do and a word requires for you to hear. Both of them are known to have a spiritual connection.

·      Now a days we (humans) take the little things for granted and are always serious about everything so we choose to not look to deep into things.

·      When a man looses his spirituality, his respect is gone and the relationship with the Divine Image is not with him.

·      Being on Earth creates a sense of mystery is knowing that we want to seek heaven to be with the Eternal.

·      However, 2 problems can arise from this: One is to not have a connection with God and the other is to feel confused as to if God is really there with you.

·      Atheism cuts off creation from God. Pantheism connects all things made from the Eternal with him.

Sacraments- Bible is Sacramental:

·      The Bible is the main source of being connected with spirituality.

·      The example of the serpent represents God’s way of showing us that material things are used to symbolize faith.

·      In the Old Testament, we see a lot of symbolism in Christ. Christ compares himself as having been filled with sin but when he stayed in the desert, he was healed through faith.

·      Sacrament means “mystery” in Greek and St. Paul named him “the mystery from unseen ages.”

·      The Lord can never be separated from his divine nature and human form. His human form allows for him to instill spirituality and to enact the sacraments in us.

·      Men tend to show their true colors when we see Christ through material things in everyday life.  It’s looked at as beautiful.

·      If man did not have spirituality, then we wouldn’t live for eternity and see the Almighty.

What Sacraments Bring to Man:

·      Divinity and beauty is what is given to us through the sacraments.

·      There are 3 different levels that man live, the sensate, intellectual and divine.

·      The sensate feels as if God did not bring about the materialistic and pretty things in life. Your often in denial or skeptical.

·      Intellectual existence is known for the human existence of the spirit.

·      Grace is the third level, in which the heart is illuminated by the truths. Peace, love and happiness are always present.

·      Because God created us, he gives us beauty and love and by him giving up himself for us, when have a closer connection with him.

·      Christ helps us through the sacraments and through his human form, we experience his power.

·      Contact can happen in 2 ways, visible with humanity and his eternal was communicated. And then there’s the invisible, meaning we saw God through him working revelations in our lives.

·      Waiting for Christ we can make it known through the sacraments.

Catechism on Sacraments:

·      The sacraments are active signs of grace given to the Church from God.

·      In order to achieve salvation, we must believe in the sacraments that God has given to us. God makes things better through the Son of God.

·      Baptism accomplishes the right for us to be baptized through Christ; therefore we have a deeper connection with him.

·      Christ is always apart of the Church.

·      Sacramentum and Mysterium derive from the word Mysterion. Meaning that through the sacraments we can see Christ himself.

·      The Church is God’s tool to help make him known among everyone. It is a sacrament of deliverance between man and Christ.

·      Christ is the head of the body but the Holy Spirit is communicated through Christ to heal and help man in their life.

These are Sacraments:

·      Life physically and in nature has 7 conditions. Five are self and the last two are individual.

·      1. In order to live, one must be born. 2.  Man has to give himself nourishment. 3. Mature overtime into an adult and accept responsibility. 4.  One must be healed if sick/broken. 5. Disease must me forced out of the body. 6. Communally, one must be in aggreeance with the government and other relationships present. 7. Man must reproduce.

·      Having a personal connection with Christ requires a few things: we should be born spiritually through Baptism. Our religious sense should mature overtime and take on the roles that are given to us. Man must go through Penance, Anoint the Sick, live under the religious institutions of the Church and fulfill Matrimony.

·      All of the sacraments are seen meaning we can experience Christ through them.

·      The Sacraments come from the Passion, Resurrection and Death of Jesus Christ.

·      Blood symbolizes forgoing just like God gave up his life; Christ is blood is powerful and special.

·      Calvary is another form of experiencing the Eternal and it separates into different categories for man based upon spiritual living.

·      Jesus Christ becomes instill in us when we take on the sacraments; the blood of Christ is experienced in our lives differently with ability.