What Francisco de Osuna tells us to do is…we have eyes, we have the eyes of our head, our physical eyes, and we have the eyes of our heart our spiritual eyes.
The natural, and spiritual, it always comes down to this: natural and the spiritual.
To protect the eyes of the heart I have to protect the eyes in my head… he goes on to explain two different kinds of recollection and then he gives some really practical advice.
He says there’s General Recollection and then there is Special Recollection. The special recollection is kind of like our meditations, being in the presence of God, he’s talking about it in a different way but in our meditations we’re pondering, we’re having a holy rumination on the things of God…with special recollection we’re spending alone time with God or being there with God.
But general recollection, the first, consists “of an understanding we must hold as securely in our heart as we grip the reins to restrain a runaway horse”(Third Spiritual Alphabet, Francis de Osuna)
The Runaway horse: that’s us with all the stuff that’s always coming in that we’re usually just letting in by just looking at “all this stuff that’s good…I’m just looking at stuff for my family…I’m just talking to my friends…I’m just I’m not doing anything bad” all that stuff…and then it just kind of takes off.
The men with all that media that you watch, like I was saying, for a while there I was trying to look at the media because I felt like I had a duty to to fill in my community on what was going on in the world…but then during the rosary I’m thinking about Joe Biden falling down on a flight of stairs trying to get on a plane…you pray for him, but I shouldn’t be having images of this nonsense that we see, that the media is putting out there; all this is just a circus: it’s hatred of your neighbor…the whole thing’s just a mess!
“Yeah but I have to stay informed…”
What’s the information that I have? if in the end I show up at Heaven’s Door and the only thing in my mind is all that stuff…this election stuff and the communism they’re pushing on us and the vaccine…
I had to look up something yesterday and immediately this thing pops up about covid, how many cases are in Kentucky you’re like what is this? This is just nonsense I mean it’s just chaos, it’s constantly to keep you completely thinking about something else.
We have one goal and that stuff has nothing to do with our goal, we want to go to heaven, we want to be saints.
That stuff has nothing to do with it, and we focus all of our energy on it.
When we let that information in there, even for a good reason, we let that information in for a good reason, and now you’ve got to hold on to that thing for dear life and it’s going to Buck you off just like a Bronco…you’re trying to hold on but that’s what our thoughts become you’re holding on for dear life and it’s a game.
This is where Osuna is saying you’ve got to take the reins and you’ve got to get that horse under control…the only way you can get that horse under control is to calm it down, we have to calm down all the stuff that’s coming in: that’s Recollection.
We’ve got to get rid of it, so that means you can’t let it come in.
General recollection is keeping all that information from coming in so you can stay focused on what your goal is.
“General recollection is our way of going continuously alert with our hearts pacified”.
See one of the reasons I told the brothers I’m not looking at the news anymore and their families or whoever can accuse me of not keeping them informed because I have a right to a spiritual life too, it’s not my job to be telling them what’s going on in the world because it affects me and you lose your peace you lose your serenity and you can’t restrain that wild horse anymore…he calls it here “a heart pacified and sealed caring not for human things” the news is all human things.
“But if I don’t watch the news I don’t know what to pray for”
You don’t need to know what to pray for, you just need to pray.
If you pray and you pray sincerely, things will change, Our Lady does with those Graces as she wants, your knowledge doesn’t necessarily affect that.
If you’re mortifying yourself for the love of God and that’s why you don’t know what to pray for Our Lady is going to be that much more pleased because you’re striving for God that much more and she’s going to use your prayers appropriately you can bet on that one.
“The first stone” he says “that must be set in the edifice of recollection is a spiritual emptying”.
Now this isn’t “Zen Buddhism” stuff. There was a beautiful soul cleaning the church yesterday and he heard us pray Compline and he said “that put me like in a Zen, yeah I mean uh, it was beautiful” he didn’t know, anyways, entering into nothingness this is the great sacrament of Buddhism, nothingness. (This is not the kind of emptying we’re talking about!)
“The spiritual emptying whereby we realize that the heart has no other task…” note this, if you’re taking notes I want you to note this “it has no other task than to approach God”
That’s your job, your heart has no other task than to approach God. You don’t have a duty to know about what the new nonsense is, about the vaccine, what the new nonsense is about whatever it is they’re talking about…I don’t know what they’re talking about anymore.
Listen to the full conference here: https://youtu.be/-Vr5dKCKFZs
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