Grace In My Heart, Flowers In My Hair

Librarian with the MLIS and all | Unashamedly Catholic | Fandoms 👀 | Hopefully one day I will be a Tolkien scholar but for now I’m just a Tolkien freak

[acatholicrose]

[aimasart]

The Batfamily

[lettucemakar]

Word already had a word count?! That WORKED?

You made a computer that can't COUNT?!

[traditional-latin-math]

The AI bubble is gonna collapse purely because they can't help themselves.

[thelegendofsqam]

Can it collapse sooner?

[probuccalfat]

everyone acts like your only choice is total excess or complete abstinence. what about moderation… what happened to my good old girl Moderation?

[momentsbeforemass]

77 times

“Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

Peter’s question opens today’s Gospel. And I really don’t understand why Peter is beating himself up about this. I’m struggling to forgive someone once.

Peter’s doing pretty good, as far as I can see.  But he still gets this answer from Jesus,

“I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

The classic understanding is that isn’t a literal count. Jesus isn’t saying, “The first 77 times, you’re good. I’ll forgive you. But at 78? I’m done.”

Jesus is telling Peter that if we are truly God’s, then our forgiveness has to be like God’s. It can’t be just a one-time thing.

It’s forgiveness. Followed by forgiveness. Then more forgiveness. 

But what if forgiveness doesn’t come easy for me?

What if I’m having trouble actually letting go of the wrong that was done to me?

C.S. Lewis put it this way: “The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday, and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put, and all has to be done over again.”

It may be that I am having to forgive someone over and over for the same thing.

Not because they aren’t sincerely sorry. Not because they haven’t tried to right the wrong. But because I’m holding on to the wrong that was done to me.

Because I’m enjoying my resentment. At least at first. Before it becomes toxic.

This is the other side of “seventy-seven times.”

Sometimes it feels like it’s taking me seventy-seven times tries to actually forgive someone who wronged me. Because I’m having trouble letting go of my resentment.

Jesus doesn’t condemn us, for trying to forgive and not being able to. Jesus lets us know that if we fail, it’s okay to try again. That the important part is that we try again.

That He’ll be with us every time we try to forgive someone.

Even if it takes us more than seventy-seven times.

Today’s Readings

[wetheurban]

You will heal. You will create again. You will wake up genuinely excited about your life. You will laugh again. You will get out of survival mode. You will trust yourself again. You will get your spark back. You will find your way back to yourself. You will. You will. You will.

[animentality]

[esoteric-merit]

This is about as unrelated as it gets, but I was once on a cooking competition show as background. I had a prep list, and while the contestants were front-stage, I was in the back of the shot, doing the prep list, looking chef-y, alongside some other BG. The prep list was double-duty, it was also making stuff for the contestants to use later, but our main job was just to make the kitchen look busier. I imagine that in most shots I was in, I was at best an out-of-focus blur behind the main shot. So at the beginning, the contestants are showing off their knife skills and making little fruit sculptures or whatever, IDGAF, and they were being interviewed at the same time. "What does cooking mean to you?" and that kind of stuff. I . . . was not supposed to be interviewed. I was BG. The interviewer apparently, did not know who was a contestant and who was BG, so they came over to me. And after all of these eloquent long-winded philosophy-and-dream guided answers, they come to me, and go "What is cooking?" And me, deep in focus on looking professional and getting the prep list done and not listening to the interviews, aware that I'm not supposed to talk or be talked to (I'm not paid for speaking lines!), but also aware I am the focus right now, but also aware that they will cut this out of the televised part and I can relax and shrug him off, but also suddenly aware there's still a live audience and I can't just shrug him off, but also confused because I didn't realize he was fishing for a deep philosophical answer: "Cooking is making food". Well. I got a laugh out of the live audience, and they must have decided to keep the line because my pay was upgraded from "SSE" (Special Skills Extra) rates to "Speaking" rates.

[templatelord]

best answer

[mutantrenegade]

You know Jones soda cap, as a tumblr user i can actually say i think I have.

[soundlessdragon]

[were--ralph]

Twitch now uses your channel to train generative AI by default.

Opt out here, you're opted in by default

ALT

[artimies6]

@majoraswrath

[three-semicolons]

My favorite dumb factoid is that Dick was cosmically ordained to die during Infinite Crisis.

This is not only the reason why he constantly gets into near-death experiences (because the universe is trying to kill him to right itself), but also there’s an infinite number of realities killing him gruesomely in order to achieve this and maintain their universe’s integrity.

Dick is stuck in a perpetual loop of suffering across timelines because he was predesignated to do so to save it, like some kind of DC Jesus, and it is the silliest enforced kicking-while-down ever. By the decree of the goddamn multiverse, Dick cannot have a break.

[hazzymayy]

Tim and dami doodle

[fnordseer5]

oh the wifi password yeah it's the nicene creed in its entirety

[mrtobenamedlater]

@purple-purple-pink-purple with or without punctuation?

[purple-purple-pink-purple]

Without, in a strung together mess like we’re Augustine of hippo

[greater-than-the-sword]

With or without the filioque?

[butterflies-and-bumble-bees]

is it in latin or vernacular?

[depsidase]

[charmspoint]

peer reviewed tags from @megacarapa

[catholicapothecary]

the general inability to think or perceive anything outside of the first order processes is baffling

[fnordseer5]

oh the wifi password yeah it's the nicene creed in its entirety

[rottingtrouble-child]

I saw this video about a doctor who performed an MRI on a 5 year old and discovered she essentially had “brain damage” from excessive iPad use, as the white matter in her brain couldn’t form properly due to an understimulated environment.

Hmm it’s almost like there’s supposed to be adult figures responsible for monitoring her screen time and making sure she develops properly… certainly this isn’t the result of neglect at the hands of her parents…

[rottingtrouble-child]

“This 5 year old is brain damaged by excessive iPad use”

Translation: This 5 year old is developmentally impaired by neglectful parents who used an iPad as a stand-in for social and environmental stimulation / interaction for hours at a time during critical early stages of child development. The iPad is the cop-out.

[rottingtrouble-child]

“Children don’t have the strength to hold pencils anymore because they only use screens.”

Translation: Parents aren’t making the conscious effort to help their children develop necessary skills and letting iPads raise them.

When are people going to realize the iPads and whatnot are the instruments through which the neglect is happening through and not the cause? How the fuck do you let your child have such a severe lack of physical strength in their hands that they can’t hold a pencil properly?

[rottingtrouble-child]

People will see a study suggesting children with higher screen times have poorer or negative developmental outcomes and immediately say it’s the screens causing this, and not the more likely fact that higher screen time = less engagement time with their environment, physical exercise, parents, family, and their peers, all of which are NECESSARY for a healthy upbringing as a social species.

It’s like saying a dog who was kept in a cage all its life and left with atrophied muscles was damaged by the cage, and not by the fact its owners were too lazy to play or walk their dog in order for its muscles to build properly. The cage is the instrument of neglect and the owners are the perpetrators, in the same way parents are the perpetrators and weaponizing screen time as an excuse and painting themselves as helpless bystanders.

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

Or to put it more succiently: Where did they get the ipad, sara?

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

The screens could be bad and the parents could be neglectful

Like if you found a kid with liver damage from alcohol abuse obviously that would be caused by parental neglect but it would still also be caused by alcohol

[prokopetz]

Once you've learned the spot the historical signposts, it's interesting how many "generically medieval" fantasy settings manage to miss the actual medieval period on both ends. They've got the Roman Empire rubbing shoulders with the German Renaissance, skipping directly from the year 500 to the year 1500 with nothing in between!

[prokopetz]

(The one consistent exception is, of course, the obligatory Vikings-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off culture, who legitimately are medieval, but nobody they interact with is, so you've effectively got Vikings with time-travelling boats raiding both Roman-occupied England and Renaissance Italy.)