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Bridget's avatar

> if I heard a fellow parishioner cough, I’d offer them a mint (and most would take it).

Necessary medication is permitted, and I think it's fair *to them* to charitably imagine that this is how they understood your offer, although *you* in hindsight understand your offer as actually a sad ignorance of the fast before communion.

Having said this, though, I went to Mass with someone recently out-of-state at a chapel where there was a *large* supply of individually-wrapped white lifesavers in the hall on the way in and my companion directed my attention to them and recommended that I take one in case I or the person next to me needed it. I was next-door to being scandalized (like, yes, let's literally *institutionalize* skating at the edges of what it means to fast, instead of just putting paper cups in the bathroom and accepting that sometimes other human beings make noises.)

With regard to the Warning: I pay zero attention to "end times" discourse. I think it is beautiful and providential that your attention was directed to this book and that you read in it something that opened your eyes to your own (at the time lukewarm) state. I think that personal accounts and conversion stories can pierce someone's heart sometimes. I do *not* think that the things that visionary people have seen or heard are generally going to literally happen the way that they have tried to put them into words afterwards, and I think that for some people who go on to read about them, there can sometimes be a risk in fixating on how things will allegedly be. The risk is related to the desire *to know the future* (*you* know that this is one of the ways the enemy tempts people!), and to the desire to plan for the future which comes from a fear of the future and a desire for control, etc., when God wants us to trust Him (and, in some individual matters and at some particular times, to trust *blindly*.) So when I hear people talk about three days of darkness, or about buying blessed candles, or about the so-called rapture, or about this illumination of conscience (I don't recall whether I've heard of that one before), I ignore all of it. I do not even check on "did a saint say this? was it paraphrased? what did the saint really say?", which in other matters I might check on and then give credence (those other matters would be "something that I am urged to do *here* and *now*" - by somebody who is telling me "a saint said to do this". Pray the rosary? yes they probably said to do that; anything else, I usually try to look up a primary source.) The risk is also related to the desire to put things off! By expecting something to be in the future, that makes it unreal to us. Maybe we hear "in the future there will be a searing illumination of my conscience" and then we think (maybe not even really aware that this is how we are thinking) "well I'll just wait until then to fully convert" when I could actually ask God *right now* for everything that I imagine He will do to me *then*: "let me know how I have most offended Thee", etc. If we are mostly excited about what He will do *to other people* then we need to stay in our lane and keep our eyes on our own work; if we are excited about what He will do *in me personally* then ask for it *now*. Ephesians 6:13 cannot be *only* about something that was centuries in the future to the people it was written to, and in any case, we are under attack *every day* in many very banal yet serious ways (for example, I am probably tempted to judge the people who institutionalized taking a mint in to Mass) so for my own convenience I would just regard the evil day as "today" every day.

But as you noted there is another reason to be excited. As I heard in a homily recently, we should look forward to and desire the Second Coming (the priest giving the homily said that he hears from people who are afraid of the Second Coming and do not look forward to it, and that is why he talked about it.) Without going into details, we know that Christ *is* going to return. We ought to be like a golden retriever or some other Very Good Dog (and specifically the kind that has given its heart to one owner, like our dog when I was a kid and she was, in her opinion, my father's dog) that hears its master's footsteps in the evening as he is coming home from work, the jingle of his keys as he gets them out to unlock the door. Our tails should be wagging!, because he is almost home; we cannot see him but we want very much to be with him, and if we are with him then nothing else matters (and if we could open the door we would but we just have paws). BUT THIS TOO we can ask for NOW as individuals; we can desire and ask for the unitive state (which is nothing other than a union of my will with God's will: wanting what He wants, in entirety) and this is a mutual possession of God (you are Christ's and Christ is yours), in the darkness of faith. My understanding is that it is a bit of a hard road to get there (St Teresa of Avila says that a determined determination is necessary) consisting in its essence of what your Benedictine nun says: "and He can burn all the recesses and pockets of sin in me that need to be burnt out" - this is precisely the second "night" of St John of the Cross. Who can endure the day of the Lord?, like refining silver; like a consuming fire. And what day is that? Perhaps today (to begin with).

Sorry, I have gotten a bit incoherent.

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