Sorry, but your answers are often over my head. Can you please just answer my first two questions directly?
My time is very limited just now, so please excuse my brevity.
Michie's response in post 14 is good - from "AI"! - but it is true.
The letter of James is worth listening to, very carefully, concerning the misguided confusion in many in the Church, on the matter of "prayer". A saint one said, simply, "
Prayer is nothing other than union with God." Many in the Church want "union with God -
but not right now, please! Let me have this life right now, God, so please give me this or that for the here and now!"
Such contradictory desires are of a "two-souled" person. Thus we must listen to St. James clearly on this matter. Two passages of being "two-minded" - or "double-souled" (depending on the translation) - must be heard.
First:
Jas 1:5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him.
Jas 1:6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.
Jas 1:7 For that person must not suppose that a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways, will receive anything from the Lord.
And he adds again, because it is very important! Many believers are of "two minds", or "two hearts": We want to have both an easy, enjoyable, pleasant life here on earth,
and also the same after death, in heaven. We want to be a saint, but not yet.
Jas 4:3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
Jas 4:4 Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
Jas 4:5 Or do you suppose it is in vain that the scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us"?
Jas 4:6 But he gives more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
Jas 4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Jas 4:8 Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind.
This is key. God cannot love both truth and falsity - He cannot be of "two minds", as many church-going Catholics (and non-Catholics) "wish" He were. The will of God is pure, and good - we must seek always and only HIS will, not our own. We must be willing to die to any (misguided, disordered, contradictory) self-love, and fully seek
His in holiness and simplicity.
I grieve to hear so many homilies and casual "adult" catechesis, where pastors seem as worldly as most who are listening to them. We cannot seek to be a lover of this world, and a whole-hearted lover of the One and Only Triune God, at the same time. This can be hard to hear - but it is Truth.
