Joann Nelander Studio

art, photography, and the poetry of prayers and dreams

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Counting Stars

Posted by Be Holy on April 19, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: christianity, God, Joann Nelander, religion and spirituality. Leave a comment

I counted stars today.
As prophets and dreamers,
Glimpsing God through the darkness,
My wonder soared.
I, too, beheld
The promise of eternity,
Stretched across the eons.

Mere points of light
In a midnight sky,
Announcing Truth veiled in mystery,
Of things hidden and unseen,
Of ages long past and yet to be.
Who with me
Knows that there is more,
Much more?

Lanterns hung in the heavens
Make of me their lampstand,
That Eternal Light
Might shine more brightly,
Giving voice to creation.

No dumb marvel,
Rather angelic themes,
To sing high praises
In celestial chants,
For all who turn their gaze
Heavenward, counting,
And loosing count,
Journey home.

Copyright 2012 Joann Nelander

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This Is The Real Goal Of the LGBT "Rights" Movement

Posted by Be Holy on April 18, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: activism, Culture, homosexuals, LGBT, morality, politics, press, Religion. Leave a comment

by Erik Rush

Source: This Is The Real Goal Of the LGBT “Rights” Movement

“The press coverage and rhetorical tempest over North Carolina’s HB2 (the new law which prevents individuals who identify as “transgender” from using public restrooms based on their chosen gender identity) and the widespread activism on the part of homosexuals in recent years has a lot of Americans wondering why there is such a high degree of concern on the part of the political left over the so-called rights of an assortment of mouthy sexual deviants in the first place. It’s even more baffling to those unfamiliar with the dynamic behind it all, given that this faction represents less than 4% of our population.The answer is simple: The so-called “struggle for LGBT rights” in America has never been anything more than a pretext for the complete disenfranchisement of Christians. Leftist leaders have always known that a socialist state must be the sole arbiter of morality, and that this cannot come about in a moral society – one in which citizens honor and obey God over the state, which is of course comprised of fundamentally flawed human beings.The scenario that has been framed by the left wherein Christian doctrine is manifestly oppressive to homosexuals, transvestites, and assorted sexual deviants is a ruse, and the said oppression of these people is nonexistent. To be fair, things might have played out differently in a Christian theocracy, but we do not live in a Christian theocracy.Ultimately, the constitutionally-guaranteed religious liberties once enjoyed by Christians will be negated via the courts. Christians will be severely stigmatized, and their position will become untenable. The Church will be all but driven underground, as in Britain and Canada. Once “God is dead,” as it were, the State will be free to impose its own secular doctrine – one that is more conducive to its control and manipulation of the populace in perpetuity.This methodology need not be relegated only to the eradication of religious groups or even a majority faith. The same tactic is in fact being used, for example, to dilute the political power and civil liberties of whites in America (another majority) by characterizing them as bigoted and oppressive toward other ethnic groups. In the secular realm, the political power and civil liberties of heterosexuals and, more importantly parents, are again being supplanted by the counterfeit “rights” of those who advocate aberrant concepts of family, sexual deviants being chief among these.The reason that such a vigorous campaign was marshaled to target Christians is because Christianity was the second greatest impediment to those advancing the socialist state, the first being the Constitution itself, specifically, the Bill of Rights.Anyone who has been exposed to concepts of Natural Law (to which American students no longer are exposed since the study of Civics was abandoned) knows that these were a fundamental basis for the Bill of Rights. Natural Law was revered by our nation’s founders as a basis for the set of liberties they recognized as being granted by God; without these acknowledged and/or codified into the law of the land, individuals remain ill at ease, and society founders. These are the liberties for which so many have fought against their governments through the ages, even if they were ignorant of these concepts as such. Recognition of Natural Law and its incorporation into law, as so many over the years once recognized, was the height of wisdom, and why the United States prospered so conspicuously for so long a time.These concepts of liberty as understood by America’s founders were distilled into what became the law of the land in America from a broad and studious view of history, the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment (which was ongoing at that time), religious texts and doctrines, British Common Law, and yes, even such things as Freemasonry (whose basis in philosophy rests largely in the foregoing).The secular humanist view to which socialists ascribe however, holds that it is our exalted and refined intellect itself that will ensure moral behavior; thus we need not worry that humanity will descend into chaos or tyranny. This of course ignores the fact that in a society which universally adopted this worldview, there would be as many codes of morality as there were people, with many of these being wildly divergent and in inevitable conflict.Inasmuch as that worldview is little more than a profoundly dishonest marketing ploy based upon human conceit and calculated to empower socialist leaders, it is no wonder that socialism has failed to do anything save for exalting socialist leaders, and why it led to the deaths of nearly half a billion human beings during the last century.”

Source: This Is The Real Goal Of the LGBT “Rights” Movement

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No Moral Equivalency between Jihad and the Crusades

Posted by Be Holy on April 17, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Catholic, Christian, Culture, faith, Religion, religion and spirituality, video. Leave a comment

Jihad vs Crusades – Bill Warner, PhD

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The Eucharist, Pledge of Our Resurrection

Posted by Be Holy on April 15, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

From the treatise Against Heresies by Saint Irenaeus, bishop
The eucharist, pledge of our resurrection

If our flesh is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us. As the Apostle says: In him, through his blood, we have been redeemed, our sins have been forgiven.

We are his members and we are nourished by creation, which is his gift to us, for it is he who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall. He declared that the chalice, which comes from his creation, was his blood, and he makes it the nourishment of our blood. He affirmed that the bread, which comes from his creation, was his body, and he makes it the nourishment of our body. When the chalice we mix and the bread we bake receive the word of God, the eucharistic elements become the body and blood of Christ, by which our bodies live and grow. How then can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord’s own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving God’s gift of eternal life? Saint Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians that we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones. He is not speaking of some spiritual and incorporeal kind of man, for spirits do not have flesh and bones. He is speaking of a real human body composed of flesh, sinews and bones, nourished by the chalice of Christ’s blood and receiving growth from the bread which is his body.

The slip of a vine planted in the ground bears fruit at the proper time. The grain of wheat falls into the ground and decays only to be raised up again and multiplied by the Spirit of God who sustains all things. The Wisdom of God places these things at the service of man and when they receive God’s word they become the eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ. In the same way our bodies, which have been nourished by the eucharist, will be buried in the earth and will decay, but they will rise again at the appointed time, for the Word of God will raise them up to the glory of God the Father. Then the Father will clothe our mortal nature in immortality and freely endow our corruptible nature with incorruptibility, for God’s power is shown most perfectly in weakness.

Via divineoffice.org

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I Listened as a Tulip Spoke

Posted by Be Holy on April 14, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: poem, poetry prose & prayer. Leave a comment

image

I listened as a tulip spoke.
Perched on her podium,
She sat in Your sunshine,
There upon my table,
Her feet wet upon stones,
Emersed from crystalline life.
No tongue could speak such eloquence.
How stately and sincere.

Earlier she had bowed low,
Her back broken,
Unable to lift her head or eyes to heaven,
But, now, she sings in colorful delight.
Her tones strum my heart’s ear.
Spritely, she smiles for having her fill
From fountains that rushed
To quench her thirst.

image

She looks at You,
And preaches me a homily
Of prismatic delicacy,
And beauteous design.
Her eyes reach to finger my spirit
With the flash of black on gold,
Your Love written in her petals
Sing to my soul.

©2016 Joann Nelander

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Of Walls and Hedges

Posted by Be Holy on April 13, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Catholic, Christ, Christian, guardian, hedges, leap, Prayer Prose and Poetry, Walls, watch tower. Leave a comment

I am the greatest obstacle
To my salvation,
Yet You leap the walls,
I have raised about me.
You breech them,
You penetrate them.
You shake and crumble them.

Your Holy Spirit
Is that quake
Of Calvary,
The earthquake,
That rattled open prison doors,
Destroyed the chains of those,
Commissioned to speak with Your power,
And in Your Name..

Place a high,
Insurmountable hedge about me.
One I can not leap,
When I hear the voices
Calling on the other side.

I know myself,
And that I shall try to flee.
For, though the boundary,
Be for my own good,
Fool, that I know myself to be,
Fleeing is in me.

All my hope
Is in the Love
You bear for me.
You, my Love,
Scale the walls of my pride,
O, Love, Who sets watch towers
On the heights,
And is enemy
To my enemies,
And the Guardian
Of my soul.

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The Breech

Posted by Be Holy on April 11, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: All rights reserved, Poetry, Prayer & Prose, Religion & Spirituality. Leave a comment

How great is the distance between us?

Some would say
The span from East to West,
Or measure in miles the chasm
Stretching from Heaven to Hell.
Others count the centuries
Since Your earthly Presence
In hallowed flesh.

There is no numbering
Eternity or Divinity.
You are closer than my breath.
Your Heart beats within my breast.
Day by day,
Nay, moment by moment,
I pick up Your rhythm.

Traversing the breech,
You make me Your own.
Small, but beloved,
I repose in willful abandonment.
Grace-filled faith,
A movement,
Not a measure,
Soars to the heavens,
In flights of trust in You.

Copyright Joann Nelander  © 2011    All rights reserved

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Flight of Love

Posted by Be Holy on April 11, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Catholic, Christian, faith, heart, Love, prayer, union.poetry. Leave a comment

I press my ear
To  Your Heart, my Jesus.
With the beating  rhythm,
That bounds within Your Breast,
My Spirit takes wing,
And rushes to Your Side,
That pierced and open side,
That Gate of Heaven.

“Enter,” You invite.
Leaving without my fear,
I enter in.

I am all ear,
You, all Heart
And Fire,
A furnace of Love.

My spirit faints
With longing.
A voice of spirit
Reassures and comforts.

In flight,
My soul alights,
Coming to rest,
As coming home.

You have always
Known me.
In an instant,
I know You,
And, only now,
Know me,
In consummate repose.

Glowing, two hearts beating as one,
Union of spirit,
Mine yielding to Yours,
To become truly myself.

Complete and Resplendent,
As the dawn of New Day,
Colored by a thousand rainbows,
Breaking ranks
And melting,
In a perfusion of light,
Dancing across my soul,
Reverberating, throughout the Universe,
In happy harmony.

O, Hallowed One,
We now are Three,
Your completeness
Embraces me.
I know all of heaven,
In knowing Thee.

Heaven has made room for me,
A sacred chamber,
And a mansion,
Raised in Your Rising in me.

I hear my new name
And am transfigured,
As You speak it.
Cor ad cor loquitor.

Copyright 2012 Joann Nelander
All rights reserved

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Jesus, Mary, I love You!

Posted by Be Holy on April 5, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Jesus, Mary, I love You!
Save priestly souls, save souls.
We beseech you:
Grant us to repeat this Act of Love a THOUSAND times, with our every breath, with our every heartbeat.

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Waltzing Matilda

Posted by Be Holy on April 3, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: Australia, endurance, grief, Hope, suffeering, survival, video, Waltzing Matilda, war. Leave a comment

I share this letter and video from a dear friend. It was sent to his friend, Al, who lost both his legs in Vietnam and suffered much, much anguish for year to come, and found his salvation and peace in Jesus.

AL,

WHEN I ACCIDENTLY PULLED UP THIS UTUBE—-ALL I COULD THINK OF, WAS YOU– OUR CLASS–
THE SUFFERING YOU HAVE ENDURED.
THE STRENGTH YOU HAVE FOUND — NOT ONLY THROUGH JESUS-
BUT THE IN- BORN STRENGTH IT TAKES TO MANAGE SIMPLE LIFE EVERYDAY.
IN A MUCH LESSER WAY, WE ARE IN THE SAME CLUB.
I SUSPECT, AS WE AGE, FEWER  APPRECIATE YOUR SACRIFICE.
YOUR DEVOTION TO OUR GOD– AN INSPIRATION.

BOB

“The Band Played Australia, endurance, grief, hope, suffeering, survival, Video,walzing Matilda, war.” composed in 1971 by John McDermott and is about an Australian soldier who lost both legs during the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. Here is the YouTube video of the song including the lyrics.

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