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Monday, July 14, 2025

Thoughts from the First Session of Fr. David Torkington's course, Prayer to Contemplation

I decided to do a retreat with Fr. David Torkington by listening to his 15 session series on Prayer to Contemplation. Every Sunday I plan to listen to one of the videos until I finish it. Here are some ideas and thoughts from the first session which was excellent. I hope you will join me:

God's power finds Its full scope in human weakness.

It is a fact that God almost always chooses the weak to confound the wise. Think of the three little children of Fatima, illiterate shepherds. Mary appeared to Bernadette, a young girl who found learning catechism so difficult that her First Communion was delayed. St. Jean Vianney had a terrible time learning Latin and hardly made it to ordination, but he converted thousands because of his holiness. Joan of Arc was an illiterate village girl called to save France from the British which preserved that country from the Protestant Revolution. God doesn't just call the smart, the rich, the powerful. He calls all of us!

Our destiny, our heritage, our journey can only begin if we freely choose to receive the love of Christ poured out on that first Pentecost day. Love cannot be forced. Forced love is a contradiction in terms....It is impossible in every way.

If we choose not to receive the Holy Spirit we are committing the sin against the Holy Spirit.

Prayer is the way we open ourselves to let the Holy Spirit penetrate us.

St. Thomas Aquinas described the mystical dynamic in three words: contemplate and share.  Our calling is to contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation with others. 

St. Thomas wants us to contemplate the beauty of God in Himself. Contemplation is for all! It is a pure gift of God to those who try to consistently raise their hearts to God. The point is to unite our love with Christ's love.

To unite ourselves to God takes time and commitment. We need to have a zeal for prayer and the discipline to give God time every day. You cannot love someone if you don't know them and you can't know them without giving them time and attention. God waits for us. Will we answer His call? 

It is in the family that we first learn to love. We go to Christ for power and strength. We receive the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit and then we can go out and share them with others.St. Francis told his brothers there are two ways to go out. The first is to live in a way that calls other to Christ, to embody the gospel in ourselves. The second way is to preach which will be useless if we have not embodied the gospel. 

Actions speak louder than words! 

At baptism we died with Christ. The early Christians actually cast off their clothes to cast off the old world and were plunged into the pool three times and then put on the new garment and then go out to transform the world as witnesses to the Resurrection.

Are we living our baptismal promises? 

Things are crumbling in the Church and we are responsible because we've forgotten the calling of our baptism. Evil has gotten into the Church because people are not living their baptismal promises. We cannot do anything about the crisis in practical terms. Only God can help us. We need to go back to prayer to change us and through us to change the terrible things that are happening to our Church.

We are all called to be soldiers of Christ. The question is whether we will answer the call. 

5 comments:

  1. Wait,how did Joan of Arc preserve France from Protestantism when the Hundred Years War was 1337–1453? And she died in 1431. Please explain.

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    1. Really? It doesn't take a Ph.D. in history to understand that if the British had won, the reigning monarchs in France during the Protestant Revolution would have been Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The Protestant Mass would have been imposed on the French as well as the English along with all the draconian measures the tyrants used against the English. Joan did, indeed, save the French from that terrible fate. Why don't you go troll someone else with your ignorant comments.

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  2. The entire month of July is traditionally dedicated to the Precious Blood, encouraging Catholics to meditate on Jesus’ profound sacrifice and the pouring out of His blood for humanity. When Pope Pius IX was in exile in 1849, he turned to the Precious Blood of Christ for strength.

    …. excerpts from the ‘Precious Blood’, by Fr. Faber

    ........We are surrounded by the sights and sounds of this short earthly life. We judge of things if not by appearances, at least by their earthly importance. We are forced to measure things by a standard which we know to be untrue….Eternity is simply a word to us; and it is exceedingly hard to make it more than a word. Time alone enables us in some degree to realize the importance of eternal things.

    We are to consider, first, the Mystery of the Precious Blood. It was one of God’s eternal thoughts. It was part of His wisdom, part of His glory, part of His own blessedness from all eternity. You know that creation, although exceedingly ancient, nevertheless not eternal. It could not be so. To be eternal is to be without beginning; and to be without beginning is to be independent act of God’s most holy, most condescending will. Thus, there was an eternity before creation, a vast unimaginable, adorable life, not broken up into centuries, not lapsing but always still, not passing, a life which had no past and no future…….this was the life of God before any creation.

    The life of God is very vast……God lies before us as an ocean of infinite life. We kneel upon the shore…..an ocean rolls where there was sky when we first knelt to pray. The boundless waters stretch above us like a living canopy…..the shore on which we kneel gives way. It is no shore. We are hemmed in on every side by this ever-blessed ocean of infinite being. God is very simple. He is simply God. He is Himself His only perfection …..we cannot comprehend so simple a simplicity.

    Let us kneel down before the magnificence of God……we see the calm of eternity upon its waters, peaceful as an endless evening……

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  3. Why do you call him 'fr.'? He's dressed in lay clothing and he's married: "When he is not writing, he and his wife spend time on their boat on the peaceful Beaulieu River in the New Forest, Hampshire, or in Poole Harbour, Dorset, exploring the Jurassic coast"
    https://spiritualdirection.com/author/david-torkington

    Apparently his brother wanted to become a priest, but died in a horrendous accident. To him Mary was a priest and so was his mother (and so can we all though he doesn't say anything about his own (sacramental) priesthood): "Like Mary (at the foot of the cross), My Mother Became a Priest"
    https://shalomtidings.org/my-mother-was-a-priest/

    [I thought the pedophile scandal broke in 2002 (?) Engel published Rite of Sodomy in 2006.] 18 NOV 2018 I admit that despite my experiences I found the matter so detestable that I PRETENDED THAT I HAD BEEN MISTAKEN AND I LOOKED THE OTHER WAY, hoping I had been unlucky enough to have stumbled on rare anomalies that would simply go away. But in subsequent years, like insidious fungus, the proliferation of pederasty has grown underground only to mushroom all over the Catholic world, but in the USA there are now whole drifts of them almost everywhere. In recent months I have been shocked beyond shocked. I am only speaking out now because I REMAINED SILENT BEFORE and contributed to the growth of the pernicious poison that will choke the life out of the Church, if it is not rooted out immediately. I am sick of remaining silent for fear of giving scandal to the laity, when it is with them, that it now seems, is our main hope of deliverance.
    https://davidtorkington.com/the-elephant-in-the-room-that-threatens-to-bring-our-church-to-its-knees/

    16 FEB 2019. There is another reason why good priests have remained silent for so long and that is because, as one Montfort priest said in a podcast that has recently gone viral, “because nobody would have believed us.” I am afraid that is so true. I WAS not a high profile priest, but back in the nineteen-eighties when I began to become aware that there was something wrong, I DID TRY TO SPEAK OUT. Even my closest friends and relations would not believe me, so how was I to be believed when I wrote to Rome? Their only response was to try to stop me speaking out. In the intervening years I have tried to explain the historical reasons that have led to the terrible sexual moral malaise that is at present destroying the Church, and how only deep radical and spiritual reform can put things right.

    https://davidtorkington.com/the-most-heinous-sin-of-all/

    He doesn't call himself a priest in his own bio on his website:
    https://davidtorkington.com/about-david/

    But Westen calls him "father" and asks him to start out with the sign of the cross. Westen also says he was "removed," but I wonder where he gets that information? "David Torkington, a formerly “canceled” priest who was removed decades ago after exposing sexual abuse within his order, discusses the importance of contemplative prayer ..."
    https://assets.lifesitenews.com/episodes/exposing-the-crisis-in-the-church-david-torkington

    Was he laicized (and left voluntarily like that Gomulka seminarian)? Here LSN calls him a 'theologian.'
    https://catholicstand.com/the-lost-art-of-prayer-lifesites-8-week-lenten-retreat/

    You attend SSPX, but who provides your spiritual direction? I wonder if they would approve of Torkington's mysticism.

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    1. My spiritual life is none of your business. The priesthood lasts forever. As for the article "My Mother was a Priest," the Church teaches about the common priesthood of the laity: https://rosary-center.org/ll44n1.htm
      Obviously it is not the same as the ordained priesthood, but we are all called to share in the sacrifice of the cross.

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