Prayer and Air

"Why could we not drive it out? He said to them, 'This kind can only come out through prayer.'" (Mark 9:28-29)

In the life after RC combox Deirdre Mundy applies G.K. Chesterton's thoughts on morbid logic to waking folks up from Maciel's spell.

G.K. Chesterton:

"There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way...".

"He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity..."

"Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid..."

"If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument..."

Deirdre Mundy:

"if someone is really integrated in Maciel's spirituality, you CANNOT reason with them... Their #1 axiom is that God created LC/RC, and that the health and safety of the Church is tied to LC/RC. #2 is that all attacks on LC/RC come from the devil..."

"Until someone starts questioning the axioms, until he starts to wonder how Maciel COULD build something good and if the Church REALLY needs LC/RC, logic can't work. Remember, insanity is a closed system-- crazy people are often PERFECTLY logical --it's just that their assumptions are wrong..."

"That's why the praying is necessary-- once there's a little crack so that God's love and their guardian angels' warnings can get through, THEN logic starts to work..."

"I think we'll make more progress with acts of love than acts of logic at this point. Help out when people need dinners. Be a good neighbor. Let the people stuck in RC know that we love them for who they ARE, not for what groups they belong to. That way, when they do start feeling the urge to leave, they'll know that they'll still have people who care about them..."