Tuesday Ramsho Complete

This is the first office I've completed in a while. Its prayers, specifically the Sedro and Bo'otho, express the fear and danger of evening, which is a typology for eschatological darkness.

To access Tuesday Ramsho, click here.

This office has a particular relevance to the lesson of the modern age, especially in light of recent Catholic discussion. The lesson that can be extracted is the worker has no right to tell his Master if he is distributing His wages properly - we each agree with God to labor in His vineyard, and we should only be concerned with our own wages. However, that does not mean there is no such thing as final judgment or eternal punishment - the threat of hell is very real, and we are never owed heaven. Heaven cannot be obtained by simply having orthopraxis, but it is only given out of the mercy of God - despite neo-pelagian thought that seems to be the basis for many Latin Catholic devotions (the eighth promise of the rosary essentially states if one frequently says the rosary, heaven is guaranteed). Prayer is different from magic in the fact that magic is the user creating the action through a spell - prayer is a request of the individual to God, and if anything is granted it is only because God has chosen to hear the petition but He acts without any obligation. This is lost in Western theology when the mechanics of prayer and grace are discussed to such a fine detail that they seem almost divorced from God as the primary actor. However, all things flow from God, and without His will and mercy, nothing would be - so let us not tell Him how to allocate His own wealth.

There is a certain confusion, though, on what this means. Some think that this means we are unable to have societal expectations and correct our brothers and sisters - that is against the instructions against Scripture. St. Paul, while speaking about chastisement by God, says that one is an illegitimate son of his father does not chastise him (Hebrews 12:8), likewise, if the Church did not discipline her children through the fathers it would be a statement of illegitimacy. And peer-to-peer correction is encouraged within even the words of the Gospel of Matthew, stating that one should correct (with the intention of love) one another who has done wrong so that person can be regained. If they repeatedly refuse to reform their ways, even after others and the Church herself has chastised him, then he is lost (Matthew 18:15-17). That is not to say the individual can never come back into the Church, but he is an agent acting against what it means to be part of the Church and has severed himself from the rest of the Church until he amends his ways. For St. Paul says even the Jews who did not believe in Jesus, whom God made a special covenant with down through the ages despite their constant failure, excommunicated themselves with their disbelief and they were replaced by the Gentiles who believed (Romans 11:11-24). No one is indispensable to God, for He can raise even stones to be Children of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). We are all to be servants of God.

Our Lord, accept our service, our prayers, come to our aid and have mercy on us!