http:\/\/www.egfbenya.com<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Dear Friends, Colleagues, Benefactors, Collaborators & Family:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jesus Christ had the right idea: Never stay in a grave more than three days. That teaching holds true to this day especially if the grave is not yours. In reality few if any individuals actually go into a grave, but their remains do, while the essential being, the soul, is born into eternity, a transcendental shift that many if not most people accept.<\/p>\n
Occasionally an entire being (body and soul) finds himself interred or almost interred. My personal experience is limited in the matter but quite memorable. In novitiate I was \u201cthird string\u201d grave digger behind John, the hired man, and Brother Jim, both being most accomplished excavators. I had personally dug graves, always with a shovel, spade or other such implement. However with two such accomplished professionals at my fore, possibilities of my actual function in the job seemed remote.<\/p>\n
Yet the Grace of God knows no limits. Both gentlemen were absent (in reserved military maneuvers and annual retreat respectively). Notice arrived of the \u201cdeparture\u201d of a brother in Christ. Yours-truly was on call with the blessing of the superior and little else. That call seemed simple enough as it could easily be resolved with a pick and shovel. I soon learned that the \u201cshovel\u201d to be used was a backhoe; quick, powerful and accurate, but in my case slow, sloppy and perilous \u2026, since I had never previously operated one.<\/p>\n
I quickly learned that it was a functional extension of one\u2019s arm, and like one\u2019s arm at a delicately set dinner table, one could shatter the greater part of an attractive setting (carefully aligned tomb stones in this case) with one awkward move. Slowly I proceeded as time progressed to the hour of burial. Excavation was easy enough as I quickly removed about a ton of earth forming a hole of disproportional dimensions in a \u201cY\u201d shape some 3 meters deep at one end and perhaps 1 meter at the other; anything but acceptable as a grave. I resorted to the shovel. I began digging at one end and filling the other. In surprisingly little time I had the standard oblong-shaped grave of desired dimensions.<\/p>\n
Immediately another problem became most apparent. At almost 2 meters depth, I was personally near or over my head in the grave and, the now-loosened soil of the Mississippi delta, in no way supported my efforts to remove myself. From there (as best as I remember) I used the shovel as a foot support whose elevation was just enough for me to leap and land flat on the external ground surface thus extricating myself from the grave. Quickly I removed the backhoe from sight, stashed the hand tools and exited the scene in time for the funeral to tranquilly proceed with no sign of the preceding dilemmas.<\/p>\n
Thus I return to the original point of this message: NEVER DALLY WITHIN A GRAVE. Fortunately Jesus Christ is always one, not only to invite, but also to demonstrate how to resolve a question. He founded and established the Transcendental Universal Christian Faith replete with specifics for immortality and, in fact, personally discharged those specifics TO Immortality up to and including\u2026. exit from a grave.<\/p>\n
We celebrate that Transcendence during the Quaresmal-Pascal season in a witness to Him and with Him to the world and to creation. Join us in these celebrations and witness for a:<\/p>\n
HAPPY and BLESSED LENT and EASTER!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With blessings in the Risen Christ<\/p>\n
Pe. Ed Benya, S.J.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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