Since my fifties, I was advised by my family doctor to take B12 supplements as it helps maintain the health of my arteries, nerves and veins. Since noticing the how it helps me sustain nerve pain, I have been very faithful to ensuring I get enough of it in my system. Although I consume eggs daily, I supplement with Live-Well Mecomin which is affordable. Below is a slide illustration showing the signs and indications if you are low in B12. Vitamin B12 is a nutrient that helps keep the body's nerve and blood cells healthy and helps make DNA, the genetic material in all cells. Vitamin B12 also helps prevent a type of anemia called megaloblastic anemia that makes people tired and weak. Two steps are required for the body to absorb vitamin B12 from food. Not having enough B12 can lead to anemia, which means your body does not have enough red blood cells to do the job. This can make you feel weak and tired. Vitamin B12 deficiency can cause damage to your nerves and can affect memory and thinking. You may need to take vitamin B-12 separately from any medication/drugs and supplements — ideally, is take one in the morning and one at night — so you can get the full dose of vitamin B-12. Don't take vitamin B-12 supplements if you have sensitivities or allergies to vitamin B-12, cobalt, and any other ingredients. I have just finished reading this book: WHY MUST WE SUFFER, A Book of Light and Consolation by Rev. F.J. Remler, C.M. This book explores the reasons for our suffering here on earth and to provide understanding and consolations to those who are suffering. More people should have access to this book to better comprehend the designs of God and to cope with life's sufferings. We often come across people who suffer in their lives and they express anger and disappointment in God, why a good God would allow such a tragedy, why did God take away innocent lives, etc It is these folks that I wish to share some passages from the book that will help them understand and to be better cope with grief and be consoled and to resign themselves to God’s will. Sadly, it is due to the lack of knowledge of our faith as Catholics / Christians that we will express such grievances; but come to think of it, the following information apply to all humanity but for Christians, because of the knowledge of the faith, will comprehend and accept the reasons better and their dispositions more receptive. Of the many reasons why we suffer, the main one is that we are descendants of Adam and we are to share in the painful consequence of original sin. To better understand this is to first know that Adam was made as what God originally intended humans to be endowed with a Pure Human Nature. It means that humans were meant to be in perfection possessing ” the faculties of our souls- memory, understanding, and free will - the members, organs and senses of our body, in that degree of completeness which God designed us to be, rational beings, composed of a spiritual soul and body, without any defect or deficiency. All the qualities necessary to make us perfect in our order of being. A keen mind, a faithful memory, a strong will, and perfection of bodily form, beauty, health, and vigor.” “There would be an entire absence of those numerous defects of soul and body which we now labour under because of deterioration brought on by sin.” “In the second place, we would be enriched with the endowments of super-nature meaning that we would be conferred supernatural grace which ‘we would be elevated high above the plane of pure nature and adopted by God as His most dear children, with the right and title to the endless enjoyment of the glory of Heaven.” “In the third place, in the state of super-nature, would include bestowal of a number of extraordinary endowments; we would possess an extensive knowledge of natural and supernatural truths; we would be free from ignorance and from liability to error in the acquisition of new knowledge, we would be free from evil concupiscence. We would also possess two remarkable endowments, freedom from every form of suffering and freedom from the painful ordeal of death. God created man incorruptible and immortal. Death was not meant for him.” The effects produced by our disinheritance (due to original sin) are the following: First, we were completely stripped of all the endowments of supernature. We lost sanctifying grace and with it the son-ship of children of God and the right and title to Heaven. No longer well-beloved children of God, we were children of wrath and outcasts from our true home. If not for the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ’s Passion and death on the Cross, Heaven would have remained closed to us forever. Secondly, we also completely lost all the endowments of preternature - our freedom from ignorance, concupiscence, sufferings and death. Our intellects clouded, our wills greatly weakened, our passions have grown turbulent and rebellious, we suffer much from sickness and diseases, from the elements, from accidents and catastrophes, from famines and wars, we must endure natural results from our own sins and sins of others, and finally we have to undergo the penalty of death. Thirdly, while we did not incur the loss of the gifts of pure nature, we nevertheless suffered a great deterioration in them. Our natural faculties were much impaired. Our intellect lost its former keenness and wide range of perception, our reason clouded and liable to errors, our wills weakened and become playthings of our passions; as a consequence impelling us to all kinds of sinful excesses. The final outcome, we are left to ourselves and unaided by grace, we tend toward sin as naturally as a stone is drawn to earth by gravity. Thus were all the evils that afflict mankind introduced into the world by original sin. The following is an example taken from life to serve the truth of original sin and it’s effects: Imagine a multimillionaire, the father of a happy family of several children. He administers his affairs carefully, his children have everything they desire to be happy. They know nothing of poverty, hunger or starvation. Their health, education, everything is well taken cared of. But the father becomes a drunkard and a reckless gambler and shortly loses everything he owns and become a ruined man, reduced to beggary and live in a poor house. However his criminal conduct involves not only himself, but also his children, who are entirely innocent of their father’s wrongdoing. Once they were happy and in possession of everything to make their life pleasant and above all, they held the right to inheriting their father’s wealth, his good name and social prestige; now they are reduced to wretchedness and misery, their hopes of a bright future are rudely shattered, and in place of a large fortune they are doomed to poverty; destitution and other sufferings. Though innocent of any wrong doing, they are nevertheless affected in a most intimate and painful manner by the in excusable folly of their father. The law of cause and effect is at work, and it is pitiless in its operation. Though they are in no way implicated in their father’s sinful conduct, they must suffer as much as if they, and not he, had been guilty of squandering their fortune. In much the same way we are now subject to the sad consequences of the loss of our supernatural inheritance in which Adam involved us by his sin of disobedience; deprived of those wonderful gifts and endowments which were set aside for us from the beginning. This is the first and principal reason why sufferings of every kind come thick and fast into our lives. May the following serve as consolation in the midst of our trials. Thanks to the infinite wisdom and goodness of God, in the light of our holy faith, the state of suffering is seen to be a state of great blessedness and of unlimited possibilities to increase our glory in Heaven. Thanks to the atonement of the Passion of Jesus Christ, His redeeming and saving grace has abundantly compensated for the loss of our original inheritance. Although this grace does not restore the Paradise which once existed on earth, nor does it remove from our lives the evils and miseries resulting from original sin; but it does what is infinitely better and more profitable to us in the end - it enables us to endure all sufferings with patience and resignation, to sanctify them by uniting them with the bitter passion and death of Our Lord, converting them into sources of rich supernatural merit, which in turn will procure for us in Heaven a throne far more glorious and exalted than if we had not fallen in Adam from the state of our original perfection. But this is often objected: “If God foreknew the fatal consequences of original sin, why did He not prevent Adam from committing that sin?” or: “ Why does God not hinder the commission of sin now? Or again: “Why does He not hinder wicked persons from doing what brings sufferings to the innocent?” To these objections the only answer is this: God has created man a free agent. The noblest faculty man possesses is his free will. With the exercise of this faculty God does not interfere in any way. Any interference would mean a limitation, a deprivation of free will, at least partially. This would in turn mean that man is not responsible for his moral actions. Interference with his free will would also do away with merit and demerit; reward for good deeds and punishments for evil acts. Man is left entirely to his own counsel - perfectly free to choose between good and evil, obedience and disobedience, virtue and vice, Heaven and Hell. Whichever he chooses shall be his inheritance. In the lifelong struggle against the forces of evil - the Devil, the world and the flesh, man has at his disposal the powerful aids of Divine grace, by the right use of which he can avoid sin and do good; but God will not in any way compel him to use this grace, or to act one way rather than another. Many abuse this noble faculty by doing what they know is forbidden and sinful, and thereby they become the authors of suffering for themselves and their fellowmen. God does not will this, but He permits it. In the meantime, His infinite wisdom and fatherly providence direct even the sinful actions of men to the furtherance of the welfare and salvation of His elect, even as He turned the malice and enmity of the Jews against Our Lord to the accomplishments of the redemption of man from sin and Hell. To further understand this, God as we all know is infinite, pure, perfect spirit and Heaven being His domain is thus pure; to merit Heaven, we then have to be pure or purified since we inherited the stain of original sin and our nature has become corrupt (no longer the pure human nature as God intended it to be). Moreover, as creatures of God, we are finite beings (limited beings), whereas God is infinite (without limitations). Therefore, it was necessary for the sacrifice of Jesus (who is God and infinite) to make up for the sins of man. Through the mercy of God, Jesus instituted the Sacraments of Baptism and Penance (confession) to help us be cleansed, be purified, in order to be reconciled to God, and Purgatory, for our final purification, if the temporal punishment for our sins are not completed before our death. Remember that our time here on Earth is a “pilgrimage”, to merit Heaven. Suffering and death are ways to earn the merits and repay our debts to God due to original sin. Therefore they are necessary for our good. Another significant reason why you must suffer, especially in times of general calamity, is this: As a member of society and a citizen of one’s country, you must unite with the rest in making atonement and reparation which Divine Justice requires for the public and national sins committed in the community in which you live. By public and national sins we understand that certain sins of graver nature which are committed on a larger scale and by many persons in a community, in a big city or province or even an entire nation, that the sins are attributed to the community as a body and not merely to this or that individual. Sins of this kind are: Apostasy from Faith, irreligion and forgetfulness of God; godless education of the young; profanation of God’s Holy Name, cursing, blasphemy and perjury; the desecration of the Lord’s Day; immodest and scandalous fashions; immoral art, literature and amusements; divorce and adultery sanctioned by iniquitous state laws; dishonesty, injustice and oppression of the poor; murder and race suicide; and finally, those wild orgies of gross immorality and unrestrained license which periodically disgrace public festivities and celebrations, or occur with connection with balls, dances, banquets and the like. God is exceedingly patient and long-suffering, and does not willingly inflict general chastisements, however richly they maybe deserved by a community. He rather desires that His offending children seek His pardon by means of a timely repentance and conversion. He waited a hundred years before He sent the deluge which He had commissioned Noah to announce; He spared the city of Ninive altogether because its inhabitants immediately left off sinning and hastened to do penance at the preaching of Jonas. God still acts in this way. He often waits a long time before He inflicts on sinful cities and nations those more extensive chastisements. He desires to spare them and therefore tries first in every possible way to recall them to a sense of their duty and to timely repentance and conversion. It is not always necessary that God send such chastisements for public sins, as He sent the deluge or the destruction of Jerusalem. There are many sins which contain in themselves the seed of future public suffering; if such sins prevail for a sufficiently long time, unchecked and unrepentant, they are bound to produce certain calamities unavoidable. Take for example, the sin of godless education, I.e. education of youth without religion. Were such a system has been adopted, the necessary result must be the following: after two or three generations the knowledge of God will disappear more or less completely among the people; the sense of right and wrong will be lost; good will be called evil, and evil good; there will be no respect for the moral law; the depravity of youth will grow worse and worse; dishonesty and corruption will prevail in business, in the courts, in the legislature, and in the government itself; taxes will be misappropriated or disappear in the pockets of grafters; heavy expenses will be necessary to maintain the growing number of asylums, juvenile courts, reform schools and prisons; there will be no security to honour property and life; the relations between capital and labor will be strained to the breaking point, so that violence and bloodshed will become inevitable; family life will be disrupted by adultery, divorce and free love; national rivalries, jealousies and hatreds, provoked by commercial greed, grow more and more intense, until they lead to international wars with their unspeakable misery to millions. Nations that sow the whirlwind must reap the storm. Public and national sins must be expiated in this world for the very simple reason that they cannot be expiated in the next. Why is it that the good and virtuous are not exempt from such sins, but are compelled to suffer like the rest? If God is just, how can He allow the innocent to be afflicted with the guilty? There are several reasons for this:
In this book, Father Remler provides 15 reasons why we ought to embrace our trials and tribulations, be they physical or spiritual, for the priceless opportunity that every pain provides us in our vocation to be made conformable to our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Fr. Remler wonderfully explains the value of penance in the light of the patient and enduring acceptance of the cross. He provides fifteen reasons why we ought to embrace our trials. If followed well, will cut short dramatically our time in purgatory. This magnificent analysis of suffering, as to its cause, its value, and its ultimate effect (i.e., conformity to Christ, the Man of Sorrows) will give us more strength to bear not only our own cross, but to willingly share in the suffering Jesus endured for all men by accepting, as joyful victims, crosses vicariously borne for sinners within our own family, for our wayward friends, for the crimes of our nation and for those dear to us who are languishing in Purgatory. Prayers of ReparationPrayers of Reparation and Consolation
Reparation for sin. Prayers of Reparation to the Virgin Mary |
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AuthorAn artist, entrepreneur, a loving family man, 30 years a Catholic traditionalist upholding traditions for the love of God. Shop for Catholic giftsArchives
January 2024
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