Holy Spirit, Come into My Life

Christianity is not external to the real concerns of my life. It illuminates them and opens me up to their true meaning.

But this only happens if I live the relationship with God that He continually desires to deepen throughout my life.

And how can I live and grow in a relationship with Eternal Love except by asking for Him to change me, asking for Him to empower me to love Him more, asking Him to enable me to see the Church as the instrument of His love, and her teachings as the road of love that really corresponds to my life?

I want Him to "come" into my life, deepen my relationship with Him, and make me more aware of His presence. This is why I must ask, continually, for the gift of the Holy Spirit to be renewed within me.

This is why my whole heart has to be a living, loving, begging prayer for God's grace.

Love All the Way

No matter how I may feel, or how distant God may seem to be from my life, I know that I can always find Him, and love Him.

He may seem hidden from my thoughts, my emotions, my psychological experience, my health, but even in this darkness He can be found through my love. Even the experience of the energy of desire may flag, but love always remains possible.

Where is this God who asks for my love?

He is inside the needs and tasks of this day, in the kids and their concerns, in the time Eileen and I have together, in the rhythm of my work and prayer.

When I write, He is here. When I do research, He is here. When my words are blocked or I've reached a dead end or I'm just tired, He is here.

When I go exploring and take photographs, He is here. When I learn new techniques, and use multimedia or the internet, He is here. When I put a lot of effort into a project and it ends up being something useless, He is here.

All day, in the house, He is here. When we eat our food and bump into one another and annoy one another, He is here. When I smile and say, "Thank you" to Eileen, He is here -- and also when I say, "Sorry" or "Excuse me," or something dumb, something I wish I hadn't said. When we pray the Rosary, even though we may all be falling asleep, He is here.

Creative mess. On the floor.

When we watch movies or TV, He is here. When we converse about everything from faith and philosophy to weather to birds to superheroes to silly names to boiled eggs, He is here. When we clean up the messes in the house, He is here. When we trip and fall over them, again and again, He is here.

When I have to just lay down in my bed, alone, in the middle of the day because my body hurts too much, He is here.

In all these moments, I want something, I am drawn by some hope that doesn't die even though I'm often frustrated by not being able to find what I think I need.

When I pray, "Come, Holy Spirit," I am asking Him to manifest Himself; to enrich my awareness of His presence. He calls out and gives Himself through the invitation to love and the longing for love contained in the most ordinary circumstances.

His invitations say, "Love all the way. Do not stop at your own satisfaction or give up because of your frustration. Seek the Source of what attracts you, and -- in affirming the goodness of whatever is given in the circumstances, and sustaining hope beyond all limits -- allow yourself to be embraced by the Source."

This sounds profound, but in practice it's really pretty overwhelming. Often our situation seems dull, repetitive, and fruitless, if not painful or desolate. But even in the best of circumstances, it's not easier to "love all the way" -- the weight our limitations pulls us toward something less, some position that appears for a while to correspond to what we want, but that can't help falling short and eventually taking on the bitter taste of discouragement.

Our hope is Jesus, because He makes it possible for us to love in the way we were created to love, which is to love in union with Him, all the way to the Father.

He sends His Holy Spirit from the Father to transform the smallness of our love, to enlarge our hearts and our loving to His measure, which is beyond all measure.

We must call out to the Holy Spirit, and listen to the silence in which He whispers to us the secrets of Divine Love, and shapes them into the flesh of our daily life.

The Holy Spirit: Leading Us to Fulfillment

Come, Holy Spirit!

Today our fifty days of Easter celebration come to fulfillment in the great feast of Pentecost. Our Father in heaven has poured out His Spirit upon us through the death, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus His Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary and has become our brother. In Jesus, God embraces every dimension of our lives, and we are drawn into this embrace by grace, by His continual superabundant gift, by the work of the Holy Spirit within us.

I know I need above all to pray for the grace to let God have His way in my life. So I pray for an increase in the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: for wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety and the fear of the Lord. The Holy Spirit gives His gifts to every Christian, and through them we grow in the likeness to God, which is our vocation.

Each one of us is called to become “godlike”—that is our destiny, to “participate” in the life of God. We know that it is here that our ultimate happiness lies, but God alone knows what our true destiny really “looks” like (“eye hath not seen…”). So we must let Him lead the way....

I only see the surface of my life. Deep down, God is working a wonder, and the means He is using penetrate my whole life with its joys and sorrows, and all that is yet unknown.

What God wants for me is so much more, so much greater, so much more glorious and joyful, than what I think I want for myself. In eternity, we shall see all and rejoice in all. Here, we see through that dark glass called faith. Sometimes it is very dark, but we must trust God to give us what we need to sustain hope, and to grow in the capacity to respond to His mysterious Love with our own self-abandoning love.

~From my book Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy (see HERE for more details)

Pentecost is Coming

We are in the week between the Ascension and Pentecost, the "Great Novena" of expectation. The Easter Celebration is approaching its fulfillment.

The light of the Easter Candle which began on the night of Holy Saturday has accompanied us through these days, and the true fire which is that new life in the Spirit is -- we hope -- burning more brightly within us, burning with the intensity of a greater love.

Let us deepen our hope in these days as we approach with real expectation the feast of Pentecost, and let us all cry out together:

People All Around Me

Home office. Sort of... Not a man cave but a camping spot.

It's summertime. I plop myself in the living room, in the middle of everything -- which is where I like it best -- and allow the surroundings to blend with my own work. When I open the Internet I open a window on the whole world, right here in the living room in the midst of my family. But in a profound sense the same thing happens when I open a book. A world of understanding is contained in those pages, and something much richer than digital imagery is required to visualize it: the human imagination.

I can easily get lost in these worlds of interactive media, articles, and old fashioned books with pages. But I don't like being thus "lost" -- I don't think the unconscious loneliness of it is good for me. Sometimes I have to be alone, but more often the hubhub that surrounds me is a good and congenial thing. I love being surrounded by people when I think. I also like being interrupted, which is a good thing because it happens plenty.

Don't just leave the pieces here!

The heat is keeping most of us inside right now. John Paul is playing the guitar in his own room (and learning too). Jojo is singing some tune of her own and making a puzzle on the floor. Some of the scattered pieces are under my feet. Drawers open and close in the kitchen, water runs, glasses clink. Actually, it's pretty quiet at the moment.

I write. I pray to the Holy Spirit to enlighten me about words, and about life. How do I listen to His inspirations? I feel so dry, sometimes. Where is God? He is inside the needs and tasks of this day, in the children and their concerns, in the time Eileen and I have together, in the rhythm of my work and prayer. When I pray, "come, Holy Spirit," I am asking Him to manifest Himself; to enrich my awareness of His presence. He calls out and gives Himself through the invitation to love contained in the most ordinary circumstance.

His invitations say, "Love all the way. Do not stop at your own satisfaction. Seek the Source of what attracts you, and -- in affirming the goodness of whatever is given in the circumstances -- allow yourself to be embraced by the Source."

Of course, things don't always seem especially good. How often our situation appears to be dull, repetitive, and fruitless. Here especially we must call out to the Holy Spirit, and listen to the silence in which He whispers the secrets of Divine Love.

Pentecost 2014

VENI SANCTE SPIRITUS!
Come Holy Spirit:

"In our labor, rest most sweet;
Grateful coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe"
(from Pentecost Sequence).

Can There be Joy, Even in Pain and Tribulations?

"Joy is like the seal of a Christian. Even in pain, tribulations, even in persecutions" (Pope Francis).

I don't think we can stress this too much, as long as we know what we're really saying. Joy is not the same thing as "always seeing the bright side," or always maintaining a constant smile or a good mood or good feelings. It's not merely a good disposition or an energetic manner.

External cheerfulness and a peaceful, confident, positive internal feeling or state of mind are not the same things as Christian joy. Indeed, joy often coexists with all sorts of apparently contrary dispositions of a complicated human personality, ranging from bad digestion to intense physical or psychological suffering. "Even in pain, tribulations, even in persecutions" the Christian person possesses joy.

The obvious appearances and feelings of joy may be signs and expressions of real joy, or some of its elements. But in and of themselves, they may indicate nothing more than natural realities such as a certain personality type, a cultural expression, a physical and psychological equilibrium, or a response to a satisfying experience. They can even be a fake dress worn by hypocrisy, or a facade that hides an agenda of violence, abuse, and personal manipulation.

Real joy, however, is deep and foundational. It is an underlying reality of the new humanity that we receive from Christ, through the gift of the Holy Spirit. The heart of Christian joy is a participation, already begun here and now in the life of grace, in the very mystery of God's own infinite joy, of His life, of His glory. No experience in this life can simply be objectified, analysed, and classified as "joy-in-the-radical-sense," because it is God sharing His joy with us -- the joy that is God Himself.

God elevates and purifies our affections, draws us through them, and gives us much help that passes through our psychic experiences and strengthens us. But even when we cannot "feel Him" in any way, we still believe in Him by faith and cling to Him in hope. We know that the source of our joy is with us, and that if we love Him, then we possess that invincible joy even if the world rages at us, even if sorrow overcomes us in the face of earthly loss, even if neurotransmitters in the brain or hormones in the body go bonkers, even if incomprehensible pain fills our entire conscious awareness.

It is for our encouragement (not our discouragement) that the grace of the Spirit touched some of the martyrs and saints, so that they embraced gruesome death "as if going to a wedding feast." But God's Kingdom is overwhelmingly made up of saints who probably went through their deaths with considerably less enthusiasm. Many lived their lives with temperaments that would not be classified as "joyful" in the mundane sense.

The joy of God is lived within the love of God, and it realizes itself vitally within our personality in the measure in which we love God and our neighbor. The resonance within experience and the external signs of joy have different forms, different levels of intensity, and variations that correspond to the secret ways in which the grace of God is at work transforming mysteriously the particular person according to his or her own history, wounds, and suffering.

If we are patient and loving with people, we will be surprised by their joy as it peeks through like the sun on a cloudy day. And a glimpse of it will enrich us.

In sum, smiles and good feelings may arise from true joy, but the joy that is the gift of the Spirit is always deeper and "beyond" any of these expressions. If life becomes more happy and "fun" in general for those who love God (and it does), it is because God's presence brings healing to the whole person... but in different ways and in different measure, always mysteriously and personally, not always obvious and evident.

After the resurrection, Jesus didn't ask Peter: "Simon son of John, do you feel good about me...."

He asked, "Simon son of John, do you love me...."

It is in God that we have joy, and nothing can separate us from this radical joy: neither principalities and powers, nor the present or the future, nor the kings of the earth and their designs, nor persecutions, tribulations, pains, nor the tragedies of life, the loss of loved ones, the oppression of harsh task masters, nor sufferings, nor piercing screams from some horrendous cancer treatment (whether it is us who scream, or the person we love most in the world as we stand by their bed), nor the harrowing abysses of psychiatric disorders, the darkness and deadness of depression, the anxiety and obsessions that rage like fire in our brains, nor the implacable daily unseen torture of a chronic illness that no one else seems to understand, nor any of the countless ups or downs of life -- extraordinary or ordinary -- that we can imagine.

When we hear the words of Pope Francis, we shouldn't say, "Oh, I don't feel joyful, so I guess I'm not a real Christian." Rather let us say, "No matter how I feel, my joy is in Christ and in belonging to Him."

When we say this, let us examine ourselves, and seek forgiveness for all our sins (which never bring true joy in themselves, although our sorrow over them is already the beginning of joy). And let us live in hope, because the life of God is our joy, and His love is stronger than our suffering, our wounds, our frailty.

We have confident joy because He has reached down to our deepest need. God has joined Himself to us in the most desolate places of our pain and tribulation. Jesus is with us, and our wounds belong to Him; they are His wounds, forever. Joy is the revolution of transfigured open wounds, open forever in His resurrected body, because of His love which He gives to us.

The joy of this love becomes mysteriously radiant even within all the moments of this present life -- this often arduous journey -- because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Corinthians 13:7). In His love we keep going, we hope, we desire, we offer, we trust, we cry out for God, we never give up.

Fortitude

"Whenever we feel weary or discouraged
along the journey of faith,
let us ask the Holy Spirit
to grant us the gift of fortitude,
to refresh us
and to guide our steps
with renewed enthusiasm."

Pope Francis