All That Lies at Hand

O God, O Jesus, O vivifying Spirit:

Without You I can do nothing.
Without You,
every moment is a crushing burden;
every trial pricks and stings my tired flesh.

Without You,
I do nothing;
I am nothing;
I am a huge, hollow hole of nothing.

O Lord my God;
O Jesus, Redeemer and Healer;
O Holy Spirit—Lord and Giver of Life:

With You
I can do all
that lies at hand

in the small space of today.

With You,
I can endure whatever weight
You ask me to bear in this moment,

trusting in Your wisdom and love.

--adapted from a passage in my book about the challenges of living with chronic debilitating illness: Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy (Published by Servant/Franciscan Media).

Working a Wonder

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Our relationship with God is mysterious, and our sufferings are a profound part of this mystery. We are called to share in the infinite life and love of God; we flesh and blood human beings, who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning even on a good day.

We are called by God to a relationship that is destined to transform us into His likeness, to “divinize” us. This is going to take some stretching, to say the least. And on top of the simple fragility of being a human being, we all have the effects of original sin and our own personal sins with which we must contend.

This is why we suffer. But Jesus has suffered for all of us, and suffers in all of us. He is the reason why redemption and glory are destined to rise up out of our own suffering, if we adhere to Him in faith, hope, and love. The grace of His Spirit reaches us especially in our weakness.

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.

Why am I afraid that I can’t trust Him?  Could I have really given myself a better life than the actual life that God has given me?  And can I construct a better future for myself than what God has planned for me? Should I not trust Him?

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.

I'm in a "Real" Magazine...Two Months in a Row!

Well, what do you know! The Meditation for the Day for August 27 in Magnificat is by...gosh!...me! Well, there it is. No matter how much I do on the internet, everyone (including me) still gets excited to see something in print. Perhaps printed books and magazines won't become obsolete. You can hold a book in your hand, according to its own real dimensions. You actually have the thing. Is it the sense of touch? The feel of pages? I don't know. I know that I love the internet and electronic media and electronic books and magazines, but I also love "real" books and magazines and even dumb, unwieldy, oversized, print-staining newspapers! Maybe its just the transition between epochs. Or maybe not.

In any case, here is a selection from the "meditation"--in case you don't get the magazine IRL ("In Real Life," hahaha). Although I must say, I feel more and more that the "IRL" tag is maybe a bit silly and misleading. The internet is very real indeed, and a lot of real life is played out on these electronic connections. Miracles even happen through the internet. Its not a problem for God. But He needs us to surrender all of our media, and all of our lives, to the mysterious workings of His wisdom and love.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the meditation:

Jesus is the intimate companion of each and every human person, even those who do not know him. He knows each one of us; God the eternal Son of the Father unites himself to my humanity and to your humanity. He lives in us and suffers in us and through us. He accompanies us through our companionship with one another and reaches out to others through our witness. 

Jesus knows who I am and who he wills me to be. He knows the secret of why I was created. He knows my sins. He knows how to heal me of them, how to draw me to himself, how to make me the adopted son that I am meant to be in him for all eternity.

And so my joys and sufferings are his infinitely wise, uniquely crafted, and tender love through which he shapes my life and leads me to my destiny. How little I really understand about my destiny. How little I understand about the eternal life that means belonging to him for ever.

We must remember every day that God is with us and that He draws us toward our true identity, which is to reflect His eternal glory in that unique way that corresponds to each of us as a person created in His image and likeness—a reflection that we do not yet understand but that He sees and knows.

We ought to dwell upon this and call it frequently to mind. Those little prayers throughout the day are worth so much: “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I trust in you. Come, Holy Spirit.” No matter the storms and the fury; the depths of our lives are not solitude. At the heart of life, of every moment of life, there is companionship with the Merciful God.

The Life He Has Given Us

It is good to live, to be affirmed, to be treated with justice, kindness and dignity, to flourish as a human being. The physical and earthly needs of the human person and human society are a concern of the Church because they too are the object of God’s mercy. God wants to comfort us in our afflictions and console us in our sorrows, but above all He wants to teach our hearts that He is with us, always.

He wants to open our hearts to the experience of something that we cannot perceive by ourselves: that the realities of our daily life mean more—not less—than we understand. Suffering must be endured, not because life is less important that we had hoped, but because it is more important that we can imagine. It is the place where God is with us.

Our hearts long for happiness, for “life.” But what is “life”? What is happiness? Do we find it only in that space of time that “belongs to us,” where we imagine that God sits in the background and allows us to play with reality, until He starts taking our toys away because “playtime is over”? No! This is not what life is! Life is God with us, every moment—in every joy (God delights in our joy) and also in the abyss....

In our trials, we may not feel the presence of God, but in our endurance and in our prayer (even our most inarticulate and desperate prayer) He is leading us to the truth that every moment of life has value because He is with us. And so we must open our hearts to Him and allow Him to shape us according to the mystery of His love. We must pray in faith and hope, that we might love God who embraces us within the life He has given us....

God knows how hard it is to suffer. But He has created us to love. Our hearts are made for God. We can only grow in this life by recognizing Him and loving Him more. Do I feel like I cannot love Him more? Do I want Him to draw away, at least a little, and give me back some of my space? Of course I feel that way, but I must pray and beg Him to teach me to love Him more, because His presence and His love are what is real in my life.

When we endure suffering, we are called to do so not with a merely stoic resignation, but with abandonment to His loving presence that is really with us and in us. And so we endure in the conviction that God offers us His love—the only fulfillment of the human heart—here and now, in the midst of our sufferings and the plodding of our daily lives. We are called to put our hearts on the line, to allow ourselves to be wounded by the hope that even in this darkness it is possible to love and to be loved, because He is with us and He loves us now. And we know that love—in the end—is always worth the risk.

The abyss is the hollow of the hands of God.

--excerpt from John Janaro's book Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy

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