Saint Bonaventure's Journey

A person should turn his full attention [to Christ],

to this throne of mercy,

and should gaze at Him hanging on the cross,

full of faith, hope and charity,

devoted, full of wonder and joy,

marked by gratitude,

and open to praise and jubilation.

He will experience,

as much as is possible for one who is still living,

what was promised to the thief who hung beside Christ:

"Today you will be with me in paradise."

This is a sacred mystical experience.

It cannot be comprehended by anyone

unless he surrenders himself to it;

nor can he surrender himself to it unless he longs for it;

nor can he long for it unless the Holy Spirit,

whom Christ sent into the world,

should come and inflame his innermost soul.

Hence the Apostle says that this mystical wisdom

is revealed by the Holy Spirit.

If you ask how such things can occur,

seek the answer in God’s grace, not in doctrine;

in the longing of the will, not in the understanding;

in the sighs of prayer, not in research;

seek the bridegroom not the teacher;

God and not man;

darkness not daylight;

and look not to the light but rather

to the raging fire that carries the soul to God

with intense fervor and glowing love.

The fire is God, and the furnace is in Jerusalem,

fired by Christ in the ardor of His loving passion.

Only he understood this who said:

"My soul chose hanging and my bones death."

Anyone who cherishes this kind of death can see God,

for it is certainly true that:

"No man can look upon me and live."

Let us die, then, and enter into the darkness....

Let us pass over with the crucified Christ

from this world to the Father

so that, when the Father has shown himself to us,

we can say with Philip: "It is enough."

We may hear with Paul: "My grace is sufficient for you."

And we can rejoice with David, saying:

"My flesh and my heart fail me,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my heritage for ever."

~Saint Bonaventure (1217-1274)

from The Journey of the Mind to God, ch. 7

True "Greatness" is Found in Giving Ourselves

"God is not one who wills only greatness. God is love, who gives himself first in the Trinity, and then in creation. And to imitate God means going out of oneself; it means giving oneself in love" (Benedict XVI).

Pope Benedict speaks of "greatness" in the way that we conceive of it, our human conceptions. In our pride, we try to imitate God (or take His place) by making ourselves "great."

And so we grasp for power, whereas God wants to make us like Him by enabling us to give ourselves in love, to share in His love.

Here is a larger quotation from Benedict XVI's homily (I'll date it if I can find the date):

"Love," "Freedom," "Dignity": What Do They Mean?

As June draws to a close, I am drawn to reflect upon the profound and crucially important continuity between the teaching of Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si' and that of his recent predecessors in the Petrine ministry.

It is striking to reflect upon the prophetic witness of the successors of Saint Peter to an authentic view of the human person, a view that is so important for shedding light on many problems of our time. This testimony by the popes and the bishops of the world in union with them, drawn from the providential insights of the Second Vatican Council, continues to be a beacon of light for those who are searching for what it means to be a human being in the midst of the expansion and development, the wild upheaval, the chaotic shifting and tumult of this period in human history.

So often we articulate deeply diverse proposals for human life in this world using the same words, such as "dignity" and "freedom" and "love," or "growth," "progress," "community," "relationship," "maturity."

How is it that we use the same words to express radically different approaches to human life and human activity? Perhaps we use the same words with different meanings. Or maybe sometimes we use the words, but without their necessary context, which results in their losing coherence and even being manipulated.

How do we know the meaning of these words that we use to speak about the human person? This question points out the great significance of the prophetic witness of the popes and the Church in our time.

The popes who have shepherded the Church during the gradual emergence of the post-modern world -- this yet-unknown New Epoch of global interdependence, unprecedented human power, and the need for a new and deeper responsibility -- have stressed the same crucial points about the dignity of human persons, their dependence upon God, and their place in the world created by God.

At the end of this post are some passages taken from a homily of Pope Saint John Paul II over a quarter of a century ago (1989). John Paul has the same concerns as Francis, as these and many other passages from his teaching make clear.

In particular he points to a foundational and defining issue that Francis also identifies, and that I wish to unfold briefly here in this post. It is the attempt to articulate human freedom and responsibility without reference to the deepest truth about the human being, namely that the human person is radically given to his or herself. The human person is created by God.

If we forget God, if we live as if God did not exist, we let go of the fundamental basis for everything we say about ourselves. We may use the same terms -- human dignity, the human person, freedom, relationship, love, happiness -- but these words only have meaning in the context of an understanding that we are created persons.

Remembering that we are created persons means affirming the radical relationship with God that originates and sustains the gift of existence that expresses God's love for each of us, the love that gives me to myself.

And it affirms the call from God, the human vocation that leads us to the fullness of our true identity as unique human persons by bringing us to the fulfillment of love and freedom with Him.

Insofar as we forget that we are created persons and "live as if God did not exist," however, our words about ourselves drift away from their genuine significance. The same vocabulary -- human dignity, the human person, freedom, relationship, love, happiness -- becomes unmoored from basic human experience, and the true elements of our perception of reality begin to fragment.

When we forget that we are created persons, we shake the foundation of our being. We attempt to withdraw ourselves from the central relationship that defines us. Thus, a variety of confused perceptions, prejudices, emotional reactions and fears can easily become mixed into our understanding of ourselves and therefore into what we mean by the words that refer to the human person and core human values. 

The same words can thereby take on different meanings. They can become pretexts for desperate efforts of self-affirmation, or defensive words that we use to protect our ever-widening isolation from others whom we mistrust, or whom we wish to avoid because of divisions, resentment, emotional pain, or just ordinary selfishness.

Thus, it is not difficult to find ourselves in solitude and plunged into an incomprehensible and radically unstable experience of life.

We may endure this agonizing loneliness and confusion for a time. Usually, however, we seek out or stumble upon others who we think can support us in defining our identity. But we cannot understand ourselves if we seal off our own existence from the absolute, secure Source that establishes and sustains us.

Too often we have forgotten that Source, or pushed Him to the margins of our awareness. We have reduced Him to an abstraction or perhaps domesticated Him into a background figure who provides comfort, whose agency is limited and defined by our own measure. Or, we have never known anything about Him, and have never responded to the provocations in life that could have awakened our interest in seeking Him. We can thus become closed off, confused, anesthetized, or asleep in front of reality.

Insofar as we fail to live some kind of vital openness to this all-good, loving, creative, radically affirming Source of our human dignity -- the Source of the real identity and preciousness of each one of us -- we live without roots. We become disconnected from the original dynamic impetus that constitutes our freedom and makes our lives human: the search and the desire for the Mystery that sustains everything.

When peoples and cultures cut themselves off from this search, they lose the sense of who they are. They attempt to "search for their own selves" but they don't know where to look, and they often conclude that their only hope is to create their own "value," using various inadequate or even arbitrary criteria.

How often we live this way today, trying to invent ourselves and invest ourselves with value. But this is an anxious, distressing, and ultimately futile project. Life "works" only to the extent that we recognize and live with a vital awareness of the gift that originates and sustains reality and ourselves -- the gift that bestows meaning, and that awakens and draws forth our fascination with everything, our wonder at the beauty of things, the universe, and our own tremendous being as created persons.

Nevertheless, we forget, and we are tempted to try to manipulate the world and ourselves. We try to create the meaning and purpose of our lives -- our identity -- relying solely on our own ingenuity, impulses, and whims. We may succeed in putting on a spectacle, but we cannot generate satisfaction or any enduring confidence with these self-definitions. We will always be haunted by the anxious sense of precariousness, fragility, and ultimately the failure of our inadequate projections. We may be able to suppress this from our consciousness and skim through our days on the surface of shallow satisfactions, but it always remains beneath our awareness like an awful, gaping hole: "This is not real. This is not who I am. This is not... enough!"

Thus, when we live the project of self-invention and self-validation, we also live (paradoxically) with a desperate hunger for affirmation from others. Seldom do we try to stand alone in the madness of an openly anarchic affirmation of ourselves by ourselves. We feel the need for affirmation from others. We want to hear that we are good, that we have value, that we deserve to be loved. This need for affirmation is profoundly human, but it becomes distorted when we subject it to our project. We start to measure the authenticity of affirmation from others -- the genuineness of the love others offer to us -- by whether or not it endorses the artifice of our limited, self-conceived identity and the ideas implicated by it.

This distortion of the need for affirmation leads us to search for places and groups outside ourselves that correspond to and support our ideas. Or, in times of confusion, we look for places where the affirmation of others resonates with our fractured self-image, but also seems to restore roots to our existence. Eventually we are willing to allow the affirming group to impose its own definition on us. We come to depend on this group-identity for a sense of coherence in life and for our understanding of the meaning of being human.

There are no lack of places, groups, and human social constructions that we can adhere to in this dysfunctional way: political structures, ideologies, nations, tribes, cults, corporations, social status, wealth, entitlement, resentment, and lifestyles that appear to satisfy but in reality thwart the actual humanity that has been given to us. We take up whatever seems to feed this need for affirmation, and we set ourselves against anything or anyone that appears to threaten it.

When this happens, there is no more room for discussion of what our words about "human person" and "dignity" and "love" actually mean. Instead we form into factions, seek security in our power, and inevitably make war against our rivals. Even the beautiful word "peace" becomes a mask for violence when we try to live as if God did not exist.

It is entirely different if we remember God, the Living God who creates us, holds us, loves us with an unshakable firmness, crafts each one of us down to the depths of our own freedom.

When we remember that the Good God is the Source of who we are, then we turn to Him, we seek Him, we open up to the mystery of our own destiny, we beg Him to show us His face, and we trust in Him.

Then we begin to discover the reality of our own identity, our dignity, and our greatness. We begin to become truly free.

Here are selections of the homily of Saint John Paul II given on June 4, 1989:

God is all-holy, he is the Creator who gives us life and who makes all that exists in the universe. We are creatures and his children, in need of healing because of our sins.

[Yet] it is easy to lose sight of the Creator, from whose loving hands all things come. It is easy to live as if God did not exist. Indeed, there is a powerful attraction to such an attitude, for it might seem that acknowledging God as the origin and end of all things lessens human independence and places unacceptable limits on human action. But when we forget God we soon lose sight of the deeper meaning of our existence, we no longer know who we are.

Is it not fundamental for our psychological and social well-being to hear God’s voice in the wonderful harmony of the universe? Is it not in fact liberating to recognize that the stability, truth, goodness and order which the human mind increasingly discovers in the cosmos are a reflection of the unity, truth, goodness and beauty of the Creator himself?

A radical challenge facing the human family ... [today] is to use the earth’s resources wisely and responsibly, which means with respect for the limits to which these resources are necessarily subject. To do this is to respect the will of the Creator.

And in human affairs the challenge is to build a world of justice, peace and love, where the life and equal dignity of every human being, without discrimination, is defended and sustained. To do this is to recognize the face of God in every human face, and especially in the tears and sufferings of those who long to be loved or justly treated.

Every act of goodness is an important contribution to the changes we all wish to see.... All our good actions constitute a victory for justice, peace and human dignity. But our selfishness and lack of moral courage lead to the persistence and even strengthening of injustice in the world.

The entire Good News of our salvation [is a] witness to the wonderful Gift of God himself, expressed in the Word of life. God bestows on humanity an absolutely free gift – a share in his own divine nature. He endows his creatures with eternal life in Christ.

Man is graced by God... far beyond anything that [we by ourselves] could humanly achieve or even desire, for the gift is truly supernatural. The wonder of this gift is that it makes it possible for us to achieve the object of our deepest longings: to live forever in intimate union with God who is the source of all good.

Without Him, We Labor in Vain

"Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord guards the city,
the guard keeps watch in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
when He pours gifts on His beloved while they slumber."

~Psalm 127:1-2

God's Innermost Secret

Trinity Sunday.

"God's very being is love. By sending His only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed His innermost secret: God Himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 221).

Andrei Rublev's Icon of the Trinity (Moscow, c. 1410).

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)

God Does Not Explain Himself, But He Promises to Stay With Us

"I will lead the blind on a way they do not know;
by paths they do not know I will guide them.
I will turn darkness into light before them,
and make crooked ways straight.

These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them." (Isaiah 42:16).

I love this verse. It's probably one of the sources of the well known saying, "God writes straight with crooked lines." As a person who makes so many crooked lines, I am much consoled and encouraged by God's promises and by His presence.

O Lord, I have so little vision of the mystery of my own life that we might as well call me blind. I am blind. I do not see or feel or understand the deepest works of healing that You are carrying out within my person.

You are leading me, especially and most profoundly, in those 'ways I do not know," the 'places of darkness' and all the crookedness of the wounds of my sins. You are leading me through so many secret sufferings, through the pain of my truest prayer that so often cries out for You, trembling with hunger. 

There is always this hunger, this longing for You, Lord, that seems overwhelming. Temptations pretend that there are other ways to fill this hunger, and they come from all directions. Ultimately, they pretend to offer something of You that I can grasp and make my own. But what they offer is not You (as I have learned by bitter experience). I want You. 

Where are You, O Lord? 

Baptism has made me Your adopted son, and has enabled me to live with You in the midst of Your People, my brothers and sisters in Jesus the eternal Son, "gathered" (ekklesia) throughout history and today in Your Church. The Church and the sacraments have brought me forgiveness and reconciliation, healing, growth and strength in so many ways. 

But the crushing human weight of the effects of original sin and the scars of my own broken life remain in me in ways I don't understand. I am still so blind. 

Yet You do not forsake me. You are leading me through the anguish and loneliness that come from being a broken human being who lives in broken relationships, who remains a sinner even with all he has been given, who suffers disappointment and fears death. 

Father, I am Your child in eternal life, but I am like a newborn baby even after these many years: small, helpless, crying out, and not yet able to see.... 

I am blind... perhaps in part because of Your mercy. You shield my eyes from the things You know I could not bear to see. Or You let me have a very small glimpse: just enough to know that the pain is there so that I can abandon myself to Your loving hands, and just enough to see that Jesus is here with me. 

Father, I believe that Jesus is here in the suffering, in the places that seem senseless, in the wounds that never fully heal.

God makes a way here, a way that I do not know. He does not explain these hidden ways to me, but simply asks me to trust in Him, to persevere on the path and share in the darkness and suffering that remain in me but no longer belong to me.

He has made them His sufferings. They no longer belong to me, and no longer define me, because He has taken them through love.

Therefore, I must not try to hold onto them, as if the incomprehensible depths of suffering somehow might give me a claim against God, a pretext to turn away from Him, to doubt His promise that He "will never forsake" me. I must not hold them up in God's face and say, "I accept that You exist, but I don't accept Your world" (as Ivan Karamazov says in Dostoevsky's greatest book).

My very bones cry out, "Why?" And yet as our dear late Lorenzo Albacete put it, "God doesn't give you an answer. He just shows up."

The "answer" cannot be a solution or a formula or anything that I can grasp with my mind. My mind cannot turn this darkness into light.

The "answer" is a fact that I must adhere to with my mind, with trust. This adherence is called faith. Even in the deepest darkness, I must have faith that He is here, that He has not forsaken me, that He is leading me on paths unknown.

God's answer is not a "solution" in the sense we think we want. It's not the ultimate "self-improvement" manual. Nor is it a social or political or psychological or intellectual solution.

God's answer is Love. His Love. God's answer to my anguish and loneliness is the gift of Himself.

Infinite Love doesn't "answer the question" of my pain; it is a response that is beyond all the terms I use to try to ask the question, and all the loneliness and anguish that drive the question. Still, it corresponds to all my human questions; it even intensifies those questions while inviting me to live them within this Love. Love transforms my longing, my emptiness, my wounds.

Love turns darkness into light.

____________________________________

P.S. -- God gives Himself in Jesus. He is Gift. He who is Love and Freedom can only be freely received. My human reason and freedom are respected by the God who created me in His image, as a person. Infinite Love gives Himself totally as a free gift. He wants to raise me up in this gift, giving me the capacity to receive Him and share His life.

This raises a new "question" for my reason, a profoundly practical question that I cannot escape. Should I accept this Infinite Gift? 

I can choose to say, "No."

A gift by nature is offered freely. True love by nature is the opposite of coercion; when we love someone we seek a free response of love. Clearly this must be super-eminently true for the Infinite Gift who is Love Himself.

He wants me to say, "Yes!" He will even empower me to say a "Yes" that shares forever in His life. But He will not force me to accept Him.

Therefore, I can reject Him. There is a great mystery here, because His creative love sustains me in my very being, which means that "I" can never "totally" reject Him because then I would cease to exist. I cannot exist, I cannot be "me," without depending totally on His Love that gives me my very being, and remains always the Source of "me."

Still, He makes me free. I do not have to accept His gift of Himself, His Love and His "way of love" that He has crafted to bring me to my fulfillment. I can resist Infinite Love. I can remain blind forever, because I do not want to let go of my limitations, my nothingness, my way of measuring reality which ultimately comes down to my misery and dissatisfaction. And I can spin endless rationalizations for why refuse to let go.

I can refuse to let go of my sufferings.

But why would I resist the Infinite Gift (who gives me my being) freely offering Himself to me forever? Such a resistance is not only the ultimate misuse of freedom. It is also the ultimate failure of reason. It is the victory of fear.

I cry out in the darkness, "Where am I? Who am I? Why all this pain?" and the answer is "I am with you. I will lead you. No matter how hard, I am with you!"

I am not given "explanations" about the mysterious depths of my own life. I am given Someone who is worthy of my trust. I need to let Him pick me up and carry me. He will never forsake me.

And He will open my eyes, when the time is right.

Asking For God's "Help"

You're probably wondering what Josefina's gripping hand has to do with God's help, or the scribes and Pharisees or anything else that the post below might address.

First, let me clarify that this is a reflection posted a week ago in Magnificat.

This is not the "Great Conversion Story" for the month (which I'll reproduce on the blog next month, since it's "St. Patrick") but rather a daily reflection, which I also have in the magazine from time to time.

Many people seemed to appreciate it when it came up last week, so I thought I would reproduce it here. If you read all the way through, the graphic might reveal its meaning. (Even though Jojo is older than the child indicated, she is not above throwing a tantrum... and she is certainly looked upon with love.)

Remaining in His Hands

Yesterday we began the season of Lent 2015. We seek conversion, to turn away from our sins, to practice self-denial and charity, to pay attention to God.

We need this school in which we learn obedience to God. To listen, to open up, to follow God and to give Him space, to recognize our emptiness and offer it to Him so that He can fill us.

Obedience to God really is the easy yoke (even though it often doesn't seem that way). The reality of "God's will" is the love of our Father, and His gentle hands guiding us toward Him and protecting us from harm.

What do we achieve by escaping from His hands? Where are we going to go?

The Lord is merciful. He doesn't want us to run forever and get nowhere. He wants us to remain on the narrow path that He is crafting for us with His loving hands.

It is a narrow path, because it is the particular love that He has for each one of us, that corresponds to the unique personality that each of us possesses.

Each one of us is a person. Unrepeatable. Unique. Loved.

We are so precious and so profound: we do not know how dear and how deep we are, because we do not really know ourselves.

God knows us. His will is His wisdom and love for each one of us. He knows what is good for us, what will bring us joy.

Let us remain in His hands.

Embracing God's Will With Joy... And Even a Few Laughs!

Donkeys have no sense of humor, especially wooden donkeys. But
human beings do. And I need a pic so I can post this to Pinterest. :)

"I want to do the will of God."

Really? Perhaps that's true, or has begun to be true, after 52 years of life.

It's about time. The hairs... they are getting even more gray, no?

Even so, "wanting to do God's will" remains an intention that I still don't manage to sustain, or even remember, through much of the day.

I know that "doing God's will" is not an abdication of my humanity, but -- on the contrary -- it is the path to the realization of my true self, created in the image of Infinite Love and unable to be free and happy with anything less. The "will of God" -- His wisdom, goodness, and love for me -- is what awakens my freedom, draws me, encourages me, whispers within my heart that fulfillment in this Love is possible.

Indeed, it is a promise.

I think, however, that in order to "do" God's will, I have to "want" more. I must ask for the grace to embrace His will -- to let Him embrace me with the grace that shows the beauty of His love while also raising me up to His measure, which is beyond all things, incomprehensible, and that opens up a path so often unfamiliar and "strange" in its ways.

Your ways are not my ways, O Lord.

At the same time, "Your ways" are the only ways in which my heart hears the echo of the promise, and finally comes to rest forever in the Love for which it cries out in every moment.

The Mystery is revealed and comes to dwell with us, not to cease being Mystery, but to accompany us, to be our companion, to dwell in the very stuff of our lives and give Himself through it.

So, what does it mean to "embrace the will of God?"

It means -- by God's grace -- to rejoice, to have gratitude, to affirm the reality of this moment... fully, with complete trust, without running away. It means to embrace my circumstances with their joys and possibilities and disappointments and frustrations and sufferings in the conviction that these circumstances have been shaped by the mystery of God's love, that He is with me in and through it all, that He is giving Himself to me and opening me up to be able to receive Him more.

I don't think I do that very often. I don't know that I ever do it. But I can't do it by my own power. He has come into the world to give me the transfiguration of humanity and the energy of love that makes this possible. He has united Himself with my life because He wants to heal me and raise me up to share in His life, to give me the gift that enables me to receive Him, the One who is Gift.

So I must take this heart of mine that cries out for Him, that longs for Him and begs for Him, that is already a total need for Him, and I must ask Him to enable me to embrace His will, to love the One who loves me and even to love the ways He loves me. This does not mean to understand His ways, or master them, or even to "feel good" about them. It is to love them; for it is love that "recognizes" and embraces and draws the whole of us beyond ourselves.

We are called to this embrace of God's will, of God's ineffable wisdom and infinite love present in our concrete lives. This embrace is the only thing that can bear up the weight of life. It is not enough to drag life with sadness and fear, for that turns everything into slavery and leads only to disgruntled conformity or desperate revolt.

In the embrace we will find the joy, the "lightness" of the burden -- our hearts and minds will glimpse it, if nothing else, though the miracle of humor. We will learn to laugh, at least a little bit, but even this is a triumph: those little bits of laughter are the buds of wonder. We may not even be aware of them, because humor is small and tender and moves through us swiftly so as to give itself away. We may not notice our own laughter, but it will be a song that will lighten the burdens of others.

The necessity and difficulty of this embrace of God's will -- God's way of loving us -- struggles against the discouragement that turns away from it and the fear and violence that attempt to avoid it or escape from it.

This constitutes the true and profound work of our lives, and it is the real existential drama that underlies the world we live in today.

He Still Comes to Dwell With Us

Christmas is an invitation to faith, trust, and love.

In our world that is so violent and selfish, that seems so hopeless in so many ways, God still comes to dwell with us.

Christmas calls us to reaffirm our faith in the mystery of the Incarnation, in God’s definitive intervention into the story of the human race; God making Himself present in the midst of human cruelty, barbarism, blindness, idolatry, and willful ignorance of His compassion and love.

Sometimes Christmas can seem a little abstract, as the world seems to go on in the same way as ever, with all of its conflicts and pride and grasping for power.

We also don't seem to change much. Our lives are still a mess. We've spent another year going around in circles, seeking our own satisfaction, accumulating new grievances, complaining, gossiping, screwing up the relationships that matter most to us, hurting the people we love.

And now it's Christmas and we stress out over gifts and food, and then we go to church and kneel before the infant Jesus and maybe it strikes us:

"Gosh, I have to admit that God is just not very important in my life. For me, being a religious person means regarding God as the Cosmic Policeman. I try not to disobey the rules. I respect Him. But I live my own life, and, frankly, I'm more comfortable when He's not around. I pray: 'Dear God, I'll be good. Okay? Protect me. Give me the stuff I need. And give me some goodies too, some nice stuff. And then leave me alone. Let me have some fun. Please?'"

But who are we talking to? A baby.

Doesn't that surprise us? We pray to God and gaze upon the image of a baby. Not because we thought it would be a good idea to represent God as a baby, but because God really became a baby.

We didn't make this up. It happened. God came into the world. He made Himself "small" so that He could enter into our lives. 

What does this mean for us? We can only grasp this by faith. We can only live the reality of this by trust and love. Let us ask the Lord to stir up this faith, trust, and love in our hearts.

If we let God into our hearts -- the God who has become so small for our sake -- we will begin to discover what this is all about. God has come to us. God has given everything. He has poured Himself out in Love. He can do this because He is Love.

And He has come to be the One who accompanies us in our misery and leads us out and beyond all of it. The fullness of the revelation of God’s love is mercy.

This baby is God's mercy. The God who is Love wants to be close to us, to save us. His name is Jesus.

Jesus is the gift of God’s merciful Love to the world, to restore -- indeed to transform -- human beings into His image and likeness. He is the reason for the joy that calls out to our hearts at Christmas.

He wants to take care of the messes of our lives, to come to us not as a threat to our humanity, but precisely as the One who generates that humanity, who creates love, who creates freedom, who makes me to be me.

The "real me" is created and redeemed in the image and likeness of God. The "real me" is not found in distraction and evasion born of fear, or the graspings of pride. The "real me" is made for freedom, for love, for self-giving in a relationship with the God who is Freedom, Love, Gift, who gives Himself to me -- and with all my brothers and sisters among whom I find Him again, the One who comes to be with me, the One who gives, Jesus, my baby brother.

Let us believe in Him, trust Him, love Him, knowing that all has been accomplished, that in the risen and glorified Jesus and Mary the New Creation has already begun in its fullness.

Meanwhile, let us live our faith in this present age so that we might grow into the fullness of trust and perfect adherence to His mercy, and so that we might witness the gift of God’s love in a world of sin, a world of confusion and violence, a world that is afraid of God, that wants to forget God.

The world strives to live without God, and then groans with the awful anxiety of the darkness, the dread of being alone, the failures and the guilt that cannot be fixed, and the dying without knowing why.

Yet "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son..." and God still loves the world through this irrevocable gift.

The gift is Jesus.

He has come to dwell with us, and He offers Himself to everyone who will receive Him with faith, trust, and love.

Wings of the Wind

"Above the rains You build Your dwelling.
You make the clouds Your chariot,
You walk on the wings of the wind"
(Psalm 104:3).

St. Therese: Drawn By Love

Her sister was reading to her about the happiness of heaven, and Therese said, "That is not what attracts me.... [Rather] it's Love! To love, to be loved, and to return to the earth to make love loved..." (St. Therese of Lisieux, Last Conversations).

There Are No "Coincidences"

God is present in this moment. Whatever the circumstances may be, He is using them as elements of a Person to person dialogue with each one of us.

God became man out of love in order to seek us out; He has personalized the whole vast, apparently random and chance-filled universe. He takes all the multitudes of forces that come together and make up the situation of reality at any given moment, and fashions them -- from all eternity -- into a love song that He wants to sing to each of us personally.

There are no "coincidences" in real life. In the ultimate truth of things, which has to do with their place in God's plan, no event is insignificant; no situation we find ourselves in can be called meaningless, because God in Christ has chosen to dwell in this world, and to shape everything into the possibility to discover Him through love, through joy, through suffering freely embraced, through sharing His mercy.

God has come to us, to dwell in this moment, to consecrate the human concreteness of this moment so that it becomes a gesture of His love. He comes to dwell with us; He takes on a human heart so as to accompany each of us and to gather us to Himself.

He comes to us and draws close to us in the humanity He has assumed in Christ, and asks us to recognize His presence and His transforming mercy even in the most difficult moments of life. This recognition takes shape within us as a genuine response of confidence and love.

Even in its apparent weakness, adherence to the mercy of Christ is the radical form of every truly constructive engagement of life. Through Christ we enter the real world, and we accomplish work that bears enduring fruit.

Saying "Yes" is the Work of Every Day

Everything is grace. Everything is God's gift, expressing His personal love for each of us and His presence within the relationships between us. He is Love. He can only love.

In the Cross He reveals that He is Love and He gives Himself as love.

He shows us that He is totally united to us in our difficulties. Totally united with us. So we don't have to be afraid of anything.

It's hard not to be afraid; but of course, He is with us even in our fear. He has given Himself and gives Himself as present in our lives now through Jesus and His Church.

In the end, we will be amazed when we realize what He has done for each of us. The marvelous truth will be clear: God is the Great Lover, He pours Himself out for each person, as only God can--all the hidden ways will one day be manifest. He gives because He is the Giver, He is Gift.

Of course, a gift needs to be received, and love is only received in a fully personal way by the return of love. We have to say "yes" to God, through our life.

Saying yes to God is the work of every day and every moment. We adhere to Him, day by day, with gratitude and readiness to receive the transforming power of His love. This is the humble, seemingly insignificant but implacable power to take the steps of responsive love from moment to moment.

It is the firm hope that endures in the midst of every tribulation, the hope by which we take the next step as God's light makes it clear to us, saying yes and praying with trust that He will make it possible.

He is Already With Us

God searches deep into the heart of every human person, of every one of us, because he wants to find us and to save us. At this very moment He is already with us in our wretchedness. He is already mysteriously at work. Cry out to Him! Never give up!

Click the link for St. Faustina's prayer: All Humankind Calls Out from the Abyss of its Misery to Your Mercy

His Innermost Secret

"By sending His only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed His innermost secret: God Himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange."

from Catechism of the Catholic Church #221

Offering Our Day to God: What Does That Mean?

O Heart of Jesus, we offer You all our thoughts, words, and actions, our joys, sorrows, and sufferings of this day. We offer You everything.

What is it that we do (or at least desire to do, however forgetful we may be afterward) when we "offer" our day to God? "Offering" involves a fundamental recognition; it entails the affirmation of the reality of things according to that inner secret that constitutes their being and goodness: the fact that they belong-to-Another.

And so we cannot possess things by dominating them and reducing them to our own measure. Our life becomes "offering" when we use and possess and love things in a way that takes them completely seriously, because things are a hymn of rejoicing to the One who makes them be, and the only way to truly love them is to join in that hymn.

The ecstasy of the beauty of things is their giving-back-of-themselves to the One who sustains them and calls them to their own fruition. We offer our day when we join in with the "giving" of things, when we allow their song of rejoicing to enter into our awareness, when our engagement of reality becomes a prayer, a "blessing of the Lord" that gives voice to the hymn of creation: Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord. Praise and exalt Him above all forever!

How does this "offering" extend to love for another person? The greatest gift, the greatest beauty in all of creation is the other person. There is much to be said about this. For now, I can only reflect that in loving other persons I am loving others who, like me, are called to the joys of eternal life. This is where the true identity of every person is found. Every person is created in the image of God and called to share in the likeness of God and the life of God. This unique, sacred, personal vocation to belong to God is at the heart of who each person really is.

When I engage in a relationship with another person, I "offer" that relationship through the recognition that this someone is not primarily a source of satisfaction or utility for me, but someone who has a destiny, who is "for Another." To love a person as offering is to love them for who they truly are, that is, to love them for the sake of that Other and their relationship with that Other. It is to love their destiny.

I Throw Myself Upon His Infinite Mercy

All the events of last week were set within the context of our annual Divine Mercy novena and the celebration of Mercy Sunday. Having journeyed through Lent and the Paschal Triduum, we culminate with the celebration of God's mercy. (Another thing for which we can thank St. John Paul II).

The mercy of God in Jesus Christ is where I find my roots. I don't know where else to stand. Mercy is the creative, forgiving, regenerating love of God beyond all measure. Mercy is the love that gives us what we lack, that empowers us to accomplish what we can't do by ourselves.

Mercy is where I must go, because I am a complete mess as a human being. I'm not happy about that. I want to change (although, frankly, I'm often glad to just be lazy). My love for God is weak. My desire to grow in love is weak. What do I have, really, that I can bring before God in prayer?

Jesus. Every day I pray, "Lord, I throw myself upon your infinite mercy!" After all is said and done, and I find my work and my prayer to be a sorry mixed bag, what's left? Jesus.

God gives Himself. He is the way and the truth and the life. He is my hope for healing and for attaining my destiny. Jesus gives Himself to save me from my sins, and also to give me a participation in the life of God. The life of God! Whoever even thinks about this? Whoever thinks about the fact that Jesus brings not only freedom from sin but also a radical elevation of life to the level of union with God?

Here I am, struggling day by day just to get by, to survive, to tread water in the ocean of my own sanity. And yet I am called to live forever with God. It's difficult even to understand what this means. Do I even want this, really? Yes, I have been created to want this, and yet I live on the surface of myself. I don't know what to do in the end except to throw myself upon the mercy of God.

And this "God" for whom I have been created: who is He? Who is God?

Infinite Giving, Infinite Giftedness and Giving, Infinitely Poured Out: Infinitely, Eternally, Transcending all possible created worlds of limitation and definition such as we have ever known or have ever experienced.

All these words of mine are baby talk; I aim sounds of speech and fall so short. Poor words.

God Is, and God Is Love.

The very inner life of God is love. The One God is a Trinity of Persons. God has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us allow our beloved Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to help us adore this mystery:

"Three Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated" (General Audience for Trinity Sunday, 2009).

Benedict: Following the Hunger for God

Below these reflections, I have reproduced a post from one year ago on "secularization". The problems it addresses are still very much with us.

Pope Benedict knows this very well. He is not quitting in the face of this crisis. Rather, he is resigning his office in order to follow the call to seek God in prayer, to offer the sufferings of his present physical condition in humility and silence before God.

It seems appropriate to revisit a point central to the eight years of Benedict's pontificate, because the secularized world cannot really understand why he has made his decision. A world without God does not understand the value of prayer, and therefore has no understanding of what Benedict means when he says he desires to "continue to serve the Church" by offering himself to God in prayer. Benedict lives a relationship with Christ in the Church, and he is now turning to prayer not simply for "practical" reasons. These constitute some of the circumstances he faces, of course, but at its core his decision is motivated by the conviction that this is the path of his vocation, the next step in a lifetime of hungering for God and seeking to know Him more intimately in an ever deeper personal encounter with Jesus Christ. He knows too that this hidden life is not an escape, but a profound way of entering into a deeper communion with his brothers and sisters, a way of offering himself to Christ in the communion of the Church in the context of his present sufferings, after a long life of dedicated pastoral service.

I am confident that his prayers will sustain his successor so that he can give a strong and attentive witness to the truth about God and His love for us in Jesus Christ--the truth that is everywhere attacked, ignored, or falsified with cheap substitutes.

My "introduction" has turned into a post of its own. Nevertheless, let me present the thoughts of last year, given in the context of the words of the Pope. Here is the post of February 17, 2012, which was called Secularization, Transcendence, and Love:


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Sometimes we throw around terms like "secularism" and "the secularized West." It is important to be precise about what this means. Terms like these are not intended to cast "the secular world" in a negative light. Rather they are intended to express an ideological and practical attitude that limits the human person to the life of this finite world. Pope Benedict XVI explains it very concisely:

"Secularization, which presents itself in cultures by imposing a world and humanity without reference to Transcendence, is invading every aspect of daily life and developing a mentality in which God is effectively absent, wholly or partially, from human life and awareness."

Secularism imprisons the human person within the confines of "the world." Sometimes it restricts itself to the world as human beings immediately perceive it (e.g. materialism). But it can allow for the affirmation of "deeper realities," and for the development of human beings and the universe under the influence of "mysterious" natural powers (e.g. the many kinds of spiritualisms that flourish today, as well as a reductionist view of religion).

Secularism is a proposal of life "without reference to Transcendence." The essence of secularism is its effort to smother the deepest reality in the life of every human person, that thirst for the Infinite that shapes every human heart. The "transcendence" that Pope Benedict speaks of here is not just any kind of "going beyond" the surface of things. It is the Beyond-all-things, that Mystery which energizes the human person and is the ultimate goal of every human aspiration. Secularism seeks to suffocate this "restlessness" of the human heart.

It does not forbid a person to be "religious" (provided that "religion" is reduced to a human system, or a set of rules that rest on human contrivance, whether ancient or new). It does not have a problem with "spirituality" as long as the "spirit" remains in the finite prison of its own idealism, or of the occult. Secularism is even compatible with talk about God. But it wants to eliminate the search for God, the hunger for God, and of course, love for God.

Above all, however, secularism cannot abide the amazing fact that the Transcendent God --the Mystery that every human heart yearns for--has entered history and dwells among us in the very midst of our world. In the end, this is why secularism is doomed to fail: because God wills to make Himself known, because He loves us. He loves every human person, even the most determined secularists who appear to have forgotten all about Him.

The witness to Jesus Christ as God's loving gift of Himself is difficult in our secularized culture. But let us never forget that His grace is at work.