Beginning to Pray

Christ's Invitation: Heaven in Faith Series

2012-01-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

"Remain in Me" this is Christ's invitation to us come what come may in our lives. We can remain in Him because He remains with us. No matter what happens, He never abandons us. He quietly waits for us even in those places in our hearts which are hostile to Him. He has won the right to do this by his death of the Cross - and his love is stronger than death, stronger than our misery, greater than our hostility to God. It is by his love than even in our failures - especially in our failures - we find Him in the most wonderful ways. In this reflection on Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity we consider these words of Jesus and how if we are faithful to cleaving to Him in faith, to being mindful of Him throughout the day, pondering his beautiful presence, He is able lead us deep into the abyss of his Mercy, deep into the love of the Father. Please click here to listen to the podcast.

Liturgy and the Discipline of the Christian Life

2012-01-21T18:13:00.001-07:00

The Society of Catholic Liturgy meets this week in St. Louis and for information click here. There will be a lot of wonderful presentations and we are especially glad to have his Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke give our keynote address. The theme is the Liturgy and Asceticism. If you cannot come, please join us in prayer. This is part of my presentation.

High atop the Carthusian Mountians overlooking Grenoble, France, out of the silent darkness hidden voices rise, chanting psalms from memory, feebly making present for a few moments a sign of the resounding praise eternally offered at the Throne of the Lamb. In the movie, Into Great Silence, the camera focuses in on a vigil lamp burning in the sanctuary of the chapel of the Grande Chartreuse. The frail flickering light suggests what the discipline of prayer is in the Church and at the same time what the presence of Christ in the Church appears to be to the world. At this hour and in the icy harsh environment in which they live, we cannot really say how consciously aware the monks are of all that is going on in this liturgy. They are vulnerable – vulnerable to the cold, to the dark, to the silence, to the loneliness and to God. They hope in the Bridegroom. They await His coming. And, they know their hope will not be disappointed. As they chant, the Carthusians surrender to something beyond their awareness, to a mystery greater than what they are able to really know. Their liturgy is enveloped in great silence, a silence pregnant with God’s hidden presence, a silence that waits for their voices and a silence that continues their prayers long after their own words have ended.

Whatever their understanding, whatever their consciousness about what they are doing, they eloquently witness to the mystical prayer of the Church at the heart of the liturgy. If we were to ask how these contemplatives are able to pray this way, nothing of the art, architecture, preaching, chanting or liturgical practices suffices for an explanation. In fact, all these things are merely the fruit of something much deeper. What permeates their liturgies with such prayerfulness is their austere discipline of life, an asceticism they take with them into the liturgy. We are confronted with their continual faith filled effort at prayerfulness as that which allows their silence to be filled with the power of God’s Word.

Many pastoral initiatives have been taken up to render the liturgy more intelligible with the hopes of instilling a more deliberately conscious participation. But is this kind of participation what liturgical renewal is really all about? St. John of the Cross’s doctrine on ascetical practices when applied to liturgical participation indicates an even fuller and more active form of participation than we might imagine if we limit our concept of participation to only those activities of which we are conscious. His doctrine helps explain the Carthusian liturgy, why it is so intense and real. There is a deeper participation in Christ’s priestly prayer, in his work of redemption, an intense participation that extends beyond the vague light of our conscious awareness. It is the realm of supernatural faith where yearnings of love lead our understanding to places with which it is totally unfamiliar. It is a theological habit of mind which unceasingly seeks God in complete trust and surrender to the saving presence of the Risen Lord.

In St. John of the Cross, the ascetical discipline of the Christian life is ordered what he calls the Dark Night. Just like the Carthusian’s vigil suggests, he sees in this dark night all kinds of encounters with Christ which exceed one’s own conscious awareness. It is not about anything we can experience. It is about being completely vulnerable to the Lord. If you have ever held the hand of a loved one struggling to pray in the grip of death, you know exactly what he is suggesting. That faith filled but agonizing silence is raised up by an aching desire to see the face of God. It is so deep, so heartrending, so solemn. Yet the one offering this prayer is barely aware of what he does. If he questions why the Bridegroom is delayed, he also knows that his hope will not disappoint. Similarly, the Carmelite Master describes a secret search of lovers one for the other in which heart-piercing glances and wounding touches are fruitfully exchanged for the salvation of the world. So important are such encounters for spiritual maturity, this Doctor of the Church orders his whole ascetical doctrine to them. Liturgical asceticism, the mental prayer we offer during the liturgy, is ordered to these encounters with Christ in the night of faith -- it is this kind of faith above all that will renew the liturgy.

Elisabeth of the Trinity - Heaven in Faith Series

2012-01-14T13:02:00.001-07:00

In the effort to begin to pray, I have found the writings of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity to be an invaluable resource. She loved the contemplative life, a way of life lived by love, for love and in love with God. This is the life of heaven, the life we are meant to live for all eternity and which we have access to even now by faith. Her mission is to help souls get out of their self-occupation and enter into a loving silence to meet the Lord. Her writings are filled with the fruits of her own intense search for God especially carried out in the painful places of her heart and her overwhelming gratitude for what Christ crucified was accomplishing in her life. Her short life ended at the threshold of the 20th Century but the spiritual message of the Mystic of Dijon continues to shine like a beacon in these dark times.

In the final months of her life, she wrote her sister Marguerite, a mother of two young children encouraging her to live a contemplative life right in the midst of her busy household. These writings include a ten-day retreat for her sister now entitled Heaven in Faith. Each day of the retreat offers two prayerful reflections - one to be read in the morning and the other in the evening. Each meditation is filled with beautiful theological truths arranged to encourage mental prayer, that contemplative silence in which we lift up our hearts to the Lord so that He can envelope us in his love and establish us in his peace.

Kris McGregor of Discerning Hearts Radio contacted me to see whether we might be able help others experience Heaven in Faith through offering theological reflections on each of the prayers of the retreat. She skillfully guides the conversation with thoughtful questions while actress Miriam Gutierrez recites the texts providing the voice of Blessed Elisabeth. The first of these shows is now available here on Discerning Hearts.

Following the Star

2012-01-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Epiphany is a celebration of the manifestation of the Lord to the whole world. Pope St. Leo says it is the day that Abraham saw and longed to see. This celebration includes the mystery of a radiant star whose mysterious light draws pilgrims from afar. It is a light that shows, discloses and reveals where those who seek the Lord might find him. The radiant splendor of this light is the source of jubilation for those who find it: "Behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was. They were overjoyed at seeing the star" Mt 2:9 -10.

What did the Magi from the East mean when they explained, "We saw his star rising and have come to do him homage" Mt 2:2? Were these Gentiles wise because they knew the Scriptures and prayed over its meaning? These astrologers seem familiar with the the ancient oracle of Balaam, "A star shall come forth from Jacob" Nm 24:17.

These Persians of the priestly caste were part of prophecy, witnesses that what was once promised was now being fulfilled, "Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you." As they followed the star, they came to the conviction that the hope of the Gentiles rested with the newborn King of Israel, "Nations shall walk to your light and kings will come to your dawning radiance." "Bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the Lord" they experienced for themselves how "The Lord will be your light forever" Isaiah 60:1, 3, 6, and 19.

The light these travelers saw was like the light St. John describes in the Apocalypse, "The city had no need for sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and to it the kings of the earth will bring their treasure" Rev. 21:23 and 24. So important is this manifestation of glory that the Evangelist indicates this mystery at the very beginning of his Gospel, "In Him was life, and this life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it" John 1:4-5. This saving glory and this guiding light is found by following the Lord in faith, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life" John 8:12.

The Star is connected to the Word disclosed in the words of Sacred Scripture. Those who want to find this Star for themselves must search the Scriptures like the Magi searched the heavens. As St. Maximus the Confessor explains, "A star glitters by day in the East and leads the wise men to the place where the incarnate Word lies, to who that the Word, contained in the Law and Prophets, surpasses in a mystical way knowledge derived from the senses and to lead the Gentiles to the full light of knowledge. For surely the word of the Law and Prophets when it is understood with faith is like a star which leads those who are called by the power of grace in accordance with his decree to recognize the Word incarnate."

This search, this prayer imbued gaze on the Scriptures, this lectio divina is worth the effort. The Light of this Word brings peace and is transforming glory for those who gaze on it. St. Augustine encourages, "The Lord of hosts is himself the King of Glory. He will transform us and show us his face, and we shall be saved; all our longing will be fulfilled, all our desires satisfied."

In the encounter with Christ this start establishes us in, the soul falls in love with the Lord in deeper ways and is moved to a loved filled adoration of the immensity of God and the greatness of his mercy. The stillness and peace which brilliant radiance of the Word envelops the soul is so great, mystics like Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity are moved by this splendor to cry out in prayer, "I want to gaze on You always and remain in Your great light. O my beloved Star, so fascinate me that I may not withdraw from Your radiance."

Christ and the Confidence that Comes from the Holy Spirit

2012-01-02T21:03:00.001-07:00

Christ baptizes in the power of the Holy Spirit and his fire animates the Christian life with hope. The Holy Spirit who moved over the waters of creation, who overshadowed the Virgin Mary, who descended on Christ at his Baptism, who carried the Crucified's last wordless cry for our sake from the depths of his heart and into the Heart of the Father, who animates the Risen Body of Christ and who burns in the hearts of the apostles and the martyrs; He is the source of a hope so great no power in the heavens above or on the earth below can overcome it.

This hope conceived by the Holy Spirit makes sense of all the questions that riddle the effort to really live. It spouts in the face that restless longing which can find no lasting peace in this world. It rises against the burden of guilt that weighs down in shackles of all kinds of self preoccupation and escapism. It stands firm before the doom of death which hangs over all that is good, noble and true in frail humanity. This hope is rooted in the truth about the mystery of man because it is rooted in the mystery of the Son of God become the son of Mary. He who freely gave Himself for our sake reveals the truth about human dignity and the greatness of the calling with which it is entrusted.

The primordial riddles running through this present moment are all of them answered anew by the risen presence of Word made Flesh who is the source of the Holy Spirit. The Fire of God, who the Light that shines in our darkness communicates, produces a superhuman confidence which does not fear conversion. The soil of our humanity is cultivated with supernatural power and our mortal existence made to flower with the fruit of divine life.

Christ was born in the flesh so that we might born in the Holy Spirit to live life to the full. The Fountain of Life from whom the Lord and Giver of Life flows, He longs for the Father's work of love begun in us to be brought to completion. His Spirit-baptizing presence--born into our lowliness, crucified by our misery, and raising our humanity on high by the power of God--mysteriously opens up the freedom needed to fully give one's life as a gift to God, to fill every moment of it with as much love as possible.

Trials, hardship, persecutions, renunciations, temptations, and sacrifices only extend and deepen the unfolding frontiers of this holy freedom, this fullness of life, this life lived by love. Such is the invincible God-given confidence of the baptized. They who have received the Gift of the Holy Spirit are continually invited to manifest this supernatural trust in God in ever more profound ways even in the face of death itself. When they welcome the Holy Spirit and obediently avail themselves to the work He accomplishes in them, they become living signs of what total trust in the Lord's presence can do and they bear witness that not even death can steal the life that that is given for the sake of God.

The Son of Mary - Cause of our Joy

2011-12-29T17:40:00.000-07:00

What Child is this? When we look to the Babe, the son of Mary, we behold the illuminating warmth of the Father's heart in the dark coldness of our fragile existence. Christian contemplation clings to this Light which darkness cannot overcome. The radiant Star which draws us through nights, shadows and voids we do not understand, He Himself is the way to the heavenly homeland into which the Father yearns to welcome us.

If we have not yet allowed ourselves to be completely captivated by the King who has come for us in such great power, ask now to be captivated by the splendor of his glory. If we have not yet accepted the poverty of our plight which moved the Savior to make Himself vulnerable to our hostile world, ask now to be made rich by the God who humbled Himself unto death. If we have yet to glimpse the great ocean of mercy flowing from the Cross, be bold to beg for his blood in which we behold the invincible power of his holiness.

Choirs of angels invite us to welcome the inestimable gift of his loving presence. Now is the time to go into our hearts and gaze on the God who reveals Himself as a vulnerable infant. This baptismal plunge into the inexhaustible riches of Christ opens up the pilgrimage of faith – this even for those whose physical trials and spiritual hardships are so intense the way forward in love seems impossible to will or discern. God has not lost his hope in us so we always have new reasons to hope in Him.

Welcoming the Word made flesh, the very Truth of God revealed in our humanity, goes beyond a mere intellectual assent to some religious fantasy or any other pious invention of mere imagination. It is much more than a sensation which makes us feel spiritual. To welcome our Savior is to embrace the power of Christ to deliver us from sin. It is devotion rooted in reality, established in the Truth. Such hospitality demands intense struggles with falsehood which strengthen our confidence in Him. We will fall but no failure can diminish our hope - for the substance of our hope is certain.

We will make mistakes but his love will move us to conversion again and rescue us from the ocean of pride which wants to engulf us. We will feel annoyed and frustrated, but his patience and fortitude are like great waves and currents to buoy us up. Because we have been loved unto the end, we always have new reasons to believe in love and live by love. Truth Himself has taken on flesh that we might know and embrace this freedom.

All of this cause of our joy is accessible to us because He allowed himself to be vulnerable and completely reliant on our broken humanity in a manner that defies all comprehension. The God who weeps as a baby is discovered by the heart who says yes to the gift of divine joy. This peculiar paradox is an encounter of humanity and divinity, life and death, good and evil, poverty and riches, condemnation and forgiveness, misery and mercy, suffering and consolation. The conflict of these extremes are only resolved by an adoration of the heart, a loving movement into the mystery of the Word become flesh dwelling among us.

Hungrily having clung with unquenchable thirst to a mother’s breast in our cold darkness, He teaches us how to cling to Him in faith. He at once envelops us in the abyss of his love when we see how He allowed himself to be wrapped in swaddling clothes. At home with the poor and all those for whom there is no room in society, He leads us to our true home in the bosom of the Trinity. We who have been loved so much only need to allow our hearts to be pierced by the plight of others and humbly attempt to relieve their distress to avail ourselves of the fulness of life which waits to rush into our hearts. What Child is this and what is the merriment He occasions? Christian prayer is rooted in this joy born of sorrow, a joy at the heart of the spiritual battle which is our faith. Merry Christmas! Let nothing you dismay.

The Mystery of a Merry Christmas

2011-12-28T10:56:00.003-07:00

The Christmas Season holds out for us the deepest personal joy. It is a season that begins on Christmas Eve, includes the Solemnity of the Mother of God (New Years Day), Epiphany (Little Christmas) and runs through the Baptism of the Lord (although the ancient observance of this Season once lasted until Candle-mass at the beginning of February). Throughout this time, the beautiful greeting “Merry Christmas” is as much of a challenge as it is a wish. The challenge and the wish have to do with beholding God who has manifested his glory in our flesh. It has to do with attending to the Word which resounds in the silent stillness of our weakness anew. Christmas is a merry exchange in which God embraces human sorrow so that men might know divine joy. It is a prayerful encounter which takes up not only a recalling of ancient events in earthly history but at the same time a loving gaze into one's own depths in the present moment, a moment which is forever carried by this newly unfolding heavenly mystery.

Christmas is about a deeper conversion of life from darkness to light, from the poverty of our pettiness into the inexhaustible riches of God's love. This life changing presence of the Lord is our joy. This hidden strength in the midst of our weakness is our hope.

The Savior is wondrously present to us and reveals his power even in the midst of this life's most difficult trials. He lives in our poverty even when we do not feel him, an ever flowing fount of divine strength in the face of all kinds of hardships which tempt us to disappointment. Yet we have great reason to persevere in prayer even in the face of death, even when we do not believe we can pray, for our hope does not disappoint.

If we renew our dedication to prayer, how can we not be merry to the point of jubilation when our faith makes the Birth of Christ and the whole mystery of the Incarnation manifestly present to us again? And yet, when we are honest with ourselves, our joy is not nearly as complete as it ought to be. The Word become flesh speaks as the Gospel is proclaimed but we do not take the time to hear. The Bread of Life laid in a manger feeds us with true spiritual food but we do not make it our life's priority to eat. Instead, we are constantly pulled into all kinds of indulgent self-occupations, prideful self-righteousness, and at the same time despairing self-condemnation. We must be vigilant lest the glitter and noise of our brokenness rob us of the joy we ought to have in Emmanuel, God-with-us.

The merriment of Christmas is his sacred presence, an astonishing presence which He has pledged to us forever. Hidden in the poverty of our work-a-day existence is a superabundant fullness of life, love and communion which is ready to be a manifest source of infallible personal joy -- if we seek Him in faith. To accept the true meaning of “Merry Christmas” requires a humble and determined effort to attend, to listen, to search, to ponder, to meditate, to wonder, to adore, and to fight for his wondrous presence in our lives, in our families and in our communities.

Merry Christmas! The God-child is born unto us: a new morning dawning on our lives, higher than our thoughts and deeper than our desires. Shining in our darkness and resounding in our silence the Word has become flesh - and death cannot overcome Him. There is a Holy Fire in the night, a radiant Star whose hope filled rays illumine an inestimable mystery entrusted to us, a mystery beyond all telling, a wonder far beyond our ability to imagine or understand. A fulfillment of all desires surpassing every promise, an overwhelming rush of divine tenderness, an enveloping comfort which surpasses the sorrow of our our afflictions, and a more than hoped for answer to life’s most painful questions: all of this is as present and as accessible in this present moment as a newborn wrapped in swaddling clothes. Christ dwells with us now as then proclaimed by angels, despised by the powerful, sought by the wise, and adored by the poor.

Hearing the Call of the Bridegroom

2011-12-21T19:55:00.001-07:00

"Let me see you, let me hear your voice." These final days of Advent lift our hearts to the coming of Christ and are meant to move us to pray How can we not make prayer part of our lives when we consider what it means that Word of the Father came in history and what it means that Jesus continues to come to us in mystery? To help us feel this in our souls, to help us raise our hearts before this great truth, to nourish us with the sweetness of what God has revealed, our liturgy includes readings from the great love poem - the Canticle of Canticles. In this poem, the Bride calls us to listen to the Bridegroom and to feel the joy of seeing Him gazing at us. And for his part, the Bridegroom of Advent longs to find us, to see us and to hear our voices. God longs for us to pray.

"Arise my beloved!" This is what God asks of us to prepare for Christmas. Who is it who calls us his beloved and who commands us in love to rise up? We cannot know until we enter the silence of prayer for our own self. Have you allowed silence to be part of your Advent Season? Do you hear Him calling to you? Do you see Him gazing at you? Why not seek him now? Why not take this moment to listen for his voice?

He the one who comes to us in our poverty, in dark stillness, in sacred silence. As vulnerable as a baby, descends into our hostile world so that we might ascend with him into heaven's eternal love. He who cannot find a place to lay his head, He for whom there is no room in this world, this Pilgrim God longs to lead us to the place prepared for us from all eternity, our true heavenly homeland, the bosom of the Holy Trinity.

This Child who comes to us does not come as a avatar who merely appears in our likeness - the Image of the Invisible God embraces our life, drinks in our existence and makes it his very own. His first cries in the manager reached their climax on the Cross: cries of prayer, cries in the face of our distress and misery, cries for love. Have you allowed this holy cry to reverberate in the hollows of your heart? By his cry into our world, this Son of Man and the only begotten Son of God, this Son of Mary and Son of the Father, He empties himself into our existence, empties Himself of his Divine Life. Why does He empty Himself and humble Himself? He pours Himself out in love into our lives holding nothing back to show us our dignity, what it means to be fully human and fully alive, what it means to live by love, to live like God, and at the same time gives Himself in love to fill us with the fullness of life so that we might embrace his very being, drink his very existence and make his life our very own.

His love for us is passionate, stronger than death: a love nothing but love alone can quench. More than any bridegroom this world has ever known, He yearns for our love and longs to enter our world anew - but He through whom the heavens and earth were brought forth waits for us. He holds his divine breath like He held his breath waiting the fiat of the Virgin. He longs to fill the world with his Holy Spirit and to renew his whole mystery anew in our lives, in our time, in our families, in our culture, in our society, today. Yet He has made his plan dependent on our saying "yes", on our feeble "fiat." He counts on our prayers more than we allow our prayers count on Him. The Word listens attentively for our quiet voice even has the heavens and the earth resound with the cries of the Divine Infant

What does our true Bridegroom cry out and what does He yearn for this Christmas? He cries for heartfelt prayer washed in tears of contrition and gratitude, bowed in humble adoration, ready to boldly say yes to his presence, generous and eager to welcome his love. The words of the Word of God reveal this cry, "Let me see you, let me hear your voice." (Song of Songs 2:14). .

The Foolishness of God in St. John of the Cross

2011-12-13T10:11:00.002-07:00

"The soul that walks in love neither tires others nor grows tired." St. John of the Cross is a saint passionate about love to the point of foolishness in the eyes of the world. But this foolishness is a family trait. Gonzalo, his father, left everything out of love for Catalina, his mother and Gonzalo's brothers despised him as a fool for love. The friendship of Gonzalo and Catalina, their holy marriage, was filled with the radiant beauty of what it means to really live. True love is never half-way. It never grows tired in its devotion.   For someone living by love, besides the beloved everything else is rubbish. Real love fears no sacrifice and is ready for every hardship. His father would die in destitution and yet his widowed mother never lost hope. They were rich in love, and in the evening of our lives, nothing else really matters. Their home was held together through every hardship and disappointment by living faith, a faith alive with love. This love, this hope and this faith formed the soul of a future saint.

John of the Cross was a fool for love like his parents, and in his foolishness lived life to the full just as they did. Like his father he too was impassioned by love's yearnings and in that passion found courage to make every sacrifice for the one he loved.  The only difference between father and son was that for John of the Cross his beloved was God alone. God's love radiates from his poetry and evokes urgent desire, profound peace and uncontainable jubilation. Fired up with love, driven by love, given over to love, friendship with God was his life's priority and a zeal to lead others into this same divine friendhsip burns throughout his writings. He chose poverty and a disciplined life so that he would have the freedom to love. This is why he embraced the the hungry, the sick and the dying. It is why he made himself radically available to the spiritually poor as well.  Something of the foolishness of God lives in St. John of the Cross's foolishness for love.

If someone were to ask what made his love for God so intense, at least part of the answer must include his devotion to prayer and the Word of God. He memorized the Scriptures and loved to comment on them, especially the Song of Songs. He loved silence and he loved to search for the Lord in the silence of his own heart. It was in the silence of his heart that he heard the Lord speak to him, "The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul."

Understanding the yearnings of love which moved in his soul provides insight into his friendship with Teresa of Avila, his zeal for the reform of Carmel and his fierce fortitude when imprisoned in Toledo. It explains why hundreds of the faithful sought him out for spiritual direction and why he would walk for miles to hear confessions. It sheds light on why he enjoyed camping in the wilderness and solitude in the countryside.    If he demanded rigor in religion, the friars he formed were gratefully loyal to him because his devotion was contagious. At the same time, he was so rooted in love that he really did not care what others thought of him or whether those who were closest to him treated him poorly -- although he always cared about them and would sacrifice anything to make sure they knew they were loved.  After his miraculous escape from the harsh torments he suffered in prison, he was asked about his experience. His words were washed with wisdom, "Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love."

A Voice Calling Out for Conversion Driven Theology

2011-12-10T21:40:00.001-07:00

The Precursor demanded conversion of life because he wanted the Truth to be welcomed in the hearts of men. Those who set themselves on the pathway toward spiritual maturity with contrite spirits and vigilant hope in the Lord know this conversion. This is a turning away from darkness and shame. It is a turning towards the light, towards complete authenticity, to real simplicity of heart. The voice of the Lord converses which such a soul in his conscience, setting afire his inner sanctuary, guiding him deeper and deeper into his own illuminated humanity. Duplicity is too painful to maintain before this truth. One is driven by the need to rectify his life, to straighten out the crooked pathways of his heart, and to make restitution to those he has harmed no matter the price or humiliation. This conversion turns us away from selfishness and sobers us about the games we play. Lust for things is renounced and the drive to satisfy bloated appetites is checked. Tears of regret flow over time wasted on silly diversions and squandered opportunities. Gratitude for the time that remains springs from the heart. One renews his commitment to the sacred bonds in which the mystery of one's life unfolds. How short and fragile the gift of life is - there is not a moment to waste if we are to really love those God has entrusted to us!

Conversion flows from and leads to prayer. One struck to the heart by his own sinfulness and need for mercy prostrates before the mystery of God's overwhelming holiness to humbly accept his place. Contrition filled adoration blankets the heart. Such a soul discovers the heartbreaking beauty of silence where God holds his Divine Breath waiting to be recognized by a cry of the heart. Such silence is the wilderness where the Precursor's cry still echoes: this is the silence of Advent. The Christian who has entered deep into this silence is ready to profoundly welcome the Word made flesh, to encounter Christ on a deeper level.

William of St. Thierry, disciple of St. Bernard, describes a deep theology which is not at the disposal of the thinker, but rather a gift for which one prepares with this whole life. It is a gift enjoyed by the spiritually mature who have freed themselves of childish attachments, anxieties, and idleness. Such a person has learned to distinguish God from the works of God, and realizes that as noble and necessary as the works of God are, they do not deserve the devotion of one's heart. The heart is made for God, to be given to Him directly or through those He entrusts to us. The spiritually mature live by such love and because they live in this way, they are prepared for a deep kind of prayer, a profound kind of theology, a contemplation that takes up the heights and depths of our humanity, continually transforming all of our activity from one horizon to the other, unifying thoughts and affections into an ever deeper existence of love -- an existence rooted in an ever deeper encounter with the Lord:

The Spirit of Life at once infuses himself by way of love and gives life to everything. He lends his assistance to human weakness in prayer, in meditation, and in study. Suddenly the memory becomes wisdom and tastes the good things of the Lord. At the same moment, the thoughts to which the good things of God give rise are brought to the intellect to be formed into affections. And then worthy thoughts are entertained of God, if indeed the word "thought" is correct. There is only awareness of God's abundant sweetness. This awareness leads to exultation, jubilation and a true encounter with the Lord in goodness on the part of the man who has sought him in simplicity of heart.

The Golden Epistle, #249-250

The Immaculate Conception

2011-12-08T14:58:00.001-07:00

We Catholic Christians believe that the Mother of God was conceived without sin because it deepens our confidence that all things are possible for God. This is a luminous feast in the midst of the dark days of winter. In what should be a season of hope, so many are weighed down by discouragement. The heart needs reason to hope. Here, what we believe about the Immaculate Conception contains the substance of our hope and helps us find encouragement to persevere in our conversion to Christ.

At the moment of Mary’s conception, in the primordial sacrament of married love, the grace of Christ reached into history to preserve his Mother from the law of sin. In that instant of love and life, an ancient curse was lifted, the futility under which all of creation struggled was relieved, and the original splendor of humanity peaked out.

Marriage is part of this mystery. The sacred character of this primordial institution is revealed in this proposition of our faith. No mere legal arrangement, marriage - so maligned and so betrayed in our culture - is holy and so is the conjugal love it safeguards. The vowed indissoluble friendship of married love lived faithfully out of devotion to God and to one another is a wellspring from which God flows into humanity. In the case of Mary's parents, in their exchange of hearts, in the kiss and embrace their friendship knew, carried by grace and sustained by the Almighty Hand of God, new life was permitted to enter into our dying world. In that moment, the tender affections of marriage attained their greatest accomplishment. The inestimable gift of self which marriage originally enjoyed but rejected was given another chance, and in that gift a new life was conceived with the fullness of life. A beatitude that had been lost to human experience was restored - and exceeded. In Mary, the Immaculate Conception, we have a sign of the victory of Christ over the power of sin, a sign raised up on high from the fruit of married love's conjugal embrace, a sign of the culture of life and civilization of love which lies open if we will return again to God.

This mystery of new life at work in the conception of Mary is a singular instance of God accomplishing his hidden purpose with unanticipated power. In her, the weary world received the first inkling of the splendor of the Lords' faithfulness to his promises. Where no eye could see, a hidden foretaste of a deliverance about to dawn in the world began to unfold. For the first time, we experienced - unknowingly - the first glimmer of the fullness of grace Christ's death on the Cross won for us. The result? Humanity on fire with the obedient love of the Holy Spirit in a mother's womb. In the conception of Mary there is a disclosure of God's unfathomable love for humanity, the greatness of married love, and the renewal of the gift of life. The mystery of the Immaculate Conception is meant to capture the heart in this radiant beauty, a hidden glory accessible only to the eyes of faith.

Since it is good for us to be bathed in the splendors of this radiance, the Church proposes the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, inviting us to go deep into the hiddeness of our faith, deep in to the divine secret entrusted to us at baptism, deep into the abyss of God’s mercy. To say yes to this sacred truth, to choose to live by it, we open ourselves to the gift of Mary -- her prayers, her purity, her love wait to fill our faith in Jesus. Accordingly, when we dare to believe that the salvific power of Christ saved his own Mother from sin at the moment of her conception, she shines for us like a star in this sea of life, giving us even deeper reasons to be confident as we sail for the safe-harbor of the Lord's infinite love.

Recollection

2011-12-06T20:29:00.001-07:00

To recollect oneself, to collect together the powers of one's soul, this is a beautiful kind of prayer which can be refreshing for the heart. In our hectic world, frequent recourse to such prayer, if only for a few moments, is essential if we are not to forget our true purpose. Normally prayerful reflection on the life of Christ or a Scripture verse or even one's own life in the light of God's love helps the soul enter into this kind of resting attentiveness. Although it entails renouncing self-preoccupation, withdrawing from all kinds of dissipating distractions and silencing the constant monologue of one's own bloated ego, the quiet of Christian recollection is not really an esoteric emptiness. It is not about the attainment of some self-satisfied state of consciousness. Instead, this faith imbued silence is filled with a transforming fullness of the Word. Like the brilliance of heaven illumines the darkness of night, in this kind of prayer eternal Light shines in the dark voids of our existence casting its loving wisdom over the captive mind, a radiance in which we find the truth about God and about ourselves.

In this prayerful silence, the One who embraced the silence of death discloses the heart-piercing depths of his divine love. This is a chastening silence, a humbling silence: this contrite stillness, this grateful quiet, this deep surrender to both holy sorrow and at the same time unimaginable joy. Like the womb of the Virgin Mary, this sacred silence of soul, visited by angels, is pregnant with deep spiritual currents of all that is good, holy and true about our humanity, currents ready to born into irrepressible jubilation.

This silence seeks in the distant frontiers of our innermost being an encounter with the One who has entered an even deeper silence to search for us. He has made his home in the vast wilderness of our hearts. A moment of mutual recognition between the Bridegroom and the soul waits to be realized in this sacred stillness. A sacred banquet is prepared. Christian recollection is not an end in itself, but a threshold - a pathway to a deeper encounter with the Lord, to a mysterious meeting of unimaginable intimacy. This prayerful peace aches with anticipation, a longing for Someone, the hidden fulfillment of all desire. For in this silence of thoughts drenched with God into stillness, the Trinity waits to embrace us, to envelop us in love, to establish us in peace, to catch us up into a foretaste of a life this world cannot hold.

Guarding Interior Silence in our Vigilance

2011-12-02T09:04:00.001-07:00

The spiritually mature long for silence - but such silence does not happen by chance. Out of devotion to Christ, one must carefully order not only the space and time in which he lives, but also take steps to protect his conscience and struggle for purity of heart.  It is difficult work and often it feels like nothing is happening, that it is a waste of time. Yet perservere in your devotion and attention to the Lord in this holy silence.  Silence filled with prayerful expectation is a spiritual place of encountering the Word who seeks us out.

To enter into prayerful silence we must withdraw from exterior and interor noise. This is not an escape -- it is the first step to dealing with reality straight up. This is why monks go to their cells, and it is why we need to make a space in our homes that is dedicated to prayer, a place in our lives where we make prayer our priority daily. This place must be sheltered from exterior noise, from noise like the radio, TV, and computer.  If we are not sheltered from it, such noise drowns us in distractions, and makes us forgetful of the deeper spiritual purpose that the Lord has entrusted to us. But in addition to the noisy world around us, there is an interior racket that comes from the enchanting fantasies we entertain about things or people, fantasies promising satisfication whether physical, emotional or even spiritual.  If this cacophony goes unchecked, we find ourselves powerless against all kinds of irrational tendencies. Unchecked, we suddenly find ourselves sitting in judgment over one another, ourselves and God -- we are such poor judges: blinded by envy, arrogance, and self-pity.

But what happens if for part of the day I renounce a little entertainment?   What happens when I renounce impulses to try to satisfy myself with things, people or food? What if, instead of wasting time judging my neighbor, I spent a little time in silence listening to the Lord?

The ancient monks understood the importance of keeping silence in daily life. They understood that the physical cell in which they dwelt was only meant to be a sign of the interior silence they were meant to keep.  Such silence is vigilant, constantly on the watch for the presence of the Lord who visits our hearts. St. Athanasius in his reflections on the Life of St. Anthony described this spiritual place as an inner mountain of hidden intimacy with God. St. Teresa of Avila described this place of interior encounter with the Lord as a garden filled with flowers of virtue and a castle filled with innumerable rooms of personal encounter.   St. John of the Cross described it as a whole new world with exotic islands just waiting to be explored. William of St. Thierry considered it the inner cell:

The outward cell is the house in which your soul dwells together with your body; the inner cell is your conscience and in that it is God who should dwell with your spirit, He who is more interior to you than all esle within you. The door of the outward enclosure is a sign of the guarded door within you, so that as the bodily seneses are prevented from wandering abroad by the outward enclosure so the inner senses are kept always within their own domain. Love your inner cell then, love your outward cell too, and give to each of them the care which belongs to it. William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, trans. Theodore Berkeley, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications (1971), ##105-106.

Dealing with Sin - A pathway for prayer in Advent

2011-11-30T19:01:00.001-07:00

God wants to help us deal with sin but He waits for us to come to Him, to invite Him, to welcome Him. Advent is a time for doing just that. Opening our hearts to the Lord with contrition filled prayer is the most important thing we can do to prepare for the joy of Christmas. Not to do so is to prefer to live in self-contradiction, a cold dark misery not worthy of human dignity.

To live in sin is a self-contradiction: it is to cleave to a word of doubt in our lives that stands against all that is truly human so that we permeate our culture with death and sew malice in our civilization. We are made to live in the truth with integrity, that spiritual harmony with God, the world and ourselves. Sin contradicts all of this. This absence of love, this misery diminishes our capacity to live with ourselves, the world and God.. To believe this fantasy is to turn in on oneself, fight against oneself, to be consumed in self-occupation. The fantasy proposes that the obedience of love by which we live by love is oppressive; therefore, we should protect ourselves and secure our destiny by our own cleverness and industry.

In the logic of sin, love is not a gift but a tool -- it must be calculated. This project is the opposite of being human, a destiny attained by trust in God alone. Yet this lie is so spell-binding, I cannot free myself from its enchantment by my own power and resources. Stifling, crushing, perverting, defacing, subjecting to futility all that is good, true and beautiful about being human, this lack of interior harmony can become a un-spiritual cacophony. Without the ability to relate in truth, we cannot give the gift of ourselves in love to God, and without God we are unable to give ourselves in love to all those with whom God has blessed us in this brief moment we share together in this world. Made in the image and likeness of God who has entrusted Himself to us, we contradict our existence when limit ourselves to mediocre, insipid substitutes for the love we were made to share together.

This self-contradiction causes guilt. Engaging in various forms of mental hygiene to alleviate guilt does not make the disease go way. No method for meditation or psychological technique can free us from the self-contradiction in which we are trapped. Since all that is natural is subject to the futility of the self-contradiction in which we live, we need a power beyond and above our nature to free us from the misery that enslaves us.

Sin, the cause of guilt, has a horrific social dimension. This this self-contradiction is contagious -- if I do not seek the antidote and I refuse the only medicine that can heal me, it kills not only me personally, but also those I most love, wounding them in ways "I am sorry" can never heal. Brutal, cruel, dehumanizing - this hostility threatens to break hearts, ruin lives, and shatter families. This cancer, this living death, robs us of the capacity to love -- and without this capacity, what are we?

Advent is a time when we deal with the reality of sin in our lives by repentance and faith in Jesus, our Lord. In the face of our self-contradiction, God sent his Son to save us. The Word became flesh and revealed the meaning of our hostility on the Cross. He is the antidote for death and the medicine of immortality. In prayer, we submit our self-contradiction to the Cross, the Sign of Contradiction. In this mystery of divine contradiction – the Word of God who is Love speaks to our lack of love, his mercy overcomes our misery.

Here, the wisdom of Blessed John Paul II is powerful: If we open wide the doors of our hearts to the Redeemer, He pierces our hearts and moves us with saving sorrow. Contrition filled prayer deals with the contradiction of sin and the guilt it causes – this holy sorrow moves us to repent of what we have done and failed to do, to confess our sins, to beg for mercy and to do penance -- which is to live in the truth of what the Lord has done for us, to make straight a pathway in our hearts and to prepare the way for his coming.

Mercy and Advent

2011-11-29T10:11:00.001-07:00

These days of Advent are about preparing a welcome for the Light of Christ who comes to us anew in ever more wonderful ways because of God's great love for us. When He first came it was the poor, the lowly, the foreigner, and the outcasts of society who welcomed Him. He in fact became all these things. But what of the mighty, the proud and the rich? To welcome Him is to say yes to love, especially love in difficult circumstances, when it really counts. Mercy is love in the face of suffering and during Advent we prepare for Christmas through the mercy we show to one another. This means we need to find ways to effectively love one another in the midst of suffering. This can be inconvenient and even painful in all kinds of ways. But Christ crucified is not convenient and his coming in our midst demands that we let go of our other priorities and allow Him to become our priority, especially when He is present in those most in need - the abandoned, the neglected, the despairing, the mourning, the depressed, those suffering all kinds of illnesses and disease, the hungry, the cold. He is there with such as these and comes to us through them-- and being watchful of his coming, staying vigilant, and "making straight a highway for God" means that we must go into the highways and byways, seek out and love these whom God loves, so that his mercy might be revealed, so that He might be welcome among us again.

As a result of Christ's salvific work, man exists on earth with hope of eternal life and holiness. And even though the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ in His cross and resurrection does not abolish temporal suffering from human life, nor free from suffering the whole historical dimension of human existence, it nevertheless throws a new light upon this dimension and upon every suffering: the light of salvation. This is the Light of the Gospel, that is, of the Good News. At the heart of this light is the truth expounded in conversation with Nicodemus: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son."
Blessed John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris #15.

Prayerful Vigilance and Advent

2011-11-27T11:14:00.001-07:00

The coming of the Lord is often imagined as an impending catastrophe in the distant future against which one must gamble, but this is a dangerous fantasy. For those who long for the mercy of the Lord, for those oppressed, for those persecuted, for those rejected, for those despised, for those abandoned, for those who hunger, for those who thirst, for the poor, for the meek and lowly; for all such as these the Day of the Lord will not be a catastrophe but if they cleave to Him in faith, this day will be a eucatastrophe -- a sudden happy ending; unimaginable, unexpected, uncalculable; a victory, a triumph in which every tear is wiped dry and every sorrow consoled, in which at last the personal story entrusted to each of them will be enveloped in joy.

The brief span of this present life is hurtling towards eternity, accelerating at an exponential rate with every instant of our lives. In the twinkling of an eye, when all seems most bleak, when the banality of evil seems to be snuffing out the last light of goodness, in the face of the total antithesis of all that God has promised, in the midst of a world gone crazy with insobriety and anxiety, when it would seem that for which we have most hoped was hoped for in vain -- it is in this instant of love when the Lord will come. It is humanity's great test and it is meant to be the finest hour for each one of us, the moment when the secret meaning of our lives is revealed.
Whether it is the end of time, or the end of our lives, or the countless opportunities we have to die to ourselves and live for Christ each day: this is the trial in which we repay love for love, when we cleave to love because of Him who was crucified by love, when we believe in mercy and practice it because of the mercy we have received. In this trial, the truth about who we really are is waiting to be revealed – for we are so fashioned that unless we are able to give the gift of ourselves in love the way God has entrusted the gift of Himself to us, we never fully become what we are predestined in Christ to be: the praise of God’s glory. And so, we must be vigilantly prayerful that we might recognize the hour of the Lord’s coming and persevere in the truth when the truth is most needed. Anyone who embraces this vigilance constantly discovers foretastes of the eucatastrophe that awaits those whom Christ calls “good and faithful servants.”

The Lord is Coming - Take Him to your Heart

2011-11-22T11:35:00.001-07:00

"Take Him to your heart... keep Him in you as in a sanctuary... live with Him in intimacy" This was advice offered to a new religious sister just beginning her life as a nun. The beauty of this message only fully discloses itself when we consider the author. Dictated while racked in pain, coming in and out of delirium, enduring all kinds of physical, psychological and spiritual hardships, wrestling with even despair itself, these words are her great testament to her hope in Christ, a hope to which she cleaved in the face of everything. In the final weeks of her life, she had become a fiery icon of holiness which gave warmth and enlightenment not just to her community but to everyone who desired to grow in prayer. This nun was Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, the Mystic of Dijon.

Taking Christ to heart is necessary if one is to be faithful in one's service to God. Blessed Elisabeth also exhorted the new sister "to raise" herself up in strength and "to surrender" her whole being to the Lord. The total trust in the Lord haunts these words. We must use our strength to raise ourselves up and not allow ourselves to be bogged down by the anxieties and concerns of this life. Once raised up, we must surrender not just for a moment and not just what is comfortable, but everything to God. Such raising up and surrender is impossible without God - but the Lord himself is our hope. Something in these words apply to every life, no matter how busy or active or frantic. Because to live the Christian life well in whatever our calling we must welcome Jesus into our hearts all the time and never lose sight of Him. This is a matter of interior discipline where we continually turn our thoughts back to the Lord, keeping them all under the "exceedingly great" love of God, "until He consumes you both night and day" (P123, 22 Oct 1906).

To take the Lord to our hearts is to raise up, to surrender and to welcome with all our might the One who comes in love, the One who is Love. If we allow our vision to be raised up by faith, if we allow Him to hold our every thought captive in faith, we begin to see that He constantly comes to us in ever new ways and we glimpse how much He yearns to be greeted in love. Recollection in the silent adoration of our faith holds us in prayerful attentiveness to this divine visitation, this divine invasion of inexhaustible love flooding into our space and time. Such loving vigilance, with its attention raised above the work-a-day world and the claims of bliss echoing in the merely subjectively satisfying, allows Him to begin a new work in our lives. If we are faithful to this, the love of the Lord can consume our whole being, making us into fiery icons of his love.

Holiness is a gift which must be welcomed and fully lived out. It is not the fruit of passivity to the demands of love or of escape from the responsibilities entrusted to us in the brief span of life we have been granted in this world. Sanctity is not attainable by method or technique or any other attempt manipulate God or else raise oneself to His level. It is not the achievement of a lifetime - but rather an obedience unto death. Because the gift of holiness consists in a participation in God's life, it is greater than our natural life and makes a claim on our whole being. But God would never ask so much if He were not going to supply all that we need for such a great undertaking. This is why He entrusts to us his very self - And He comes in the power of the Holy Spirit pulsating, communicating, enveloping, inundating us the "exceedingly great" love revealed on the Cross. We find new courage to take Him to our hearts because He takes us to His heart even more.

The Ladder of Life

2011-11-18T06:52:00.001-07:00

In his treastise on Humility and Pride, St. Bernard provides insight into what it means to persevere in living life to the full. He is commenting on St. Benedict’s Ladder of Humility. In both cases, “the ladder,” an image which Jacob dreamed about and through which the Lord visited him (Gen. 28:12ff), is a metaphor for life.   Humility with its constant struggle against pride makes one capable of living in real communion with God and neighbor, the very communion which characterizes our life in heaven: a communion of love. We are otherwise so locked up in gratifying our big fat egos, we are not free to live, free to share the gift of our self with those whom we are meant to love. What else is hell than being imprisoned in one’s own preoccupations while at the same time perpetually agitated and never at peace with one’s self? Both saints help us see that on the ladder of life one can ascend to hear the voice of God or descend into the lifelessness of sin.

St. Benedict teaches that ascending the Ladder of Humility begins with fear of the Lord and ends with the discovery of a respectful finesse in all of one's relationships.   For him, the heights of living humility involve becoming so at peace with one’s own self that the monk is able to carry himself in all situations with that meekness we find in Christ. Obedience, confession of sin, and perseverance in love through all kinds of trials and humiliations are all the means by which this fullness of life is discovered.

For St. Bernard, pride begins with the way that we look at our brothers and sisters, and it ends in a total rejection of God. Paradoxically, to climb this ladder is to fall out of the heights of humility and to choose a living death. His teaching highlights the important struggle which true interiority and authentic contemplation entail.

St. Bernard writes to monks who have begun to enjoy what it means to live with themselves. Such dwelling within, habitare secum, is possible because of the Divine Indwelling.  The gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts means that the deepest reality about ourselves is not the gravity of our own big fat ego but rather dynamic and loving presence of God himself who keeps us in the orbit of his love. One glimpses the enormity of this gift the more one is able to face his own sinfulness and offer it to God.   It is in our relationship with God, the gift of ourselves to God in response to the gift of himself He has given through Jesus Christ on the Cross, that we discover our true dignity and find ourselves able to live with ourselves.

St. Bernard is keenly aware that the prayerful person tastes a little of this self-knowledge and has begun to rest in the love of the Lord. He is also aware that it is at this moment the contemplative is most vulnerable to spiritual attack. His teaching is a warning: the descent into pride begins when we allow ourselves to be preoccupied with interests that go beyond loving God and being merciful to those entrusted to us. It is possible, even as one begins to really live the Christian life to the full, to become what St. Paul condemns as “a busy body” (1 Timothy 5:13). St. Bernard suggests that this kind of curiosity in the affairs of others is what caused the Fall of the Seraphim and what attaches the Fall of Man to the envy of the devil. Devotion to prayer and being merciful to those God entrusts to us are sure protections from this folly because only through dedicated service to the Lord will we persevere in the life Christ won for us.

The Hope for Every Soul is Love Himself

2011-11-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

Any soul, even laden with sins, captive of its vices, held by its pleasures, imprisoned in its exile, locked up in its body, nailed to its worries, distracted by its concerns, frozen by its fears, struck by manifold sufferings, going from error to error, eaten up by anxiety, ravaged by suspicion and, lastly, according to the prophet, a stranger in a foreign land... every soul, I say, in spite of its damnation and despair, can still find in itself reasons not only to hope for forgiveness and mercy but even to aspire to the wedding feast of the Word: as long as it does not fear to sign a covenant with God, and to place itself with Him under the yoke of love... For the Bridegroom is not only a lover: He is Love. You will say: yes, but is He not also honor? Some affirm this; as to myself, I never read anything of that kind. I have read that God is Love. St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Sermon 83, Song of Songs, as cited by Blaise Arminjon, S.J. in The Cantata of Love: a verse by verse reading of the Song of Songs, translator Nelly Marans, San Francisco: Ignatius Press (1988, reprinted 2005), 346-347.

Classical Education, Contemplation and Wonder

2011-11-11T13:37:00.001-07:00

Classical education is oriented towards the wisdom of contemplation, and because of this, such education opens students up to the possibility of living a wonderful life. It is precisely that we might live life to the full that the Lord came. The life giving quality of classical education is born in the culture of life and civilization of love the blood of Christ once made possible and still makes possible today. It is a kind of education in which human dignity, truth and virtue are integrated to prepare someone for the search for God and in finding Him, to cleave to Him. Through this kind of education we learn like St. Bernard that no matter how much we find Him, there is always more to be sought and in cleaving to Him there is always more to find. Because it so well equipped students for this journey of life, a classical approach to education at one time well served not only Catholic colleges and universities but even elementary schools and high schools as culture enriching institutions. More often than not, whenever classical education was wholesale abandonned, not only the Catholic identity of the institution but also the cultural enrichment it once provided to the broader society was also diminished. What would happen if this kind of education were ever rediscovered?

I am not sure why this approach to education was abandoned to the extent it has been, but any genuine renewal of the Church in America will require an examination of conscience in this regard. Archbishop Chaput suggests that the Catholic witness to the wider culture has been "bleached out" in part because of a growing sense of insecurity in the face of scientific skepticism. Perhaps Catholic educators still find themselves compelled by thinkers like Robert Merton who looked on contemplation as anachronistic and even dangerous for society. Ironically, the spirit of scientific investigation itself should have caused us to question whether contemplation really is as opposed to science and progress as he and many others suggested, and still suggest. Why did we not apply a little skepticism to such skepticism? Why did we not inquire into the biases and assumptions standing under such doubt?

As people of faith, we are too passive in the conversations taking place in the public square. In failing to question the questioners, we allow doubt and ignorance to rob not only us but our children of the rich patrimony our civilization has cultivated. The wisdom of contemplation, to which all good education opens, is worth promoting and in fact vitally needed in the face of the dehumanizing forces unrestrained in our society. The human mind is so great and vast that, besides scientific thought, it stands to reason our intelligence is also ordered to the enjoyment of other kinds of knowledge. There are certain things that science limited to the observation of merely measurable data cannot know and unfathomable mysteries that no verifiable hypothesis can explain away. Indeed, a man has not yet lived if he has never tasted those deeper levels of knowledge which touch what is most noble, true and beautiful about our humanity.

Given the current state of our culture, do we not as educators and people of prayer have a responsibility to reconsider the rich synthesis of knowledge sketched out by great intellectuals like Jacques Maritain or Dietrich von Hildebrand? Rather than narrow-minded doubt, such thinkers not only beautifully magnified the scope of human knowledge, the scope of the truth in which human dignity is rooted, but in contemplating the light of truth they also discovered the living secret to which human wonder is open, a secret so relevant in the face of the dying culture of these dark days. Even now, especially now, when so many are looking for a word of hope, through classical education and contemplation, universities and other educational communities can still help lead students into the discovery that the wonder of life is what makes life wonderful.

The Canonization Process for Elisabeth of the Trinity

2011-11-10T13:51:00.001-07:00

Over the summer, the Archdiocese of Dijon has opened the process for the canonization of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, the Carmelite Mystic of Dijon, France (1880-1906). Blessed John Paul II identified her as a strong influence on his spiritual life at her beatification in 1984. Cardinal Decourtray (at the time Bishop of Dijon) attributed his own healing to her intercession at the time. Centennial celebrations throughout France indicate that many have discovered devotion to the Trinity and deeper contemplative prayer through her life, writings and intercession. For many, her canonization would express and deepen their sense of gratitude to this pianist become nun at the turn of the last century.

Part of the process leading to the declaration of sainthood requires that a second miracle be obtained by her intercession after her beatification. This seems to have happened for a religion teacher dying of Sjogren's Syndrome. Miss Marie-Paul Stevens, while on a pilgrimage to Blessed Elizabeth's convent, in Flavignerot, just outside of Dijon, appears to have been completely cured. Investigation of the miracle is part of the process. Go here for the original report in Italian. For more on the ceremony opening up the cause, see Laudem Gloriae. This same blog also contains great posts on her Feast Day and the Day of her Death.

Elisabeth of the Trinity and the Gift of Prayer

2011-11-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

Elisabeth of the Trinity helps the Church understand that prayer is a gift given by God for the sake of our humanity. It is an encounter with the Trinity - at once profoundly personal and ecclesial. This contemplation changes the way one thinks and lives, but Elisabeth's writings show that we never go beyond the truths safeguarded in sacred doctrine. Instead, her writings suggest that in prayer the truths of our faith are experienced like a symphony and that in this music wonderful hymns of heaven ring. To join this music even for a moment is to realize what Elisabeth of the Trinity discovered. It is to become like her the Praise of Glory, what she believed was her personal vocation before the Lord and is everyone's vocation in different ways. To join such a chorus if even just for a moment in one's busy day - this is to taste what it means to be free, to be fully alive, to live in the truth about one's own self, to catch sight of our heavenly homeland and to find a little rest in the midst of this weary world. Last year, for the memorial of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, I linked some resources about her life. That material can be found here: More about Elisabeth of Dijon.

The Feast of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity

2011-11-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

"I have found my Heaven on earth: since Heaven is God and God is in my soul!" In speaking these words, Blessed Elisabeth, who understood the Christian life in terms of becoming the praise of God's glory, opens up her wonderful vision of the present moment as the nexus in which the purpose of faith, the heart, and the presence of God coincide. In this grace filled moment with which God has entrusted us, eternity is already beginning and progressing in time while Heaven and earth are embracing. In this moment, the heart can find its home in God because God is always ready to make the heart his home in ever new ways. To fully enter into this moment and all the truth it contains, all we need to do is raise our minds and hearts to the Bridegroom who stands at the door and knocks. In her prayers, she begs Him to facinate her - because once our hearts are fixed on the One who has died for us, the Fire of the Holy Spirit transforms us into fiery icons of divine love and the mystery of the Word Incarnate is renewed in our own lives. For those who feel their weakness and are tempted to be discouraged by their failures, the Radiant One waits to be let into our thoughts, into our memories, into our imagination, into our affections so that the glory of God might be revealed, so that like Elisabeth, we too might become the praise of God's glory.

Prayer and Purgatory: Thresholds to Glory

2011-11-01T19:30:00.000-06:00

Purgatory and prayer are both the thresholds to Glory. In both cases, the disciple of the Lord receives purification to live life to the full, to be free, to stand before God and, finally, to see his face. If we are not purified, healed, strengthened and taught how to love, we are not ready for such glory. Prayer is better than purgatory when it comes to this work of grace. It delights the heart of God and more fully reveals his glory when souls allow Him to accomplish this great work in this life. Yet, in our weakness, we, even if we believe, do not always give God the permission He needs to do this work - and God never acts in us without our consent. Because love is constricted by any lack of trust, it is possible and even often the case for those who love God to die without the Lord having been able to bring to completion the work He had begun in them. That is why, although it does not delight Him in the same way, He will also accomplish this work of love after death. By grace, death helps us surrender what we would not surrender in this life. This is what purgatory is - like prayer is in this life, it is a threshold to heaven - just a more difficult one. This doctrine of prayer helps us realize the unimaginable work God is about in those who love him. The doctrine of purgatory helps us understand how, if we are the least bit faithful in opening our lives to Him, He is so much more faithful in completing what He has begun in us.

Much of what happens in purgatory is analogous to what happens in deep prayer -- that is deep prayer and purgatory involve a purifying pathway through death and into glory - both are like a fire, like a surgery, like a contest, and like the preparations for a wedding night.

Remember the man in Mark 9:24 who approaches Jesus about his demon possessed son only to be rebuked for his lack of faith? What Christ reveals to him about his faith increases his faith and he cries out, "I do believe, help my lack of faith!" This prayer is one we must all offer in this life or the next - for this is the state of everyone who approaches the Lord. Our lack of faith must be purified. Any lack of faith, lack of mercy, lack of forgiveness, and selfishness needs to be destroyed -- these are not worthy of heaven and the purification of these things, their destruction by the love of God, is as painful as fire. But in both prayer and purgatory this Fire of Love does not destroy us and the pain it causes is only temporary - because it envelops us with light, love and life. As the flame increases and all that is not worthy of our true nature is destroyed, we are ignited with a greater freedom, a greater desire, and keener insight than we have ever known before. Blessed are those with the courage to face this fire in this life - they already know the freedom that awaits us! At the same time, how can our hearts not be moved to pray by the plight of those who must face this fire after death?

Prayer and purgatory are like going into surgery. There are certain cancerous growths in our hearts that need to be cut out and the wound completely healed if we are to have the spiritual health the joys of heaven demand. If our hearts are not healed before we die, God will not let death stop Him from completely restoring and making whole those who persevered in their faithfulness to Him. To this end, in both prayer and purgatory, the Holy Spirit envelops us with the Father's love just as Christ was enveloped on the Cross - an painful envelopment which is experienced as abandonment. In both cases, this delicate surgery can be very intense and difficult - but Christ, the divine physician, is always Himself the antidote for death and the medicine for immortality. Blessed are those who are docile to treatment the Divine Physician already offers them - the full life of heaven has already begun for them! At the same time, how can we remain indifferent whose healing must be completed after death when our prayers provide them true consolation and in some way quicken this work?

Prayer and purgatory are both like a contest where athletes overcome their weaknesses and awaken their confidence for victory. Only the courageous are admitted into heaven because only the strong of heart are capable of the kind of love heaven demands. Blessed are those who by dedication to prayer and devotion of heart strain with all their might for what lies ahead - they realize in this world the triumph of good in the very face of evil and injustice! At the same time, how can we not pray for those who are too weak after death to stand and worship the Living God when our prayers are a true encouragement?

Heaven is for lovers - not lovers of merely earthly things but lovers of Him whom this earth cannot contain. In heaven, humanity enjoys a communion of everlasting and unceasing friendship with the Bridegroom who has awaited us from all eternity. To live like this we must learn to love like Him. Here, prayer and purgatory are like the preparations for a wedding night where the soul learns to wait for the Beloved at the threshold of an enchanting trysting place - fired by love's yearnings such souls are captivated by love. Those passing through this threshold need our prayers most of all - whether they are still with us in this life or have already embarked on their journey to the Father's house. Blessed are those who seek this night and make it the priority of their heart to wait for the Lord - their whole existence will be permeated with a joy this world cannot contain!

Saints see Christ - Glory Truly Hidden

2011-10-31T21:37:00.000-06:00

Someone once told me that the greatest tragedy in this life is not to become a saint. But what does it mean to be holy? The holy ones of God see his glory - not passively, but ardently and with initiative. To this end, C.S. Lewis offers a beautiful reflection on the glory of the Lord which is a glory vere latitat, a glory truly hidden, accessible only to the life of faith, a heavenly glory that no earthly creature can see unaided or bear alone. This glory is carried by our neighbor - a creature made in the image and likeness of God. The implication of his reflection when we apply it to our question is that being a saint means to be devoted enough, humble enough, vulnerable enough and loving enough to help one's neighbor bear this burden, a burden never meant to be carried alone. To be holy means trusting Christ and allowing the weight of my brother's glory to crush my own pride so that I too might finally learn what it means to be fully human, fully alive:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of theses destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal... Our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ is vere latitat -- the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. Weight of Glory, 15.

That Mysterious Presence of the Lord in Prayer

2011-10-31T00:18:00.000-06:00

St. Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs provide beautiful descriptions of the mysterious presence of the Lord in prayer. Wishing to encourage Christians who find their hearts yearning for God, St. Bernard personally appropriates the words of the Bride from Chapter 2:17, "Return, my Beloved."

St. Bernard was aware that while the Lord is always present to the soul in some way there are also times when He chooses to visit souls that wait for Him with a special intimacy. Those who taste this beautiful presence of God, like St. Bernard, long for it and wish it never to end. At the same time, they also accept that God is sovereign in his love and learn to respect this sovereignty -- even though the absence of the Lord is a very painful reality to endure. In other words, they know that prayer does not produce God's presence but that his mysterious visits produce all kinds of wonderful things in the soul, and so they find the confidence they need to wait for Him.

Does not such a view free us from that excessive and distracting preoccupation with our own psychological operations in prayer? Precisely because God's presence is not the product of one's own fantasy, one does not need to try to produce it. It is a matter of remaining vigilant, sober, alert, and patient: our hearts fixed on the One for whom we long, searching for Him. studying Him, imitating Him, and ready for Him.

This kind of presence of God is never to be mistaken for a psychic state, a feeling or a sensation or even the mere absence of such experiences - all of this is merely what can be produced by our own clever egos. The coming of the Living God into one's soul is not a product at all. Instead, this inestimable gift is wholly other, an Other who is totally beyond and completely deeper than such things. As such his mysterious visit does not admit of being manipulated by techniques and methods. In Christian prayer, the best methods merely dispose and prepare for the coming of the One whose heart piercing love remains forever wild and free, and therefore, boundless.

This boundless moment of divine intimacy floods our hearts in the most wonderful ways without our even being aware of what has happened to us, and this even during the time we spend in prayer. His heart moving company is so subtle neither our senses nor even our powers of intuition are capable of noticing that He is truly there. Yet in spite of our inability to notice Him, this interior epiphany of divine love is so powerful it not only makes us aware of all kinds of different sins which darken our hearts, it gives us new light by which we can repent, that is rethink our way of life; and at the same time it also frees us from even the slightest attachment to anything which in any way threatens what is good, noble and true about who we really are before the Lord.

Overwhelming us with so many strong desires to take up all kinds great works, when He visits us with his presence our hearts are also moved with courage to endure every hardship for the sake of love. We hope in Him because we sense that He hopes even more in us. Years after St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas would explore the cause and the purpose of this gift in terms as the spiritual missions of the Son and the Spirit through the Divine Indwelling of the Trinity by grace (Summa Theologica I, 43). For his part, St. Bernard saw this gift of love in prayer as a transitory foretaste of the eternal life that awaits us in heaven, a glimpse of God which we hardly notice when it happens -- but a mysterious visit haunting us and leaving us yearning afterward, even to the point of calling out like a Bride heartsick for her Bridegroom, "Return, my Beloved!"

"Only by the movement of my heart did I perceive his presence and I knew the power of his might because my faults have been revealed and made visible; at the very slightest amendment of my way of life I have experienced his goodness and mercy; in the renewal and remaking of the spirit of my mind, that is of my inmost being, I have perceived the excellence of his glorious beauty, and when I contemplate all these things I am filled with awe and wonder at his manifold greatness. But when the Word has left me, all these spiritual powers become weak and faint and begin to grow cold, as though you had removed the fire from under a boiling pot, and this is the sign of his going. Then my soul must needs be sorrowful until he returns, and my heart again kindles within me -- the sign of his returning. When I have had such experience of the Word, is it any wonder that I take to myself the words of the Bride, calling him back when he has withdrawn?" Sermon 74, 6-7 translated by Irene Edmonds in Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, vol. IV, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications (1980) 91-92.

Blessed John Paul II, Prayer and Evangelization

2011-10-23T20:57:00.000-06:00

On Saturday we commemorated Blessed John Paul, an apostle of divine mercy for our time, a time filled with so much poignant suffering, a time when even a mother's womb has become a place of violence. He well understood that only the loving goodness of God revealed in Jesus Christ could address such misery. He generously engaged the fray in the battle for human dignity to which we are joined by our Catholic faith. To win this battle, he well understood the primacy of prayer.

Although prayerful throughout his life, in his final years he made prayer the special focus of his teaching. In particular, he invited all the members of the Church to contemplate the face of Christ. By this he meant that we should seek the face of Christ in our prayer, in our study, in our relationships with one another, in every situation.

The face of Christ is revealed in so many beautiful ways in the Scriptures, in our tradition and in our daily life. On this point, John Paul II was especially aware of the writings of John of the Cross who describes the loving eyes of Christ reflected on the propositions of our faith, eyes that are attentively fixed on us, eyes that wait to be discovered in the deep silence of prayer. He was also very heedful of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta who helped the whole Church discover the face of Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor, a face to which we must never allow ourselves to be indifferent. The heart piercing gaze of Christ in prayer and in prayerful action melts the hardness of our hearts and helps us rediscover the warmth of God's love. Indeed, Christ who understands the tender strength of humanity waits for us to discover his loving glance in every moment, in thousands of ways. He hopes in us even more than we hope in Him.

Christ fully reveals man to himself by revealing the love of God the Father. To contemplate the face of Christ is to see the mysterious truth about who we are and the even more mysterious truth about who the Father is. Do not the atheist ideologies of the 20th Century witness that, without Christ, humanity is always at risk of forgetting itself in the most violent and dehumanizing of ways?

Searching for the face of Christ and discovering in his loving gaze the truth of the mystery of man and the truth of the Father's merciful love is an urgent task that every Christian must take up. When we see the extent to which God has gone for our sake, we find motivation to live by love for those entrusted to us. Only those who seek an ongoing encounter with Christ are able to address the evil threats against human dignity so alive in our societies today, threats with which even those closest to us must deal. Those who open wide the doors of their hearts to the Redeemer have a real word of life which counters the culture of death engulfing our civilization, engulfing those most relying on us. That is why when he came to Denver in 1993 he directed the youth who were so alive with the love the Lord to bring the Good News of our faith to the modern metropolis, to shout the Gospel form the rooftops - to be proud of the Gospel of Christ.

What is Contemplation?

2011-10-18T23:31:00.000-06:00

Contemplation, also called "mental prayer" by the great mystics of the Catholic Church, is a loving gaze through the eyes of faith at the mystery of God revealed in Christ Jesus. Contemplation is captivated by the loving gaze of God who is captivated by humanity. In a transitory and imperfect manner, like looking through a dark class or catching a reflection in a mirror, this kind of prayer provides a foretaste of the wisdom God yearns to share with us in heaven. This holy exchange of glances - between the eyes of the heart and the eyes of God - is at once the most human, tender, intimate, reciprocal, vulnerable and divine of self-disclosures. So vast the unexplored horizons of this prayer, the greatest discoveries in this frontier of human existence still wait to be made. Those who devote their whole lives to pursuing contemplation marvel at how much more immense the mystery they behold actually is than what they first imagined.

Contemplative prayer yields a kind of knowing which changes the whole of one's life, igniting the heart with love stronger than death and illuminating the mind with the very splendors of God. Progress in such prayer is through the mystery of the Cross. Cross centered contemplation in fact transforms the inner man because it opens up the deepest recesses of the heart, the suffering abyss of human misery, to the loving goodness of God. It is a prayer which allows God to continually question everything about one's manner of life. It is an unfolding conversation with the Risen Lord which constantly gives one real confidence to persevere in faithfulness to Him and to more strongly cling to Him in one's own weakness.

Mental prayer seeks the loving eyes of God reflected in - or carried on - the propositions of our faith. There was a time when sacred reading, meditation, and prayer were understood as converging together in this humble glimpse into the Ineffable. Study of the Sacred Page is called the soul of theology because prayerful reading and careful reflection on the Holy Bible is devoted to seeking this gaze of God. For those who patiently seek it, His divine glance is marvelously revealed in the inspired and inerrant words the canon of the Sacred Scriptures contains. Such a study, such contemplation, participates by faith in God's knowledge of Himself.

Contemplation is the most mysterious of all the modes of knowledge the created capacities of the human intellect can be raised to in this life. Transcending all psychic states, our psychological faculties come to rest in this deep silence - because it is a kind of knowing which does not primarily involve our natural operations. If this explanation is inadequate it is because in part the loving knowledge we are trying to consider confounds all psychological descriptions or attempts at explanation. In the most subtle of moments, like lighting, eternal Truth flashes through all levels of consciousness and into depths of which we are not conscious, illuminating everything from within with such blinding brightness that little but the most overwhelming love is remembered and what is remembered cannot be articulated. Essentially supernatural, a sheer grace, it is far above every other kind of knowledge. The greatest mystics describe it as a knowing which is "not knowing." Doctors of the faith identify this kind of love imbued knowledge with that of the Bride of the Canticle of Canticles who knows nothing but her Beloved. St. Paul speaks of knowing nothing but Christ and Him Crucified. This knowing is not darkened but puts on the mind of Christ which knows nothing but the loving goodness of the Father. It is a renewal of the mind to such heavenly glory that it thinks thoughts no longer subject to sin or death.

Contemplation is the most humanizing of all the kinds of knowledge there is -- because men and women are made in the image and likeness of God, and the more they participate in God's knowledge, understanding and wisdom, the more they realize their true dignity and identity. Most devout Christians do not know that they have been entrusted with this inestimable treasure and remain only vaguely conscious of the gifts lavished on them in their prayer. Yet it is not necessary to be aware that one is contemplating to enter deep into this wisdom from on high and at the same time many rob themselves of true understanding because they are too self aware. Indeed, one has not begun to live if he is ignorant of the divine human knowledge discovered in the loving exchange called contemplation. As St. Irenaeus explained, "The Glory of God is man fully alive - and the life of man is the vision of God."

Prayer and Theology

2011-10-17T19:09:00.000-06:00

There are some who believe prayer and theology are opposed undertakings or at least activities that have nothing in common. Those who espouse such a view often reduce prayer to simply an impulse of the will towards God or else a psychic state or a strong feeling produced by spiritual exercises. They also look at theology as a kind of product derived from scholarly inquiry into arcane questions or even a chess game of sophisticated skepticism in which careful and clever observations are proposed without ever committing the pieces. For those who espouse such an approach theology rarely gets to breath in the fresh air of heaven and prayer remains prisoner of the preoccupations of one's own psyche.

There is a different kind of theology which frees prayer so that it might walk with the Living God and there is a different kind of prayer that breaths life into theology so that it rises up into the very life God. Such prayer and study are filled with the Holy Spirit. They involve putting on the mind of Christ. For both real prayer and true theology are meant to participate by grace won for us on the Cross in the reciprocal gaze of love shared by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit - that eternal act of knowing love and loving knowledge that knows no end. The briefest moment of such contemplation in the midst of prayer imbued study or theologically purified prayer flashes with a loving Light, a burning Wisdom in which one can never live the same way again. It is so intimate and personal, immense and cosmic all at the same time - because such is God. When you meet Him in your prayer and study, a deeper conversion, a deeper love, a deeper kind of life opens up - and one simply cannot go back to the way things were before.

Prayer born of study is open to a foretaste of the wedding feast that awaits those who are faithful. Study pregnant with prayer discovers that the deepest yearnings of the heart are raised up and ignited as the highest powers of the mind are captivated and renewed. Such prayer and such study converge in a humble kind of knowing which exceeds all natural modes of knowledge, which is like not knowing - or rather a knowing nothing but Christ and Him crucified.

The Image of the Invisible God

2011-10-16T21:12:00.000-06:00

The true Son of God, the Word made flesh, the manifestation of the Father's glory once stood before a crowd of powerful people who in their cleverness wanted to trap him. Politically astute, theologically sophisticated and financially secure, their wisdom proved folly before the foolishness of God. When the Lord was asked about whether to pay tax, He asked to be shown the coin by which the tax was to be paid. "Whose is the image?" "Caesar's" was the reply. The Living Image of the invisible God rendered his verdict, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." (See Matthew 22:21-22)

If we know what we owe Caesar because we recognize his image, how can we possibly begin to understand what we owe God if we will not ponder his only begotten Son? Here the Son of God shows us the connection between the image of something and the reality it signifies. One belongs to the other. When we look at images of earthly powers and authorities we understand what we owe to those powers and authorities. But how are we to know what we owe God? And should we ever begin to fathom that debt, how should we ever pay it?

Those who first heard the Word made flesh were too trapped in malice to ponder these ramifications. They did not understand the connection between the Living Image and the Truth of the Father He revealed. They did not perceive in the poverty of God before their eyes the debt they owed to the One who made them. Their hearts were closed to the wisdom by which they might render to God what is God's. They could not recognize any of this in the Image of the invisible God because their anxiety driven self-reliant political, religious and financial world was a blinding trap. So pulled down by petty struggles for power, they were unable to raise their eyes to the spiritual reality dawning in their very midst: they had no idea of the glory shining on them and were deaf to the wisdom thundering around them. If we allow ourselves to be self-satisfied and do not keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, we could easily fall into the same trap.

When we behold God's only begotten Son, when we ponder how He emptied and humbled himself unto death on a cross, we catch the faintest outline of what we owe and our hearts are stirred with the conviction of how to pay it. He wants us humbly to entrust to Him our misery -- it is the only thing we have that is really ours, everything else is really only a gift on loan from God. And, in exchange for our confidence in Him to deal with the lack of love in our lives, He who reveals the inexhaustible love of the Father promises unimaginable glory.

The Present Moment - Eternity Begun and Still in Progress

2011-10-13T09:35:00.000-06:00

We are often deceived into thinking that doing great things for God is something for tomorrow and the life of prayer is something only to be taken up when one's life's circumstances allow it to be more of a priority. This is not the way the saints understand time.

For the saints, heaven haunts this present life, its music beckoning us beyond the narrow prison of our own ego to look up and behold the One we have pierced. He stands before the eyes of our hearts risen from the dead, triumphant over every form of mediocrity which besets us, with his eyes fixed on us, waiting for us to fix our gaze on Him. How much longer will we deny Him?

Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity believed that time is "eternity begun and still in progress." The truth is each moment of our lives carries us into the eternal love of God ... if we let it. Each moment is a sacrament that gives us God ...if we see it with the eyes of faith. Each moment is pregnant with unfathomable grace, power that has flowed from the heart of Christ, so that God's will -- all that is good, pleasing and perfect -- is only a decision away. Will we choose Him who waits for us even now?

Vietnamese Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan discovered something like this contemplation when he was imprisoned for the faith. Struggling to rise out of an ocean of anxieties and nightmares, he came to see the present moment for what it really is:

If I wait for an opportune moment to do something truly great,
how many times will such occasions actually present themselves?
No, I will seize the occasions that present themselves every day.
I must accomplish ordinary actions in an extraordinary way.
Jesus, I will not wait,
I will live the present moment,
filling it to the brim with love.

Five Loaves and Two Fish, trans. Tinvui Media, Boston: Pauline Books and Media (1997) 13.

Pope Benedict and Sacred Silence

2011-10-11T20:51:00.001-06:00

Regarding the importance of sacred silence, Deacon James Keating of the Institute of Priestly Formation shared with me a great piece on the Holy Father's visit to a Carthusian monastery in southern Italy. This short article is a reminder of how important it is to schedule periods of the day when we withdraw from the barrage of noisy diversions all too available to us. A little time each day in prayerful silence protects against the illusions our noisy culture promotes and it helps us keep in touch with what is really real. Practicing silence and protecting our limited powers of attention from all forms of dissipation helps us focus our strength to confront the really important questions that we all must face at some point - questions which expose the truth about ourselves. If we are patient, silence strips us of the silliness that so often pulls us away from the truly essential. In silence surrendered to God we discover just how vulnerable we actually are and how little we understand our need for God. In such silence, we touch what is truly human and we taste what it is to be fully alive. It is in this sacred silence that we discover we are awaited by Love.

As reported by CNA last Sunday:

The Pope contrasted the silence of the order with the noise of modern life.
“Without realizing it, people are immersed in a virtual dimension, because of the audio-visual messages that accompany their life from morning to evening,” he said.
He called the Carthusian charism of silence “a precious gift for the Church and the world,” and one that contained “a profound message for our life and for humanity.”

“Retiring into silence and solitude, man, so to speak, is ‘exposed’ to reality in his nakedness,” said the Pope. This allows man to experience “the fullness, the presence of God, of the most real Reality that there is, and that is beyond the dimension of the senses.”
The Pope joined the monks for Vespers, the evening prayer of the Church. Before entering the monastery, he remarked that the ancient monastic life is a rebuke to a certain modern mindset “that is not Christian, or even human, because it is dominated by economic interests,” or is only concerned with earthly and not spiritual things.
A society based on such a mindset, he said, “not only marginalizes God, but also our neighbor, and we do not strive for the common good.” The monastery, though, is instead “a model of a society that focuses on God and fraternal relationship.” This is something for which we have “so much need in our time,” said the Pope.

A Summary of St. Dominic's Prayer

2011-10-10T14:32:00.001-06:00

The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic presume a connection between the body and the soul, devotion and prayer. Each of the ways speaks to the importance of what is called "vocal" prayer. Such prayer goes beyond words that are said out loud. Bodily though it is, such prayer reaches for that true and total spiritual worship advocated by St. Paul in Romans 12:1-2. It takes up gestures of the body which move the soul with devotion so that the grace filled and Holy Spirit imbued soul might move the body in true worship to make Christ-like sacrifices of love:

- The bowing of one's head and heart with humility at the beginning of prayer before the crucifix, at the altar, in the Name of the Trinity;
- The throwing down and prostrating of one's whole body with tears of compunction for the sins of others when one can find no more tears for his own;
- The welcoming of all the physical difficulties and the patience endurance of all kinds of bodily discomforts during prayer as part of prayer itself, as a way of offering one's body to God in praise;
- The fixating of one's gaze on Christ crucified while kneeling and standing with bold petitions filled with confidence in the indescribable goodness of God and sober acceptance of one's own weakness;
- The raising of one's hands to heaven with eyes wide open in the ancient orans of the first Christians;
- The stretching out of one's arms cruciform with a cry for help in heartbreaking situations;
- The standing strong with hands folded in prayer like an arrow shot into the heart of God;
- The sitting in holy reading and contemplation - that ancient practice of lectio divina; and
- The frequent quest for solitude in which one resists fantasies and evil thoughts like flies and prepares for spiritual battle against diabolical malice by the sign of the Cross.

The Rosary: Pathway of Mercy

2011-10-07T12:39:00.000-06:00

Mercy or misericors, St. Thomas explains, is miserum cor, to have heartache over the plight of another as if it were one's own (ST I.21.3). When we allow our hearts to be pierced by the plight of another in this way, we are moved to act, to do something to address the sorrow. When it comes to the inner life of God, St. Thomas observes that God perfectly effects mercy - that is, although He does not suffer in Himself, He communicates his perfect loving goodness to address the deep sorrows suffered by in the creatures He has made. Because He is infinite and we are finite, our misery, the intense absence of love in our hearts which is both the cause and fruit of evil in our lives, is circumscribed by inexhaustible frontiers infinite Love.

You complain that you do not see this love, that the pain is to great? This is why the Word became flesh - by being born as one of us God Himself blazed a trail from the glorious heights of his eternal unbounded love down into the dark labyrinthine passages of our broken hearts. He made his Cross the point where the immensity sorrow inflicting the human heart is kissed by the greater immensity of God's love. All we must do is look for this threshold in faith and ask God to help us cross it. Here we will see the infinite love of God.

Those who glimpse this love start on a pilgrimage. Repenting of the ways they have hurt others and themselves, they discover a life of ever deeper personal conversion. It is a journey of forgiveness in which they submit to the Holy Spirit the wounds that others have done to them so that they might learn compassion and intercession. It is a journey where they allow their hearts to be pierced by the plight of others just as God allowed himself to be pierced by our plight on the Cross. In this miserum cor we discover the wisdom of God to know what to do in the moment and the power of God to act even when we feel we are at a loss and powerless ourselves.

This pathway of mercy is the journey out of the prison of our own big fat ego and all forms of self-occupation. It is also a journey into the vast horizons of the heart of Christ Jesus from which flows the very wisdom, love and goodness of God. The Risen Lord is Christ Crucified in whom we behold the foolishness of God bringing to shame our wisdom and the powerlessness of God overcoming the power of sin.

To help us make this journey, our great patrimony proposes that we fill our imagination by pondering the life of Christ and seeing the connections between his life and ours. One of the tools which helps us do this is the Rosary - that ancient prayer where we ponder all the mysteries of Christ's mercy in prayerful awareness of his Mother, Mary whose soul always magnifies the Lord. As St. Bernard says in the Office of Readings today:

He lay in a manger and rested on a virgin's breast, preached on a mountain, and spent the night in prayer. He hung on a cross, grew pale in death, and roamed free among the dead and ruled over those in hell. He rose again on the third day, and showed the apostles the wounds of the nails, the signs of victory; and finally in their presence he ascended to the sanctuary of heaven. How can we not contemplate this story in truth, piety and holiness? Whatever of all this I consider, it is God I am considering; in all this he is my God. I have said it is wise to meditate on these truth, and I have thought it right to recall the abundant sweetness, given by the fruits of this priestly root; and Mary, drawing abundantly from heaven has caused this sweetness to overflow for us.

The Mission of Contemplatives in the Church

2011-10-06T14:35:00.001-06:00

Though having embraced anonymity and engaged in an apostolate which avails no measurable results to this world, the sons of St. Bruno take up the work of contemplation and enter deep into the heart of the Church. They have discovered in the presence of God the salvation of the world:

By devoting ourselves exclussively to God we exercise a special function in the Church, where things seen are ordered to things unseen, exterior activity to contmplation. If we are truly liivng in union with God, our minds and hearts, far from becoming shut in on themselves, open up to embrace the whole universe and the mystery of Christ that saves it... We testify to the world, excessively absorbed in earthly things, that there is no God but Him. Our life clearly shows something of the joy of heaven is present already here below; it prefigures our risen state and anticipates in a manner the final renewal of the world... By penance, moreover, we have our part in the saving work of Christ, who redeemed the human race from the oppressive bondage of sin, above all by pouring forth prayer to the Father, and by offering himself to Him in sacrifice. Thus it comes about that we, too, even though we abstain from exterior activity, exercise nevertheless an apostolate of a very high order, since we strive to follow Christ in this, the inmost heart of his saving task. The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications (1994) 239-240.

The Road of Prayer - the Path to Integrity

2011-10-03T22:14:00.001-06:00

Those who wish to embark on the road of prayer in earnest must travel down the pathway of integrity of heart. This means we must seek to be completely truthful about ourselves with God and we must submit what is in our hearts to the judgment of God. Many people mistakenly believe they can do this by themselves. But this is pure folly. No one has come to full maturity in Christ without the help of many brothers and sisters in the Church throughout his life. The Lord has chosen to allow us to submit ourselves to his judgment through those He sends us, through those to whom He has chosen to make us accountable. Such truthfulness with God and with those He sends in our lives requires a struggle for humility, a battle against pride and a fight against any kind of self-reliance that prevents us from turning to the Lord.

In his rule, St. Benedict observes that progress is gained by learning to be transparent with someone to whom you are accountable. He had in mind a spiritual father but this could also be a spiritual mother, a confessor, a spiritual director, or even a good spiritual friend. It is important to submit our struggles to someone with a little wisdom and who is concerned that we come to full spiritual maturity. The fact is that we cannot face what is in our hearts by ourselves and we need one another. In a special way, those who have devoted themselves to seeking wisdom of heart through prayer and study are in a position to help us with this task.

Why do we hold back from God and why are we afraid to share with those who can help us with the dark struggles in our lives? Instead of thanking God for his generous love in sending us his friends, we are afraid of what they might say or think. Their very presence brings us to the brink of a conversation with God in which the way we live will be questioned. We are afraid of this judgment only because we do not realize how much we are loved. When we recognize we have lost our courage to approach God, when we find ourselves afraid to open ourselves to someone He has sent to us to help us find our way home, there is little else to do than to admit our lack of trust and to call out to the Lord, "Lord, have mercy!" His merciful love is so great, He will not fail to give us the courage we need to bring our fears and shame into the light of day. He is in fact giving us this courage even if the truth comes out only a little bit at a time.

In humbly disclosing the struggles of our heart, the first words are the hardest and give the most glory to God. This act of humility we make at such moments is something that only his own humility makes us capable of offering. Such holy conversation is a start, a step along the way to the integrity Christ calls us to -- a little progress along the road of true prayer made possible by his grace.

St. Paul and St. Therese - the true nature of holiness

2011-10-01T21:17:00.000-06:00

In Colossians 1:24, St. Paul speaks of rejoicing because through his own trials he participates in Christ's salvific work for the Church, making up what is lacking in Christ's suffering. While the sufferings of Christ are sufficient for our salvation, the way He suffered allows the Church to share in his work and participate in it through the trials of each of her members. The Church is in fact a mystical reality, the Body of Christ in which the Lord's whole mystery is present. Although all Christians are invited to take up this work, the great saints like St. Paul or else closer to our time St. Therese, share in this mysterious work of love in an intense, pure and extremely fruitful manner.

St. Therese of Lisieux faced a terrific struggle with her faith while dying of tuberculosis. She describes in her autobiography how her life, which up to that moment had been like a fairy-tail (a remarkable statement when we consider many of the difficult things she had already endured in her life of faith), had become a prayer. The thought of heaven which had been a consolation to her all her life suddenly left her dry. It was not the article of faith -- that is, that there is a heaven -- that she doubted. Rather it was the fear and uncertainty over whether heaven was actually a possibility for her personally. This experience so close to her death after years of joyful devotion to the Lord puzzled theologians: was she simply weak in faith when push came to shove or was there something deeper going on? The more theologians discerned her life, the more certain they became that there was something deeper, something like the experience which St. Paul bears witness to in his letter to the Colossians.

Leading up to this moment, St. Therese had asked for all the graces that everyone else rejects, the ones God offers so generously and that we often turn our backs on. She had asked for these rejected gifts because she understood a mysterious sorrow that the Lord had over the rejection of his gifts. She asked for these gifts out of a sincere desire to console the heart of God. (One can only wonder what God thought of such audacity with the smiling desire to imitate it!)

One of the gifts she received from praying in this way was a special love for souls who were far from God, a compassion for those people who did not believe God loved them if they believed He existed at all. This love even included those who were hostile to God and religion. (If you know anyone like this, ask St. Therese to pray for them.)

For their sake, she offered her life to the merciful love of God and asked God to allow her to share their plight so that they might know his mercy. When she asked this, she was asking to share in the passion of Christ, to make up in her body what was lacking in the suffering of Christ - just like St. Paul. Though she was fatally ill, it was not physical suffering that bothered her but the deep mental anguish of wondering about God's plan. When she says the thought of heaven was no longer a consolation to her, this indicates that she was tormented by whether God's plan was really a loving plan for her personally. Paradoxically, it was in the experience of this anguish of heart that she became most Christ like - that is most like Christ when He prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."

It is possible to face intense questions about our faith but remain faithful. This is what she chose to do. In this kind of trial, the intellect is thrown into a terrific darkness. One simply does not want to think about the things of God because the thought of them is mysteriously painful and the temptation not to trust God becomes overwhelmingly acute. What she did and what we must do in these moments is to cleave to God by a loving act of trust even though trusting in these circumstances is so difficult. This means living by love even when love feels absent. This also means trusting in God's virtue when we do not feel we have any of our own.

It is a curious thing that the greater our devotion to God, the more normal we become. Saints are extraordinary precisely because their struggles are so ordinary. It is their faithfulness that sets them apart - a faithfulness beyond which frail humanity can account for, a faithfulness that witnesses to the power of God. Thus, even in the midst of these spiritual trials, Therese continued to struggle with all the other ordinary weaknesses we all suffer - like pride. She even complains to God that despite all her resolutions to be humble in the morning by evening she has a long list of failures to confess and with this is continually realizing in new ways how she needs to trust in the Lord even more (See Pri 20). In this, she has left us a sign about what the perfection of Christian holiness is all about - the freedom to rely on the Lord in our weakness. We can do this because God never tests us beyond our strength and always gives us exactly what we need, when we need it, when we rely on Him. No matter the the intensity of our trials or confusion, He gives us the grace to choose Him, and in choosing Him to believe in his love, and in believing to live by his love even when - perhaps especially when - we feel we have run out of love. All that is left is trust - and trust in the midst of trials allows Christ to renew his whole mystery.

Angels Ascending and Descending on the Son of Man

2011-09-29T15:58:00.000-06:00

By the ministry of the angels and through the sacred humanity of our Lord, Christ brings about on earth what God wills in heaven. This is what happened to the Virgin in Nazareth. This is what happened in the agony of Gethsemane.

In the spiritual life, God sends super intelligent messengers from beyond the narrow confines of this visible world to help us take on the mind of Christ and to act in his power. Angels ascend and descend on Christians just as on the humanity of Christ. Their words communicate deep things into our hearts unimaginably more expansive than are the limited horizon of thought open to merely human speech. St. John of the Cross says that their messages from heaven actually wound us with a deep ardent love of God that does not easily go away to change us, to help us find the only One who can satisfy our heart’s desire. There is nothing like love to free us from ourselves, from the prison of our own preoccupations. Their ministry is to guide us out of our big fat egos so that we might find Christ and cleave to Him in faith.

One of the biggest obstacles to prayer is our bloated sense of self. It really is a problem of being full of oneself. A primordial hostility towards the true God lives in our hearts and compels us to seek and to fashion idols that appeal to our imaginations, that we seem to understand, that we think we can control. In our arrogance and ignorance, we easily convince ourselves that what we imagine God to be God is. When we do this we have made an idol out of the self because we have limited God to the product of our own fantasy. Whereas prayer should be a humble conversation with the Living God, when the ego is worshipped as an idol, prayer is reduced to an interior monologue in which we exhaust ourselves going round and round in circles - not unlike what is envisioned in various systems of reincarnation. Such prayer is nothing more than talking to oneself. It is fruitless self-occupation.
Here, self-preoccupation is a very consuming kind of worship. Preoccupied with our own concerns, experiences, thoughts, memories, fantasies, feelings, plans, ambitions, grudges, and desires; there is no interior silence for us to listen to God, to allow his silence to humble us in ours, to hear his creative voice so that it might produce a new work in us. The shell of our ego is so thick that it would have imprisoned us forever had not Christ pierced it by allowing himself to be pierced through by our sins.
Why does God send us angels? God has desire to bless us with every spiritual blessing through Christ so that we might become the praise of his glory. Angels help us realize this most high calling because their messages help us see the truth about God and about ourselves. Through their ministry of which we are rarely directly aware, we see ever more deeply that the life of the Trinity, the inner life of God, is a constantly going out from "self" in an eternal ecstasy of unimaginably rapturous love: the immortal life of God is pure vulnerability, pure desire for union, pure benevolence for the other, pure self-surrender, pure reciprocity -- but in all of this a holiness, a wisdom, an inexhaustible incomprehensibility before which every created intellect must bow and the powers of all imagination must kneel. By the hidden ministry of the angels, God desires that we, mere frail creatures though we are, share in this eternal life, his own life. In the image and likeness of this unfathomable God, marred by sin but restored by Christ through his suffering and death, He constantly sends angels in secret ways to free us from ourselves and to lead us into a place where we can find Him to share his life with Him. God's holy messengers - both angels and men - in speaking the truth to us, wound us with a love by which we see that we are only most fully ourselves when like the Living God we give the gift of ourselves in love.

Being Merciful and the Holy Spirit

2011-09-28T14:36:00.002-06:00

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are understood in many beautiful and wonderful ways. For example, the gift of counsel has been understood to identify a movement of heart that gives a knowing certitude about what to do in a difficult situation. St. Thomas Aquinas sees a relationship between this gift of counsel and the beatitude declared by Christ "Blessed are the merciful, they shall receive mercy" (see ST II-II, q.52, a.4) One of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer also comes to mind on this point, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." What is the relationship between the prompting of the Holy Spirit and the blessedness realized in being merciful?

To say that someone is merciful (misericordia) indicates one's heart has been pierced by the plight of another. It is an intimate and personal moment which reaches for the restoration of dignity in the one who suffers. It is a sharing in one's own heart the misery suffered by someone in some way entrusted to us. To affirm the dignity of another, I need to be able to enter into that person's heart with something that will address the misery, that thirst for love. Otherwise, my act of mercy can only be an external kindness which never really addresses the actual plight of the person God has brought to me at this moment.

Only the Lord has the power and authority to enter the heart of another. He created the heart - each heart - and so He is the only one who knows the way. He is the Living Water which alone quenches the soul that thirsts for love. If He stands at the door and knocks, entering the heart is what He won the right to do by his death on the Cross. He who is Pure Love vanquished the powers of death and hell, piercing the heart of humanity because He allowed us, our misery, to pierce Him. In this way, He suffered the misery and meaninglessness of each of us on the Cross. Because He yearns that we be restored to our dignity and that we be free of such burdens, with this power He is always knocking, He is always seeking the lost sheep, always running off to meet his lost son no matter how far away, always trying to bandage the neighbor He finds beat up on the side of the road. And we who are joined to Him by faith and members of his mystical body are the instruments through whom He works for this great purpose.

The gift of counsel and being merciful intersect before the plight of the neighbor God entrusts to me. When the Lord brings us a neighbor who is suffering, He also sends us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit prompts us with divine power and authority so that we might be an icon of Christ, so that the mystery of Christ might be extended to this suffering heart in this present moment, so that the Lord might deliver this particular loved one, neighbor, stranger or even enemy from the hell in which they are engulfed.

Indeed, the most dangerous of all moments is to stand before the suffering of another and to be paralyzed by our own indifference. It is a danger to our own humanity, a temptation to become inhumane. St. Thomas and other authoritative voices from our tradition seem to have understood that the Holy Spirit will not allow this to happen if we are open to his subtle movements in our hearts. Even when circumstances are so surprising and overwhelming that it is difficult to develop a good plan, the Holy Spirit gives us enough understanding and certitude about how to be merciful in such moments that we can act. With whatever effort we make, even if only feeble and reluctant, the power of Christ's salvific work not only opens up the possibility of being holy ourselves in ever new ways, but also gushes forth through us to refresh all those thirsting for living waters. How much more Christ can do when we act with the boldness of the sons and daughters of God!

The Gift of Intercession

2011-09-25T21:30:00.001-06:00

In striving to love someone the way that person really deserves to be loved we often discover how important it is to turn to the Lord in prayer. When our hearts are pierced by the plight of those we most love we find ourselves needing to pray. Spouses, sons and daughters, and parents all have needs which only the Lord himself can meet. In fact, the more we strive to be faithful in loving those God has put in our lives, the more we see the limits and weaknesses of our own humanity. It is an existential and personal experience of the human frailty.

This is why, when it comes to truly loving those God has put in our lives, we must constantly humble ourselves and ask the Lord to help us. It is by beautiful paradox that the more we love someone we also see how much they suffer, and the more we see this, the more their plight moves us to humbly seek God on their behalf. Sometimes their sufferings can even be difficult occasions of intense anxiety for us. Yet in the face of such anxiety and heartache, prayer can easily become humble movement in the depths of the heart in love, for love and by love. This is the secret of the Cross. When it comes to the demands of love and the poverty of our hearts, God is ready to provide if we are willing to ask and He always gives in excess of our openness and trust in his love.

To pray with hope out of one's own poverty before the painful misery of the beloved, this is the beginning of the priceless gift of intercession. It is so rare, so beautiful, so human and so divine - all at once. Such prayer only happens when the heartache of the one we love becomes our heartache too. It is in this poverty of heart from which springs a prayer deeper than words, or thoughts, or feelings. It is prayer in the core of our humanity, prayer from the center of our hearts. The Holy Spirit produces this prayer. This prayer cannot cease even in the face of the most intense anxiety and fear. In this prayer, He is the bond which joins hearts together - a bond stronger than death. In the power of the Holy Spirit, our frail cries to God are joined with the cries of the one we love and at the same time the Holy Spirit joins them to the cry of Christ Crucified - His last wordless cry which echoes forever as the triumphant hymn of heaven where He reigns risen forever. Because of his great mercy and love, our heavenly Father never fails to answer such prayers.

This union of hearts in prayer is an entry way deep into the communion of saints -- these kinds of petitions and intercessions are what help bring God's mercy to bear on our misery. On this point St. Dominic would encourage his friars that when they ran out of tears for their own sins they should begin to weep for the sins of others. This heart to heart compassion when joined with prayer becomes a source of grace in the Body of Christ. When we let such deep compassion carry us into prayer we discover two things:

First, our trust in God is limited by the boundaries we impose on Him. He is capable of infinitely more than anything for which we can ask or even imagine. But something in us pulls back from this God who is not only capable of infinite love, but is eternal love Himself. Indeed the One from whom we can ask anything might also ask anything in return. And so we are afraid. But voices from heaven constantly call to us, "Be not afraid!"

Second, the only way to make space in our lives for God to act, the only way to overcome our lack of trust, is by prayer. God has permitted this moment in the life of this person He has given you to love because He is about a great purpose -- not only for the two of you, but for all those He loves. He wants us to enter into a deeper friendship with each other and with Him - this is the whole purpose of his plan, of those things He has willed and those things He has permitted that His Will might be done. Here, prayer is both the means and the end - because true prayer always ends in friendship with God.

Pope Benedict and the Question of 16th Century Christianity

2011-09-23T11:24:00.000-06:00

Over at http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/ is Pope Benedict's address to the representatives from the Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany at the ancient Augustinian Monastery at Erfurt where Martin Luther studied theology. The Holy Father's words include a great examination of conscience for anyone engaged in the task of theology, especially for those who know that prayer and theology must not be separate enterprises, who strive for a theology to help build up the Church. He observes:

"Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. Insofar as people today believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God?"

Pope Benedict's question which he attributes to Martin Luther, is a question of prayer, and this question was the driving question of the 16th Century -- not only among protestants, but also for Catholic saints and mystics like Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri, and Catherine of Genoa - to name only a few. We constantly find in the witness of 16th Century Christians how much they loved prayer. They gave the highest priority to seeking and attending to the Lord for extended periods of time every day. Prayer seems to have opened them to a deeper encounter with the Savior because through it they learned how much they needed salvation. The Holy Father's reflections suggest it was in prayer that they opened their heart to the truth about sin in all it's horrific dimensions - great and small, malicious and petty. These holy men and women also realized the price the Lord suffered to free them from this reality and in the Cross they also glimpsed the vast horizons of His unsurpassable love. They clung by faith to the Risen Lord, radically trusting that He is personally concerned about each of us in the most tender of ways. They loved virtue and though they stove for it with all their strength, they always attributed any growth or development in it to the gracious goodness of God. They loved the Word of God and those that could read were convinced that prayerful study of the Holy Bible provided an irreplaceable means of attending to the Lord. Prayer, conversion and theology went together for them. It is in things such as these that good Christians still hold so much in common. Just as such friendship with God was a source for the renewal of the Church in the 16th Century there is little doubt that the restoration of the Church in our own time will be accomplished by a return to such radical and honest prayer: a prayer that imbues the way we live and the way we understand our faith.

Prayer out of the Depths

2011-09-20T13:23:00.000-06:00

"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice." There are moments in the Christian life, moments when you least expect them, when you are severely tried. There are times where we must perservere in love when everything most hoped for seems to evaporate while everything most feared explodes around us.

When thrown into such a crisis, such a moment of judgment where the truth of the heart is exposed, there is no magic formula which can lessen the sting and no switch to reset everything back to "normal." Such trials launch one out into new unexplored territory. In such uncharted waters, many mistakes are made while many more undealt with transgressions are suddenly exposed. Fear and anxiety must be constantly renounced. It is time to trust - but in these moments trust costs so much. Here, one is made lowly and discovers the depths of one's own poverty. One sorrows. One thirsts. One hungers. Prayer becomes a wordless cry, a naked clinging to the One who seems absent, a patiently kept vigil for the One whose coming is our only hope.

In such dark nights, do not despair: the Holy Spirit in his great love for you has brought you to the threshold of the Father's glory. You, soul that suffers all these things, you have been called blessed by our Crucified Master, and the meager confidence that you manage to place in Him will bear fruit that this present life cannot contain! You have entered an abyss of misery and the deeper abyss of God's mercy waits for you there. It is in these depths, and only in these depths, that intimacy with God grows and the secret of love is entrusted to the soul. For we cannot love except at our own expense. We cannot progress to our goal but by means of the Cross.

Christian Perfection, Grace and Contemplation

2011-09-17T19:02:00.000-06:00

If we are called to be perfect as the heavenly Father isperfect, then we must seek, far outside the narrow frontiers of our ownfantasies, a perfection beyond all natural capacity, exceeding anything whichour limited reason can calculate. Thisis why those who want to obey Christ, those who want to be perfect as is ourheavenly Father, must first of all approach God like beggars. Before the mystery of God’s love we are indeedbeggars who do not know what we need or how to ask for it. Charity cannot be grasped by our owncleverness nor can it be mimicked by our own industry. A soul weighed down by the spirit ofself-sufficiency lacks the freedom this gift requires. Here we come against a great mystery. The primacy of grace in the Christian life isessential to Christian perfection.

If we are in some sense beggars asking for what we do nothave and cannot even understand, the words of Christ push us beyond being just beggarsin pursuit of this gift – for his mysterious command reveals more than a moral imperative,it reveals a relationship. We are notasked to be perfect as some inaccessible godhead is perfect. Were we asked to do this, Christ’s commandwould be completely impossible. Rather,we are asked to be perfect as is our Father in heaven, the Father who in hisgreat love for us gave us his Son. Itis through the gift of Jesus that we know our Father and his perfection. It isthrough Jesus’ gift of himself on the Cross that the perfection of the Father piercesour hearts and transforms who we are. Faith in Christ makes us into the sons anddaughters of God. Not as slaves but assons and daughters, being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect ispossible.

The difference between a Father and Master, a son and a slave, is a matter of how each regards the other. This speaks to the primacy of contemplation in the Christian life. Although our faith compels usto take up every good work for the honor and glory of God, Christian perfectiondoes not consist principally in good works. Instead, we are made perfect by the obedience of faith, a faith thatattends to God in love. For in silentprayer, prayer where the heart attends to God, we allow the Father to behold usin love, to enjoy our attentive presence as his sons and daughters. As we allow Him to behold us in love, themost beautiful desires are given birth to in our hearts. Possibilities we never knew existed suddenlypresent themselves in the concrete opportunities of our real life circumstances. The heart delights to discover that theability to add to the Father’s delight in ever new ways is always just adecision away. This is because the gazeof the Father is not passive – it is unfathomably fecund, constantly bringingforth into existence out of nothing. Whenthe Father sees us in love the overwhelming generosity of his Heart spills intoours: He lavishes us with every gift and blessing so that his perfection mightbe revealed by how we live at all times in every circumstance, that we mightbecome living icons of Christ the visible image of the invisible God. In such prayer, our gaze, participating bygrace in his eternal creative love which constantly explodes into to action,becomes like His: we are in this exchange of glances with God perfect like ourheavenly Father.

The Cross of Christ, Christian Prayer and Mary

2011-09-14T23:16:00.000-06:00

Those who open their heart to the Our Lady of Sorrow learn the abandonment of the cross, the glory of redemption, the deepest sorrows, and the most unspeakable jubilation as they converge in Christian contemplation. In suchcontemplation the heart raises a hymn of glory - or rather, Christ raises thishymn in the soul as it learns to surrender to the Holy Spirit as did his mother,Mary. Elisabeth of the Trinity explains that if anyone wants to raise thehymn of glory like Christ offered with his last breath, they must putthemselves in the hands of Mary, the mother who knows this music more deeplyand more fully than any other soul.

The Virgin Mother stood at the foot ofthe cross as that unrepeatable Spirit-filled canticle exploded from the deathrattle of her Son’s spent body. She could hear this because she stood infaith before the antithesis of everything that was promised her about her Sonand she attended to his heart. In that moment, fulfilling words that wereforetold, Her heart was pierced with His.

Can one's own heart be pierced by the plight of another? This is a work of the HolySpirit - the Spirit of God which moved Jesus to surrender himself in obedienceto the Father on the Cross: this Holy Spirit makes it possible to share in Christ's same surrender, His same heart piercing hymn of praise. Pierced like herSon on the Cross, her heart shared in the music of His and she knew the most powerful prayer ever uttered, the most penetrating contemplation a heart in this life has ever glimpsed. Allowing His last cry to pierce heruntil He gave up his last breath, she was the first to be caught up in theresounding note of new life, the first to let this new life raise her up evenas crushing sorrow gripped her heart. Yes, this Mother of Sorrow grieved not only for her Son but for all thoseher Son has ever loved. In grieving for her Son, she has shared in the sorrows of us all.

This is why Mary helps us enter into deep prayer. She knows Christ's canticle on the Cross is more powerful than the gripof weariness in the world, and she yearns for the children entrusted to her toraise the song that her Son offered - for this song glorifies the Father, thissong saves the world, this song raises the dead. She wants what her Sonwants and she rejoices in the very same things that cause her Son torejoice. So Jesus gives his Mother to us so that her joy and ours might beexcessive, and in this excess of love, she envelops in prayer those who allowthemselves to learn from her to listen and to raise her Son's greatcanticle. She teaches heart piercing contemplation - a kind of prayer inwhich one makes up in one's own body what is lacking in the suffering ofChrist. Only contemplation which has this Marian character, whichreceives from Jesus the heart piercing gift of his Mother, goes deep into themystery of the Cross. Only that contemplation that goes deep into themystery of the Cross really discovers unspeakable and inexhaustible joy - theFont of Eternal Life.

Heaven's Music - the call of divine silence

2011-09-11T21:06:00.000-06:00

Heaven’s music penetrates our earthly existence and invites us to deep prayer, to the radiant solemnity of God’s inexhaustible love. Enveloping each moment of time is a symphony of divine silence. An eternal melody resounds in every earthly sorrow if we have the heart to listen. It is a sobering tone that tolls behind the intoxication of pleasure and a hopeful note which lifts the soul weighed down in the frustration of suffering. It resonates in our hearts even as we pretend not to hear and we struggle to catch its subtlety even after years of learning to listen. In all these things we can hear Christ eternally lifting his heart in praise of the Father because on the Cross his fullness has pierced our emptiness, and our emptiness, his fullness. Yet how few listen for this silent harmony echoing through the vast cacophony of our world? To hear the symphony of divine silence, we must enter into deep silence. We must hunger for it. We must thirst for it. We must order our lives around seeking it. It must become a priority of the heart. Seeking this silence by love, in love, for love bestows familiarity with the mysterious Great Canticle bearing up this present moment we have right now to render it fertile with eternal meaning.

St. John of Avila's Life of Prayer

2011-09-08T10:41:00.000-06:00

      St. John of Avila (1500-1569AD) knew many of the 16th Century mystics and in fact had a hand in the conversion of some of them including St. Francis Borgia, S.J. and St. John of God. Yet spiritual writers like E. Allison Peers note that this parish priest does not present a doctrine of contemplation as such. Rather, one finds in his writings concern mainly with ascetical practices, penance and meditation. This raises a question about whether John of Avila was a contemplative and whether he himself had mystical experiences.

      Whereas some might be inclined to the position that he was not a great contemplative himself because he did not write about this kind of prayer, it must be observed that his pastoral responsibilities rather than his experiences in prayer inspired most of the direct content of his writings. In other words, simply because he wrote about beginning to pray for the sake of those entrusted to him does not mean he did not have an intense life of mental prayer or contemplation. In fact, his friendships with other great contemplatives suggests otherwise, and sprinkled in his writings are insights which suggest a very intense prayer life supported his apostolic work.

      In fact, the more intense one's own prayer, the more difficult it is to write about. St. John of Avila was an important voice for the renewal of the Church in Spain precisely because he was a man of prayer. One indication of this is that after Law School but before beginning his studies for the priesthood, he spent two years in solitude. Some of his contemporaries believed his doctrine of the spiritual life too mystical, and he was subjected to the Inquisition as were many others who advocated the importance of mental prayer in the Christian life. Indeed, in reading his writings, if he is discreet about contemplative prayer, we must remember the irrational fear gripping many leaders of the Church of his day. At the same time, when addressing the renewal of the Church, he does not fail to advocate a return to deep personal prayer among the clergy. Why would he advocate something if he did not experience it himself?

     In the Catholic tradition of spirituality, although it acknowledges many kinds and degrees of supernatural encounters with God, an effort is made not to identify experiences in prayer with the quality of one's friendship with God. Although the stirring of warm affections in prayer are considered a good thing, emphasis is put on the loving resolve to pray come what come may. This is because the perfection of holiness in the Christian life consists operationally in supernatural love - a love produced by the Holy Spirit through whom the human person participates in the eternal love of God. Thus, periods of dryness can actually be experiences of the most intense kind of mystical prayer - precisely because without the soul realizing it, God is producing a greater love in its depths.

     We find a tension in the writings of Teresa of Avila, especially in her autobiography, where she acknowledges, humbly, that was she was being favored with in prayer was not commensurate with her actual devotion to the Lord. This fact not only disturbed her but also disturbed those closest to her. In the case of John of Avila, rather than describing mystical experiences (he is aware of what these are and can even affirm that Teresa of Avila's experience of the prayer of rapture is authentic), he describes to a student the quality of love one must persevere with in taking up a life of prayer:
   (as cited by E. Allison Peers, Studies of the Spanish Mystics, vol. 2, London: SPCK (1960) 105-106.)

The profit of the soul consists rather in a man's denying his own will, and courageously doing that which he feels to be pleasing to the Lord than in tenderness of heart and sweetness of devotion. For in the former is revealed the true love which a man has toward God, wherein consists the perfection of Christianity, whereas in the latter may be concealed love of self, which befouls all things. Wherefore do not be dismayed by the dryness which you say is in your heart, but press on through the desert, though there be no green trees, nor shade to give refreshment, nor water to gladden you.

St. John of Avila - Master of Contemplation and Renewal of the Church

2011-09-05T21:30:00.000-06:00

During World Youth Day, Pope Benedict announced his intention to declare St. John of Avila a Doctor of the Church. This means that the Pope believes his teaching contributes to our universal patrimony in an important way. I must admit, up to now, I mainly know him as a theological consultant for St. Teresa of Avila, also a Doctor of the Church.

A statue of St. Teresa of Avila - just outside the walls of Avila

When she wrote her autobiography, she submitted the work to him to find out whether her experiences were authentic and whether her doctrine was true. Although he found her experiences to be authentic, he was concerned that not everything she described applies to all Christians. He also affirmed that her teaching on prayer was true, especially what she had to say about the prayer of rapture. Like St. John of the Cross, he was wary of extraordinary mystical phenomena - like visions and locutions. As great a mystic as he was, he insisted that the ordinary and surest way to intimacy with the Lord is by love imbued faith.

The Walls of Avila

St. Teresa of Avila had picked a reliable source to review her life experience and understanding of prayer. He had already guided many of the early Spanish Jesuits as they attempted to bring the practice of mental prayer to bear on the mission of the Church. St. Ignatius invited him to join the society, but his health was frail. Instead, he supported the mission in Spain confident that the Jesuits would lead souls to Christ. His own preaching had moved more than one saint to embrace of life of conversion and deep prayer - including St. John of God whose conversion was so dramatic, everyone thought he was crazy. Like St. Teresa, St. John of Avila too had faced an Inquisition which was not favorable to the practice of contemplation, which would have preferred the practice of the faith to be limited to liturgy and good morals. He was able to affirm for her and for those Church authorities questioning her the primacy of contemplation and grace in the discipline of life Christ calls us to embrace.

What is wonderful about these Spanish mystics of the 16th Century - whether St. Ignatius and his St. Francis Borgia or St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of Avila and so many others - we find the integration of deep prayer, ascetical vigor, solid doctrine and a love for the whole Church. Devotion to liturgical prayer, an inspiring moral life, a hunger for deep silence, great spiritual friendships, concern for the poor and love of the poverty of Christ -- one finds in teach of these saints an integration of these elements. They realized the importance and primacy of contemplation but did not neglect the mission of the Church. Nor did they ever fail to love those the Lord entrusted to them. They realized the primacy of grace in the spiritual life but did not fail to make every effort to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by their strict discipline of life.

Avila - fortifications over one of the gates

In the case of St. John of Avila- we have a parish priest dedicated to the art of spiritual direction deeply concerned about the failures of his brother priests and bishops at a critical moment in Spanish and European history. He met this concern by following Christ into all kinds of apostolates with every fiber of his existence deeply convinced that the only path to renew the Church was through promoting the practice of mental prayer and the discipline of the Christian life as widely as possible, starting with his brothers in the clergy and going out to every level of society. His efforts bore great fruit not only in Spain but throughout Europe. He had an important hand to play in the institution of the modern seminary as a place of strong community life, mental prayer and intense study of the faith. In other words, he helped the fathers of the Council of Trent realize that building seminaries that were genuine centers of Christian spiritual formation was the key to the reforms most needed in the life of the Church. It is fitting that in the midst of the challenges the Church faces today, Pope Benedict should direct our attention to this particular reformer, a reformer who calls us to depths of prayer.

All Things Visible and Invisible

2011-09-03T11:13:00.000-06:00

Jeffrey Allan over at Secret Harbor has posted a wonderful text by St. Gregory the Great which sheds light on the realism of Christian prayer. In other worldviews, there is a tendency to collapse good and evil as simple moments of a greater dialectic. There is also a tendency to see the world of visible things as merely in the process of being absorbed by some greater reality or else even simply an illusion from which we need to free ourselves. There is something attractive about rising above all the conflicts which come with living a good life and allowing them to resolve themselves as we occupy our minds with the some sort of absolute. But St. Gregory rightly observes that because of sin our contemplation of the absolute is distorted -- and without grace it is the case that our own big fat ego easily becomes the only absolute we see. For the Christian, adopting a worldview in which only the absolute is thought to be real would amount to a rejection of the gift of creation which God carefully brought forth into existence and ordered as a gift of love to each of us, a gift that includes our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, spouses and children, neighbors and even strangers, a gift that when gratefully received and cared for calls us beyond ourselves and beyond our limited experiences into his wondrous Light.

We could say that the Christian worldview accepts that visible things are real and that invisible things are even more real. In other words, we do not believe that everything we see is an illusion. Neither do we believe that the world is limited to only that which we can perceive with our senses or measure by our technology. The visible and the invisible interpenetrate our existence. Beyond what we can see and hear, enveloping every moment and holding it all together, there is the constant dawning of a spiritual reality. This reality is deeply personal: penetrating the deepest places of the heart even as it shines out on the remotest horizons of the cosmos. This personal Light is brighter than every physical light because every other form of light is merely an image of this dynamic and creative reality. This Light is the very source from which even the light of human reason sprung into being and continues to exist. In this Light, our frail minds glimpse the victory of all that is good, noble and true in the unfolding battle against evil, banality, and falsehood - a victory already realized in the heavens and a battle still being fought out in the heart. St. Augustine claims to have seen this Light even before his conversion - so by pure gift it is accessible to all those who seek it with a pure heart. When this Light shone on him, he explained that he knew at once that it was the Light that made him, a Light that was concerned about his own existence, a Light that invited him to a whole new kind of existence - a light of life, love and eternity.

Creation - the first book of prayer

2011-09-01T21:21:00.000-06:00

Creation is the first book of Christian prayer, a book in which the outlines of the face of Christ can begin to impress themselves on the heart. In this book, we read God's love in things visible and invisible - a love that is once revealed and hidden, a love which in the fullness of time became flesh. Christ reveals the glory of God in nature because by Him all things were made.

Creatures are formed by the Word in a kind of sacred harmony. The harmony of creation mediates truth -- the truth about God. Ancient Christian thinkers marveled at how in the very multiplicity of created things there is constantly revealed in ever new ways the divine simplicity from which they issue. At each moment, the fragile passing beauty of created things echoes, in no matter how faint a manner, divine glory. Even the first primal light by gentle whisper into chaotic dark emptiness is beget in glory, the glory of eternal love. With that first light and all the other works which continue to issue from the Word resounding in the silences of creation, at any given moment, flashes of overwhelming love imbued glory can peek through to wound our heart, to beckon us to something more than this world knows.

This is why St. John of the Cross calls creation a messenger of God, a messenger that speaks of the One who yearns for us and awaits us in love. Though the message of creation is easily forgotten - it wounds only lightly - it pierces us all the same, pricking our hearts in gentle and healing ways. How captivating to ponder how creation can be God's messenger precisely because it is not God: what was fashioned merely fragile and passing can point to something wholly other than itself precisely because the One who is love created it by love to manifest inexhaustible and manifold divine splendors of love whose specific dynamism would otherwise remain wholly hidden. Such manifestations of love beget love if only for a moment. Sometimes when it is hard to pray a moment is all we need.

Our Heavenly Homeland - True End of our Pilgrimage - and America

2011-08-28T10:38:00.001-06:00

I am almost home - I hope. For the last month, my reflections have been about a pilgrimage I made with some seminarians, a colleague and a few friends. Over eighteen days we wen about five thousand miles by bus stopping at shrines, cathedrals, and basilicas in seven countries and twenty-two cities as we made our way to Madrid for World Youth Day and back. Our pilgrimage which began in Krakow also ended in Poland at Jasna Gora with Mass in a chapal next to Our Lady of Czestochowa on her feastday. Today, everyone is home, I think, except me. I am waiting in Toronto after having had to re-book my flight. Believe it or not, here in this busy airport is my first chance for solitude and silence in a long time. Being almost home helps me remember that although the earthly pilgrimage is over for now, I am still in the middle of a spiritual pilgrimage - that together we yearn for our heavenly homeland, our true home where we are awaited by those who most love us.

Part of our pilgrimage took in the great achievements of our faith in art and culture, and part of our pilgrimage was about understanding the ways in which the Church fell short of her mission. It is as if we forgot that we are not at home in this world and became to at home with worldly power and honor. Pettiness and bad judgment always result from a failure to remember one's true purpose. It is sobering to call to mind that despite great achievements we always remain capable of deviating from the mission entrusted to us by God.

Briefly, when Christianity became the official religion of Rome, the Church began to enjoy not only spiritual power for the salvation of souls but also had to deal with different forms of worldly power. Social institutions were formed to take care of the poor, the sick and the widowed. Then when the empire fell, the Church hierarchy and the monasteries became the only providers of social order and culture. At the same time, the seduction of worldly power sometimes poisoned pivotal decisions. Normally, the end was good - a society ordered to God. Mistakes usually involved the means used to achieve this -- faith cannot be compelled by violence or fear without harming human dignity and destroying the very foundations of Christian culture.

Faith in fact has the nature of a proposal - something that requires freedom in order to be properly embraced and lived. It is only a power not of this world which produces it in the heart, a power that is shown forth in the weakness of the Church rather than her earthly glory. In many cases, it was not until the Church lost its worldly power that the suffering and injustice such decisions caused could be more objectively evaluated. When during the Great Jubilee in the Year 2000 John Paul II asked for pardon from the world for the sins committed by members of the Church, there was a lot that needed to be forgiven.

Piety in America lives as a proposal with which each generation must wrestle. It has not given birth to the great monuments and cultural achievements we find in Europe, but it has its own dynamism which is vital to God's plan for the world. Although we believe in the goodness of people to use their freedom well, we also believe that those with power need to be accountable because earthly power and the human heart are subject to death - and so we do not put our trust in government or any unaccountable political power, even if that power were religious. When it comes to faith, although we desired no established religion and wanted a separation of Church and State, from the beginning Americans tended to see themselves as a pious people as dependent on Divine Providence as the Children of Israel entering into the Promised Land. There is both optimism and caution which lives in the American religious sense.

This paradox living in the heart of our history and national character is not fully understood by most Americans, and we risk losing something very important for our culture as a result. Our culture of personal liberty is built on it. In this paradox, the mission of the Church and the purpose of government have a chance find their proper place so that human freedom and God's love can come together in our society.

This is why America, for all its struggles with materialism and temptations to arrogance, has a deep piety that still informs its culture at times, especially when it comes to personal liberty. The mission of the Church involves service to the piety which informs this liberty. It is a service of truth. In America, the Church must work to be a vital voice in the public square which contributes to a just society. Yet it is not a voice of earthly power as it once was in Europe. This frees the Church to be the voice of conscience America most needs. Is there a model here which points the way forward in post-Christian countries which need a new evangelization today? Whether this is so or not, this collision of freedom and faith which American democracy and the mission of the Church make possible is what helps America point to something beyond itself: it is what helps me remember our true homeland.

A note about America's caution regarding religious institutions. It is not the Church as such that American's distrust - yet every religious organization is made up of people and it is the tendency of people to abuse power of which Americans are rightly wary. It is a humble part of the American character which sees that the desire for earthly power is a dangerous force in the human heart. Something inside us wants to make a name for ourselves and if we do not humbly allow ourselves to be held accountable by God and those He gives us - well, we soon find ourselves intoxicated with our need to be in control at the expense of another's freedom. When we have not submitted this to Christ in our service to the Church, such psychological forces can influence the kinds of decisions we make for even the most noble of causes.

It is not a bad thing for the earthly power of the Church to be limited - in our weakness the power of God is made perfect. Sometimes, so that we do not get carried away by the pride of life and forget that we are meant for something much greater, God strips us of earthly honor and influence. When He humbles us, it is to remind us about what is really important. Earthly power is meant only to protect and promote human dignity - it is not something we should be at home with. This world and the power we find here are not big enough for our hearts - we are made for something much greater. Here, we are only almost home - Someone with a host of angels and saints, the family of God, awaits us with love at our true home - so that every homecoming only anticipates something even better.

So sitting in Toronto's airport waiting for my flight - I am almost home, but even when I get to Denver and find myself at home telling stories about this adventure with my wife and children, we will still only be almost home. Something about being with our friends and family anticipates our true homeland in a beautiful way. But there is something even better waiting for us, something which every other homecoming signifies and points to. We are meant to care for our earthly home so that those entrusted to us and who come after us can learn to love, so that they can find God. Our true home, however, is found only in Christ to whom every knee must bend and every head must bow, on the earth and under it. The pathway to this heavenly homeland is faith - a road traveled by the truly free who by truth know how to love.

Burgos and Lourdes

2011-08-23T17:40:00.000-06:00

Gothic Cathedral at Burgos - the City of El Cid

Father Raymond Gawronski, S.J. preaching at Mass in Burgos

Tonight we are in Ars after yesterday took us from Burgos, Spain through the Pyrenees to Lourdes. We are all still pretty exhausted from World Youth Day. Yet many of the seminarians are overcome with some of the graces they have received in these days. In Lourdes, we participated in a beautiful candlelight vigil where we prayed the Rosary and sang songs with pilgrims from all over the world. The devotion was so beautiful, especially when you saw all the sick who had come.

The entry way to Lourdes

It seems since the Wedding Feast at Cana, Mary continues to initiate profound, healing and life-changing encounters with the Lord. At this site, as is well known, the Virgin Mary appeared to a little girl in the 19th Century. (Click here for a more detailed account of the apparitions.) Bernadette was from a poor family but had a deep faith. This beautiful Lady, after teaching her how to pray, told Bernadette to dig in a grotto, to drink, to eat bitter herbs and bath in the water there for the sake of those who did not know the Lord's forgiveness. Those who were sick were to come, drink and bath in the water, explained the mysterious person, to be healed. In fact, since 1858, there have been about 70 confirmed healings - healings that defy medical explanation. There have also been thousands and thousands of other graces given to pilgrims. The Lady who appeared to her prayed with her and eventually told her that her name was "Immaculate Conception.' The priest who investigated these apparitions acknowledged that it was a rather sophisticated phrase for an uneducated youngster considering that the expression had up until that point never been spoken in La Patois - the ancient mountain French of the region.

To this day, thousands of pilgrims come nearly everyday to drink and bath in the water, to go to confession and mass and to pray the Rosary. Many of these pilgrims are sick -- and their faith is very moving. Some are healed in physical and visible ways - for many more the healing is spiritual, an invisible healing of the heart - which is the most important grace of all. Tonight when I asked the men about their experience

Crosses left by Pilgrims at Lourdes

one said he was so moved by what he saw that there were no words to express it. And then he sat in silence for a moment and said he did not want to talk about it anymore. If you were at dinner with us, you could tell he was reliving a beautiful moment of grace. It is for memories such as these that one goes on pilgrimage.

Waiting for the bus in Burgos - if your bus ever gets in a fender bender in this city, they have great chocolate!

Madrid - a city of great blessings!

2011-08-20T05:41:00.000-06:00

These are some shots of Madrid - there are signs all over for World Youth Day. There is also a shot of Americans gathering for a special Mass with the U.S. bishops today. Our seminarians had a special mass with the Pope this morning.

For those of you who are joined to us spiritually by prayer since when we first left Krakow - a little update: We made it to Madrid after a wonderful day of prayer at Manresa - where St. Ignatius spent a year in prayer and spiritual trials. We soon began to experience our own trials. Our bus broke down outside of Zaragoza and we got here late on Thursday. But in a way World Youth Day began at the truck stop in Zaragoza. The seminarians pulled out a guitar and started to sing. Soon whole groups of pilgrims began to join us. It was wonderful fellowship. One lady was so moved she gave another guitar as a gift - so we sang a special song for her and prayed together. The joy and excitement in Madrid are very beautiful -- like that moment at the bus stop. The Spanish are wonderful hosts.

It is hard to explain the graces that are here. Nothing has been real easy - yet everything filled with so much joy. Trials and sacrifices and hardships are the greatest blessings on a pilgrimage. At the time you do not see it - but then if you are patient and trust - God does some great and unexpected thing. Isn't this just the way He works in our lives all the time when we let Him? Thanks for praying for us and for all your support for our future priests. God is raising up some remarkable men to serve the Church -

Montserrat and St.Ignatius

2011-08-17T16:18:00.000-06:00

We had mass at the Benedictine Monastery at Montserrat up above Barcelona today and tomorrow we will go to Manresa. What ties these two places together is St. Ignatius of Loyola. Montserrat has a miraculous image of Our Lady - said to be associated with St. Luke. It is believed that this image was discovered by shepherds in 880 A.D. although some historians believe it was actually carved in the 12th Century. Whatever the actual history, there have been various shrines on top of this mountain where Christians have dedicated their lives to prayer for over a millennium. Benedictines eventually founded a monastery there in the 11th Century.

St. Ignatius came here after his initial conversion. Wounded by a canon ball during a battle and while recovering at his brother's house he discovered the presence of the Risen Lord in his life. He noticed this presence through reading. When he read novels about chivalry and romance, he reflected on how these entertained him while he was reading but afterwards left him empty. When he read the lives of the saints, he discovered that his heart burned within and stirred with desires to imitate their zeal for the Lord. Recognizing the opposition of these two movements of the spirit helped him see Christ as the one who could help him live life to the full. Indeed, we only discover the gift of who we really are through an authentic gift of ourselves to others, and Christ alone makes givings ourselves in this way a real possibility. Ignatius wanted this possibility in his life and he resolved to follow Christ. With this resolution, he went to Montserrat and spent two days making a confession of all his sins. After his confession, he spent the night in prayer - as a knight in arms - before Our Lady of Montserrat. At the end of his prayer, he left his sword with our Lady and decided to spend the rest of his life as a pilgrim doing penance. This would eventually lead him to Manresa. Here he spent a year in solitude - fasting, praying and doing penance. He battled severe bouts with depression and all kinds of spiritual trials. In the end, he had a deep encounter with the Holy Trinity, gained wisdom of heart and wrote down his insights in what we now know as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

This was an important day for our seminarians. Before their formal studies, all of them go through a year of spiritual formation which seeks to tap the wisdom of heart St. Ignatius learned at Manresa. While I do not think they have visions of the Trinity as did the founder of the Society of Jesus, many of them experience graces that are life changing in all kinds of different ways. It is the wisdom of heart that one gains through being generous with God in prayer and with one's life that most prepares them for the work God has for them. Please keep them in prayer that we might gain this wisdom- tomorrow to Madrid!

We are in Spain!

2011-08-16T14:45:00.000-06:00

After a plunge into the ocean Today we made it to Barcelona. Our pilgrimage takes us to the Cathedral and Montserrat tomorrow - and if things go well possibly Manresa.
Some of our experiences -- it is live music on the gandola -- in Venice: Day 5
And then what we saw in Milan: Day 6

Mary Draws us up to Christ

2011-08-15T16:08:00.000-06:00

In my last post about Il Duomo in Milan, I mentioned how Mary and all the saints sit atop the Gothic Cathedral there. They are witnesses to the power of the Risen Lord - who raises us up in such a way that we can raise one another up too. The way Mary and the saints are positioned on the top of spires it is as if they are pulling the whole structure to heaven. This is exactly what the holiness of Christ does in the Church. It pulls everyone up to the things of heaven.

Although the holiness of Christ totally exceeds that of every creature, there is one creature who is blessed above all others by Him. Mary was assumed into heaven because of the holiness with which her son Jesus blessed her. The Archangel Gabriel said she was full of grace. Her cousin Elisabeth said she is blessed among women, and that she is blessed because she believed in what the Lord said to her. Mary said that all generations would call her blessed.

Like a good mother, she wants to share these blessings with us. She wants to share her holiness with us. When our devotion to Christ is genuine, she is always there lifting up our efforts at prayer, at love, at self-discipline - helping us realize the communion with the Lord we so deeply desire. In fact, the greater our desire for the Lord, the more she is able to raise us to Him - just like the artists and architects believed when they place Mary on top of Il Duomo.

Il Duomo in Milan

2011-08-14T17:44:00.001-06:00

This Church was a sheer and unexpected grace today -- it has its own bright Gothic splendor which shines in the middle of the city. The inside is magnificent. I thought, because Milan was industrial, that the Church might be neglected or else in some difficult part of town. Instead, it rises up in the very heart of the city. Our tour guide explained to us that if we really wanted to know the heart of Milan we needed to see the heart of Il Duomo - a Church dedicated to the Nativity of Mary and the Assumption. In fact, arrayed in gold, Mary sits on top of the Cathedral, drawing all the architecture with her with a throng of saints into the heavens.

Going to the Heart of Il Duomo in Milan

There is so much to reflect on - but one thought that keeps coming back is how this Church rises up in the heart of the city. Chesterton observes that ancient people, especially those of the Mediterranean basin, would build their cities around a sacred place. Furthermore, the cities of Mediterranean cultures tended to be walled - as if to keep not only human enemies but also the perilous forces of nature at bay. The interior of the city was protected so that people could live - and the most important part of life was worship.

The Virgin Mother drawing up Il Duomo to Heaven

For the Romans in particular, the greatest of all human virtues was piety - loyalty to the gods of the family hearth. Chesterton believed it was their family values that distinguished, that motivated their struggle against Carthage - even after the Roman peoples were utterly vanquished. Deep in the Roman heart was a desire to protect a way of life, to protect the sacred places entrusted to its care, to protect the family heritage for which the Roman was responsible.

Verifying these observations, the Book of Maccabees testifies that there was an original friendship between Roman and Israel. Both peoples were engaged in the fierce struggles to protect these values against opposing cultural and political forces. The Carthaginians worshiped Molech by infant sacrifice - the same practice that we find in the Ba'alism condemned by the prophets. (It is hard not to categorize as similar the current promotion of clinical abortions - only our god is commercialism, a god who demands complete and constant votive offerings to a new priesthood we call the salesman.) The ancient Romans and Jews knew that it was worthy to fight against such a dehumanizing religion, that if they failed to stand up to the forces which promoted it - all that they considered most important in life would be lost. Their God-centered, family culture was worth their very lives to preserve.

Although Rome defeated Carthage - it began to lose its struggle for these values. Christian apologists tell us that fear and despair were eating at the very heart of Rome before the Gospel was proclaimed. Christ died so that a new kind of God-centered, family culture might thrive. Such a culture of life and civilization of love is meant to serve as a sign in this life for what awaits us in eternity. Pope Benedict observes that it was not purely accidental that after the Greeks, the Romans should be among the first to receive the Gospel of Christ. Instead, he contends, this was an important part of divine providence - the Gospel was not something proclaimed to individuals in isolation. It was meant to imbue culture and raise it up so that its most noble aspirations might be realized.

Where Ambrose baptized Augustine

It is on this point that our visit took on special meaning. Buried in the Crypt of Il Duomo, a Cathedral that sits over the vestiges of the baptistery in which St. Ambrose baptized St. Augustine, is one of the great reformers of the 16th Century - St. Charles Borromeo. In a future post I want to share a conversation I had with Cardinal Stafford about him, a conversation which helped me understand why it was so important to found St. John Vianney Theological Seminary. But to conclude this post, it is enough to recall that St. Charles undertook the reform of the Church at a time of crisis. The Renaissance which seemed at first to promise the achievement of a genuinely Christian culture had gone awry. What ought to have been a theo-centric anthopological enterprise had developed into an un-Christian anthropocentric endeavor - the rebirth of culture became "man centered" rather than "God centered." This naive exuberance in humanity's achievements contributed to profound divisions in the Church which have never been healed.

Waiting for our bus

How did St .Charles deal with this excess and help the Church and the wider society find its balance again? He spearheaded any number of new endeavors many of which he turned into success stories because of his hard work. But behind all this was three things which roots genuine culture in human maturity: asceticism, contemplative study and most of all a return to the discipline of prayer were at the heart of all his efforts. In addition to all our efforts to advance our society in terms of technology and art, just like Christians of the 16th Century we also need to engage the struggle against sin, the struggle to find the truth and the struggle to pray if we are to preserve what is most essentially human - humanity in relation to God - in our culture. So today I remembered your intentions behind the leader of the 16th Century Catholic Reform whose example remain an inspiration for our efforts today.

Freedom Needs the Truth

2011-08-13T15:48:00.003-06:00

Yesterday we went to Padua -- Daniel captured part of our adventures here: Day Four. In the meantime, I would like to reflect on our adventure today. Today's experiences were a little frustrating - and at the same time overwhelmingly beautiful. They evoked a question from me - namely: Why do we pray? Why is it essential to make time in one's life for prayer?

One answer pertains to our need for the truth - because this is what we seek in prayer. In prayer, freedom, maturity and truth go together. Growth into full maturity and freedom is only possible if we have a guiding principle for our lives. True freedom is the freedom to give one's heart in love, to offer one's heart to another. Such freedom needs the truth -- the truth is its guiding principle. Truth provides spiritual sensibility. It allows us to tune into what is truly essential in prayer and in our relationships with one another. Without truth, freedom is doomed to betray itself, trapping the heart in the impenetrable prison of one's own big fat ego. We pray to seek the truth - the truth is the only path to the freedom to love.

One of the things one sees in both Europe and America is that many are inhibited from recognizing the radiant splendor of the truth surrounding them - have they despaired of its existence? This is what I see in the eyes of many people we pass as we walked through the glorious beauty of Venice today. This experience was particularly haunting on our way to venerate the remains of St. Mark, the evangelist.

Our local tour guide tried to explain what we were seeing in the Basilica of San Marco after our community mass in one of the side chapels. But I am not sure she saw it or fully realized what she was trying to explain to us. It was obvious that she had been taught to contemplate the building with secular eyes. She tried to ignore it when our men went to their knees before the bones of St. Mark to ask for his intercession and out of devotion to Christ. Instead she was intent on explaining the Pala d'Oro behind the relics. She was so intent to explain its craftsmanship (it is exquisite!) and the history behind its production that she seemed almost unaware of the beautiful mystery it was depicting and why this sacred art should be placed so close to the bones of the evangelist. She had, at least for this presentation, lost her spiritual sense and was not really in touch with those who had hoped she could guide.

Without her spiritual sensibility, the truth standing out in radiant clarity before her could not be recognized, the truly essential could not be voiced. Now this is something many of us do from time to time and I do not think Italians are more prone to this than any other group of people. Yet the incongruity of offering purely secular observations to a group of pilgrims on a quest for spiritual truth has been with me all day - it illustrates a particular poverty that afflicts contemporary culture.

There is an emptiness in the eyes of more and more people - sometimes it lurks behind avarice and caprice, sometimes resentment. Our priests and seminarians were even sneered at on a few occasions as we walked through the streets. What is going on? Could it be that weighed down by purely material values anything that witnesses to the possibility of something better suited to the human spirit is provoking? Those who do not know God and who have not dedicated themselves to prayer must also experience moments of joy and even moments of meaning -- moments that make them question whether they should doubt their faith in the merely material to satisfy. Even so, meaning, truth, harmony, mediation - this is elusive, sometimes to the point of evading all recognition even as it stands before us. In the Church of San Marco, the Risen Christ radiates his presence in thousands of artistic creations and objects of devotion arrayed to adorn a house of prayer fit for worship of the living God - yet He goes unrecognized in the midst of such splendor.

Christ is the truth, the life and the way. He is the life principle by which those who believe in him live. He is the Word, the Logos, the Mediator of truth from God to the hearts of men and the truth of men to the Heart of God. He is Divine Reason, Perfect Harmony, Pure Beauty. Maturity and freedom are stunted because when this Truth is not seen. How strange it is not to see the One from whom all things come and to which all things flow. We must seek and strain to find. We must knock. We must ask for the Truth who longs to give Himself. Freedom needs this Truth to grow and maturity needs full human freedom to be realized. So in our prayer, we must seek the Truth and when we find Him, allow our minds to rest in Him, to dwell in Him - in this way, whether we are in an ancient sanctuary where the bones of apostles and prophets or in city streets seeing the sadness revealed in the eyes of strangers -- we will find Him who searches for us even more.

Video Clips of our Journey from Krakow to Vienna en route to Madrid

2011-08-12T16:46:00.001-06:00

These are some video clips made by Daniel, one of our seminarians from Denver. I hope sharing these experiences with you helps you pray for us - we are praying for you every day.

Day One
He arrived early with a couple other seminarians and before meeting up with the whole group went to Auschwitz to pray on the Feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein).

Day Two
Daniel shows our meeting with Cardinal Dzwicz in the chapel where Karol Wojtyla was ordained, the Franciscan Church across the street where he liked to go to pray, the Wawel (Castle) with the Cathedral underneath which Blessed John Paul II prayed his first Mass.

Day Three
This one shows our road trip from Krakow to Vienna -- we get stopped and searched by the Czech police on the way. It was quite a situation - they gave up the search when Father Gawronski, S.J. started praying the Rosary with us. I am not so sure they are used to people praying in public there. The end of the clip shows our daily mass at a Polish parish not far from the Belvedere.

We made it to Padua today so there is more to come!

Pilgrimage - visible travel and spiritual journey

2011-08-12T00:05:00.000-06:00

Pilgrimage has an arduous physical dimension but the prayer with which it should be imbued is even more demanding. The great teachers on prayer remind us that prayer is not something that naturally comes to us. It is a gift from God which one must ask for and it requires great effort and determination. It is a pilgrimage of faith. Just as a great journey is normally embarked upon after acquiring sufficient provisions and often many of these are gifts from those who love us, prayer also involves undeserved gifts of love and concern, and a lot of commitment.

In this pilgrimage, riding in a bus from central Europe to Madrid, there are no physical challenges. But spiritually, there is always a need for effort, for vigilance. Pilgrimage requires the discipline of a constant readiness to be flexible with changing circumstances and opportunities to help. Sometimes God permits you to meet someone with a real need, someone who can really use some help. A pilgrim needs to be just as attentive to these moments as he is to the interior movements of the Holy Spirit in prayer.

The owner of a hotel we stayed at in Krakow told a story about a pilgrim priest he observed in the mountains. The priest was hiking along his way and saw an elderly woman trying to dig up potatoes by herself. The priest stopped, asked for her shovel and began to help her. There was a little commotion when his entourage caught up with him – it turned out this pilgrim was the bishop of Krakow – Karol Wojtyla, the future pope who would institute World Youth Day.

This story is an example of how we are to encourage each other in prayer and pilgrimage, how we sustain one another in our journey to the Lord. Our journey is not simply to some physical destination. The goal is a spiritual – because we are on a search for God. God is found in a place of humility and patience – a place where we live with the truth about ourselves and find the courage not to be overcome by sorrow. This is why many of the great mystics sometimes voiced concern over any preoccupation with physical travel that might distract from the spiritual journey. The visible journey is always to be subordinate to the spiritual one -

Let others go to Jerusalem, but you as far as humility and patience. So doing you leave the world; in the other manner they enter it. Guigo the Carthusian, Meditations #262.

Seek God, and do not seek in what place he dwells. What is most important in order to find him is to remain silent and to be humble. Abba Sisoes, as cited by Dom Andre Poisson in Personal Prayer, Grande Chartreuse 1976, 1998.

Encountering John Paul II on our Way to Madrid

2011-08-11T17:36:00.001-06:00

While we were in Krakow, we went to the chapel where Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest and then to the crypt of the Cathedral where he offered his first mass. He was ordained during the Nazi occupation, in private, after completing a course of studies carried out in secret.

There is a beautiful silver altarpiece depicting the Churches of Rome, Jerusalem and other places he to which he journeyed as a pilgrim. There is a statue of our Lady of Fatima – to whom he attributed his survival from the attempt that was made on his life at St. Peter’s Square. There is a silver book in which one finds a small reliquary for the blood of John Paul II and a copy of the picture used at his beatification earlier this year. In the midst of this, the current Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, met with us and told us about the Chapel which Pope John Paul II used as his personal oratory when he became Bishop of Poland.

Cardinal Dziwisz and Father Raymond Gawronski, S.J., professor and spiritual director at St. John Vianney Semianry

Cardinal Dziwisz, who closely assisted John Paul II, came to Denver for WYD 18 years ago and shared his own fond memories of the occasion. He described it as a dramatic turning point, a victory for the Church. He hopes that the same will happen in Madrid. He also spoke about John Paul II’s life of prayer – how the Holy Father believed that by prayer our whole vision of life is changed, that we constantly see new possibilities for the Gospel of Christ. Such is the optimism of our faith. It was a beautiful moment of prayer in the chapel with Cardinal.

We then went to the Cathedral in the Wawel, the Castle of Krakow. At the time of Karol Wojtyla's ordination, the castle was occupied by the Nazis. Blessed John Paul II decided, despite the risks, that his first mass would be celebrated in secret on a small alter under the Cathedral in the crypt. This is where all the great kings, queens and Polish heroes are buried, the resting place of the first Bishop of Krakow. Celebrating this first mass close to these heroes was both risky and intentional – he believed that Poland had a special destiny in the world, a special role in the plan of God to which he wanted his ministry attached. And, he believed this even in the face of the brutal suppression of his people, at a moment when it appeared likely the nation would not survive at all. He had incredible confidence in God. Something of his faith echoes in that crypt and in that secret chapel of his ordination. Watching our seminarians kneel before the little altar there, I could not help but pray for their formation and preparation ordination – in many ways, their vocations are the fruit of John Paul II’s ministry and Poland's destiny. You could tell these men felt a bond with the Polish Pope, that his commitment to the Gospel of Christ resonates in their hearts too.

Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

2011-08-09T15:50:00.000-06:00

Father Mark has a great post on St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She is a fascinating person to study. A student of Edmund Husserl, arguably one of his best, she advanced philosophical discussions in phenomenology. Reading the life of Teresa of Avila inspired her conversion and she became a Carmelite nun. She began to become a great contemplative, plummeting the depths of prayer like the great Spanish Mystic. Deported from Holland during the war, she was sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp which is in the vicinity of Krakow. This plight, bleak though it was, did not discourage her. She saw it as an opportunity to make a more perfect offering of herself to God for those she loved. She offered her plight as an act of prayer - for her family, for the Jewish People of whom she was part, for Germany and for all those she loved. While many people see death as an escape from the pain, inconvenience and difficulty of life, Christians view death as a final act of worship - the supreme moment of our life of faith. To this end, St. Teresa has shown us the science of the Cross in the very face of the evil - she has shown us that prayer is always possible and that we never have to lose hope.

My original plan was to go to Auschwitz as part of our pilgrimage today to honor her and to remember the many souls all over the world who still suffer as victims of inhumane ideologies and godless malice. Last year, in Dachau, I remember the sobering sounds of a young woman sobbing. The effects of cruelty ought to be sobbed over and remembering the evil of which we are capable ought to move us to beg for God's mercy. This is what I had hoped to do today. However, most of our group arrived today and many of them had difficulty getting here. So my day was spent gathering and welcoming our pilgrims.

Hospitality - giving and receiving it - is a vital part of the spirituality of being a pilgrim. There is something of the mystery of welcoming Christ in it. Sometimes, listening to God in prayer must be temporarily postponed so that we can welcome the Lord in the disguise of those He sends us. Nonetheless, a special grace still connected me to St. Teresa. Three pilgrims who came yesterday had some free time this afternoon while everyone else was getting in. So they went out to the former extermination camp on their own -- not only to honor St. Teresa (Edith Stein) but also to honor St. Maximilian Kolbe who was killed in a starvation bunker in the same complex a couple miles away. In fact, yesterday was the anniversary of his being sent to the bunker after he offered to substitute himself for a man condemned to die. Accounts from the prison guards themselves tell us that he turned that hellish bunker into a place of love, praying with and comforting those with whom he was condemned unto the end. When the seminarians left to go to this bunker today, they carried my intentions with them -- which means they carried your intentions too.

St. Dominic and the Basilica of the Holy Trinity

2011-08-08T11:53:00.000-06:00

Today on the Feast of St. Dominic, I went to the Basilica of the Holy Trinity. Dominicans came to Krakow under the leadership of St. Hyacinth. He had traveled with his bishop to Rome in the hopes of meeting St. Dominic and convincing him that Poland needed preachers. Dominic invited him to join his newly formed order and sent him to head the mission in Poland himself. Dominicans have been ministering at the Basilica ever since.

One of the biggest problems is that there are never enough good preachers. The Lord relies on preachers to spread our faith. Yet oftentimes those who try to preach the Gospel fall short of their task. Noticing such failures could be discouraging. It can also be a moment of grace, a moment to hear the Lord's invitation for oneself. The truth is - everyone to whom the Gospel has been entrusted has a responsibility to witness, to share the faith. When we possess the truth, it sets us free - free to act, to live life to the full. On this point, the Christian faith is not passive. It demands our effort. The truth must be lived. This is what the Lord invited St. Hyacinth to through St. Dominic -- and the Church of the Holy Trinity is fruit of St. Hyacinth's response to this invitation.

St. Augustine opens his Confessions with questioning how we are to praise God if we do not know Him. He understands that our deepest happiness, the place where are hearts most rest, is in worshiping the Lord. But how do we know who the Lord is so that we might worship Him the right way? St. Augustine answers his own question. It is through the words of a preacher. What an awesome responsibility preaching the Gospel is! What courage it takes! Yet the Lord has entrusted this great work to us despite the weakness of our intellects and our inability to fully express the magnitude of the gift He has won for us on the Cross. Thank God there are those who love us enough, who are courageous enough, to spend their lives in study and preaching - because of them we have access to what is most important for the human spirit, the gift of the Gospel of Christ. Thank God for St. Dominic and all the preachers whose yes to the Lord never became a no, who by God's grace and perseverance never compromised in the task entrusted to their care.

Krakow and Divine Mercy

2011-08-07T23:56:00.004-06:00

My favorite aspect of going on pilgrimage is that every day is filled with new graces and surprises. When things go wrong and plans fall apart, opportunities to trust in God's providence are born. He never disappoints and always exceeds every expectation. All that is required is trust.

In a suburb just south of the town center, Lagiewniki, there is a sanctuary dedicated to Divine Mercy. Sister Faustyna Kowalska had a deep relationship with Jesus and He spoke to her about his desire for Christians to rediscover devotion to his Divine Mercy. He appeared to her with rays of light coming from his heart - a visible symbol of the grace, the blood and water, that He poured out on the Cross for each of us. He knows our every suffering. He has entered deep into our misery. He comes to us inviting us to entrust our difficulties to Him. It is by trusting Him that his power can flow into our lives.

Jesus asked Sister Faustyna to have an image painted depicting the way she saw Him coming to us. There were several attempts both before and after her death to provide this image. The image commissioned before her death did not fully meet Sister's expectations. Nor was it placed in a convent chapel the way she desired. In fact, many things that Jesus asked of her never quite went the way she had hoped. She often thought that she was failure - and many of her fellow religious thought she was crazy. In the midst of this, she refused to be discouraged but constantly tried to renew her devotion to Jesus, trusting in him.

After her death just prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, one artist painted an image of the Lord in a manner described in her diary and gave it as a gift to the convent in Lagiewniki where Sister Faustyna was buried. He offered it in gratitude for a miracle that saved his life. The image is believed to be miraculous. Some who have looked on it in prayer have been cured. Something about this image and the the devotion promoted by Sr. Faustyna helped many Catholics deal not only with the Nazi occupation but also communism. John Paul II also found this devotion to be helpful for his own spiritual life. Today, the image is located just over the relics of Sister Faustyna in the convent chapel on the grounds of the sanctuary. In 2002, John Paul II consecrated the grounds as a sanctuary to Divine Mercy. Today, over two million pilgrims visit each year discovering in different ways what it means to trust in the Lord and to live out his merciful love in their daily lives.

Yesterday a couple of our pilgrims arrived - without their luggage. There was a little bit of discouragement in their faces when I met them at their hotel. They needed to go to mass and were located only blocks away from the sanctuary. So we went. It was so beautiful and peaceful, a small example of the the surprise graces the Lord constantly gives to those who trust in Him.

Thinking on What is Above

2011-08-04T12:13:00.000-06:00

This begins our series on pilgrimage. To take time in one's life for a holy journey helps us remember the truth about who we are and where we are going. It helps us think about what is above, to rediscover what it means to be free, rational and spiritual creatures.

William of St. Thierry encourages his 12th Century Carthusian friends at Mont Dieu to fix their minds on heavenly things in his Golden Epistle. When we take time for silence to think about God and heavenly things, it feeds our spirits with the truth about the world and ourselves. Sustaining our lives with the truth is what it means to be rational, to choose to live in relation to the Lord, in harmony with his Presence. There are many things that demand our attention, so this endeavor is not always easy especially because we are so forgetful. It is a matter of clinging - a decision not to let go of God in one's thoughts and memories, and frequently renewed efforts to constantly attend to the Lord in our hearts. The more we think about Him and honor Him, the more He can bless us. This is a timeless truth. For those of us who live in the hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis, keeping William's ancient counsel is as beneficial to us just as it was for his contemporaries:

All greatness and goodness for the spirit that is great and good consists in looking upon and wondering at and aspiring to what is above it, so that the devoted image hastens to cling to its exemplar. For it is the image of God, and the fact that it is his image enables it to understand that it can and should cling to him whose image it is (#209).

Pilgrimage

2011-08-03T11:41:00.000-06:00

This month of August, I am setting out on pilgrimage with a group of seminarians and priests from St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver - where I serve as an assistant professor. We are meeting in Krakow on August 9 and traveling by bus to Madrid for World Youth Day. Along the way we will stop and pray at cathedrals, shrines and monasteries in Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, Southern France and, of course, Spain. For those who cannot physically participate in this pilgrimage, I invite you to join our group spiritually. In whatever time you make for daily prayer, remember to pray for us and our deeper conversion to the Lord. By such prayers we realize together a solidarity in the Holy Spirit which is greater than all space and distance. To help you pray with us, I will post pictures and short reflections about the places we visit along the way.

Our Sunday Visitor's Guide in the Internet 4.0 described this blog as presenting a place for prayer on the Web with a message that we are in the world but not of it. I am grateful for this mention and to all the readers who have joined me in prayer over the years - I am glad we have encouraged each other in so many ways. We are in the world, but not of it: concerns for material things and the affairs of this world are a part of our lives, but not the main part. We are meant for something more. This world, entrusted to us for the brief span of our lives, is not our true home. Making a pilgrimage, even joining one spiritually by prayer, reminds us of this great truth. We are travelers here, on a journey to our heavenly homeland, the Father's house, the very bosom of the Trinity.

As follow pilgrims, it is important for us to encourage each other, not only with the words of the Holy Bible and the great saints who have gone before us, but also with our own words, our very lives. Our lives are a pilgrim way through this land of shadows into a fullness we are incapable of imagining. The path we trod is that forged by our crucified God. We must take up our own cross and follow Him with all the devotion of our hearts. A pilgrimage helps us renew our devotion. I hope that you will join this pilgrimage by praying for our seminarians on their way. You will be in my prayers that the Lord will pour out his blessings on you and your loved ones.

God's Action and Human Freedom

2011-07-31T15:02:00.005-06:00

The Lord sometimes invites us to see his glory in a powerful way, but we hesitate and balk before this invitation. We see all the problems, all the hunger, and we ask Him to make them go away. He sees those He loves and his heart aches for them. He commands, what seems to be from our limited human perspective, the impossible, "Feed them yourselves."

By the natural light of reason we know we do not have the resources to fulfill His command. Furthermore, our freedom only works self-sufficiently within the visible, the possible - but God is about what is impossible for the human person left to only his natural resources. The Lord invites his followers into his loving action, unceasing eternal activity which transcends all natural capacities and at the same time that toward which all of nature is oriented.

Why do we try to dismiss God's invitations and commands? Instincts of self-preservation kick in. Such movements of the heart, because they are wounded by sin, do not incline us to trust God when He directs us beyond our natural limits. At such moments of crisis, whether or not we realize it, our faith is being tested, we stand in judgment, and our heart is being revealed. Our instinct is to preserve us from such vulnerability. Yet when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable at this moment, when we do so out of devotion to Christ, we begin to see the truth about who we really are.

Humbly accepting such moments, we discover deep questions and fears that haunt us: If we say "yes" to God, will we lose our liberty? Or similarly, if we say "yes" to God but fail to be successful in what we think He wants, then what? These doubts, if not submitted to Christ, are impediments to fully thriving in our life of faith. Growth in faith depends on our willingness to overcome such obstacles. The answer to such questions is a question provided by St. Paul, a question which should lead us into deep prayer - what can separate us from the love of God?

The path for resolving conflict between God's action and our freedom is to enter into silence and beg the Lord for a deeper trust. Our humility and perseverance in making such a petition attract his countless blessings. Through these we begin to experience our natural liberty and God's supernatural action not as opposing forces but rather as mysteries ordained for each other.

Rather than a battle, the relationship between our freedom and God's action is more like a dance. The whole visible cosmos of this present life is like a ballroom filled with the music of the Holy Spirit. The Bridegroom invites us to enter into movement with Him and waits for our response. In this dance, even should we say no or put Him off, He accomplishes his purpose while continually offering new invitations. His great hope in us is not vanquished by our doubt. In this way, the Author of our freedom is constantly at work in our decisions, bringing to completion His designs. If we confidently step out in trust and keep our eyes fixed on Him, his radiance draws us so that what seemed to be a barrier becomes a stepping stone into his embrace.

God is always thrilled when we say "yes," even if all we have is a few loaves and couple of fish. This is because our "yes" makes space for God's power to be manifest. Such space affords the world a glimpse, a foretaste of the final consummation of all things in Him. This eschatological vision is enveloped in His exceedingly generous love. Even if it is unrecognized, what is manifest is the great wedding feast which has been prepared from all eternity. We are indeed awaited by love - will we seek Him how seeks for us? Blessed John Paul II points to this mystery in is own reflections on what it means to thrive, to realize the perfection of our human liberty in the action of God:

"God's action in no way restricts man's freedom; it leaves man free to try out his own plans and his own solutions; it even allows evil to exist, in order to bring out of the good that is latent in all human initiatives. At the same time this action of God in the world, this divine economy in human affairs, does lead -- through all the complexities and deviations as well as all the authentic achievements of humanity -- to the shape of things which man and the world are, in the end, to come to accept. It will be accepted because of the indubitable fact that the affairs of man and the world reach consummation in the hands of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who embraces and penetrates the entire world. The great German poet said, in Faust, that Satan is a force that always desires what is evil, whereas the good always goes into action." Blessed John Paul II, Sign of Contradiction, New York: Seabury (1979) 175-176.

Rejoice in the Lord Always

2011-07-24T10:48:00.001-06:00

Christians have the duty to rejoice, to express their joy to the world. Great thinkers like St. Augustine explain to us that joy is love which possesses its object. When we have what we most desire, we are able to enjoy and rest in what we love. We also know that many things we desire, even when we attain them, do not provide a joy that lasts. Most things we desire are too small to occupy our hearts for long, at least in a way that fulfills us. St. Augustine teaches that what we desire determines the weight of our soul. If we desire earthly things, such things will weigh us down. But if we desire heavenly things, our hearts will rise up to what is above. Obviously, we cannot rejoice very long if our hearts are weighed down by lesser desires all the time. The command to rejoice in the Lord implies that we renounce desires that clutter our lives with things that weigh us down, that prevent us from raising our hearts.

The Christian sense of rejoicing, however, goes beyond the renunciation of earthly things. This is because of what Christ offers us by faith. When we believe in Him, when we reach out to him in prayer, when we lift up our hearts and offer them to the Lord, He shares with us something splendid and glorious, something so beautiful that our hearts will never tire of it as long as we cleave to Him by faith.

What does it mean to rejoice in the Lord? It means to attend to Him who is coming to us, to offer Him our hearts. This allows Him to pick them up with his own hands and to join them to His own. In this moment, our hearts are transformed, a new creation begins to unfold. A new holy communion, forged by the Cross, is laid open to us. In this moment of grace which no natural light can see, the Father looks on us with His beatifying love just as He gazes on his own Son. For a moment open to eternity, Christ's joy becomes our joy. Filled with this life, light and love, can we remain silent or indulgent or anxious? No. Such love is too big to be kept inside and left unexpressed. It is a driving passion that consumes every fiber of our being. Such love, such joy needs to be expressed to those whom we most love, to those who most need it, to those we do not know and even to those whom we do not yet know how to love.

Quaerere Deum - to seek God

2011-07-21T23:49:00.001-06:00

The wisdom of St. Benedict directs us away from putting one's identity into productivity alone. Although he values work, he knows it is not enough to be a good worker. In his view, being accomplished, effective, and competent - these are all admirable qualities, but none of them by themselves get to what is most important. In fact, in his vision, such qualities, if not ordered to a greater purpose, can even lead to an unhappy life. He proposes instead that the principle purpose, the noble pursuit by which we come to taste eternal beatitude even in this life, is quaerere Deum, to seek God.

This proposal rests on the truth about human dignity. The dignity of men and women, the dignity of all human life, transcends this world. This is why it must be carefully protected and nurtured. The dignity of the human being does not rest in functionality - for being human is greater than the sum total of human functions. It does not rest in our achievements because the true goodness of humanity surpasses the totality of all its achievements which have been, are or will ever be. The mystery of human dignity is hidden from us, greater than we will ever understand. Our spirits stretch out to Someone all of creation reflects in a seeming unlimited and excessive manner. At the same time, by holy paradox, the magnitude of all created beings spanning from one end of the cosmos to the other barely hints at only the faintest shadow of the Uncreated Power in which alone our hearts can rest. God's loving and tender desire for friendship with each of us is the source and summit of all human dignity. It is with this great love that we who are but mud are fashioned in His image and likeness. And, it is our dignity which compels us to yearn for Him who yearns for us.

How do we seek God? The only way to find God is by the love of Christ. His love is accessed by humbly going to the Cross in faith constantly. Since the Cross reveals pure love, we must continually renounce everything in our lives which opposes pure love. Since it is through the Cross that the love of Christ flows into us, we must strive to lovingly offer anything that God permits to test and purify our love. Since it is on the Cross that humanity is able to offer acceptable praise to God, we must pick up our own and follow our crucified God. It is along these lines that St. Benedict counsels nihil amori Christi praeponere - prefer nothing to the love of Christ.

Commenting on this Benedictine wisdom, Pope Benedict explains, "Holiness consists of this, a sound proposal for every Christian that has become a real and urgent pastoral need or our time, when we feel the need to anchor life and history to sound spiritual references." Cited in Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI, ed. Rev. Peter John Cameron, O.P., San Francisco: Magnificat/Ignatius Press (2006) 222.

Prayer and the Great Divorce

2011-07-17T18:48:00.001-06:00

"Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of creature within the dungeon of its own mind -- is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains." This is the insight attributed by C.S. Lewis to George MacDonald in The Great Divorce.

This notion that Heaven is real and Hell anything divorced from reality applies to prayer. Prayer can be Heaven or Hell depending on whether we choose to pray by love filled faith in the Lord or else allow some enchanting form of self-occupation to swallow our attention. Christian prayer is meant to be a heavenly dialogue even if it involves suffering some painful truths we would rather not face. Prayer can also be a hellish monologue, a conversation turned on itself in which one never breaks free of his big fat ego.

Prayer in which one humbly converses with the Living God unlocks divine beauty and raises the eyes of our soul to inexhaustible splendors -- wonders we could not have ever imagined existed. Such prayer extends our vision so that we even come to see these wonders in everyone the Lord entrusts to us. The second kind of prayer imprisons us in the merely subjective, and weighs us down in nostalgia, bitterness and regret. With the eyes of our heart rolled back on themselves, we are unable to open them to the mystery of God uniquely revealed in the gaze of another. There are many different techniques and methods for perfecting this second kind of prayer. But in the prayer of faith, how ever helpful they might be in the beginning, every technique must bow and every method must bend before the power and sovereignty of Christ.

Even in the midst (especially in the midst?) of what the saints call the dark night, the prayer of faith is a foretaste of the fulfillment of all desire won for us by the Blood of the Lamb. The second kind of prayer, even in its most blissful ecstasies, is a pathway into a state of mind common to those swallowed in the self-occupation from which Christ yearns to deliver us. However therapeutic and pleasant, exercises in mental hygiene can not lift one above himself. For those whose prayer is but a monologue, unless they allow the silence of God to shatter their interior chatter, they will come to lose all memory of the true longing stirred in their hearts by simple joys and noble sorrows. On the other hand, whatever the trials with which they must deal, those who persevere in the divine dialogue initiated by the Word made flesh journey across a threshold into their heavenly homeland: the household of the Father in which they are awaited by love.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Blessed John Paul II

2011-07-15T15:54:00.000-06:00

Mount Carmel is a place of prayer and spiritual contest. It is a geographical location - a place where Elijah prayed, a place where Crusaders worn out from war went to find God, a place where to this day great ascetics still live. Mount Carmel is more than geographical, however. It is also a spiritual place where the Lord teaches his disciples to perfect their faith. Many of those who go to this spiritual place join the Carmelite family and enter deep into its rich patrimony. This patrimony is so abundant that not only Carmelites, but also others spiritually share in the astonishing gifts entrusted to this religious family. They discover in these gifts deeper union with Christ. One of these gifts is the special patronage of the Mother of God under the title of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

Mary's spiritual maternity helps Carmelites learn from her how to ponder, to meditate, to think on Christ in their hearts. The Brown Scapular, part of their habit, is a symbol of her intercession - a sign that she covers them in her prayers. They wear this sacramental as a sign that they have said "yes" to the prayerful presence of Christ's mother in their lives. The color "brown" speaks to the ascetical efforts and countless trials that learning how to pray demands. In fact, Mary makes pilgrimage with those who dedicate themselves to deep prayer in all their struggles and difficulties. She is a faithful mother who works tirelessly that a Carmelite's faith in Christ might come to full maturity.

Blessed John Paul II wore the Brown Scapular. Even though he was not a Carmelite, he chose to live in that place of spiritual contest and intimacy with God that Carmel represents. He chose to do this like Christ, enveloped in the maternal love of Mary. Very early in his spiritual life, he understood that Mary brought us to Christ. This seemed obvious to him - how else could it be? Instead, what amazed him was that Jesus should entrust his Mother to us. Even before he became a priest, Karol Wojtyla found this gift to be an intimate and remarkable testimony to the inexhaustible mystery of Christ's great love for his disciples. He experienced for himself that anyone who says "yes" to this gift from Christ and who welcomes her as a companion in his life's journey learns to recognize and enjoy all kinds of blessings in all kinds of circumstances.

The Flower of Love

2011-07-13T13:26:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite poets is Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit also known as Jessica Powers. She lived from 1905 to 1988. She became a Carmelite in her thirties. In her poem Flower of Love she reflects on St. John of the Cross's saying, "Where there is no love, put love and you will find love."

The difficult labor of putting love where there is no love is described in terms of a planting a flower. This flower has the potential of recreating Paradise in our hearts. These last strophes seem to offer particular encouragement to those who struggle to plant such a flower in their own lives:

Blessed are they who stand upon their vow

and are insistent

that love in this bleak here, this barren now

become existent.

Blessed are they who battle jest and scorn

to keep love growing

from embryo immaculately born

to blossom showing.

Primarily for them will petals part

to draw and win them,

It, when the pollen finds their opened hearts,

will bloom within them.

(1948)

Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Ed. Regina Siegfried, ASC and Robert F. Morneau, Washington D.C.: ICS Publications (1999), 41.

St. Benedict

2011-07-11T19:54:00.001-06:00

"Listen, O my son to the precepts of the master, and incline the ear of your heart: willingly receive and faithfully fulfill the admonition of your loving father; (cf. Prov. 1:8, 4:20, 6:20)that you may return by the labor of obedience to him from whom you had departed through the laziness of disobedience." Rule of St. Benedict, tr. Luke Dysinger, O.S.B.; Source Books (March 1997)

There is a certain urgency in this appeal with which St. Benedict introduces his rule. He is deeply concerned for the reader, as if the very life of the reader depended upon understanding what he was trying to convey. What he in fact conveys is a way of life, a day to day discipline for the Christian life. Many followers of Christ are scarcely aware that our faith demands a disciplined life. Without discipline, we cannot hear the Lord speak to our hearts.

The saint's appeal invites a relationship. If his appeal works, it is because the reader has somehow intuited the holiness of St. Benedict and at the same time also glimpsed in these words the concern of a spiritual father for his son or daughter. What St. Benedict learned through those who formed him in the faith, he wants to pass on through this rule that he is entrusting to us. Someone cared enough to pass on the faith to him, to be a spiritual father to him. Now in this rule, he shares from his heart practical advice that he learned at the price of great personal suffering.

In his efforts to be a spiritual father, he was often rejected and at one point his reputation ruined by false accusations manufactured by those who envied him. But no matter the trial, he never wrapped himself in righteous indignation and lashed out against those who injured him. Instead, he quietly followed his crucified God in the humble manner he learned from his own spiritual fathers. By suffering such obedience to the Lord, he learned how to willingly and faithfully incline the ear of his heart so that he might labor for obedience. It is precisely this kind of wisdom we need for the Christian life today, a wisdom forged in trials and tribulations, a wisdom which cannot be shaken.

St. Benedict teaches a discipline for the Christian life in which the disciple constantly chooses to be reliant on God and the way God wants to work. The way God has chosen to work is through our fellow sinners. It is a kind of scandal that God chooses to work through frail human beings, even to the point where sometimes in our devotion to the Lord we must obey them, even if they appear or are mistaken. This never means we act against our conscience -- God expects us to use our heads. That is why He gave them to us. But we often need to act against the temptation to think we know better than everyone else. We also need to act against our tendency to put our own big fat ego at the center of the cosmos. This is why we humbly make ourselves accountable to one another. This totally goes against our cultural values which exalt self-sufficiency and individualism - even to the point of absolute selfism. Yet, St. Benedict understands the apostolic command: we obey one another out of reverence for Christ.

Christians are not self-sufficient. They are completely reliant on the Lord and on those to whom the Lord entrusts them. Consider how the Lord has chosen to reveal himself through the words of a preacher. He makes known his ways through faithful teachers. He is also teaching us through generous spiritual fathers and mothers. Whatever our particular circumstance, our faith was given to us by someone who loved us enough to tell us the truth, even when that truth was painful to hear. Our job is to listen to the Lord speak through such people - through them, He is speaking to our hearts, helping us overcome our laziness, teaching us how to make something beautiful of our lives for his glory, and leading us back to Himself.

The Wisdom of God

2011-07-07T20:53:00.000-06:00

I once asked a Carthusian why he embraced a life of silence and anonymity. It seemed to me that he could have done more for the Church if he were actively ministering in the world. I was thinking with the wisdom of men. He answered me with the wisdom of God.

The Carthusian explained that by entering into silent anonymity God could make his prayer more fruitful for the salvation of the world than anything else he could possible accomplish on his own. He understood the primacy of contemplation in the life of the Church, a truth which today is often neglected. This primacy derives from the fact that the life of the Church is essentially the life of grace, a life freely given by Christ. No method or technique or program or anything else born of human industry compels the Blood of the Lord -- but the humble petition of a repentant sinner always moves Him to act. Such is the wisdom of God.

The wisdom of God is foolishness to the world, but divine foolishness is wiser than the wisest man. In the world, to make a name for yourself is important especially if you want to be successful. In the mystery of God, to magnify the Lord is important if you want to be faithful. In the world, your self-reliance makes a positive impression on most people for a short time, but whatever you accomplish by your cleverness eventually will be forgotten. In God, your reliance on Him will be viewed negatively by most people for most of your life, but what God accomplishes by your trust will last forever. What about when we are unfairly accused and mocked and rejected? Christ never promised we would be treated fair when He commanded us to pick up our own cross and follow Him. Yet this is exactly where the foolishness of God comes in. In the wisdom of the world, such humiliation is a doom worse than death -- but in the wisdom of God, this is a hidden blessing through which new life can flow into the Church by our loving obedience.

The Mystery of Faithful Love - living signs needed today now more than ever

2011-07-06T20:17:00.001-06:00

John Paul II once told priests not to let their "yes" to God become a "no." This is true not only for priests but for anyone who is consecrated for love and by love. Besides the priesthood, marriage is a kind of consecration one makes with another person to reveal the indissoluble and faithful love of Christ. Because Christ's love for the Church cannot be broken, this bond in the sacrament of matrimony is also indissoluble. Holy Orders and consecrated life also involve irrevocable commitments. Yet this is exactly what love wants to do - commit itself irrevocably. This is because love tends to the likeness of the Lord - and God is love. Whatever our state in life, our solemn pledges establish us in the unfathomable mystery of this faithful love. Since He has loved us unto death, such pledges are also unto death. It is on the basis of the irrevocable nature of God's love for us that John Paul II appealed to priests to be faithful and whatever our state in life, we need to apply this appeal to our own situation as well.

There is a very grave spiritual dimension to such a life commitment: if anyone tries to break a marriage or any other consecrated way of life, they do great violence to themselves and everyone around them. Forsaking marriage or religious life or the priesthood is always gravely harmful on both a personal and societal level. It robs everyone of a sign of God's faithfulness which is owed them by the pledge that one has made.

Pledging the gift of self in love is completely so like the Lord, so God-like, that it requires Divine help to fulfill such a commitment. It is our dignity to make such an irrevocable gift of self and God always provides the grace for this if we ask. We must believe in his love more than we believe in human weakness. If you get married or are ordained or make any other kind of vows with the thought in the back of your mind that "should things get too rough there is an escape hatch" - well, it does not seem to be a very mature pledge of oneself and it certainly does not seem to be anything "like" the way God has chosen to love us. One does not need God to be faithful in such circumstances. But when you freely choose to embrace something with the resolve that "no matter what, by the help of God, I have got to make this work" -- well this is a whole new game. God can do something with you because you have placed yourself in a situation in which you must rely on Him.

What about those times when we are betrayed and abandoned, when all our deepest aspirations are crushed, when we are misunderstood and taken advantage of, when we stand before the antithesis of all we hoped to achieve by our pledge of love, when disappointment, bitterness and resentment knock at the door of our hearts and when there seems to be no love left at all? And, what about those times when we cause such things or do them to those who are entrusted to us? What about our weaknesses and our dignity? There is no nice cliche to offer those who find themselves at the foot of the Cross, except to point to the One whom we have pierced and to bring such questions to Him in prayer. When we trust in Him especially in these circumstances, He is able to reveal his glory. He will whisper the secret of faithful love when such love seems most impossible to find.

God needs living signs of His faithful love in the world. Whether we are married or religious, priests or deacons; we who have consecrated ourselves or been consecrated by love and for love must not allow our "yes" to God to become a "no." Although there are tragic and impossible situations, whenever by ardent prayer we choose to be faithful to one another and to God, it allows God to signify, to show forth his unfailing faithfulness to the world.

The Spirituality of Faithful Love

2011-07-02T13:35:00.002-06:00

Marriage contains a spirituality primordially established by God and redeemed by the blood of Christ. In marriage, God joins what no man can separate and when this is done with Christian faith, the Risen Lord raises up this love as a sign to reveal the nuptial meaning of all of creation. Grace-imbued married love affords a true opportunity to step up into the mystery of being fully human and fully alive. When marriage becomes a school of love it attains an eternal quality: it glorifies the living God. This is why the capacity of a man and woman to solemnly pledge themselves to one another in an indissoluble friendship of faithful love open to the gift of life is so sacred, so beautiful, so worthy of being protected.

This sacred capacity cannot be aped even if those who think we are but apes try to do so. No pretense of marriage lays claim to the sacredness manifest in the love of husband and wife. Such artificial attempts are merely different forms of fornication. Fornication always dehumanizes. It is a counterfeit of the real thing. In these relationships, what St. Augustine says of Pagan Rome applies: whatever joy is attained has the fragile brilliance of crystal, a joy for outweighed by the fear it will be shattered in an instant.

When a man and a woman fall in love with each other, they see at once how very different the other is and at the same time they cannot imagine ever being whole without this difference in their life. It is impressed on anyone who has tasted this realization, even if only briefly, in God's love for us, He did not create us simply to function and exist. He created us to thrive to the full, and to help one another thrive. Just as a man and woman discover in their differences a desire for communion, God likewise looks on us and yearns for us, and this divine regard stirs something in us for Him.

This is why Marriage is a communion of love which reveals God's presence to the world. Accordingly, God is very concerned about this particular institution. protecting it and promoting it throughout the history of salvation. Christ's first miracle was performed at a wedding banquet out of concern for protecting the reputation of the Bridegroom and the Bride. God designed marriage with so many graces, joys and consolations to support it because He knew this communion would push humanity beyond itself, into places it could not bear alone. This is why the redemptive work of Christ extends to it and transforms it.

Those generous enough to God and to each other to say "yes" to everything marriage is meant to be are driven by a divine passion. The consolations and joys themselves are not enough for them. Nor are they aware of sufferings or sacrifices that must be made. They stand firm no matter the cost.

The friendship love of marriage, even the most difficult marriage, speaks to the primordial, faithful and suffering love with which God fashioned our humanity. God's love is firm and unshaken even if human love sometimes fails to be so. Marriage can withstand any trial when the spouses together discover their marriage is worth the struggle and that their suffering in love is for a purpose greater than themselves. More aware of their own shortcomings than those of their beloved, but also more confident in God's love than their own weakness, they turn to God in prayer to provide what they most need that their love might thrive. When offered with faith and perseverance, such prayers are heard by God and the Lord helps us realize what we cannot realize on our own.

What wisdom do those in married friendship learn in such prayer? Their eyes twinkle with a holy courage come what come may. They are so grateful for their friendship, grateful to each other, and grateful to God, that no matter the cost, they would not have it any other way. True spousal love which the Lord entrusts to us has something in it even stronger than death. Such love stretches out and yearns to realize the unity of heart and mind which even death cannot vanquish. To this end, St. John Chrysostom puts these words into the mouth of a husband:

"I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us ... I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you." As cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2365.

Prayer and Fighting for Marriage

2011-06-30T20:24:00.001-06:00

One of the ways Mother Teresa of Calcutta fought poverty was she taught families to pray together. Typically, she would teach the Rosary. Getting parents to pray with each other and their children gave people hope where there seemed to be none and it helped married couples find love when love seemed most absent. Ironically, she is said to have stated that the greatest poverty she ever encountered, she discovered here in America. She was very disturbed to find people dying of loneliness and isolation in our most modern metropolises. The recent efforts in many States to redefine marriage will only make this particular form of poverty more acute. It is time for us to learn a lesson from Blessed Teresa and rediscover prayer in our family life.

Mother Teresa was wise to see prayer as something much more than a mere esoteric exercise. It is vital to the affairs of this world, here and now. That is why marriage needs prayer. In fact, it is first of all in marriage that the art of prayer is supposed to be passed on. If people are losing the fight for marriage in society, it is only because very few marriages are fighting for their love with prayer. Can anyone adequately defend true love if he does not truly pray? Indeed, only prayer can address the deep seated lack of courage that seems to have taken hold of us in both the public square and our own homes.

So long as people of prayer do not engage the fray and make their voices heard, our families and our society will always be vulnerable to unchallenged and dehumanizing cultural and political forces. Along these lines and contrary to contemporary prejudice, it is not compassionate to be tolerant of all forms of fornication, contraception, abortion, pornography, prostitution, and divorce. The truth about the heartache and human carnage left in the wake of such practices must be made known. Is it really mean-spirited or unenlightened to dare take a stand for what is truly human? The truth is, even if we do not find sufficient charity in our hearts to do what our faith demands, simple justice requires that we speak up when something as sacred and beautiful as marriage is under attack. This is true not only in society but also in our own homes. As Blessed Teresa explains: "There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives - the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them."

If there is a failure in courage on our part, it is because, as Christians, we do not pray as we should. When we do not pray, we do not encounter the Lord and without encountering the Lord, we will never find sufficient confidence to speak the truth in the face of power, or to love in the face of hatred. Here again, the wisdom of Mother Teresa is helpful: "Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness." As cited by EWTN.

The Paradox of Holiness and Communion

2011-06-29T00:16:00.001-06:00

To be holy is to be set apart. To be in communion is to be in solidarity with one another. Prayer both sets us apart and establishes us in a deeper communion. It is a paradox. Although this mystery is not completely solvable, one hint is the relational dimension of prayer. It is ordered to a real friendship with the all holy God.

In asserting this, the paradox in question can never be simply an intellectual puzzle – it is existential and evokes a response. This friendship ‘sets us a part’ in the sense that we make God the priority of our heart and allow Him who is not of this world to become the life-principle of our soul. This means we are in a sense dead to the things of this life or at least not animated by them. Here, this "out of this world" orientation of Christianity can be disconcerting. Sometimes we struggle with a fear that if we really begin to pray, we might lose out on some beautiful things in this world. But living by faith does not mean that Christians care any less about the affairs of this world nor do they enjoy life any less, and this is especially true when it comes to our friends including all those the Lord has solemnly entrusted to us and to whom we are likewise entrusted for this brief time we have together in this life.

This is where the paradox comes in. Even though God's love orients us to a life beyond this world and sometimes away from some apparent forms of communion this world recognizes, the net effect of this new orientation is that Christians are free to be even more engaged in the lives of others. This is because God is love - the deeper our communion with Him, the deeper our solidarity with those we love and the greater our ability to love. Such love is not limited by our human frailty. It is a divine gift and charged with the power of the Holy Spirit. By continually entering into the love of God through prayer, Christians discover new capacities to love those they hold most dear, and they experience a deeper communion with one another.

This paradox is taken up by Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity who often wrote to encouraged friends to love prayer. One letter suggests that prayer should not be limited to any quantity of memorized formulas that one mindlessly races through. It proposes a more authentic, a more personal, and a more consuming kind of prayer. Elisabeth in fact envisions a form of prayer which permeates every moment of one's life. She explains it as a ceaseless occupation of the heart, "the raising of the soul to God through all things." In this same letter, she asserts that if we engage such ceaseless prayer it "establishes us in a kind of continual communion with the Holy Trinity." In this communion with the Trinity, we also find a spiritual solidarity with one another, a "meeting of our souls." By ceaselessly raising our soul to God, we enter "more deeply into ourselves" "where the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit dwell" and, she claims "in Them we will be One." (L 252)

Christ's Real Presence and true Christian Life: never static, always dynamic

2011-06-25T17:34:00.003-06:00

The Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is a living reality in the Christian life. His presence is dynamic. In perpetual thanksgiving, intercession and adoration of the Father, the Real Presence is permeated with prayers that reach into our hearts. The Blessed Sacrament evokes a response. By this prayerful presence, He truly comes to us and invites us to enter deep into His inexhaustible mystery. This remarkable presence is pure prayer surpassing all mere feeling and thought. It is His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity.

The Body of Christ is perfect praise overflowing with the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Under the veils of bread and wine, the power of Christ’s prayer issues forth into the hearts of those who partake of this mystical banquet and even flows into those who behold the Eucharist with faith. His Body offered for us and actually present to us is Bread for the final journey, the Medicine of Immortality, the Antidote for Death, the Pledge of Eternal Life. By this Real Presence, He truly takes into his heart all of our deepest needs, makes them sacred in the very Blood and Water which flowed from his side, and offers them to the Father.

An unseen force greater than any material gravitational pull at work in the visible world, Uncreated love is at work in the depths of the human heart whenever we avail ourselves to this overwhelming presence of Christ by faith. In this way, He is constantly drawing us and we discover Him to be the true center around which the whole Cosmos revolves. The loving gaze He bestows on us through the Blessed Sacrament leads us to gaze upon Him in return, even when his Presence is completely hidden by our own trials and difficulties. If we remain true to our faith believing in His love, it is especially in these moments where we cannot feel Him or understand his purpose that He is particularly close to us, truly at work in us, accomplishing more than we can ask or imagine. It is here that our lives become like his Real Presence, never static, always dynamic. Instead, we find ourselves not unlike the bread and wine of the Mass, by His prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit forged into love where love seems most absent.

Praying the Psalms

2011-06-23T00:37:00.002-06:00

God has revealed to us how we are to praise Him -- and the right way to praise God is found in the psalms. The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, explains that the Psalms teach us how to pray to God. His catechesis has ancient roots. St. Athanasius passes on this same teaching he learned from St. Antony of the Desert at the end of the 3rd Century. The psalms teach us how to raise our hearts in prayer just as Jesus raised his heart in prayer.

The praying of the psalms, especially in the Liturgy of the Hours, is a school for the heart, providing words for interior movements so delicate and beautiful, the heart itself is scarcely aware of what they are and without divine help powerless to articulate them. It is a matter of learning how to "feel" about God and all things in relation to God in a manner that truly renders fitting praise. This perfection, the heart feeling what it ought to feel before God, lived in the heart of Christ informing every word and thought He offered the Father. Conforming our hearts to the Heart of Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit to which the psalms dispose the soul. In fact, the Word himself prayed the psalms -- and based on his own teaching on prayer, he must of prayed the psalms with complete attentiveness to every thought and emotion they disclose, complete confidence in how our heavenly Father would receive such prayer, and complete attention to who He was to be offering such prayer.

Earlier this year, Father Benedict Groeschel offered the annual retreat to our seminarians. It was an honor to have an opportunity for a short conversation with him after the retreat while taking him to the airport. Just before we left, one of the seminarians asked me to find out how Father Groeschel prays the psalms. So I asked him. He answered with one word, "Slowly."

This would seem to be the best way for us to allow the psalms to teach us the movements of the heart of Christ. When we pray them slowly and consider what the psalms contain - that "range of human experience" the psalms convey, as Pope Benedict reminds us - it gives ours hearts the time they need to catch up and to appropriate the psalms to our lives. Even better, taking time to thoughtfully consider what we are offering the Lord in these revealed prayers affords the Holy Spirit the opportunity to appropriate our lives to the psalms. In this kind of prayer, our lives become the praise we offer.

The Book of Life and Corpus Christi

2011-06-20T17:11:00.001-06:00

16th Century Camaldolese Hermit, Paul Giustiniani, in his reflections on the role of study in the discipline of the Christian life, insists that for those who want to grow in prayer Christ Jesus must remain at the center of any study of the Sacred Page. He does not say that all other study is without any merit whatsoever, and his words are mainly aimed at keeping hermits engaged in prayer. He believes, however, in the primacy of contemplation in the life of the Church. Thus, there is an important reminder here for all those who study theology:

Christ is the only master and the only book, the book that contains all divine wisdom. My book should be Jesus Christ on the Cross: a book entirely written with His precious Blood that is the price of my soul and the redemption of the world. The five chapters of this book are the five sacred wounds. I want to study that one book alone, and other books only insofar as they comment on it... Jesus Christ is a book in which is summed up, for those who know how to read the writing, all doctrine, all discipline, all controversy, all treatises, all exhortations, which have been or will be done in conformity with God from the beginning to the end of the World. Dom Jean Leclercq, Alone with God, Bloomingdale, OH: Ercam Editions (1961, 1989, rev. 2008) 73-74.

This passage speaks specifically to the contemplative intellectuality characteristic of our Christian faith, an intellectuality growing from an encounter with the Living God. It is oriented to a kind of knowing that does not stop at the level of concept or even intuition. It is a kind of knowing that is deeper than all feeling. It is more like the kind of knowing that is shared between friends that love one another. It is the wisdom of a heart to heart with the Living God. This kind of knowing is essential for the Christian life. Our faith is relational or it is dead. It is for union with God or it is nothing. We could interpret Giustiniani's words to apply to the exercise of our love informed faith in any study of sacred doctrine: this study is life giving to the degree that it deepens and extends our relationship with Christ.

As we approach the celebration of Corpus Christi -- I can think of no better way to study the Book of Life than through our participation at Mass, our communion with his Body and Blood and our adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The Word, who was in the beginning, waits to disclose his wisdom to us in the Eucharist. When we participate in the liturgy with our hearts attentive to our Crucified God, when we receive in communion this Living Bread, when we adore the Risen Lord who promised to be with us until the end of time: we are studying the mystery of Christ not only with our intellects but with our hearts.

The Three in One and One in Three

2011-06-18T16:21:00.001-06:00

I arise today by the mighty name of the Trinity -- the Three in One and One in Three.
These words from St. Patrick's Breastplate speak to a dimension of prayer which is regularly neglected. Most people think that prayer is for pansies. On the contrary, prayer is not about emoting or appearing pious or simply achieving a state of enlightenment. Prayer takes supernatural courage. It is about the victory of good over evil in our lives, our role in a primordial conflict the apocalyptic consummation of which will usher in new heavens and a new earth. In this vein, the ancient Lorica attributed to St. Patrick presents prayer as a call to battle and the Name of God as the banner of the Christian cause.

We stand when we recite the creed and profess the Trinity - as if we were preparing for battle, as if bracing against an onslaught, as if preparing to charge. When we do this, we are declaring that at the center of the world is uncreated Love - and that everything comes from and goes to this Love. Our profession is to fight for this love, to defend it, to promote it come what come may.

To rise up, to stand, to take a stand, to stand firm - this gesture speaks to what might be considered a violent dimension of Christian faith. Yes, there are things for which to put our lives on the line -- and our living our faith to the full is just such a thing. Here, standing is a gesture of Christian prayer because the prayer given by Christ in the Holy Spirit is prayer in a time of war. The whole cosmos, visible and invisible, is in mortal combat over God's love and in many ways we are standing behind enemy lines.

Whatever the peace Christ has left us -- it is not the kind of peace in which all conflict has ceased. Instead, it seems to be a peace that we possess even in our darkest moment, in the very face of our enemies. And so we stand. We choose to be faithful to our baptismal promises - promises to renounce evil, to not waiver in our faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this even to the shedding of our blood. We accept the challenge of our faith in the Three in One and One in Three. We make ready for the contest under the mighty Name of the Trinity.

The battles we must fight do not involve shadow-boxing. If we are to realize the victory of good over evil in our hearts, we must fight the good fight. If we are to taste the triumph of the children of God, we must run the race so as to win. To finally be the free men and women God has destined us to be, we must step into the arena of prayer and daily life to take up battle. Love itself requires such a battle - through all kinds of difficulties and trials -- because one cannot love except at one's own expense.

Our battle is not merely against human forces. We do wrestle with ourselves: the self-indulgence, insobriety and anxiety which would threaten our hope if we do not keep our eyes fixed on the Lord. We also wrestle with the world: its standards, its hostility to the truth, its fear of holiness. But most of all, we fight against the malice of super-intelligent beings bent on our eternal destruction - these foes, stronger and wiser than we, know just what to suggest to rob us of all courage, and their demoralizing lies cut to the heart. Indeed, they are impossible to overcome without divine assistance - and yet God makes them the instruments of our growth into spiritual maturity, using their malice to make His love invincible in our hearts.

We fight also with God -- sometimes seemingly against Him, like Israel in his desire to receive a blessing. We fight to surrender our will to His Will, our minds to His Mind, our life to His Life. How is it that we who are so frail are challenged by God into such a contest? God has created us in his own image and He knows that the courage He has given in the hearts of men and women reflect the greatness of his own heart. And so, in his Name and for his sake, we arise and stand fast! We make our case before the Living God, acknowledging our guilt and pleading for his mercy - but in his mercy daring to ask, daring to trust that he will look on our boldness with loving kindness, because He himself put that boldness in us.

To fight for life, for truth, for love: these are things instilled in us -- especially by our fathers. If our natural fathers were not able to teach this -- then we need spiritual fathers who will. Such fatherhood requires dedication, courage and generosity. And I am so grateful to the men I have known who have made this dedication, this courage, this generosity their own. It is the greatness I see in the eyes of faithful priests and good dads.

That men should often fall short of so high a calling should not be surprising even if it is always heartbreaking and disappointing. The big fat ego dies hard and only after a lot of suffering. Yet those who allow the Lord to chastise them, that is - who choose to be sons who are loved - such pillars are the strength of our families and our Church. They witness to a love which is stronger than death. It is the love of the Father that radiates in such fatherhood - because such fatherhood, rooted in Christ and filled with the Spirit, gives God the Father the space He needs to shine forth in this world. It is this same eternal love by which we each arise in the name of the Trinity.

The Living Presence of the Holy Trinity

2011-06-14T17:14:00.003-06:00

Bl. Elisabeth of the Trinity witnesses to the living presence of the Holy Trinity. In her theological vision, the Trinity is not an abstract puzzle which must be solved or the object of intellectual despair. This is because very early on in own her life she felt the overwhelming love of God. This love ravished her soul and she welcomed it and surrendered to it. Rather than an abstract dogma, we find her addressing the Trinity in personal terms of endearment "my Three," "my All," and "my Beatitude." Rather than a static idea, the Holy Trinity is for her ever actively present in the soul, constantly at work, continually rebuilding by love what we thought we destroyed. The Trinity is no nihilistic, closed or absorbing reality. Instead, the Trinity is so open and accessible that her writings suggest we only become most fully the creature we are predestined to be in Christ through completely entering into this mystery and allowing God to enter into us. The Three in One and One in Three is our true home, the fulfillment of all desire, our inheritance with the saints, the Abyss of Mercy, the Furnace of Love, our heavenly homeland.

Access to this unfathomable mystery she describes in terms of a wholly simple and loving movement, a gaze of love, a descent, a divine impact, an astonishing encounter with the Triune God. To lovingly attend to God's living presence is to remain, to surrender, and to dwell with Him. This kind of deep prayer, which she calls holy recollection or even contemplation, allows God to completely envelop and immovably establish the soul in the peaceful stillness of the Bosom of the Trinity. It is the method of not using a method to approach God. Rather, God crucified for our sake is approached in such humble gratitude of heart, it yields a "not knowing" of anything but Him and his great love. She describes this kind of contemplation as primarily God's work which we make space for by self-denial and silence. The soul humbly asks and obediently waits. The Father engenders the Son and causes Love to be born in the heart. In her vision of prayer, not only do we come to rest in the Holy Trinity - but God is transforming our hearts, renewing the image of the Trinity on earth.

Such prayer is purifying, simplifying, humbling and, at the same time, glorifying. Blessed Elisabeth understood that our humble trust in Him makes us irresistible to Him. He lavishes us with incalculable blessings, exceeding every expectation, and raising us above ourselves to participate in his very life. For her, the weaknesses we discover in prayer do not impede God's work but instead become instruments through which He is revealed. Human frailty is meant to be enveloped in divine splendor - and this is achieved in the deep silence of loving surrender to his living presence. Through humbly clinging in love to the living presence of the Holy Trinity we become what we are predestined to be: the praise of glory.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus

2011-06-10T14:06:00.004-06:00

On the faithful, who adore

And confess you evermore

In your sevenfold gift descend;

Give them virtue's sure reward;

Give them your salvation, Lord;

Give them joys that never end.

For Pentecost this year, that wonderful publication Magnificat provides a beautiful translation of the Sequence, a prayer offered by the Church during the Liturgy of the Word at Mass. The prayer asks for the Holy Spirit to come - to come into our inmost depths. This Gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts is the secret of the Christian life, the vital principle of true prayer.   He comes to dwell in us as in a temple - that is, his living Presence enlivens us as it permeates the sacred sanctuary of our innermost being. This life-giving Breath of God, creatively hovering over the chaos of our hearts, shines forth with divine glory, the glory by which God is known and loved in the visible concrete particularities of our lives, even in those most difficult situations where He seems absent. Especially in these moment when we are tempted by great discouragement, when we call out in faith regardless of what we feel or intuit, this exceeding Gift of the Divine Presence overflows the heart so that it cannot help but be lifted up in praise.

The Holy Spirit comes when we ask for Him out of faith in Christ. This is because Christ Himself is also asking that this same Gift be poured out on us anew. This happens in such manifold measure, we sometimes forget how remarkable our life of prayer is. Consider the moment when the priest calls out to the assembly, "Lift up your heart." Isn't it true that we assembled together in prayer by faith and baptism are able to obey this command of Christ because the Holy Spirit is already raising up our humanity above itself?  We may not feel anything and it may seem like the most "non-spiritual" moment - but faith transcends what "seems to be" and what "feels." Faith alone receives the Holy Spirit - love imbued faith is a precious gift produced in us by our Advocate and Guide. Through inspiring ever deeper and more intense movements of faith within us, the Holy Spirit breathes in us so that filled with divine life we are able to utter prayers and petitions which conform in more perfect ways to Christ himself.

The painful cries of the heart pierced by the love of God, or else moved by the misery which constantly threatens our existence, are joined in the power of the Holy Spirit with the cries echoing in the heart of the Risen Lord. This is true whether such prayer is offered in inspired words committed to memory or holy stammering gushing from the heart cloaked in adoring silence. It is true when spontaneous tears overflow and groans break forth from our depths.  Such prayer extends throughout all those deep sighs and bubbling jubilation hidden in Gregorian tones and it lives in even the most simple of hymns sung with childlike confidence in God.

By our baptism in the Waters of New Creation, by the warmth and light of the Fire of God, by the fragrant anointing from above, these inebriated stirrings of our frail humanity are enveloped in the very movements of the Lord's own heart. Since Christ risen from the Dead prays in the power of this same Holy Spirit, the possibility of communion is opened in His prayer, a prayer that has already vanquished death and even now overcomes every evil. The Paraclete communicates the secrets of the Lord's heart into our own depths sometimes with overpowering forcefulness, sometimes with subtle whispers. This identification with the Heart of Christ takes place in our hearts especially in those moments when we are pushed to the brink, when we struggle to stand firm at life's darkest hour.

Here is the secret of the holy audacity we find in the eyes of martyrs and confessors.  The Holy Spirit given by Christ bursts forth with that incredible courage which fills the countenance of those who tread in the dark valley of the shadow of death. Those without this Gift are astonished and feel a longing to taste the life giving waters flowing from such souls. Enlivened by such Spirit-filled prayer, what can hold us down? What can prevent us from raising our hearts to the highest heaven? Indeed, by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, we are already filled with heaven even as we live on earth. Under the holy impetus of indwelling Divine Love, all the world is being raised to God - to joys that will never end.

The Prayer of Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit

2011-06-06T19:04:00.000-06:00

In Christ Jesus, humanity has been received into its heavenly homeland, the spiritual reality wherein it is finally free to thrive to the full. This paradise is reserved for all those who persevere until the end in loving one another out of obedience to Christ. In fact, loving God and one another here and now anticipates the life God has in store for those who believe. Therese of Lisieux calls this living by love. Such a life alone is commensurate with God's call to humanity. For to love God with one's whole being and love one's neighbor as oneself - to be able to do this and never grow weary, to be constant with what is most noble in our humanity towards all that is good and holy - this is what it means to thrive as a human being, it is what we were made to be. This is the divine image revealed in us - and in heaven that image shines in the perfect likeness of the One who has gone before us.

Whoever has endeavored this, that is, whoever has endeavored to really love unto the end, such a person has in one way or another tasted something of heaven. Such a person knows deep inside the greatness for which we are made. At the same time, everyone who strives to live by love knows that it is impossible without help from above.

That we might realize our true calling, Jesus ascended into heaven and makes intercession for us - his love which has no end is poured out before the heavenly Father on our behalf. Jesus constantly pours out his heart to the Father that we might receive this the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Father never ceases to answer the prayer of His Son by sending the Holy Spirit always anew into the hearts of those who ask in faith.

True prayer, mature Christian prayer, the kind by which we can live by love, is produced in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Gift promised to us by Christ before He ascended into our heavenly homeland, the Holy Spirit is the animating principle of the Christian life, the Soul of the Christian soul. The Divine Counselor is come upon us and envelops us with all the wisdom we need to love those entrusted to us, to be faithful in our love for the Lord. In Him, possibilities present themselves in prayer we could have never imagined existed. We may fail and fall short, accused in a thousand ways of our weakness: this Advocate testifies to the power of God at work in our frail humanity. The Creator Spirit ushers us into our true homeland and establishes us into communion with the Holy Trinity - in this life we have Life itself, Life to live life to the full, to live by love.

The Super-abundant and Transforming Law of Prayer

2011-06-03T23:17:00.000-06:00

St. John of the Cross, in his commentary on Living Flame of Love, refers to the perfect way the Trinity arranges and distributes blessings in prayer (see especially 3:28). This divine order, or law of faith, operates in the spiritual life like the law of gravity in the visible world. It is a force, only not that which is impersonally exerted among different bodies of physical mass, but rather that which is operative between spiritual beings who love one another. Personal love has its specific spiritual gravity. If unimpeded, it draws lovers into ever deeper union. In the order of grace, we are drawn to the Bridegroom because He is drawn to us even more.

The law of divine friendship regulates beautiful moments of prayer so that by faith they always lead us into deeper union with Him. In other words, God touches us with the truth in love or inspires us with noble affections which break forth in love for one great purpose: to draw us into a participation by grace in the very life of the Trinity. Again, the specific dynamic of encountering Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit in prayer is divine union with God - a union where we are not annihilated or absorbed into some greater reality, but a real union of love - like that between lovers. He achieves this by giving all kind of astonishing gifts, all of which are ordered to help us fall deeper and deeper in love with God. This is true of all his gifts, especially the one's most difficult to receive, the kind we can only say yes to in prayer. The reason these special graces of prayer have this one effect is that He has fallen in love with us first.

Such is the nature of divine eros or desire. This movement in the heart of God produces the same kind of desires in hearts of his creatures. The gifts He gives are for no less purpose. He gives out of his desire that we might be one with Him in friendship. What kind of love characterizes this friendship? It is not platonic or disinterested or altruistic - it is at once sacrificial and a burning passion, a total gift of self and the desire to possess the beloved's companionship forever. Our tradition calls this agape - which because of the simplicity of God's nature is the same as his eros. Because of the Almighty's infinite perfection, there is no limit to His love. When we allow ourselves to be loved with this Divine Love, we can always fall deeper and deeper in love with Him because His love is inexhaustible. We also discover the more we are in love Him, the more the power of eros and agape in us are brought together so that our love for Him expresses itself in the most wonderful ways in our love for one another.

On this point, St. John of the Cross describes this soul as overflowing with divine grace and virtue and becoming "like a well of living waters that flow impetuously ... the soul is flooded with divine waters, abounding in them like a plentiful fount on all sides!" Living Flame of Love, 3:7-8 as translated by Kavanaugh and Rodriguez in Collected Works, Washington D.C., ICS (1991) 676.

The soul who generously loves God and does not refuse Hist manifold gifts becomes like the One whom it loves -- the One in whose image it was created! That the Giver of all good things would so super-abundantly immerse a frail human being in such transforming love is astounding. Yet, in those periods when my own heart has been parched, the Lord has often sent someone just like this to refresh me and encourage me on my way. St. John of the Cross does not directly explore this idea, but it is implied in what he teaches. Namely, the grace of deep friendship with Christ always overflows into the life of the Church. Such holy people not only quench their own desire for the Living Water, but also help alleviate the thirst of fellow pilgrims so that we will not lose heart on our way into eternal friendship with the Lord.

Prayer in Frustration

2011-06-02T13:05:00.000-06:00

In our frustration with our most important relationships, is there hidden a gift for the spiritual life? When all my plans go amiss and the trials of family life seem to reach a boiling point, it is difficult to recognize in this experience a blessing from the Father, even though my faith tells me there is. The truth is frustration with those I love and their disappointment in me, these are always so many invitations to prayer.

One author who really challenges me in this way is Slawomir Biela. He captures the unrelenting doctrine of St. John of the Cross regarding the opposition of a self-sufficient attitude to true union with the Lord. He believes God permits us to suffer deep frustration to purify us of pride and to help us rely on the Him alone.

A prideful, self-reliant attitude afflicts marriage, family and all forms of consecrated life. This attitude subjects us to all kinds of fantasies and falsehoods unworthy of our existence and incapable of sustaining real love. Biela explains, more specifically, "If we treat people as a support in themselves then our relationships with them become false and filled with illusions. If God wants to lead us into a spiritual desert and attempt to make even a part of these illusions evaporate, we will undergo deep frustrations." God Alone Suffices, Denver: In the Arms of Mary Foundation (2003), 68.

There are great implications to Biela's reference to "spiritual desert." For example, just like the Lord worked mighty signs and wonders in Egypt, He will allure us into the desert through all kinds of trials and tribulations that we too might enjoy a deeper friendship with Him. The desert is a place of intimacy with the Lord - only in the wilderness of our own hearts is there enough space for God's love for us to unfold.

Falsehoods are always a frustrating source of spiritual bondage – they never lead to what our hearts truly need. Underneath any clinging to fantasy is a hostility to the Lord, the fear that we cannot trust the Lord with our happiness, that we must rely on ourselves or others whom we think we can control. To be free of falsehood in our dealings with those we love, we must be led from this distrust into a real heart to heart with the Lord. When those who pray taste the pangs of deep frustration in their most important relationships, God is leading us into just such a "spiritual desert."

To get us into this desert, Biela explains that the Lord even permits us to feel cheated, hurt, abandoned, rejected and betrayed by those we most trust. At the same time, we find ourselves letting everyone around us down. We suffer their disappointment in us. These kinds of graces, so difficult to see as graces, when offered to the Lord in prayer are especially liberating.

They do not liberate us from love -- but for a deeper love. The problem is not that we have let others into our hearts - the problem is that we do not relate to them rightly. By identifying deep frustration with spiritual purification, Biela indicates one of the ways God helps us relate to those He has entrusted to us and to whom we are entrusted with an abiding spiritual freedom. Such freedom not only raises up our own dignity but theirs as well.

This is true even if, when we suffer these trials, it feels at first as if the Lord has rejected us. What is really going on deep within us is not rejection. Instead, in allowing us trials, the Lord is expressing great confidence in us, his confidence that we are ready for true spiritual freedom, that we are ready to receive his strength to suffer the truth. For this, we must ask Him ardently and with great trust. The friendship He desires to share with us demands no less. Even in our frustrations and failures, we must live accepting our dignity as sons and daughters of God, tested and made strong in his love that by truth we might live like Him.

Making Time to be Alone with the Great Alone

2011-05-31T20:04:00.000-06:00

Each day, it is important to set aside time for solitude with God, to be alone with the great Alone. The ancient desert fathers spoke of the importance of making a new beginning each day, of withdrawing into silence to renew our encounter with the Lord. Although many think of a retreat as a weekend to do ever so often, it is good to build into our daily schedules small retreats from the busy-ness around us, and to allow ourselves to be enveloped by the love of the Most High if only for a few moments. This means we must regularly disavow all sorts of distractions, pre-occupations, anxieties and silly amusements to make room for God in our lives.

Although not always comfortable, gratifying or even therapeutic, by making a place in our daily schedules for entering into silence and attending to the whisper of the Lord in our hearts, our relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit acquires the space it needs to unfold. Finding regular periods during the day to bow our heads and fold our hands is about renouncing a kind of self-reliance which robs the Bridegroom of our attention. Those who do this discover a powerful paradox: the more we attend to the Lord, the more we find ourselves able to attend to those He has entrusted to our care. When we add the salt of prayer to our daily routines, we discover constant engagement with Him in an ongoing conversation about all of life in light of the Gospel - so that our life is never simply flat, never an empty routine. Through prayer, time becomes pregnant with moments in which we are invited to give ourselves in love, moments in which eternity is born, moments of the Cross - moments where the glory of God is manifest.

Here, daily prayer is about a devoted love, a faithfulness of heart. By making space for prayer, by ordering our lives for this devotion, prudently subordinating other responsibilities around this heart to heart with the One who has loved us to the end, we are constantly astonished over how He is so much more faithful to us than we to Him. By setting aside our anxious concerns and lifting our hearts above the merely material, if even for just brief periods each day, we glimpse how the Almighty generously gives us all we really need and much, much more. The fact is, the Lord enjoys the company of those who humbly seek Him, who especially in their darkest hour trust in Him. He enjoys being astonished by our faith. Those who make Him the priority of their hearts are always blessed in ways beyond their understanding - discovering in being alone with the great Alone, the threshold into an unfathomable communion of love.

St. Thomas says prayer is a mouthful of reason: oris ratio

2011-05-28T21:44:00.003-06:00

In his treatment on Christian prayer in the Summa Theologica II-II, q 83, St. Thomas wants his students to see that prayer is not only something that involves deep emotions and desires, but that it also takes up all the powers of reason. For him, prayer is not simply a naked impulse of the will toward the Divinity - but it also involves human intelligence raised on high by grace, by a participation in the very mind of the Living God.

Oris - what comes out of the mouth, what is expressed for someone to hear - in the case of prayer, this Someone is God. Christians dare raise up their petitions with confidence because by faith in Christ and by baptism they have become the sons and daughters of the Most High. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they voice (whether out loud or in the silent words of their hearts) desires, which no human speech can adequately express, with loving trust in Christ to their merciful Father.

Ratio indicates not only reason but also dimensions of "Logos" beyond what "word-verbum" immediately suggest to contemporary English speakers. "Ratio-logos" also calls to mind truth, harmony, mediation. Yet even in relation to the Latin Vulgate "Verbum," "Ratio" extends to the biblical concept of "dabar," God's word of power by which Divine Will is accomplished, the Word through whom all things were made.

On Earth as it is in Heaven: Prayer revealed and given by the Word made Flesh lifts up the soul into the canticle of praise sung in the heavens and through such a soul allows those harmonies to echo on earth. Prayer mediates the true goodness and glory of God, even when the Lord appears all too absent. Indeed the unfolding of the world and our lives in time and space is never accidental, but everything has been carefully planned for by the Author of Life from the beginning so that no matter what happens - we are always awaited by love. In prayer all of creation resounds with the splendors of divine life, light and love which the Lord has longed to share from the beginning.

Wisdom, goodness and love characterize this plan: this is why the world explodes around us with such beauty even when everything seems to be going wrong. Prayer enters into the Almighty's reasons for the most difficult things and finds Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, grace infused reason sees beyond misery's deep abyss to contemplate the deeper abyss of Mercy: the Truth who is limit of every evil and falsehood, in whom is realized the victory of good over evil.

Christian's pray with a mouthful of reason - divine reason given as a gift from the Father for the salvation, not only of themselves, but of the whole world. If it is a cry of the heart - a cry of recognition and love embracing both trials and joys - it is also a spoken truth which shakes the foundations of the heavens and the earth, standing firm on the Word Himself. And for those who most need it, at death's hour or some other insurmountable trial, the spoken truth of such prayer is a light that shines in the darkness, a flickering hope which anchors the cosmos in the hand of God.

The Fruit of the Vine and Work of Human Hands

2011-05-25T20:38:00.000-06:00

He is the vine and we are the branches. We are meant to bear "fruit of the vine and the work of human hands" which he raises up and transforms - making it something worthy of his wedding feast. He changes this fruit and work into his precious Blood offering it as the Cup of the New Covenant without which we have no life in us. The 3rd Edition to the Roman Missal, with the new translation of text, helps us also see that as the Vine, He is also the source of our fruitfulness and our work which He accepts from us - meaning everything that is most important about our life must be ordered around prayer:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,

for through your goodness

we have received the wine we offer you:

fruit of the vine and work of human hands

it will become our spiritual drink.

(source: http://www.usccb.org/romanmissal/samples-priest-gifts.shtml)

This new translation of this prayer of the priest, which will go into usage this November, indicates in the Christian life, everything is grace, everything is a gift from God through Christ. Our work and our fruitfulness are not ultimately the products of our self-reliance and competency. These too are gifts, graces for which to give thanks.

By the Father's generosity to us in his Son, He raises our whole being to participate in the very life of the Holy Trinity, makes us capable being fruitful, of doing something beautiful for God. We call such participation divine life "grace" because it is a pure gift merited for us by Jesus' death on the Cross. Christ died that we might have this new life. Through his wounds, God's life flows into our hearts when we say "yes" by faith. Because it comes through the Risen Lord, the sanctifying life of grace sets us apart as Christ-like, uniting us to Him, and allowing us to draw from Him everything we need for holiness:

"The life of grace is, then, a conformity to Christ. But it is not only a question here of an external imitation, but of a sharing in the very life of Christ. Thus Christ is not only the pattern, the archetype according to which we ought to reform our soul; he is also the source from which alone the life of grace can be unfolded in us." Jean Danielou, God and the Ways of Knowing, trans. Walter Roberts, San Francisco: Ignatius Press (1957, reprint 2003), 200.

Jean Danielou helps us see the connection between imitation of Christ, sharing his life and the life of prayer. Christian life is not simply about external conformity to socially accepted behaviors - in other words, it is not primarily about a observing a moral code and cultural conventions. These things are part of the Christian life, but secondary to a deeper interior reality, a reality which transcends conventions and constantly rises above moral norms. Our external behaviors are meant to be the fruit of something unfolding deep within - signs of a new vital principle being born within.

True imitation of Christ is first an interior reality where the movements of one's own heart participate in the movements of Christ's heart. It is the movement of Christ's own life in the Christian which makes the believer fruitful. It is by the life of Christ in us by faith that we have fruit of the earth and work of our hands worthy of being offered in a manner that is acceptable to God.

How does our faith make the life of Christ fruitful in such a wonderful way? Grace is given in prayer. Prayer is the branch cleaving to the Vine to draw its life, to draw forth grace. Prayer humbly seeks from the Lord what is needed to be fruitful, and in Him even our prayer itself becomes good fruit. He then draws everything that is good, noble and true in this to Himself transforming the fruit of the vine and work of our hands into his own blood.

Christ renews this union of life and love at every Mass. Through his priestly and creative action, he makes our lives, our work, our fruitfulness part of his blood offering, glorifying the Father and extending his salvation to the world. In his wisdom and goodness, He does this through our frail humanity He already infused with his life. He pours our life into His Blood. He pours his Blood into our lives. It is the sacred banquet, mystical wedding feast, to which all true prayer is ordered and from which all real prayer comes.

A Biblical Walk through the Mass

2011-05-24T11:35:00.000-06:00

The coming changes to the liturgy this November are going to be very important for our life of prayer. There are profound connections between liturgical worship and contemplation - in fact liturgical worship is both the source and summit of our personal prayer. The following review is of a book by a longtime friend of mine here in the Archdiocese of Denver who teaches at the Augustine Institute:

Edward Sri, A Biblical Walk Through the Mass: Understanding what we Say and Do in the Liturgy, West Chester, PA: Ascension Press (2011)

Have you ever sat in an airplane and found yourself engaged in a conversation about the Mass? For many non-Catholics and Catholics alike, the Liturgy can seem like a lot of standing up and sitting down with no rhyme or reason. Yet the rituals are ancient and biblical with deep and profound meaning. How can something so profound be explained in a simple to understand way? Although I have never had this experience, while waiting for take-off, Dr. Sri met someone who, seeing his enthusiasm for the liturgy, acknowledged that “there are was something deeper going on there, in that there Mass.”

In many ways, his book is an exploration about what that “something deeper” is. Starting with the introductory rites and marching straight through each part all the way to the dismissal, he takes time for short but informing catechetical explanations of the reasons behind the individual rites so that the reader gains a sense of the overall beauty of the liturgy as a whole. His method is to tie the parts of the Mass to thoughtful Biblical reflection. Often, he puts the reader in touch with very Scriptural foundations of the Eucharistic Liturgy. He focuses especially on the changes in language coming in the responses for the assembly. He offers good explanation as to why these better translations were needed. The reader gains an appreciation for how these new responses will help us all better connect our Eucharistic worship with the Scriptural traditions out of which it comes.

Dr. Sri successfully provides a nice biblical overview of the Mass and its parts while informing us about the coming changes to the liturgy. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to prepare for these changes and understand the liturgy from a biblical perspective - because in all our standing and kneeling, silent attentiveness and responses: there really is "something deeper going on there."

For this and related materials by Dr. Sri go to: http://tinyurl.com/3txsfmp