The Resurrection and Life

Do you long for New Life?  Easter is about the only new life this tired out world has ever known. This life has the form of a vine exploding with branches and fruitfulness.

Jesus, risen from the dead, is the Vine - and his friends who believe in Him are the branches. He has called you, the one who is reading this, into this friendship.  Connected to the Word of the Father by faith, we have a new life in us -- an eternal life, stronger than death, making all things new.  Just as life flows from a vine to the branches, the Holy Spirit flows from the Son through His Body, the Church, into the soul of the believers to make their love for one another fruitful.

That we might fully possess this joyful fruitfulness, the Father tenderly serves us as the Vine-Dresser. He delicately prunes his vines, for no other reason than that they might be fruitful. Sometimes, this means patiently pruning us down to the stump, until nothing but what seems weakest and most inadequate is left.

The mystery of the Father's vine-dressing is a difficult mystery. Yet, it is rooted in everything Christ revealed to us through His own passion and resurrection. Only by allowing His Son to suffer death is the Father able to raise Christ's humanity to life not subject to death. Similarly for us, that we might know the life of the Risen Lord, the Father sometimes prunes away what we deem most precious.

The devotion of Christ to the Father, characterized as it is by faithfulness, confidence and trust, must become our same obedience to Christ. His total surrender to the loving plan of the Father is given to us and meant to live in us. The Father only prunes away what is lifeless, what stands in the way of this surrender.  He permits us to die to ourselves in order that Christ's obedience might become the obedience that lives in our hearts. As the Risen One reveals, surrendering to the Father's will, even as we die to ourselves, opens up a more fecund and eternal mystery. Paradoxically, being pruned by the Father is the source of joy.

To be pruned down to the stump - there are times when we most desire to feel the presence of the Risen Lord, but in our distress cannot seem to find Him. It is a kind of death. Sometimes,we are permitted to suffer that interior void, that empty abyss that only He can fill. We long for an answer to tragedies sometimes so catastrophic that nothing in our lives feel like they will ever be the same again.  Instead, we are left, at least for a time, feeling puzzled and even abandoned. Yet, engulfing this abyss is an even deeper abyss: God has plunged our misery into the immensity of His Mercy. 

Though we cannot see or feel it, Christ who knows our misery sends the Holy Spirit into our sorrow to bring us a new life, a new joy.  This is why, as we are pruned even to the stump, we have a reason for our hope.  If we believe, nothing can stand between us and the love of Christ - no matter how great the feeling or difficulty. Our work, at such times, is simply to trust in Him, to remain in Him by an act of faith -- for obedient faith goes deeper than feeling, thought, fantasy or intuition. Obedience lives in a deeper part of who we are -- and the Spirit dwells in these abysses because it is here that He has fashioned horizons vast enough for His presence.

The Risen One too was stripped, and as He suffered the loss of everything, our Crucified God, through his obedient devotion to the Father, accomplished His greatest work: our salvation. Our work, as the Father prunes the branches of His Vine, is to be obedient to the Word that not even the meaninglessness of death could mute. This means sacrificing our plans for God's plans. It means putting our neighbor before what is comfortable and convenient. It means also renouncing sin - no matter the cost. It means offering the sorrow of our heart as a sacrifice of love in prayer. All of this is how we remain in Christ even as we are being pruned and stripped of everything - even down to the stump of our lives. When the obedience of our faith is most tested and conformed to the obedience of the Son, we can at last receive the fruitful joy that the Father longs for us to know.

The Triduum - Into the Silent Fullness of God

The deepest and most beautiful pathway of prayer is opened up in the Triduum. Each liturgy opens into an even deeper silence in the fullness of God. This is the fullness open when Christ's heart was pierced by the lance -- one which gushes forth with new life for those whose prayer aches with thirst.

The Savior of the World on Holy Thursday in thanksgiving and blessing binds us to Himself by the Blood of the New Covenant. At that Sacred Banquet in which the Word of the Father washes feet and offers Himself as true spiritual food, prayer takes us into the mysterious source and summit of everything we believe! Those who will partake of this mystery offered, broken and given, taste on their own tongues a glory that the world cannot give.  

On Good Friday, the realization of this supreme prayer of the Lord passes through betrayal, denial, passion and the silence of death.  In the agony and blood of the One whose wordless cry reaches the Heart of the Father, prayer beholds an obedient love that no height or depth or power can overcome. Those who will come to adore the Cross enter the very threshold to the bosom of the Trinity and find the only place where the human heart can rest.

On Holy Saturday the pathway of the Lord's prayer leads through Hell itself. Guided by His Rod and Staff in that Valley of the Shadow of Death, prayer discovers an invincible fountain of hope. Those who follow Him through such pain know the light, warmth and victory that are His.

In the dark hours of the Easter Vigil, the unvanquished Word of the Father rises and appears in our midst.  This enfleshed Word, having conquered death and sin, lifts the whole world into a new creation, and makes of everything in our lives, an acceptable offering to the Father. Prayer beholds on this night the light that shines in the darkness and the truth that darkness cannot overcome it. Prayer plunges into those new waters of that new creation and it gives birth with the Church to new sons and daughters in grace. Easter Prayer proceeds from this new life and, even when uttered on dying lips, knows the antidote for death and the medicine of immortality -- for it beholds the One whose silent fullness makes all things new.

Self-discovery and Gift of Self - the Truth Christ Reveals

John Paul II sincerely believed that we are so created that we can only discover the truth about ourselves when we give ourselves to another.  He believed this from his own experience. He marveled how it was possible to meet someone and be so overwhelmed by their beauty that you should want to sacrifice everything for their sake, that this other person might thrive. In this he glimpsed not only the beauty of God's plan for man and woman in marriage, but also the beauty of Christ's love for each and every soul.

The communion Christ has come to share surpasses the fulfillment and mutual possession meant to be ours in the institution of marriage. When we see His beauty, we realize that the deepest joys shared in the marriage of man and woman only foreshadow a more wonderful communion that is to come.

Before the Beauty of His Face, even the sorrows and disappointments that we bear in our families, no matter how crushing, take on a new perspective. He who was abandoned and betrayed captivates us in His radiance even as we struggle with humiliation and resentment. Those who we thought we could never forgive, we find the courage to forgive whenever we glimpse Him gazing on us in love.

His beauty, the beauty of a love that holds nothing back, evokes a response from the deepest part of our being. For when our eyes are opened by faith in Him, we are moved to believe at once that Christ has perceived our beauty before the dawn of creation -- and in perceiving it, brought it into being and offered His life in sacrifice for it, that each soul that believes in Him might know a greatness far beyond its power to surmise.

The Son who forever rejoices in the sheer goodness of His Father, rejoiced anew to make this known to all creation. He chose to do this through friendship with each of us - so that each of us participate in the revelation of glory the Father has given to His Son. This friendship and participation is nothing less than a dwelling in his presence - by faith in this life, and glory in the next. For this purpose and out of nothing, the Word of the Father summoned a beauty so deep in the human heart that, even when the human heart is diminished by sin, He has already resolved to sacrifice everything in order that all that is good, noble and true in it might not perish.

Nothing forces his loving sacrifice save the divine predilection for humble humanity that lives deep in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Father is drawn by our plight to speak His Word into our difficult  personal circumstances. With His Word, He breathes His Holy Spirit into us that we should have hope and thrive. In the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ journeys across the vast horizons of our hearts "like a Bridegroom coming from his tent, a champion running his course." For what He finds most beautiful in us is that we are in His own image and likeness -- creatures who are meant to mirror in time the love that He offers without reserve to the Father from eternity.

The work of redemption that He wrought on the Cross is about bringing to completion this intimate and faithful communion of sacrificial love for which we were created. He reveals the beauty of an unimpeded love on the Cross to capture our hearts so that we might finally be able to love without impediment. Though such a love seems so far beyond our limitations and sins, He offered his sacrifice for our sake in a way that allows us to participate in what He has done -- and, in this, we become what we are meant to be: living sacrifices of love, the praise of His glory.  

Glory in the Shadows

This Sunday of Lent, my thoughts go to the Reverend Billy Graham. Saint John Paul II called him "Brother" and I am thankful that God sent such a brother to walk with our nation during such times as ours. He witnessed to the Gospel of Christ with a certain wholesomeness and confidence that helped me remember the goodness of God. I do not believe that his witness has been diminished by his death, that death could ever diminish his life - for he lived for God and hoped that, by suffering his own death with faith in Jesus, he might finally enter into the fullness of life that Christ came to give him.  From what I have heard, there is little doubt that he saw glory in the shadows of death, and he knew his hope would not disappoint.

The Holy Transfiguration avails the heart to a secret glory - a hope flooding contemplation in faith that we hold in our hearts as we follow the Lord. The light of Christ shows us that the love of the Father, so immense and inexhaustible, is a mountain that towers above and overshadows our lives. When we allow Christ to lead us into this shadow, His glory baths the soul in a splendor that this world cannot hold. Our hearts are finally open to hear the Father's love speak to us in the midst of this astonishing beauty that only our Savior can reveal-- the truth that the Son has longed for us to know from before the foundation of the world.

This place to which the Word of the Father leads us is an up hill climb. He knows, because He has gone before us, that His Father's love is made known at a height that challenges us out of sluggishness. Yet, just as He is drawn to the Father, He draws us upward, against the grain of our lives. Sometimes this pathway of faith leaves us with many unanswered questions - questions about death and beyond death, about a difficult hope, far beyond our power to imagine and understand. Such is the greatness of the Father's love - His merciful love draws us up into a greatness that is unfamiliar to us, so different than our own expectations, so far beyond our own sinful limits.

To be led into these heights of eternal life, to this sacred place of truth, one must renounce the easy way, and climb with acts of faith through the difficult ambiguities of life - stretching above what is merely convenient and comfortable, beyond what we feel entitled to, and beyond even what the world judges to be respectable. This is because the great love to which we are called can never be confined by what is merely comfortable or convenient.

Witnesses like Billy Graham remind us that real love goes beyond social conventions and the fears of the culturally powerful. To ache with such love for God, and for those He has entrusted to us, is to share in the love of the Son for the Father, of the Savior for the world, of the Trinity for holy humanity. Such love gives hope. It heals marriages and makes families whole. It mends broken hearts and welcomes the lost home. It brings back to life. It stands firm in the face of death because it knows that death is not the end. This is the pathway of faith - a path that goes against our sluggishness, that ascends with the Word ablaze into the Father's shadow, that is vulnerable to the command of Love, that sets out to the Cross - that place of love poured out to the end - with unfathomable hope.

PS - for those interested, I am giving conferences for a retreat on the spiritual doctrine of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity in Nebraska this Spring.  For more information, click here.

Making Space for God

In these holy days of Lent, we are invited to make space for God in our lives and in our hearts. We do this by prayer, fasting and almsgiving. To give alms empties our hands of things that distract us. To fast empties our bellies of food that dulls the mind.  To pray empties our hearts of agendas that can only fall short of the glory to which God calls us.  With hands empty and ready, a mind hungry for His Word and athirst with His love, and a heart humbled and freed to welcome His presence, we give the Lord all the space that He needs to heal us, to strengthen us, and to draw us deep into the bosom of the Trinity.