Predestination and Spiritual Revival

At the heart of every revival is the eternal plan of the Father that has predestined us in Christ for every spiritual blessing. There is such wisdom and goodness in this plan that it can move the coldest of hearts into prayer.  It is this grace that stands behind the revival of our own times - the Eucharistic revival is a grace that the Father has predestined us to receive.  Will we open the eyes of our hearts and welcome the gift? 

Some use sacred doctrine to distract themselves from the power with which God moves.  One doctrine that ought especially evoke tears of compunction and gratitude is predestination.  Instead, it is often proposed in a way that stirs up bewilderment and confusion. Yet, if approached correctly, predestination can draw us into contemplation and lead to spiritual renewal.  

Predestination is sometimes used to mask anxiety and smugness before the mysteries of grace and freewill, God's plan and human freedom, who will get into heaven and who will not. The mystery is approached as if it only concerns the particular future of this soul or that one. Yet the Fathers of the Church and mystics like Saint Elisabeth of the Trinity considered this mystery from another standpoint.  For these great contemplatives, predestination was a doctrine about the wonderful possibility to live by the love that the Father has blessed us with in Christ Jesus.  

St. Augustine and St. Thomas took great pains to help us wonder over the freedom of the children of God in the shadow of the grace of Christ. They did not intend to limit the scope of human freedom in the narrowness of despair or presumption. They had no desire to discourage a generous response to the Lord.  They had personally been touched by the unexpected liberty of Divine love liberating their own human love, creating in it new capacities, moving their own hearts across new and yet to be explored frontiers.  This hope they wanted to hand on through their teachings.  

To understand them, we must respect their purpose and holiness.  Instead of a discouraging mental puzzle riddled with presumption or despair, they saw true hope rooted in the victory of good over evil already realized on the Cross. For them, this free decision of God in his loving plan means that nobody's life is an accident or the result of chance, that by God's grace a soul is granted the true freedom to stand with God who has taken his stand with us. In humility, they knew that such freedom was not their own doing but the grace of Christ in them. So did they find their place under the Cross of Christ and stand with Him. Correct interpretation of their development of the doctrine of predestination can only be done from this vantage point. 

The saints saw themselves not as innovating but as protecting the Biblical vision, the vision of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who preceded them. This is the vision of St. Elisabeth of the Trinity. This is the vision of St. Paul.  In fact, she believed that through the biblical passages that she committed to heart, St. Paul taught her this message in a very personal way, as one soul to another. Relational wisdom can only be transmitted relationally - so the Father sent the Son, and so the Son sends us to one another, and so we enter into one another hearts with the wisdom that is from above.

In this vision, every human person is foreknown by God in a gaze of pure goodness, meaning and beauty.  From the vantage point of pure gratuitous love, wonder grips the heart over just how much God has chosen to bless us in Christ.  Such a vision of predestination ought to evoke determined bold confidence, a firm resolve to receive the gift that God has so freely offered. It ought also evoke humble gratitude and reverence for such an undeserved gift. Here, from the ground of fear of the Lord and love of the Father, we can discover a new willingness to avail ourselves to everything that God has in store for our lives. 

We are invited with the saints to open our eyes. When we do we discover another gazing on us with an ever incomprehensible and inexhaustible love. To look into the eyes of Christ who longs for us in love, to rest in that gaze, in the love that one finds there one discovers that answers to all the most difficult questions of life.  For just such an encounter, the Father sent His Son into the world - and the Word waited until the moment under that kindly movement of the Holy Spirit our eyes were finally awake. 

Predestination challenges us to open our eyes.  Its resounding echo resonates deep into our hearts with primordial and eschatological reverberations. Only the eyes of faith can behold the fire of sacred love igniting the whole cosmos until the heart itself burns with the same fire. To contemplate, to behold, to ponder, to yearn, to be amazed, to be astonished, to let the Word of the Father into our innermost heart - this is what it means to open our eyes.  If we but open our eyes, all the blessings given us in Him transform us into pure praise. Then we become a perfect offering in which the glory of God is revealed in the world.   

Predestination is catholic - universal for every time and place in the life of the Church because such is the love of the Father. Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity offers her vision of predestination to her sister Marguerite, a young mother with two daughters.  She proposed predestination in Christ to help her sister open her eyes. She believes that even those with busy family lives and overwhelming responsibilities can become the praise of God's glory.  So we who have been predestined in Christ must open our eyes today and behold the goodness of the Father who gives every good gift in Him - for a great gift is given us today, an immense outpouring of the blessing of the Father, and this gift of revival reveals His goodness and love for us.

Pope Benedict - rest in peace

Some thoughts on Pope Benedict

https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/the-spirituality-of-benedict-xvi?fbclid=IwAR2FAbw__esP_gP8vH4u_Ht4sYKZxL2eEn7x7gZteOxiqqxMewgIl5OQxBg

Eucharistic Revival - the Invasion of the Word

 The Invasion of the Eucharistic Word 

The Eucharistic Word invades

In the solemn mirth

Of this very moment,

Under a multitude of veils,

Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity

Rejected but undaunted,

Resounding with meaning - faith’s secret orientation point

Amidst the rush of change, 

Through the profane, Light blazes its trail of glory. 

In the beginning, we hear these silent

Magnitudes of majesty,

In hidden untold splendor,

Bursting forth the more

Betrayed, denied, abandoned,

Suffering to be suffered,

By a surrendered heart, that patiently 

Bears his love lavished soft on 

Beatitude's breathing.

Before this fulness of life, 

a soul can ache with

Such sadness and joy in adoration - 

At once enkindled, overflowed, overwhelmed

By those harmonies

As still remain to be heard:

Throw down your crown, fall on your knees - ah those

Hymns, anthems, canticles becoming

That heart, who raises whole creation into

Dawn's brightness.

Spiritual Fatherhood in Northern California

Faith comes by hearing, but who are we listening to?  On my own first visit to Holy Transfiguration, this question rang through me.  After a difficult experience in formation with another community, I was looking for someone I could trust.  Abbot Boniface had founded a Byzantine Monastery in Redwood Valley, California, and someone suggested that I meet with him and seek his counsel. I wondered whether this would be a man I could trust and deeply hoped it was.

There is a crisis of fatherhood in the Church today, and our young people are paying the price.  In a culture where fatherhood is mocked and men are not encouraged to be strong, it is countercultural and even counter-intuitive to make such an observation.  Because we do not cultivate or honor fatherhood, the body of Christ is often lacking this essential gift,  an irreplaceable mediation of the grace of Christ. Many ecclesial personalities suggest that they know Christ and may really believe that they do, but few know how to be spiritual fathers. There is little in our culture that encourages the cultivation of such manhood. So many, often without realizing it, project their own fancies onto Jesus instead - blind to true Light, we do not see rightly - and this is especially true of men who lack the courage that real fatherhood requires, who lack the conviction required for sacrificial love. Because they have never learned to be sons, they do not know how to be fathers.  Blind themselves, at best they can offer only inaccurate guesses about God's will and uncertain encouragement to vague ideals.  

A true spiritual father, on the other hand, is able to see. Having learned to be a son, he knows how to contemplate, how to behold reality with confidence.  He is able to listen in a manner that makes his whole being vulnerable to God - humble trust and obedience to the heavenly Father opens up such contemplation. He lives in gratitude because he knows that such vision has been bought for him at the price of Christ's blood, and the freedom he now has to see is something he refuses to take for granted.  

Because Jesus is the Word of the Father, we need men, such as these spiritual fathers, who will help us find the Lord so that we might learn how to live.  We need another to help us welcome "the Light" who was "from the beginning." Someone beyond ourselves needs to speak the Word into the whole of our humanity until everything human about us - our entire image and likeness to God - is translucent with the Light of Christ.  Such is the role of a spiritual father: this man listens souls into being because he himself "keeps" the Word in his heart.  Because he has welcomed the Light that shines in the darkness, he can listen to the suffering ache in this particular son or daughter. He can listen until he enters the aching truth of another - and because he yearns to unveil to them what they cannot see on their own. The light of Christ is mediated through a spiritual father who listens.   

When a soul humbly seeks help, a true spiritual father tunes into this particular “end point” in eternity and carefully discerns this soul’s unrepeatable role the great symphony of creation.  In order to realize such greatness - a soul needs to be taught to see, needs to be listened to, needs to manifest its pain to someone who will fight for it, protect it, and help it become what it is meant to be.  In the order of nature, this is the work of a father - in the order of grace, this is the completely unmerited privilege of a spiritual father. In my case, I was encouraged to study theology in Rome and to become a teacher, but to do it as an act of faith. This was just the word I needed at the time, a spiritual direction even as I felt I was wondering aimlessly.  I had a sense for how to serve God and confidence in the goodness of His work in the world.

Confidence, purpose and sense of identity is what Abbot Boniface offered me when I came to first came to Mt. Tabor.  It is the very purpose that he founded Mt. Tabor - and when he offered it, the stream of spiritual fatherhood he chose to sanctify this mountain flowed from the caves of Kyiv.  Indeed, as is the case of Ukraine, this monastery is at the head waters of the Russian river, looking out over lands once claimed by Russia. Just as faith flowed from those caves of Kyiv into Russia, so too does faith flow into California from this vantage point.  The caves of Kyiv received the grace of monastic mysticism from Constantinople - and this heritage drew from the deep dug wells of desert fathers in Egypt. This great heritage found expression in the life of St. Symeon the Studite - who in turn formed St. Symeon the New Theologian. This happened at about the same time that Ukraine was first accepting the Gospel of Christ - and through this acceptance, the Russian people were evangelized by a monastic Church - a Church of spiritual Fathers.  California in all its rejection of fatherhood and hatred for actual men needs a new evangelization -  one that can only flow from spiritual fathers and the monastic tradition.

The great calling for Mt. Tabor is not simply to be a shelter in the storm of secularism - but, as were the monasteries of Egypt, Constantinople and Kyiv, a school of spiritual fatherhood, a place where one can be a spiritual son, a place where men show one another the Light as brothers. It is not an ideal of "Prayer and work" but of "prayer and family" - of sobernost, solidarity, a union of hearts forged for the glory of God. Glory waits to be revealed by those who will seek the Son of the Father.  For St. Symeon the New Theologian, one learns to see the Light of Christ through the mediation of a spiritual father — one needs a spiritual father to see the immaterial light of Trinitarian glory.  Since the time of Abbot Boniface, Holy Transfiguration Monastery has helped form such men - and this is true even now. 

What has primacy over war, insurrection and natural disaster? Your witness to Christ

Christ, the Word of the Father, commands those who believe in Him, "Do not be terrified."  If we stand in the face of war and insurrection is breaking our society apart, and fires and floods and storms and earthquakes threaten at every side, "Do not be terrified."  If false prophets predict utter catastrophe and declare the end of time, "Do not be terrified."  To be terrified is to be so seized with fear that you are not able to do anything or think of anything.  But Christ commands us not to be terrified.  This is because what He reveals is more powerful than natural or manmade disasters.  Whatever the catastrophe - He is Lord and nothing can impede his power.  With Him there is always a future for each person and for all of humanity - no matter what happens.  This is why He declares that "before" any disaster that might befall us is His saving plan.  Before the worse catastrophe that we might imagine, we should expect to be imprisoned, mocked, ridiculed, humiliated in all kinds of ways.  Why does the Almighty God allow his beloved to suffer in this way?  Because before all the threatening circumstances and misfortunes of life - and actually into these very realities - He has sent his beloved to provide a word of hope.  He has sent his disciples, his faithful followers to witness to the exceeding love of God and to declare it so that those who might need it the most can find it where and when it seems absent.  With the love of God revealed by Christ, even in total disaster and insurmountable hardship, a man can stand firm with hope - because this eternal love opens to horizons the exigencies of the moment cannot hold back.  God's love shatters the prison walls of rancor, strife, animosity, bitterness and disappointment. God's love opens possibilities even in the face of grave injustice and horrific evil - a life line to those who are surrounded by death.  God's love sanctifies broken wombs and raises up to life those whose lives we have destroyed. God's love pricks the conscience of the hardest heart and brings to repentance those everyone assumes are set in their ways.  God's love raises out of the narrow confines of the pressing moment, raises above the social conventions of every historical epoch, and breaks open the dams of human potential - for those who know this love remember what it means to be a human being.  It is because of this love that Christ tells us, "Do not be terrified."