The Divine Dynamism of the Poverty of Christ

Christ crucified reveals to the world the poverty of God.   On the Cross, God comes to us with arms stretch out and empty hands.  We see there a sacred emptiness, an abyss drawing us.  This divine humility opens up a place of encounter where everyone no matter their struggles can come to Him.  The poverty of God is God's love for man.

To accept this poverty is to open up one's heart to God's love and to be implicated by God in his love for others.   This is why some choose to live a more radical form of  poverty for the sake of a genuine love of God and one another.  Their radical poverty is really a radical fraternity, a fraternity with divine dynamism.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, started by Father Benedict Groeschel and some of his fellow Capuchins,  have devoted themselves is a rediscovery of genuine fellowship in the Lord. By placing their fraternity above material comforts, they are rediscovering how to live with one another as brothers in Christ. Their community is committed not only to how much more simply they might live but even more to how to simply build real fellowship with one another in the Lord. By eliminating material distractions, they discover new ways to be more patient with each other and trust God - and this builds up those who volunteer with them and all those whom they serve.   It brings hope to the communities in which they live.  The following is part of a note about the last Palm Sunday from the Bronx from Father Conrad Osterhout, c.f.r., a long time spiritual father and friend who runs a soup kitchen there:

This past Sunday, the friars and sisters and many friends of the friars, as with the Church around the world, processed with palms and sang Hosannas in praise of Christ our King.  Processing around our Bronx neighborhood on Palm Sunday is an incredible experience.   Passing along the avenues, 200 voices strong, we wave our palms and sing to the rhythm of drums and guitars.  It is a festive entrance to the Holy Week.  As we read in scripture, "with praise, let us awake the dawn," so our prayer and song resounds with incredible joy.  The greeting of our neighboring Baptist and Evangelical friends along the way adds to the hope we feel.  Some express their union with us with waves and smiles.  Others sing along or dance a bit.  Even those who look on quietly accept the palms that are offered by the brothers who greet them along the way.  

The Paschal Mystery

Those who yearn for a deeper friendship with Christ look to the Cross as the threshold of hope.  They see in  it their own failures, short-comings and inadequacies enveloped by the boundless mercy of God.  The weakness and evil each of us struggles against finds its limit before this inexhaustible mystery.  The whole world, every hardship that shakes it, every trial that overwhelms it, and every disappoint that threatens it, all of this revolves around the One crucified by love. We see in him a love that is stronger than death, a love no deluge can quench, the definitive victory of good over evil.  Who can separate us from Him?  It is enough to gaze into the face of the One who accepted death for our sake to know why the Christian does not lose hope in the midst of persecution, rejection, derision, abandonment or even death:

Progress is made only by imitating Christ. At the moment of his death he was certainly annihilated in his soul,without any consolation or relief, since the Father had left him in the deepest aridity.  The Lord was compelled to cry out, "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?" (Mt 27:46, Ps 22:1).  This was the most extreme abandonment that Christ had suffered in his life.  And by it he accomplished the most marvelous work of his whole life.  What he did surpassed all the other miracles he had performed on earth or in heaven.  That is, he brought about the reconciliation and union of humanity with God through grace.  The Lord achieved this at the moment in which he was most annihilated in all things: in his reputation before people, since in watching him die they mocked him instead of esteeming him; in his human nature, by dying, and in spiritual help and consolation from his Father, for he was forsaken by his Father at the time, annihilated and reduced to nothing so as to pay the debt fully and bring people to union with God.  Likewise, the greatness of the work accomplished by those who are truly spiritual will be measured by their annihilation of themselves for God.  When they are reduced to nothing, the highest degree of humility, the spiritual union between their souls and God will be accomplished.  

From Ascent to Mt. Carmel, II, 8, 8-11.

The Mystery of the Lord's Supper and the Faith of those who Hope

Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, when he was Archbishop of Saigon, was sent to prison and not allowed to exercise his ministry for thirteen years. On occasion, family and friends found ways to get particles of bread and a dropper full of wine to him explaining that he needed this "medicine." With this "medicine" the prisoner would celebrate Mass in secret and then give communion to his fellow prisoners. Through the mystery of the Lord's Supper, these prisoners found the strength to face their own Calvary and to become a source of hope for others.

When his friends and family said they were providing medicine, they were telling the truth -- the Eucharist is the medicine of immortality, and the Mass has real power to heal. This is because Christ feeds us with Himself and his life transforms our suffering and weakness. With his strength in us, our hardships are changed. Nothing can separate us from the love of God and with this love, we constantly discover new ways of loving those God sends to us.  The Cardinal's witness helps us see that no matter how desperate the plight in which we find ourselves, with the Eucharist we find ever deeper reasons for hope.

"If you wish to strengthen your faith

you must nourish yourself with the blessed Eucharist,

which is the "Mystery of Faith" and fortifies faith."

Road to Hope, 80

Holy Week, Prayer and Suffering

Holy Week helps us focus on the salvific suffering of Christ.  The events of this week spiral towards the Cross where human misery is enveloped in Divine Mercy.  In this week we recount how the politically and culturally powerful could not thwart the plan of God to raise up humanity above everything that threatens its true dignity.  Before the One Crucified by love, Holy Week opens the mystery of suffering to the threshold of glory.

Although aspirations for something greater than this world live in the hearts of men, suffering and death, guilt and shame burden human existence.  We are not at home with this state of affairs even when it is obvious that we have brought so much of it on ourselves.  We know things ought to be different, but there is no easy answer to this riddle.  Humanity struggles under a kind of doom where everything that is good, beautiful and true about our lives finds itself subject to futility.  Here, we constantly betray ourselves even in the best of times, but when there is great hardship, we find ourselves on the edge of falling apart in despair.  

We are not the only ones who are concerned about our plight.  Deep in the heart of God there is a judgment about human evil that we can only know through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This knowledge pierces to the heart and makes us rethink the way we live. When we know our sins in light of this judgment we also know there is Another who knows our true dignity and He has chosen not to be a spectator to our plight.  Instead, He has implicated Himself in it.  Holy Week is about God's answer to our human dilemma.

On the Cross, God and man become implicated in each other's plight.   In mystery of Love crucified the heartache God suffers for humanity and the misery men suffer without God are bound to each other.  By this saving work, suffering and death have been endowed with new meaning.  This means when we face discouraging circumstances our faith opens us to his transforming power -- if we trust in Him.

We have every reason to trust!  The power of God's love, is greater than all the evil that looms over our existence, including even the evil produced by our own failures.   Before this Divine Power, any sense of hopelessness however strongly felt is only a feeling, a feeling to be resisted even if it must sometimes be suffered.

By faith, Christ has suffered in such a way that we can join all our afflictions with his in a mysterious manner.  When we trust Him, when we choose to believe in love even when we feel like we cannot love any more, when we offer our misery to Him in an act of faith, this sacrifice of love unleashes God's power in the world.  This has practical implications for those struggling under the difficult burden of hardship.  No matter our circumstances, if we look to Christ, we behold an answer to the difficult riddle of human suffering and death.  

In his encyclical on Human Suffering, Blessed John Paul the Great explains to us how to find joy in the midst of illness and hardship.   In his vision of our faith, the feeling of uselessness and the sense that one is a burden to others, discouraging though this may be, these difficult moments can actually become through faith in Christ a source of joy.  This is because when we surrender this feeling to God in prayer, we discover "the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ."

Saint Paul speaks of such joy in the Letter to the Colossians: "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake"(88). A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering,a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person "completes what is lacking in Christ's afflictions"; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemptionhe is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters. Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. In the Body of Christ, which is ceaselessly born of the Cross of the Redeemer, it is precisely suffering permeated by the spirit of Christ's sacrifice that is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world's salvation. It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption. In that "cosmic" struggle between the spiritual powers of good and evil, spoken of in the Letter to the Ephesians(89), human sufferings, united to the redemptive suffering of Christ, constitute a special support for the powers of good, and open the way to the victory of these salvific powers.  The Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris #27.

I Stand at the Door and Knock - Heaven and Faith Episode 9

Christian prayer begins because the Word of God comes to us.   Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity believes Jesus is constantly coming to us in new ways - always humble and gentle, in his own time and on his own terms.   Our Risen Lord is the Word of the Father sent to our hearts that we might know the truth about God's love and the truth about our humanity.   God loves us in an exceeding way because He created humanity to be filled with his love.   And God is Love.   To say "yes" to his Word is to say "yes" to his love and filled with Him, to choose to love right now all those God is entrusting to us.  We can do this even in our weakness because of his beautiful presence within us.   The Word of God, the Word made flesh, the Word crucified for our sake, this Word that has conquered death lives to give us new life.   He knocks at the threshold of our innermost being and waits for us to open wide the door of our hearts to Him.  All we must do to begin to pray with this Word is to believe, to choose to say "yes" to this Word.

Click here for episode 9 of my podcast on Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity's Heaven and Faith.