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The Way of Love

There are many spiritual paths offered us in life. Some promise therapeutic relief from
burdens of sorrow and anxiety. Others achievements of consciousness and the wonders of psychic states.  There are forms of spirituality that promise power and gifts, prophecy and knowledge. The Holy Spirit, however, offers another way.

This new way on which the Holy Spirit leads passes across these other paths. It knows relief from anxiety and many other rich spiritual experiences. It is strewn with many gifts, prophecies and kinds of knowledge. A certain stature is realized. An inner strength acquired. A beautiful wisdom grows. Yet none of this is the destination that the Breath of God gently blows us toward or the ultimate purpose for which this Furnace of Love burns within.

The vanishing points to which the Soul of our Soul raises us, calls us, and directs us reach out to an unfathomable unity of love. The Creator Spirit etches us into a window through which heaven comes. He forms the clay of our humanity to become a resting place for the Living God. He breathes on us until we are covered with divine life and intimately bound to it. Our Advocate, He floats the light of truth into the deep crevices of our hearts as we ponder the Scriptures so that we might renounce what is not worthy of our dignity and glow with warmth in this cold world. He washes over us through our fasting and prayer until we are purified of anything that might betray the friendship that we are meant to know.

Finally, after we are made mature through the difficult trials and challenges of loving those entrusted to us, this Anointing from Above makes us shine with the Light of Christ as if we were icons surrounding the sanctuary of God’s presence. Then, when fully having realized in our own personal freedom the unique and unrepeatable creature God has delighted in from before the foundation of the world, we will have become a communion of living signs whose joy – the limits of time and space are too small, whose peace – nothing in the heavens or on the earth or under the earth can diminish, whose love – death has no power to end.

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Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving – in harmony with human nature

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are works of piety that make space for a right use of reason. Many spiritual people do not connect works of piety with reason or love or freedom.  Without making good use of reason, freedom and love, our works of piety will fall short of our Lenten Observance, and the healing that this season offers us will not be realized.

We must confront some popular misconceptions about our human reality. Reason is presumed as cold and calculating, the dispassionate part of our psychology whose purpose is exhausted in minimizing risks and maximizing opportunities. Freedom is associated with selfish indulgence and escape from responsibility.  Love is often thought to be irrational or opposed to reason or simply a feeling. Although to the extend that they are isolated from one another some of these presumptions about these spiritual realities might be true, God created these wonderful powers to be related in a kind of sacred harmony resonating in the spiritual interior of our lives.

Frequent confession and extra-sacramental penance like making a pilgrimage or observing Friday abstinences are aids to this difficult work.  It is a manner of asceticism, of spiritual practice, out of love for the Lord. It is not a matter of accomplishment or achievement, but a matter of vulnerable surrender and humbling ourselves before an inestimable gift. To fully realize our God-given human vocation, we must do everything we can to tune and discipline our use of reason and piety, love and freedom until they are made to resound in divinizing harmony through our spiritual exercises this Lent.

The harmony of reason, freedom and love with works of piety is gift upon gift – restoring and perfecting the image and likeness of God in us.  The gift of human reason is given by God so that we might use our freedom to love in a manner that gives Him glory. Through the Holy Spirit who prays in us, the gifts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving expand the capacity of reason to find the holy freedom such divinized love demands — a freedom that gives space to everything that is good and authentic in our humanity and that frees us from everything that is not worthy of the noble calling that we have received.

Because of sin and its limiting power, unaided reason by itself cannot secure this kind of freedom.  So we surrender to the Holy Spirit who convinces us of sin and the deep things of God. He prompts us to be merciful when we are otherwise thoughtless or resentful, and He moves us to venture with love into situations that we would otherwise find inconvenient and repulsive. When the Holy Spirit raises reason up in prayer, when the limited designs of our hearts are pierced by the limitless designs in His, the vast expanse of human frailty is laid bare and capacities unfamiliar to us are revealed.  It is here, in this desert wilderness, that the music of heaven is waiting to fill.  It in this emptiness and poverty of heart that the divine harmony of human reason, freedom, love and piety resounds.

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A Missionary Disciple and the Gift of God

The disciples of the Risen Lord are missionary.  They are sent out by Him into the world to be messengers of Divine Mercy, and their teaching is not their own. They know that they have been entrusted with a pearl beyond price, the mustard seed, the one thing that does not fail when all else fails around them. They declare what they have heard because what they hear has turned their whole world upside down and given them ground on which to stand, rock on which to build, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

They are sent out because the One sent to them commands them.  Raised from their sight, and at the same time, always mysteriously present in new and surprising ways, they follow in the footsteps of their Crucified Master.  Their mission is to reveal His love in the face of alienation and hostility, to bring action filled words of hope into hopeless situations, to propose and re-propose faith for eyes yet unable to glimpse the glory of God. In all this and so much more, they long to satisfy the great thirst by which Christ cries out, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

The One who conquered death asks the Father to send Tongues of Fire to these disciples whom He has sent. Thus, this Mysterious Breath from the Heart of Father and Son breathes in them, sealing the deepest interior of their hearts with the freedom to offer their lives in love. The Father and the Son have always delighted in this excess of joy because in sovereign freedom They forever seal their own love with this Consuming Fire.  Now in pure jubilation, because the Risen Lord has asked it and because all things are given Him, the frailest creature can also know this Uncreated Gift until one’s whole being echoes, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

Missionary disciples live by breathing in the Holy Spirit’s animating presence through which with great delicacy He lavishes on them spiritual gifts of every kind. New and unfamiliar wonders bathe these souls as their whole existence aches with both the exultation of heavenly canticles and the heart-piercing cry of the most vulnerable, the very same music resounding in the depths of God. In this symphony of truth, the true disciple discovers how to rest in the tenderness of God and, even more, how to be so tender with God that He might rest in them, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

The intensity with which the Fire of God’s Love burns in them is the same intensity that propels them out into the most painful of life’s problems.  Into the dangerous peripheries of society and into the troubled heart of a family, for the sake of both friends and enemies alike, the missionary disciple is not afraid to enter with the peace of Christ. Animated by the Spirit, these disciples breathe forth a hidden fruitfulness so super-abundant, this life is too short and limited to hold it all.  Even in their dying breath, one can hear them sing, “If you knew the Gift of God.”

A missionary disciple is a soul lit ablaze, a fiery icon of love and truth, a window through which the joy of heaven shines with life saving splendor. By making of their bodies a living sacrifice, true spiritual worship, such missionary souls offer divine warmth, light and life to a cold, dark and dying world. Through these generous souls, even when brutally rejected and scorned unto death, the joy from on high is revealed here below, especially where it is most needed.  Because they have sung sealed with the Holy Spirit, others now sing “If you know the Gift of God.” 

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Holy Fear and the Shadow of the Cross

Today, the Church takes us under the shadow of Calvary to behold our salvation and to approach this sacred place requires a reverence and awe that are not of this world. The Man of Sorrows gives Himself for our salvation, lays down His life that we might live. We come here today because of the burden of guilt that we have carried for far too long, the reality of death that we cannot avoid, and the desire to be understood and loved, to be connected to Someone who can relieve the sense of alienation that we suffer, to the only One who can fulfill at last the desires of our hearts. We dare to call out to Him “remember me” because of the heart-piercing gifts by which the Holy Spirit moves our hearts.

Saint Hildegard von Bingen describes this supernatural grace that she discovered when she entered into this shadow of God’s immensity. Fascinated and astounded, she has discovered awe in the presence of a reality greater and more real than is she. Tested, challenged, and tried, this gift from above makes her dare to approach nonetheless, and to stand humble, attentive, and ready to act. The tedium that can sometimes overcome a soul in prayer has no power over her now. Completely alert, this profound reverence prevents her from losing her focus, gives her the courage to stand firm, to behold, to listen, to adore. She personifies this astonishing super human gift, describing a mysterious figure covered with eyes, a creature who never loses sight of the immensity of Divine Justice, a being of merciful contemplation whom she identifies as “the Fear of the Lord.”

We, frail though we are, are all called to stand before the immensity of God’s justice and truth just like Saint Hildegard. The gift of fear of the Lord remains meaningless if we do not ponder the great mystery of human weakness and divine power, the abyss between actual human achievement and the demands of divine justice, and this for even the most pious and holy among us. What is this mountain, this immensity of Divine Justice, but the very mountain on which the Father glorified His Son, the mountain on which stands that Cross around which the whole world, each one’s life and all of history turns?

Up against the price that He paid for us and the greatness of the salvation He won for us, no one who is unwilling to bend the knee and bow the head should ever dare approach this King of Glory. Christ crucified knows our presumption and pride, our capacity for self-delusion, our hypocrisy, all the ways we overestimate ourselves, and even more, the ways we hate and torment ourselves.  These spiritual diseases are not acceptable to Him but for love of us, each one, He accepted their consequences unto death on the Cross. So He offered His last wordless cry, the prayer that still echoes between heaven and earth, a cry that death could not silence, that hell could not contain, this prayer from a heart that our cowardice and lust for power rent open.  This cry of love is the last word concerning all things human, the fullness of everything the Father has yearned for us to know, the voice that is heard the immensity of Divine glory. We dare not listen without the reverence this supreme act is owed.

If we are to stand before the mystery of the Suffering Servant who, raised on the Cross, revealed the unity of divine justice and mercy at the price of His own blood, then we need the Holy Spirit to protect us from our own cowardice and mediocrity. If we ask with humility, He gives us the same hope-filled fear that He breathed into the good thief and that He sent to stand with Saint Hildegard. If we will persevere in Calvary’s shadow, the Holy Spirit will move us with humble awe and wonder to renounce all the evil and mistaken judgements we have made about God, ourselves and neighbors.

When we tremble before the love, justice and mercy revealed on the Cross, holy fear makes us know that our Crucified God does not intend his admonishments to crush us but to prepare us, to make us humble and vulnerable enough to carry out His work in the world.  Holy fear will prevent us from losing heart. Today, Saint Hildegard’s vision of Divine Justice and Holy Fear gives us the courage to stand before the righteousness of God, to beg “remember me”, to confess his sovereignty, to bow our heads and to kiss his feet. 

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Holy Spirit – Life of the Soul

The Fire of God never ceases to reveal the truth in love.  It burns in human nature without consuming it, but allowing God’s holiness to be safely approached by the humble of heart.  This Holy Fire burns away impurities, it warms, it illumines.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth.  One of the most beautiful qualities of the truth is that its discovery always contains a note of surprise.  The truth is never exactly what we expect.  It reaches beyond what is calculable and dances outside the narrow confines of cleverness.  Precisely because it holds us accountable to things we would rather not face, we sometimes experience the impulse to deny the truth. Yet to do this would be to choose to live in myth, constantly blown around by the callous whims of our own egos.  On the other hand, if we are docile to the Fire of God’s love, we are able to surrender our existence to the mystery of the truth so that something beyond ourselves shapes our being.

The Wind of God whispers primordial harmonies our hearts need to hear.  Out of tune with reality, we are unable to appreciate the symphonic wonders of what God is accomplishing the way we were originally meant to.  Uncreated Love speaks in our innermost being to remind us of the love we are created to know and manifest- convicting and confirming, admonishing and encouraging – that we might accept the truth about who we are and who God is and what we must do.  When we do – we find ourselves rectified, standing on solid ground and in a better place to safe-guard and protect our dignity – no matter the external circumstances that must be faced or endured.

The Holy Spirit is the life of the soul – the human spirit’s only source of lasting refreshment.  The Spirit animates us with the life of the One who sent Him– the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.  To be open to the narrow way of truth the Holy Spirit teaches is to be vulnerable to the immense excess of divine love, and being immersed in this ocean of love is the secret to the fullness of life.  Conversely, to resist this Divine Inflow is a convenient but perilous path.  For humanity’s spiritual thirst is unquenchable save by those living waters by which we die to ourselves and live by the life of Christ in us.

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The Power of the Holy Trinity

All too often, the Holy Trinity is approached as a problem to be solved rather than the initiator and ultimate end of the whole Christian Mystery.  This living love is not something that we wait for at the end of our lives.  Nor is it something we analyze as an object of study outside of ourselves.  This eternal life is the truth we were made to behold and to share in.  We access the life of the Trinity even now by faith – it is why we begin our prayer “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

To be a Christian is to be plunged into the primordial mystery of love which is the Trinity.  This means we participate in their circumcession of love, of being in relation to one another, being “for” one another, all of this makes us capable of being for God and for one another in all the concrete circumstances of our life.  Circumcession is the circulation of love and knowledge – a knowing love and a loving knowledge- eternally exchanged by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It is the reality of communion in which we participate by sheer gift, a gift won for us on the Cross.  

The Trinity is the mystery from which our faith comes and to which it leads. The Three in One and One in Three is more present to our hearts and minds than we are to ourselves.  The Holy Trinity is a reality of unspeakable love that begins right here and right now with the decision to believe in this love and to live by this love.  To choose this is to make oneself vulnerable to the love of God – and to die to everything that is hostile to His love.   This is what happens when the Trinity touches us, when the living God pierces our hearts – the invincible unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is ours by grace.

In his commentary The Living Flame, St. John of the Cross describes the Trinity in terms of a hand, a delicate touch and a delightful wound.   The Father is the hand “wounds to heal.”  Everything comes from Him reaching out to us in blessing just as He reaches out to Adam in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.  Yet to make us healthy, He reaches out to destroy sin.  This involves dying to our old way of life and renouncing those things that are obstacles to loving those He entrusts to us.  The Father reaching out to us wakes us from our spiritual slumber and stirs us to re-orient ourselves ever more deeply to his love.  

If the Father is a hand reaching out of us, the Son is his touch – the Crucified Christ is the only way the Father reaches out to us.  In Jesus, humanity and divinity touch each other, divine mercy touches human misery.  This means that to know the Father we must not be afraid to search our misery for His mercy – Divine Mercy is deeper, the ultimate boundary to our hostility to God, to one another and to ourselves.

If the Father touches us through his Son, the touch of Christ leaves us the Gift of the Holy Spirit.  With the presence of the Holy Spirit, a taste for eternity lingers in the soul.  We find in ourselves not only the desire but the ability to rise above the limits of the present circumstances and see the possibility of a greater freedom and truer love.   The Holy Spirit lives in the wound of love God grants us – a wound that heals us and helps us realize the great dignity for which we are made.

To avail ourselves to this beautiful touch of the Father by which His Spirit orients us to divine things, all we must do is prayerfully surrender.  This means to boldly trust in Him through all the opportunities to love He gives us in the here and now.  This is not always an easy choice – but what good is our love if we only render it when it is easy to give.  And this choice that opens the whole mystery of God before us is always possible, no matter the circumstances around us, if we reject sin and keep prayerfully vigilant for His presence, clinging to our faith in which we find  the very substance of our hope.  A soul that lives by this hope hungers for love and is always ready to be drawn deep into the mystery of the Holy Trinity into which we have been invited through the generous blessing of the Father, through his Son and in the Holy Spirit from before the foundation of the world.

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The Gift of the Holy Spirit

Pentecost is a Feast of Love.  It is the feast of the Canticle of Canticles where the Bridegroom comes to kiss his Bride. Today the Church cries out to her Bridegroom for a divine kiss, a kiss from the mouth of God.   It is this kiss entrusted to frail humanity that makes all the difference in the world and in our lives.  It is by this kiss that God discloses the depths of his love, that He surrenders His Holy Spirit to each of us in the most unique and particular way.   It is the kiss God entrusts to humanity from the Cross.

The Holy Spirit is the life of the soul.  He is the great gift that the Risen Lord breaths into the world.   When lovers kiss, it is as if they are trying to breath their spirits into each other.  Each wants the other to completely possess the gift of who they are.   It is by way of a holy kiss that Christ breaths his Holy Spirit into the Church.

The whole Church and each of us as members of this mystical Body, through this same Gift, want to give everything we have to Christ and find in ourselves the power to do so and the inner conviction that we do not want to have it any other way.  This is because with the Gift of the Holy Spirit we realize this is exactly the way God has loved us in Christ Jesus.

Wherever the Spirit blows, the most beautiful affections are ignited in our humanity.  The Spirit of the Father and the Son moves us with a passion so sacred that it raises us up above ourselves.  Such holy desires caused by the Fire of God in us allow us to participate in the very life of God.

The more humble we are, the more the kiss of Christ permeates the deep places of our hearts.  He won the right to enter into these deep places, to breath his Holy Spirit into these depths, by emptying Himself until he became like us.  In solidarity with our humanity, having embraced this most frail work of his creation to his Uncreated Nature in his Divine Person, He allowed himself be completely vulnerable to us – like a lover who attempts to disclose his love to the beloved.  Spurned and rejected from the beginning, He would not give up on the friendship He yearned to share with us.  He offered his kiss to a distrustful humanity by humbling Himself in the face of our pride and overcame our hostility to Him by his death.  When we gaze on Him who died for us, always we see His arms are wide open, ready to embrace us.  He waits to kiss us with the Gift of His Spirit whenever we allow our hearts to be pierced by his love.

Will we surrender to his kiss?  Will we allow ourselves to be caught up in his love?  True, the more we offer ourselves in love, we find ourselves dying to our old way of life. It is the pathway of surrender and trust. We are afraid of this — abandoning our old way of life leads somewhere with which we are not familiar. But the kiss of Christ is so beautiful, so life giving, it is worth this death a thousand times over.  Let Him kiss you with the Kisses of his Mouth! 

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Prayer to the Holy Spirit

O Holy Spirit, Soul of my soul, I love You and adore You!

Teacher of all truth who searches the deep things of God:
In the face of my hostility to the truth,
You have the power to sting the conscience
With your healing power,
Open up today, again, the floodgates of holy tears,
Let compunction flow in this barren heart,
In this love parched world,
In the hearts of all who long for freedom from sin.

Lord and Giver of Life,
Time is short, the hour is late, and judgment certain:
I beg for the gift of repentance
That I and all those threatened
By the power of death,
Might never again forsake the pathway of life.
Help me scrutinize my whole way of life
In the light of the Gospel.
Help me die to myself that I might live
No longer my own life,
But the Life of Christ in me.

Sanctifying Gift of God,
You are constantly coming
Into the innermost depths of my being:
In ever new and more wondrous ways,
Inebriate me again in Your Love!

Breath of God who sweeps over Creation,
Your presence transforms the heart into paradise
And you constantly fill our inner poverty
With such inexhaustible riches.
Even more, You never cease
To allure us out of self-occupation
And into that sacred silence
Where the Word, who makes all things new, resounds:
As You enter ever deeper into my misery,
Lead me deeper and deeper into the heart of Divine Mercy.

Fire of Love,
Ignite holy affections in the deep places of my heart
that I might never be indifferent to the plight of my neighbor
Or fail to seek forgiveness from those I have wronged,
Or delay in offering forgiveness for those debts I can relieve.
Left to myself, I do not have the power
To forgive or forget an offense,
And in the effort to love as I have been loved,
I feel my weakness and inadequacy all the time.
But you constantly teach me compassion and intercession:
Help me submit my brokenness and sorrow to you.

You who covered the Son with transfiguring brightness,
Illumine our darkness with the radiance of Christ,
In the midst of crisis, help us overcome anxiety and insobriety,
In the midst of disaster, free us from all despondency and sinful anger,
That all those who suffer and are burdened might keep their eyes fixed
On the One who has triumphed over sin and death,
Who alone can lead us to the victory of good over evil.

You who overshadowed the Virgin Mary:
Pierce me with the love of the Father revealed by Christ Crucified,
Lift up my heart with the praise of the Only Begotten Son
In whom the Father is well-pleased,
Enflame me with the prayers of the Risen Lord in bold confidence
For the salvation of the world!

Most High and Glorious God,
I promise to be obedient, teachable, surrendered, and abandoned
In everything you permit to happen to me:
Only let me know your holy and true will.

Amen.

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The Tears of God and the Need to Pray

We must pray for everyone affected by storms that hit the South and the Midwest and storms in recent weeks in Europe — in these disasters death took whole families, children, parents, neighbors and friends.   We must pray for all those overwhelmed by such natural disasters.  We must also pray for the vulnerable all over the world, those who suffer in the grips of terror, especially those victims of heartless violence and hatred.   How many of those left behind in these devastating storms and how many survivors of the diabolical cruelty unleashed in the world today are questioning their faith or well be left questioning it for years to come?   For those who draw close to God, they share his tears and they know they must pray for their brothers and sisters whose hope is now so tested.

The Living God is not indifferent to our plight and as long as his children suffer, His Heart aches for them. He stands in solidarity with each of us in every situation.  In our hunger and thirst for justice and in our need for safety from danger and for comfort in sorrow – He stands firm in his devotion to us.  Though it is beyond our power to understand – his love and wisdom have not changed.  His glory is being revealed even if we cannot see it, even if it is disguised beyond recognition in the misery that engulf us.

God who has created us and saved us and who longs for each of us to thrive loves each one with a particular love: each one’s personal plight is his plight too.  Every single life is treasured by Him and He longs to wipe away every tear.  He knows our suffering.  He hears our questions and He empathizes with our helplessness.  He mercifully waits for our humble trust – and those who cleave to Him in the midst of trial discover the reason for their hope.

Our Crucified God has implicated himself in our personal tragedies in such a way that He suffers with us out of love so that we never suffer alone.  It is in the mystery of the Cross that the victory of good over evil is found.  If we must walk the valley of death, His Love is stronger than death – no storm or disaster or oppression or persecution or sorrow or trial can overcome it. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ – He vindicates our faith even in times of overwhelming calamity and incomprehensible evil.  He is always the substance of our hope.

If He has bound himself to the suffering, by the love that binds us to Him we must draw near our neighbors who suffer as well – with our words, and actions, and our prayers.  This is what it means to be in his image and likeness.  It is in such moments of solidarity that our hope is tested – and our hope will not disappoint.

“I know my Vindicator lives and He shall rise up from the dust of the earth at last.”  Job 19:25

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The Light of Tabor

What does it mean that the apostles witnessed Jesus on a cloud covered mountain clothed in dazzling light in dialogue with Moses and Elijah?  
On the mountain in the cloud and darkness, we are reminded of the transcendent truth revealed in Christ, that this is hidden wisdom given only in faith, and that faith itself is like the ascending a mountain – each step raises us higher into God’s mystery and deeper into purity of heart.  In the light and glory of this moment, we see the Gospel of Christ contemplated in the Law and the Prophets.  As Christians, we must not be ignorant of the Bible but prayerfully reflect with the eye of faith on the wisdom of God which imbues the Sacred Page.

What does it mean that the apostles heard the command of the Father?
It means the ear of the heart must be open to the Word of Truth in all the hidden disguises He comes to us.  When we find the Beloved Son in those God has entrusted to us, we must never leave Him, we must strive to serve to Him with all our strength, and no matter the cost we must follow Him in everything.  He alone is our hope on prayer’s pilgrimage from Mt. Tabor to the Hill of Calvary.

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