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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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Pope Francis: To follow, To Edify and To Confess

On March 14, following the conclave, Pope Francis gathered with the Cardinals to pray for the Church.   He exhorted his brothers with words that encourage me to pray, “After these days of grace I would like us all to have the courage, simply the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Cross of the Lord, to build up the Church in the Blood of the Lord, the blood shed on the Cross, and to confess the glory of Christ crucified.”  (Click here to for his very first words as Pope to those gathered at St. Peter’s square – via Sr. Lisa at Nunspeak.)

The tender but challenging truth suggested in these three simple ideas fills my soul: to prayerfully walk in Christ’s presence whereever it leads, to build up the Church with the Blood of Christ no matter the price, to confess the glory of Christ crucified with every fiber of strength God has given us – this is life to the full!  There is so much more to say, but for now, this close to Easter, it is good to think about the essence of His message, his invitation to have courage together before the mystery of the Cross by the blood of Jesus.  This is the way forward for the Church and for each one of us personally.

The blood of Jesus – fountain of our salvation!  My heart goes here because it helps me realize how much the Lord has loved us and the power of the life He gives us.  Because Christ has loved us with a love that is stronger than death – we have hope even in the face of our failures.

But there is an implied challenge in these words – to the degree that our hearts remain hard, that we will not repent, that our lives are unconverted by the love revealed by Christ Jesus, we have not fully welcomed the gift of our redemption – and only those who welcome this gift can enter deep into its saving mystery.  As the Holy Father preached today, God is so merciful that the problem is not that He will ever stop extending His forgiveness to us – but we might stop asking if we allow our hearts to be hard to his Word.

 If we want to be disciples of the Son of God, those who hear the word and keep it, we must deny ourselves and pick up our cross and follow our Crucified master. In order to be the disciple of the Lord, in order to listen to the Word in our heart, we must make space – a movement of self-denial, not only a denial of sin but a denial also of those things that dispose us to sin.

We can only be filled with the riches of Christ if we are empty of ourselves.  Filled with ourselves, drunk on materialism, caught up our cleverness, tied down to our need for control or riches or security or reputation – there is no space for God to give us His Word or freedom to welcome this gift of love.  And His Word laid open on the Cross is the true life of our hearts and only hope of this dying world. 

With the Word of the Father, the Word made flesh, we have everything. Without this Word of Hope living in our hearts and in our actions, we live without the meaning or purpose the Father created us to know.  Indeed, without the Word who was from the beginning, all else is loss and can only end poorly.

Our lives must begin and end in the Word entrusted to us by the Father, the Word who proceeds from His Heart, the Word who knows the way into our hearts, the Word who knows the only pathway into the Heart of the Trinity.  To live by the Word of the Father, to live by the Truth Himself, means, in addition to self-denial, the acceptance of suffering for the sake of love – this is a life covered and filled with the blood of Christ.  Love suffers the hardships of others – our spouse, our children, our parents, our neighbors, even our enemies – because love cannot stand for the beloved to suffer alone.   Love raised up by the blood of Christ suffers rejection and being misunderstood because it is more powerful than persecution.

Love never gives up hope because the blood of Christ is its strength.  But for a Christian to try to love without Christ, for a Christian to try to live without the Cross- love unsurrendered to God leads to disaster.

As Pope Francis explained in his first mass with the Cardinals who elected Him:  “When we walk without the Cross, when one builds without the Cross, and when we confess Christ without the Cross, we are not the disciples of the Lord by the servants of the world.”

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With God’s Love Wounds of Sin become Wounds of Love

Transforming “wounds of sin into wounds of love”
is something that St. John of the Cross describes the Holy Spirit as
accomplishing in the soul. To help us understand this effect of God in the
soul, St. John of the Cross describes God’s action as a cautery – the
application of something physically hot to a wound, “If applied to a wound
not made by fire, it converts it into a wound caused by fire.” (See Living
Flame of Love, 2.7)

In prayer, God can touch the soul in such a beautiful way
that all past grievances are forgotten and all past guilt surrendered to His
Mercy. Such prayer anticipates what awaits those who hope in God and choose to
live by love — at the final judgment; every tear shall be wiped dry, every sorrow
consoled. Divine Love is that good.

This means, when I am vulnerable to the love of God in
prayer, He is able to help me forgive and even to forget grievances that burden
my heart. Rather than disposing me to render a harsh judgment toward the person
who has hurt me – the Holy Spirit teaches me how to pray for that person and
how to have compassion for them in their misery. This also means that when I
struggle to forgive someone it is not merely because of the wicked thing they
have done, but this struggle also speaks to the ignorance of God’s love I am
suffering.

To be merciful, I need mercy — and here I am a sick beggar
who must rely completely on the Lord. Yet God would not give us the desire to
be merciful if He did not intend to give us the love we need. This love, which
He gives in prayer to those who confidently ask with perseverance, this
mysterious love makes wounds of sin into wounds of love because each wound of
sin becomes a beautiful new way for us to discover the inexhaustible riches of
Christ.


Not to know the love of God is the deepest misery of all —
but to be pierced by His Mercy, if only for a one wondrous moment – no wound is
more healing for the soul, and the only thing that can heal such a wound of
love is to become more vulnerable to love, to allow oneself to be pierced by
love over and over again, “to such an extent that the entire soul is dissolved
into a wound of love. And now all cauterized and made one wound of love, it is
completely healthy in love, for it is transformed in love.”

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