Thursday, 27 Mar 2008, 4 pm
This is the last reflection of a series on seven signposts. The first reflection began Lent, and now this one bridges us into the Easter season and beyond.
Signposts give us direction. They point to some place. They involve action, movement. Many signposts call us to remember something important, some thing that is already there but is often covered up by the minutia of daily life. Signposts represent a choice—to follow or not to follow. It takes grace to see a signpost and courage to follow where it points.
All is gift.
This signpost points to the attitude of gratitude.
Many people say “everything is gift,” but the word all seems bolder, more encompassing. All excludes nothing. Every thing, every person, every situation, every moment of time, every breath, every molecule, and every ounce of energy in your very existence, every opportunity to choose to love and to give—all is gift.
This means that the present moment—the now, and every thing about it, be it joy or suffering or more likely a combination of both—is gift, a present. It is an opportunity to be present to what is, and to be open to God. And the choice (another gift) is yours to receive or resist. Not in the past or in the future, but only now in the present moment can you have presence, awareness, being. Memories and wishes are good, but they are not reality; they are not what is. Receiving is being; resistance is pride.
The first Beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, is a be-like-this-attitude that all is gift, an awareness of our poverty. For if all is gift, then nothing is mine. All belongs to God. And in opposition to everything the world says, those who can accept the humility of this poverty, or accept grace to move toward it, are truly blessed, and “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Thus the words from Scripture, “In Him we live and move and have our being” are not only poetic, but are actual physical reality. All is indeed gift.
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
All is gift. If we receive, then gratitude, and perhaps awe, is our response.
Keep hope alive.
Dare to trust.
Surrender to grace.
••• Reflect love. •••
Gravitate to humility.
Pray always.
All is gift.
Our Lady of Mercy is praying for us…
Monday, 11 Feb 2008, 2 pm
Signposts point to where we want to go. Follow, or don’t follow. There are seven signposts listed below because seven is the number of completeness. No claim of originality is made for the signs, excerpt maybe for their grouping.
Keep hope alive.
Dare to trust.
Surrender to grace.
• • • Reflect love. • • •
Gravitate to humility.
Pray always.
All is gift.
Keep hope alive.
This signpost comes from a priest that used to be campus minister at the Mount. He would always sign the end of his letters with this. It is a reminder the importance of hope. Hope and faith are like two sides of the same coin. Sometimes faith seems hidden, so hope pulls you through the dark times. Sometimes hope seems lost, but faith pushes one through. Faith is the muscle, the driving force; hope is the spark of light that illuminates the way and warms a cold heart.
Dare to trust.
This signpost is a shortened form of “dare to move faith to trust” as described in the short essay, “It is Not About Belief” by Jon Zuck. Believing in God is one thing; trusting God is another. Both are part of faith, but the real test of faith is not believing, it is trusting. There are times when nothing in your experience will confirm, support, or backup faith. The world says one thing; faith says another. Which one do you trust? In the Gospels, Jesus implies trust when He talks about faith.
Surrender to grace.
This signpost comes from a line in the book, The Lord by Romano Guardini. (An excellent book that contains short reflections on nearly every episode of Jesus’ life in Scripture.) Although the sentence was referencing something specific, it applies to everyting. God’s grace rains (or reigns?) down upon us every second to open our eyes to see Him and His love for us, and calls us into a deeper relationship with Him. We resist. We need to stop resisting. “Surrender” can also mean “abiding” as referred to in St. John’s Gospel.
Surrender to grace can also mean to stop resisting the present moment. Enough grace will be given to you to get through whatever you need to do. In other words, do what is right when you see that something or someone must be attended to—this is an opportunity given to you to love and God will help you through it.
• • • Reflect love. • • •
The center signpost. There is a signpost for hope and one for faith (trust). Love of course needs to be included. And being the greatest of the three, plus a direct reference to the nature of God, it has the three bullets highlighting it. All signposts ultimately point to this place. We are not the source of love. God is. We do not possess love. Love possesses us. We do not create love. We channel love. And love, unlike the limited nature of material things, grows as it is shared.
Scripture says we are made in the image of God. This means two things, and both are equally correct. One, we are created as a copy—a person imprinted or made from an impression from a master image, the master image of who/what God is. (Note, this does not mean we are gods. We have attributes like God, beings with a will and an intellect.) Two, we are an image as in a reflection—we reflect the image of God to others. This synchronizes with what St. Teresa of Avila said about prayer as us looking at God looking at us. Another metaphor is that God throws us a ball called Love—are we going to keep it or are we going to throw it back to God through the next person?
Gravitate to humility.
This signpost points to the First Beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit. Scripture and all of the saints and mystics call us to humility. Not humility as the world defines it, that is, as a sense of proper self-esteem where one does not elevate or demean ones self in relation to others. This is important, but Christian humility aims for the complete and total nothingness of pride. We have nothing to boast of to God. We have no entitlements or any thing to lay claim on God. We are nothing without God. All we can really ask for is mercy. (See the story of the Canaanite women begging Jesus to heal her daughter.) The verb “gravitate” implies that we should keep moving toward humility.
Pray always.
This signpost comes from Scripture. It is a reminder to be aware of God’s presence, our be-withness with God, throughout our whole day, every day.
All is gift.
This signpost points to the attitude of gratitude. Many people say “everything is gift,” but the word “all” is more encompassing. “All” includes all—every thing, every person, every breath, molecule, and energy of your very existence, every opportunity to choose to love and to give. The words from Scripture, “In Him we live and move and have our being” are not only poetic, but are actual physical reality. This signpost also points to humility. (See the post “Certainty” for more.)
Keep hope alive · Dare to trust · Surrender to grace
• • • Reflect love. • • •
Gravitate to humility · Pray always · All is gift
Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008, 10 pm
At some point in every faith journey, one finds him or her self taking an inventory of their core, central beliefs. Some of these beliefs are held very tightly, some loosely. The more central a belief, the more one aligns his or her identity.
Paula D’Arcy describes her seven central beliefs as certainties. These are listed below followed by some of my comments.
1) “I am certain everything is gift.”
This is the very foundation from which the first Beatitude speaks—blessed are the poor of spirit. (i.e. humility)
2) “I am certain we are entitled to nothing.”
See #1. Entitlement is an illusion that develops from one type of response to receiving gifts. (i.e. pride)
There is great freedom in realizing that one is not entitled to anything. All is gift. All comes freely from God. Why? Because God chooses to do so. God wants to; He does not need to. That is what love does. That is what love is.
With freedom comes responsibility to be good stewards of the gifts received. And with gifts comes, or should come, gratitude.
3) “I am certain the wells for pain and joy are not separate.”
See #1 and #2. This is difficult for many to accept. Not everyone can see the connection. One is not entitled to joy. And at the same time, one is not entitled to pain either.
The Buddhists say that the cause of all suffering is desire, and thus they seek to eliminate all desire. St. Ignatius of Loyola agreed that suffering comes from desire, but it is our disordered desires that cause suffering. Our drives, desires and wants, are energies given to us by God. They are gift. And because they are from God, they are good. By our re-ordering of these desires according to our priorities and our notions of happiness (not God’s), we cause dis-order and dis-ease.
4) “I am certain bitterness and healing are a choice.”
This is our response to #1, #2, and #3. You are free to choose how you respond.
5) “I am certain that running from your darkness leads to greater darkness.”
See #2, #3, and #4. Is this a definition of despair?
6) “I am certain the darkness is held ultimately by light.”
This is the source of all hope. See #1 and #7.
7) “I am certain that the words from Scripture, ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’ are not poetic; they are actual physical reality.”
See #1.
Our Lady of Mercy, pray for us…
Monday, 7 Jan 2008, 11 pm
Thomas Keating, in Manifesting God, says: “Worthiness is not the issue.” Get over it. Stop projecting your own self-esteem issues onto God. God is God, not the god you make Him out to be.
The Gospel is not about earning the love of God because we already have it. It is a matter of receiving it and of being grateful.
And this takes humility, the first Beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit…
Thank you Father. Help me to recognize and remember my poverty.
Tuesday, 6 Nov 2007, 7 am
Meister Eckhart, a 14th century German mystic, once wrote, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
From Ronald Rolheiser’s book, The Shattered Lantern:
The original sin of Adam and Eve, the prototype of all sin, is presented as a failure to be receptive and grateful. …
God makes Adam and Eve and places them in the garden and showers them with goodness and life. They are given beyond measure and are promised that life will continue in this rich and good way on one condition—they are not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.
The prohibition boils down to this: God has told Adam and Eve that they will receive life as gift, but they may never take life as if it were theirs by right. The condition God places on them is not an arbitrary or petty test. No. It expresses an entire morality: as long as you receive and respect reality as gift, it will continue to give you life and goodness. If you attempt to seize it or take it as owed, you will know shame, disharmony, pain, death, and loss of a connection with God.
Reminds me of the First Beatitude: Blessed are the poor of spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
All is gift.
Saturday, 28 Jul 2007, 3 pm
In Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft links the virtues of the Beatitudes with the vices of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Beatitudes are the antidote to the Seven Deadly Sins, leading to life, not to death.
Pride vs. Poverty of Spirit (Humility)
“Pride is self-assertion, selfishness; poverty of spirit is humility, selflessness.”
Avarice vs. Mercy
“Avarice is greed, the centrifugal reach to grab and keep the world’s goods for oneself; mercy is the centripetal reach to to give, to share the world’s goods with others, even the undeserving.”
Envy vs. Mourning
“Envy resents another’s happiness; mourning shares another’s unhappiness.”
Wrath vs. Meekness and Peacemaking
“Wrath wills harm and destruction [separation]; meekness refuses harm and peacemaking prevents destruction [coming together].”
Sloth vs. Hunger & Thirst for Righteousness
“Sloth refuses to exert the will toward the good, toward the ideal; hunger and thrist for righteousness does just that.”
Lust vs. Purity of Heart
Lust dissipates and divides the soul, desiring every attractive body [and thing]; purity of heart centers and unifies the soul, desiring God alone [the one thing necessary].”
Gluttony vs. Bearing Persecution
“Gluttony needs to consume an inordinate amount of worldly goods; being persecuted is being deprived of even ordinate necessities.”
Saturday, 28 Jul 2007, 2 pm
The Beatitudes are linked together. They do not stand separately.
The poor in spirit, those detached from the desire for worldly goods, must necessarily also be the pure in heart, since their heart is not split and set on many things of this world, but purely on the “one thing necessary”. They love God and therefore they shall see God. These pure in heart, in turn, are meek, the holy and harmless and humble, because that is the character of the God their hearts are set on. The meek, in turn, are persecuted by the world and made to mourn; they are taken advantage of. Yet by their very act of suffering persecution, they are peacemakers. They make peace by the same method Christ did on the Cross: by draining off the bloody mess of human history into their own broken hearts. The peacemakers are also the merciful, for war is caused by the insistence on justice almost as much as by injustice. The cure for war and the way to peace is not justice but mercy, forgiveness. Yet the merciful hunger and thirst for justice even as they go beyond it to mercy, for they realize that in God’s spiritual economic recovery program for our fallen world the only way to justice is not from below, from force, from something less than justice (like bombs), but from above, from something more than justice, from mercy, from the character of God himself as revealed in Christ. It is Christ’s mercy in dying for us that satisfies justice. Mercy and truth met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other on the Cross.
There are, of course, other ways to string these pearls together. This is just one way.
Recently I read someone say that old secular mantra about Jesus—he was a wise and great teacher, but not God. I wonder how they explain, or even try to live, the Beatitudes? These people contradict themselves in the same sentence. Even though the Beatitudes are the exact opposite of the wisdom of the world, they are completely and totally dependent on Christ, on God.