From today’s Gospel:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to
you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. (John 14:27)
So often we look for peace or
ask for peace and we don’t find it. The peace we are looking for cannot be
obtained through any means other than direct personal contact with Jesus
Christ, a contact which is established and maintained through prayer, especially
meditation and the Jesus Prayer, and through the sacraments of the Church.
Sometimes even at Mass we don’t
find peace because we use our time and our energy completely focused on the
rubrics of the liturgy and on its stuff—the
vestments, the ceremonials, the incense and even the music, and do not use the
Mass as a means of us encountering the living Jesus Christ through the word,
the homily and the sacraments. When I was the director of our college choir,
one of my priorities in picking music was to select music that would help
students develop their personal relationship with the Lord. Without that,
nothing has value.
A couple of quotes for you to
consider:
“People concern
themselves with Christian upbringing but leave it incomplete: they neglect the
most essential and most difficult side of the Christian life, and dwell on what
is easiest, the visible and external.
This imperfect or misdirected upbringing
produces people who observe with the utmost correctness all the formal and
outward rules for devout conduct, but who pay little or no attention to the
inward movements of the heart and to true improvement of the inner spiritual
life.” Theophan the Recluse in The Art of Prayer, p. 164
Perfection consists in doing the will of
God, not in understanding His designs. . . . Whether it be in meditation,
contemplation, vocal prayer, interior silence, or the active use of any of the
faculties, that which God wills for the present moment is best and all else
must be regarded by the soul as being nothing at all. J.P. de Caussade, Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, p. 9 of the online edition.
Keep your heart fixed on God,
find him right here right now in this present moment, and give yourself to Him
in love, and you will find that peace Jesus gives to us, the peace which,
according to St. Paul, “surpasses all human understanding.” (Phil. 4:7)
God bless you.
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