We can't do it for ourselves

Friday, April 28, 2017

I haven’t posted since Tuesday because I’ve been a bit under the weather. On Tuesday I wrote about the gifted religious experiences that many of us have, moments when it seems as if the veil between heaven and earth is rent, times when we are overwhelmed and overjoyed by beauty, by the experience of love, or by a strong sense of the presence of God or of the risen Christ.

I also mentioned that after receiving gifts, life tends to go on as usual, while the experience we have had remain pleasant memories but don’t necessarily cause any significant changes in our lives. How can this be? For an answer, I turn to Saint Augustine of Hippo, who writes about such things in his Commentary of Psalm 41.

He reminds us that God is so far beyond us that in order to attain to God, we have to reach beyond the usual horizons of our souls. “If my soul were to remain within itself it would not see anything but itself and, within itself, it would not see its God. . . . It is there, in fact, above my soul, that the dwelling of my God is. That is where he dwells, from there he sees me, from there he created me . . . from there he raises me up and calls me, from there he guides me and steers me into harbor.”

But we cannot remain beyond ourselves for too long because, as Augustine puts it: “Our body that is doomed to corruption weighs our souls down and our spirit is troubled by many thoughts. . . . Since we are weighed down by our heaviness we soon fall back into our habitual ways. We let ourselves be dragged back to our usual way of living. And just as when we drew near to God we found joy, so when we fall back to earth we have reason to groan.” Read Psalm 41 (42 in modern numbering) to see an expression of this groaning:

Why are you cast down, O my soul and why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

The psalm supplies a remedy for this sad state of affairs: it is hope. We are given to experience times of great sweetness, but then we are cast back down upon ourselves and we are threatened and tempted by our own inordinate desires. Saint Augustine expresses the remedy eloquently:

While awaiting heaven find your God here below in hope. . . . why hope? Because I shall witness to him. What witness will you give? That he is my God, the health of my countenance. My health cannot come to me from myself. I will proclaim it, I will bear witness to it: My God is the health of my countenance.”

And there is an important lesson to be learned here: Our health cannot come to us from ourselves. It must come from outside us, and above us, and through the merciful ministrations of a God who loves us more than we can sometimes love ourselves. Let this be a guide to your ongoing prayer.

God bless you! Have a nice weekend!

Mystical Moments

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Yesterday, as we celebrated Mass on the Feast of Saint Anselm, I was overwhelmed for a time with a incredible beauty of our liturgy, and the colors, and the sights, and the smells and the words of consecration, and for a brief instant I felt like I was witnessing the great liturgy of the kingdom to come. It didn’t last for two long, but now, whenever I think back on it, I can see a picture of it in my mind that is as clear as it was the moment it happened.

Every once in a while, God gives us a particular gift: a period of time or even a brief moment when it seems like the veil between heaven and earth is rent, and we are filled with a sense of joy and beauty that has us feeling more connected to God than ever before. I believe that experiences of this kind are especially rich during the season of Easter when our attention is focused on the reality of the fact that the Christ is alive and is present with us. Perhaps you have had such an experience, or even more than one. Perhaps it hasn’t happened to you yet, but your time will come. But will you be ready to accept the moment of the Lord’s visitation?

It takes practice to make ourselves ready to receive such a gift. I don’t propose to be an expert on the spiritual life (which is why I entitle my reflections as “spirituality for beginners,” since I always feel like I am one myself), but if I take a look at my own experience and at the work of God’s grace within me, I can report to you a couple of things that I have begun practicing lately. And please don’t think I have mastered these practices, for, as I said, I am only a beginner.

·         Catching judgmental or negative thoughts about others and then reaching deep down inside my self to a level of my soul where there exists nothing but charity and compassion.

·         Actively practicing a certain way of seeing: looking at every single object in my universe as a sign of the creativity and love of God, excluding nothing. Even the bottle of Tylenol on my desk; even my computer mouse; even my unmade bed; and an old Christmas card (from 1984) hanging in my room with one word on it: “Rejoice!”

·         Smiling more, trying to make a smile be my default mouth position.

·         Rejoicing at the beauty I see around me as if I were seeing it for the first time, and not taking it for granted as I so often do.

·         Reading prose and poetry that speaks of love, even human love, in a way that reminds me that God is Love, so all love is God. (I recommend two books to you that I have found inspiring: The Enlightened Heart and The Enlightened Mind, ed. Stephen Mitchell, published by Harper Perennial). And at the moment I am particularly inspired by the Sufi poet Rumi.

Alas, these sublime moments don’t last forever. All too soon, we return to our habitual way of being and thinking. There is a reason for this and St. Augustine explains it beautifully. This will be the subject of tomorrow’s reflection.

In the meantime, stay open, be more aware than ever of the presence of the risen Lord in your life, and practice seeing beauty tucked away in little corners that you have been ignoring lately. You’ll be glad you did!

God bless you!

Gems from Saint Anselm

Monday, April 24, 2017

In the monastery we celebrate the feast of Saint Anselm today. One of the things I like about this feast is that the antiphons we use for the Divine Office are particularly beautiful. Many of them come directly from St. Anselm’s writings, and each is suitable food for meditation. I offer you the best of the lot:

“My Lord and my God who made me and late remade me, my soul longs for you.”

“From what generous love, from what loving generosity God’s compassion flows out to us.”

“Trust in God, for I am confident that the Lord will answer all your needs.”

“My God, I pray that I may so know and love you that I may rejoice in your forever.”

“O Christian soul, restored from the weight of death and redeemed by the blood of Christ from bondage, take heed and remember you are risen.”

“Enter into your soul’s inner chamber, and seek God with all your heart.”

“Hope of my heart, strength of my soul, help of my weakness! By your powerful kindness, O Lord, complete what in my weakness I attempt.”

God bless you!

I saw Him!

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Tuesday in the Octave of Easter

I saw the risen Christ this morning.

I was sitting in the monastery refectory at 5:45 am, having my usual cup of coffee before Morning Prayer. I looked around the room and saw the risen Christ shining through the building, because if Christ were not risen, none of what I was seeing would exist. And when I went into the church and sat in my choir stall, again I realized that none of what I saw or was experiencing would exist if Christ had not been risen from the dead.

We began Morning Prayer by reciting the psalms. Ok, the psalms would still exist because they pre-date the birth of Jesus, but the settings in which we pray the psalms, and the interpretations we give to the psalms (since so many of them speak of the risen Christ if you know what to look for), and the music, and the prayers, and my relationships with my confrères, and the massive Paschal Candle lit and shining brightly and the flowers, especially the lilies which always look like trumpets to me, and, of course, the very Abbey Church itself, would not exist if Christ had not been risen from the dead.

And I thought about my life, and what my life was like before the risen Christ had led me to faith and eventually to the monastery, and I shudder to think of what my life would have been like if none of that had ever happened, and how lost I would be, and how empty my life would be, and how impossible it would be for me to have access to God the Father and how there would be no chance for me to enter heaven because I would still be in my sins since I could never pray the Jesus Prayer because He would have no power in my life. I remember the wonderful passage from Ephesians---no, wait! I couldn’t, because the letter to the Ephesians would never have been written, if Christ had not been risen from the dead.

And so He is all around me, and He has saturated my life, and still does because daily He works in me and keeps me going.

Look around yourself. Note that this reflection would not exist if Christ were not risen from the dead, and you would never have heard of me. Look at all the objects around you in your home and perhaps in your pockets that would simply not have been there. And think, like I have, of what your life would be like if Christ were not risen from the dead and there were no Church, no faith, no baptism, no Eucharist, no Savior. And give thanks, for the Lord has been risen! Amen. Alleluia!

God bless you!

Good Friday: It doesn't make sense; It does make sense

Friday, April 14, 2017

Good Friday

On the cross Jesus bears the weight of all the evil there is in the world, all the misery, the deceit, the hatred, the agony, the physical, mental and psychological pain, the betrayal, the denial, the ridicule, the humiliation, the crushing disappointment and even the sense of abandonment and total helplessness. He does it for you and He does it for me. He does it because we have hurt people and he does it because life has hurt us as well. On the cross He gives us a place to hang our own pain and misery and everything else I mentioned up above. On the cross He bears our own sin as well.

Time spent meditating on the suffering and death of Our Lord is time invested in our ultimate salvation. Time spent mediating on the suffering and death of Our Lord is time spent learning to make sense of what happens in this life, and the message is this: it doesn’t make sense.

So much in our lives doesn’t make sense. So many things have happened which we are powerless to explain or to wrap our minds around. I believe that this experience of senseless hopelessness is part of the agony that Christ bore on the cross which culminates in His cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

But there is a second message that the cross offers us, and it is a message that contradicts the first: it does make sense. During your darkest moments, gaze on the cross in meditation or in silence, and this message will eventually come to your mind and calm your senseless agony.

And so, we have to say this about the cross: it does make sense, and it doesn’t make sense. And we have to rest in the contradiction. That’s what he called it, Simeon the prophet who held the infant Jesus and spoke to His mother. He will be a “sign of contradiction” to the world. (Luke 2:34).

Look at your own life. There is a lot of good in you. And there is also evil in which you have been complicit. And how many times has something happened to you which has made you want to cry out: “This isn’t fair!” or even “This doesn’t make sense!” Your life therefore is itself a contradiction, and your contradiction can find its home in the contradiction of the cross.

Saint Benedict doesn’t specifically mention “contradiction” but in essence he addresses it in the fourth step of humility: “under difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions, [the monk’s] heart quietly embraces suffering without weakening or seeking escape.” (RB 7:35-36)

When Christ bids us to “carry your cross,” He is telling us to accept the contradictions which we find in our lives and then to look to the cross, where Contradiction finds its fullest expression. And, united with the cross, we bear the pain, always remembering that the Cross is not the end of the story. It is merely one terrible yet necessary stop along the way. Resurrection is almost upon us. And then all contradictions dissolve into endless joy.

God bless you! Have a wonderful weekend. Happy Easter to you!

The Greatest Gift

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Holy Thursday

This is the day when we commemorate the institution of the Eucharist in a special way and on this day I offer the following reflection:

I have often written how all the religions and cultures of the world have their special Wisdom Teachers, and that, to a great extent, all these wisdom teachers say basically the same things but in different languages and with different symbols. This common spiritual teaching is called Perennial Wisdom.

Nonetheless, among all the wisdom teachers of the world, there is only One who has claimed to be God: Jesus Christ, the son of God, who proclaimed himself to be the great I AM. The Jewish religious leaders of the day were completely scandalized by this audacious claim and convicted him of blasphemy and demanded that He be put to death, this man who claimed to be God.

AND THEN HE PROVED IT by being raised from the dead, and these events will play themselves out in our liturgies over the next few days, culminating in the great celebration of Easter: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

BUT THAT WASN’T ENOUGH. Before he was betrayed and delivered into the hands of those who would kill him, Jesus left us what many consider to be the greatest gift of all: He left us the Eucharist. And once again, this gift makes Christianity to be unique among all the world’s religions. We worship a person who is both human and divine and who left us with an everlasting gift that makes it possible for Him to be physically present with us every single day; not only that, but WE CONSUME him as often as we receive communion at our liturgies.

In honor of the gift of the Eucharist, I offer you this sublime passage by Saint Ambrose of Milan (c. 334-397):

He is the bread of life. Whoever eats life cannot die . . . Go to him and take your fill, for he is the bread of life. Go to him and drink, for he is the spring. God to him and be enlightened, for he is the light. Go to him and become free, for where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom . . . ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” (John 6:35).  Ambrose of Milan, Commentary on Psalm 118. (In Clément, p. 108)

God bless you this day and always!

He got to you first!

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

All of our spiritual aspirations, desires and hopes are implanted in us by God and are the result of the Spirit’s activity in our own souls before we were awakened to the reality of our life in God. All is God. All is the activity of the Trinity working in us, of the God “in whom we have our being.”

The monastic father John Cassian reminds us that it is God’s intention that we be united to him and is expressed in Jesus’ “high priestly prayer” in John 17:

So we shall arrive at the goal of which we spoke and which the Lord desires for us in this prayer of his: ‘that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one.’ (John 17:22-23). ‘Father I desire that they also whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am’ (John 17:24). in Clément, p. 211

I happened to come upon a Sufi account which helps make this relationship with God clear and precise:

At the beginning I was mistaken in four respects. I sought to remember god, to know Him to love Him, and to seek Him. when I had come to the end, I saw that He had remembered me before I remembered Him, that His knowledge of me had preceded my knowledge of Him, His love toward me had existed before my love to Him, and He had sought me before I sought Him.

I’ve said it before and I repeat it now: In whatever way you may be reaching out to God, especially during these days of Holy Week, know that God is already reaching out to you in greater measure and has planted your yearning for him within you. This is what He wants for you. Let the readings and prayers of Holy Week drive that message home for you this year.