Never be discouraged

From the second reading on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord:

God saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,

not because of any righteous deeds we had done,

but because of his mercy. (Titus 3:5)

It is all about the mercy of God through Jesus Christ, and it is good for us to reflect on this during this Year of Mercy.

We do not connect with the Lord through our good deeds and virtues---these, too, are gifts of his grace and mercy. Our connection with the Lord depends wholly on our awareness of our own iniquity and weakness. Trappist Abbot André Louf said it so beautifully in one of his talks about living in community:

“. . . we should identify ourselves with the others in our common frailty in order to reach, from this point of departure, the salvation given us by Jesus. De profundis—‘out of the depths.’ For this is the Good News, this is the Church, and nothing else. Jesus came for these sinners, these sinners that in fact we are, and not for the righteous that we thought we were, that we hoped to become or appear to be, secure at the heart of the Christian community. There is no Good News without the proclamation of the forgiveness of sin.”   (In the School of Contemplation, 2015, Liturgical Press, p. 44. The emphasis is mine.)

And to this I simply add: We must never be discouraged about what we discover about ourselves. Never be discouraged by our weaknesses or failings or bitter mistakes---especially as we grow in the spiritual life, because our own growth sometimes causes to look with dismay and even disgust at the follies and iniquities of our earlier lives.

The other day I knelt in prayer before the Manger asking God to remove a particular weakness from me, but when I heard the reading at Mass today I realized that what is most important is not the removal of a weakness as much as the mercy that such a weakness impels me to ask for.

As Saint Benedict put it: “Never lose hope in God’s mercy.” (Rule of St. Benedict 4:74)

He will complete His work for you

Once again we turn to the prophet Isaiah for our Advent meditation. This passage is filled with promise for all of us:

For just as from the heavens

the rain and snow come down

and do not return there

till they have watered the earth,

making it fertile and fruitful,

giving seed to him who sows

and bread to him who eats,

So shall my word be

that goes forth from my mouth;

it shall not return to me void,

but shall do my will,

achieving the end for which I sent it.  (Isaiah 55:10  NAB translation)

The interpretive key to this passage, for me, is my word, which reminds me of  the beginning of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The Word is Jesus Christ, come down from heaven.

He waters the earth: we are the earth, thirsting for God all the days of our lives. The water that Jesus brings is the living water that he promised to the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. He promises that if we drink of this water we shall never again thirst. Our thirst will be satisfied with the coming of the Lord. What is dry and cracked and barren in our lives will be made fertile, and bear fruit—perhaps things which you have never even imagined up until this point in your life.

Christ will come to do the will of the Father, and achieve the end for which He was sent: our salvation, our healing, His forgiveness, His grace and truth, His mercy and compassion, and His love for you which is so great that He died for you—you alone, if necessary.

And then, having achieved all of this, He will return to the Father. And your life will never again be the same.

And so, no matter where you are at this point in time—whether you are standing at the peak of a mountain which you have struggled to climb or whether you are lost in a pit or in a valley of near-despair, consider this passage and realize that Jesus Christ is being sent into the world—and to you—to achieve His Father’s purpose for you in your life.

Some of you may already have had evidence of this in your life; some of you may be waiting for the gift to touch you and transform you. All of you—no, all of us—are once again promised a great and wonderful gift.

Celebrate the coming of this gift, and your Advent will be blessed. And your Christmas will be filled with a delight that no one can take from you.  God bless you!

Tomorrow will be my last post for 2015, and I will resume posting again on January 3, 2016. Thank you for reading these reflections and thank you for your kind words and encouragement. Please spread the word, post these reflections on your own timelines, and send me email addresses for my mailing list.

Thank you so much.

An antidote to pride

Saint Luke’s Gospel tells of a blind man who was sitting by the roadside begging, and who cried out,

“Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me.” This is one of a number of encounters that Jesus has with the blind, and all of them are particularly valuable to us for our meditation and growth in spirit and in holiness.

This man was blind; he could not see. That is, he could not see the many things that we see naturally without giving a moment’s thought to them.

The blind man, however, did see in a deeper sense; He “saw” that a great and powerful man was approaching him; he” saw” the reality of Jesus’ lineage (Jesus, Son of David), and he “saw” his own need for merciful pity. The word he uses in Greek is eleison, the same word we use at Mass when we pray Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. And we usually translate it as “have mercy,” but the current English translation of the Scriptures we are using at Mass has the blind man calling out not for mercy, but for pity.

That might rankle us and shake up our pride a bit. Do we think of ourselves as needing pity? The blind, the lame, the helpless, the lost, the paralyzed, the total loser---all of these need pity, a special brand of pity. They need the pity that is going to lead to action, to reparation, to restoration and to thorough healing.

But do we need pity? What might it cost our pride if we began to think of ourselves, not only as sinners in need of mercy, but certainly as the lost an prideful needing pity?

It might do us some good to humble ourselves in that way. And if we do, then, we will begin to see what we often overlook and what we tend to ignore or hide away.

Jesus has an answer to all of this: His answer: What do you want me to do for you?

Out of your humility, ask him. Now.