How to Love God with all Our Strength

This is what happened:  One day, at twilight, when I reached the main road, two men looking like soldiers caught up with me and demanded money.  When I told them that I had not a penny on me, they refused to believe me and shouted rudely:  "You are lying.  Pilgrims always collect plenty of money."

"What is the use of talking to him," said one of them, and he hit me on the head with his club with such force that I fell senseless to the ground.  How long I remained unconscious I do not know, but when I came to myself I was lying by the forest road, robbed.  My knapsack was gone from my back; only the cords which had fastened it, and which they had cut, remained.  Thank God! they had not taken my passport, for I kept it in my old cap, ready to show it at a moment's notice.  I rose, shedding bitter tears, not so much on account of the pain in my head as for the loss of the Bible and the Philokalia, which were in the stolen bag.

I did not cease to mourn and to wail day and night.  Where was my Bible, which I had carried with me all this time and read since my early youth?  Where was my Philokalia, which gave me so much enlightenment and consolation?  Alas, I had lost my first and last treasures in life without having enjoyed them fully.  It would have been better for me to have been killed on the spot, than to exist without spiritual food.  There was no way of replacing these books now. 

Heavily I dragged myself for two days, overcome by my calamity.  Exhausted at the end of the third day, I fell to the ground and went to sleep in the shelter of a bush.  And I had a dream.  I saw myself in the monastery cell of my elder, lamenting over my loss.  In his endeavor to console me the old man was saying:  "You must learn therefrom detachment from worldly things for your greater progress towards heaven.  All this has been allowed to come to pass so as to prevent you from slipping into mere enjoyment of spiritual sweetness...  God directs all events for the good of mankind, for 'he wills that all men should be saved.'  Be of good cheer and trust that along with the temptation God provides also a way of escape.  In a short time you will rejoice more than you grieve now."

As these words were spoken, I woke up, my strength returned and my soul was at peace, as though filled with the brightness of dawn.  "God's will be done," I said, and, crossing myself, got up and went on my way.  Once more the prayer was self-acting in my heart as it had been before, and I walked serenely for three days.

-The Way of a Pilgrim

The Way of a Pilgrim is a nineteenth-century spiritual classic by an anonymous Russian writer.

Why We Need the Prophets

When God created humanity, he implanted in us something of his own divinity, in the way of a more ardent disposition, with a shining spark of reason to illuminate our minds and teach us the difference between good and evil.  This is called conscience, which is the natural law.  It was by submitting to this law, that is, the conscience, that the patriarchs and all the faithful in the days before the written law were well-pleasing to God.  But since conscience was clogged and trampled on by humanity in general through successive sin, we needed the written law, we needed the holy prophets, and we needed the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ to uncover and waken it, and to bring the buried spark back to life through the observance of his holy commands.  So it is now up to us either to keep it buried, or to allow it to shine in us and illuminate us if we obey it.  For when our conscience tells us to do something and we ignore it, and it speaks again and we still do nothing but trample on it, we finally bury it, and it can no longer speak clearly to us because of the weight pressing on it.

Let us take the greatest care, then, brothers and sisters, to guard our conscience as long as we live in this world, and not allow it to convict us of any wrongdoing, nor despise it even in the smallest matters for any reason at all.  For, as you know, from scorning such small and supposedly unimportant things we are led to despise even great things.  Both living a good life and living a life of sin grow from small beginnings, to end in either great good or great evil.

-Saint Dorotheus of Gaza

Saint Dorotheus of Gaza (565) was an abbot and teacher of the spiritual life who founded his own monastery.  

Suffering

Suffering fastens upon our real being firmly and tenaciously; it cuts through all the appearances behind which we hide, until it reaches the depths where the living self dwells, into the darkness of which the latter retreats, trying to make good its escape...

But just because suffering can only touch our finite being, it comes as  revelation to us of the reality of our individual and separate existence.  We discover what we are the moment the world fails us, and what remains of ourselves when everything else is taken away.  When the world is against us, we see, starkly, the tragic quality of our personal destiny...  The ultimate distress is spiritual; it is born of the spectacle of the will to evil which runs riot through the world, even though we are not always its target, and which lurks no less at the bottom of our own hearts, forcing all creatures to feed their sense of power on the suffering of others, and realizing thus a sort of hateful solidarity between them...

In suffering we cling to being more tightly than ever, since every nerve that has not been broken is sensitized to the maximum...  It is certainly wrong to consider suffering as the worst of all evils, and to make its eradication our supreme goal.  It makes us aware of evil; it is not an evil in itself...

We may be sure that the value of every individual is in proportion to the extent, the subtlety, and the depth of the sufferings of which he is capable, for it is in suffering which gives him the most intimate communication with the world, and with himself.  The extent, the subtlety, and the depth of all the joys he can ever know are in proportion to them.  Who would renounce the joy in order to escape the suffering, and desire insensibility in their place?

It is suffering that deepens our consciousness, plowing it up, making it understanding and loving, scooping out a refuge in our souls into which the world may be welcomed.  It refines to an extreme delicacy our every contact with the world...

Since suffering penetrates to the secret of his most intimate life in the soul of a man, it awakens all the forces of self-love within him...  The real problem is not to find a way to anesthetize suffering, since that could only be done at the expense of the total sensibility, in other words, of consciousness itself.  The problem is how to transfigure it.  And is all the suffering in the world offered us no better alternative than revolt of resignation, one might well despair of the value of the world.  For suffering acquires meaning only when it nourishes the flame of our spiritual life.

My suffering is mine; it is not me.  If the self gives way before it and becomes one with it, it succumbs.  But there is another possibility - to remain detached from it without ceasing to feel it, and in so doing, to possess it.  In this tension, the individual within us is at once present and transcended.  Suffering becomes a sort of cauterization, which burns up the individual part of my nature, and forces me to consent to its annihilation.  

-Louis Lavelle

Louis Lavelle, 1951, was a professor at the Sorbonne, Paris, and was a prominent Christian philosopher.

Praying and Loving

Prayer develops that conversation with Christ which makes us his intimate friends:  "Abide in me and I in you" (Jn 15: 4).  This reciprocity is the very substance and soul of the Christian life.  Wrought in us by the Holy Spirit, this reciprocity opens us, through Christ and in Christ, to contemplation of the Father's face.  Learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy, the summit and source of the Church's life, but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity, which has no reason to fear the future, because it returns continually to the sources and finds in them new life.

Is it not one of the "signs of the times" that in today's world, despite widespread secularization, there is a widespread demand for spirituality, a demand which expresses itself in large part as a renewed need for prayer?  Other religions, which are now widely present in ancient Christian lands, offer their own responses to this need, and sometimes they do so in appealing ways.  But we who have received the grace of believing in Christ, the revealer of the Father and the Savior of the world, have a duty to show what depths the relationship with Christ can lead...

Prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine beloved, vibrating at the Spirit's touch, resting filially within the Father's heart.  This is the lived experience of Christ's promise:  "He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him" (Jn 14:21)...

Our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening, and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love."  Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history:  by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God's plan.

-Pope John Paul II

Wisdom

Love effects a likeness between the lover and the object loved...  He who loves a creature, then, is as low as that creature, and in some way even lower, because love not only equates, but even subjects the lover to the loved object.  By the mere fact, then, that a man loves something, his soul becomes incapable of pure union and transformation in God...  Until a man is purged of his attachments he will not be equipped to possess God, neither here below through the pure transformation of love, nor in heaven through the beatific vision...  Love causes equality and likeness and even brings the lover lower than the object of his love...  All of the world's wisdom and human ability contrasted with the infinite wisdom of God is pure and utter ignorance...  Anyone, therefore, who values his knowledge and ability as a means of reaching union with the wisdom of God is highly ignorant in God's sight and will be left behind, far away from this wisdom.  Ignorance does not grasp what wisdom is; and in God's sight those who think they have some wisdom are very ignorant...  Only those who set aside their own knowledge and walk in God's service like unlearned children receive wisdom from God...  Accordingly, a man must advance to union with God's wisdom by unknowing rather than by knowing.

-Saint John of the Cross

The Trust and Love of the Men Who Lowered the Paralytic

We must allow ourselves, as honestly as we can, to be challenged by the reality of God's world, as it seeps through the cracks in our home-made world, and so gradually learn to trust in him, and so to love him, and so to become docile to his creating and his commanding.

The choice, however obscure it often is in the particular circumstances of life, is very clear in its basic principle:  either we surrender to fear, fear of what God has put in us, fear of the world around us that we do not control, fear of God's infinite freedom and sovereignty, and this is inevitably to build up defensive structures of rigid self-determination; or we learn, slowly maybe, to trust and to love.  "Do not be afraid, only believe" (Mk 5: 36).  "Perfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn 4: 18).  So we must use whatever freedom we have, we must use our minds and our imagination, in ways that will build up love and trust.  Also we must let ourselves be honestly hurt by the inevitable inadequacies and frustrations involved in our attempts to be God unto ourselves, so that our motivation to escape from our self-imposed bondage may be strengthened.  

But let us make no mistake.  This means a real dying to self, a real losing of self.  The sentence of death passed on Adam was not just vindictiveness on the part of God, it was a mercy.  Nothing would have been more awful than for man, imprisoned within himself, to have eaten of the tree of life, to live for ever.  It was mercy that subjected Adam to death, just as it was mercy that frustrated the ambition of Babel.  It is a mercy that is offered to us too:  in baptism we died with Christ.  Day by day we can live out that liberating death and be born more and more effectively into the real world of God's light and love.  There we can keep company with him.  The door is open:  are we ready to pass through?

-Father Simon Tugwell, O.P.

Acting on Christ's Words

I long to see you set afire, swallowed up and consumed in his blazing charity, for we know that those who are set afire and consumed in that true charity lose all self-consciousness.  That is what I want you to do.

I am inviting you, in this blazing charity, to plunge into a peaceful sea, a deep sea.  I have just rediscovered the sea - not that the sea is new, but it is new to me in the way my soul experiences it - in the words, "God is love."  And just as a mirror reflects a person's face and as the sun shines its light on the earth, so these words echo within me that everything that is done is simply love, because everything is made entirely of love.  This is why he says, "I am God, Love."

This sheds light on the priceless mystery of the incarnate Word, who, out of sheer love, was given in such humility that it confounds my pride.  It teaches us to look not just at what he did, but at the blazing love this Word has given us.  It says that we should do as a loving person does when a friend comes with a gift:  not looking at the friend's hands to see what the gift is, but looking with the eyes of love at the friend's loving heart.  And this is what God's supreme, eternal, more tender than tender goodness wants us to do when he visits our soul.  So when he comes to you with his incalculable blessings, let your memory open up at once to receive what your understanding has seen in his divine love, and let your will rise up in blazing desire to receive and gaze upon the burning heart of the giver, the good gentle Jesus.  In this way you will find yourself swallowed up and clothed in the fiery gift of the blood of God's Son.  And you will be freed from all suffering and grief.

-Saint Catherine of Siena

Saint Catherine of Siena (1380), Doctor of the Church, was a Dominican, stigmatist, and papal counselor.  

The Righteousness that Surpasses

At the moment of his death Christ was certainly annihilated in his soul, without any consolation or relief, since the Father left him that way in innermost aridity in the lower part.  He was thereby compelled to cry out:  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27: 46).  This was the most extreme abandonment, sensitively, that he had suffered in his life.  And by it he accomplished the most marvelous work of his whole life, surpassing all the works and deeds and miracles that he had ever performed on earth or in heaven.  That is, he brought about reconciliation and union of the human race with God through grace.  The Lord achieved this, as I say, at the moment in which he was most annihilated in all things:  in his reputation before men, since beholding him die they mocked him instead of esteeming him; in his human nature, by dying; and in spiritual help and consolation from his Father, for he was forsaken by his Father at the time so as to pay the debt fully and bring man to union with God.  David says of him:  Ad nihilum redactus sum et nescivi (Ps 72: 22), that the true spiritual person might understand the mystery of the door and way (which is Christ) leading to union with God, and that he might realize that his union with God and the greatness of the work he accomplishes will be measured by his annihilation for God in the sensory and spiritual parts of his soul.  When he is brought to nothing, the highest degree of humility, the spiritual union between his soul and God will be effected.  This union is the most noble and sublime state attainable in this life.  The journey, then, does not consist in recreations, experiences, and spiritual feelings, but in the living, sensory, and spiritual exterior and interior dead of the cross.

-Saint John of the Cross

"You Follow Me"

He who wishes to be wise without true Wisdom, or saved without the Savior, is not well, but sick - is not wise, but a fool.  Devotion to the Blessed Virgin is actually necessary, because there is no better means of obtaining God's graces than through his most holy Mother.  

A man should force himself to be obedient, even in little things which appear of no moment; because he will thus render the practice of obedience in matters easy to himself.  He who always acts under obedience may rest assured that he will not have to give an account of his actions to God.  

Perfection does not consist in such outward things as shedding tears and the like, but in true and solid virtues.  Tears are no sign that a man is in the grace of God, neither must we infer that one who weeps when he speaks of holy and devout things necessarily lives a holy life.  Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life; therefore the servant of God out always be in good spirits.  

When a man is freed from a temptation or any other distress, let him take great care to show fitting gratitude to God for the benefit he has received.  We must accept the adversities which God sends us without reasoning too much upon them, and we must take for granted that it is the best thing which could happen to us.  We must always remember that God does everything well, although we may not see the reason for what he does. 

Everyone ought to give in readily to the opinion of another, and to argue in favor of another and against himself, and take things in good part.  Let a man always think that he has God before his eyes.  

There is nothing the devil fears to much, or so much tries to hinder, as prayer.

An excellent method of preserving ourselves from relapsing into serious faults is to say every evening, "Tomorrow, I may be dead."

-St. Philip Neri

Italian priest and founder of the Oratory, died 1595.

The Eucharist

We ought to pay God honor in every way we can think of; for every creature, even the tiny insects, if they could only understand, would be bound to look up at the Blessed Sacrament and bow down before him.  Yet there is a higher level at which we can praise God.  We can love him ardently, and want him in the depths of our souls, with all our intellect and all our reason.  This is far better than any outward act that we can perform.  Still, there is another level, even higher:  to acknowledge in the depths of our souls that God is so great and we are so small that it is impossible for us to praise him.  This is in itself an act of praise far beyond all words and thoughts and understanding.

A great teacher has said:  "The man who speaks best about God is the man who has recognized his inward riches and is silent"...  God's incomprehensible glory is so great that merely to acknowledge it comprehends all words and all forms.  The soul praises him by being engulfed in him, losing itself in him, sinking down and melting into him, sharing in God's own praising and thanking of himself for his own being.

Our dear Lord said:  "Caro mea, My flesh is truly food, and My blood is truly drink; whoever feeds on Me remains in Me, and I in him"...  It was not enough for him to become our brother, to take upon himself our human nature.  It was not enough that he should become man so that man might become God.  He wanted to be our food as well.  Saint Augustine said:  "There is no people so great as the Christian people; none of them has a god so close to them as our God is to us."  We feed upon our God.  How wonderful and inexpressible is this love of his, that found this marvelous way for him to come to us!  His love is beyond all comprehension, and it should pierce us all to the heart that he shows such incomparable love toward us.

-Father John Tauler, O.P.

Father Tauler (1361) was a German Dominican priest, a popular preacher, and a mystical theologian.

The Humility of Mary Exalted

For a sermon on the Blessed Virgin to please me and do me any good, I must see her real life, not her imagined life.  I'm sure that her real life was very simple.  They show her to us as unapproachable, but they should present her as imitable, bringing out her virtues, saying that she lived by faith just like ourselves, giving proofs of this from the Gospel, where we read:  "And they did not understand the words which he spoke to them."  And that other no less mysterious statement:  "His father and mother marveled at what was said about him."  This admiration presupposes a certain surprise, don't you think so, little Mother?

We know very well that the Blessed Virgin is Queen of heaven and earth, but she is more Mother than Queen; and we should not say, on account of her prerogatives, that she surpasses all the saints in glory just as the sun at its rising makes the stars disappear from sight.  My God!  How strange that would be!  A mother who makes her children's glory vanish!  I myself think just the contrary.  I believe she'll increase the splendor of the elect very much.

It's good to speak about her prerogatives, but we should not stop at this, and if, in a sermon, we are obliged from beginning to end to exclaim and say:  Ah!  Ah!, we should grow tired!  Who knows whether some soul would not reach the point of feeling a certain estrangement from a creature so superior and would not say:  If things are such, it's better to go and shine as well as one is able in some little corner!

What the Blessed Virgin has more than we have is the privilege of not being able to sin, she was exempt from the stain of original sin; but on the other hand, she wasn't as fortunate as we are, since she didn't have a Blessed Virgin to love.  And this is one more sweetness for us and one less sweetness for her!

-Saint Therese of Lisieux

How Much More will the Father Give

1.)  Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.

2.)  Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance:  I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behavior; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.

3.)  Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world but also in this one.

4.)  Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.

5.)  Only for today, I will devote ten minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.

6.)  Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it.

7.)  Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure that no one notices.

8.)  Only for today, I will make a plan for myself:  I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it.  And it will be on guard against two evils:  hastiness and indecision.

9.)  Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances, that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in this world.

10.)  Only for today, I will have no fears.  In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness.  Indeed, for twelve hours I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.

-Blessed Pope John XXIII

Avoiding the Sin of the Rich Man

Give us understanding, my God, of what it is that's given to those who fight valiantly in the dream of this miserable life.  Obtain for us, O loving souls, understanding of the joy it gives you to see the eternal character of your fruition, and how it is so delightful to see certainly that it will have no end.  Oh, how fortunate we are, my Lord!  For we believe in everlasting joy and know the truth well; but with so pronounced a habit of failing to reflect on these truths, they have already become so foreign to our souls that these souls neither know about them nor desire to know about them.  O selfish people, greedy for your pleasures and delights; not waiting a short time in order to enjoy them in such abundance, not waiting a year, not waiting a day, not waiting an hour - and perhaps it will take more than a moment - you lose every thing, because of the joy of that misery you see present!

Oh, how little we trust You, Lord!  How much greater the riches and treasures You entrusted to us, since after His thirty-three years of great trials and so unbearable and pitiable a death.  You have given us Your Son; and so many years before we were born!  Even knowing we wouldn't repay You, You didn't want to cease trusting us with such an inestimable treasure, so that it wouldn't be Your fault, merciful Father, if we fail to acquire what through Him we can obtain through You.  

O Blessed souls, who with this precious price knew so well how to profit and buy an inheritance so delightful and permanent, tell us how you gained such an unending good!  Help us, since you are so near the fount, draw water for those here below perishing of thirst.  

-Saint Teresa of Avila

Seeing Everything Distinctly

Simplify your judgment, do not reflect on yourself so much nor argue inwardly, but go on your way simply and with confidence.  As far as you are concerned there is nothing in this world except God and you; all the rest should not touch you except insofar as God may command and as he commands.  I beseech you not to look about you so much but to keep your gaze fixed on the relationship between God and you.  You will never see anything but goodness in God or neediness in yourself, and you will see his goodness supplying your need, and your poverty the object of his bounty and compassion.  So do not look at anything except that - I mean of deliberate intent - and glance at all the rest only in passing.  Moreover, do not analyze what other people are doing or speculate what will become of the, but look upon them simply, generously, with kindness and affection.  Do not demand more perfection from them than you do from yourself and do not be surprised at the various forms of imperfection may take, for imperfection is not more imperfect for being unusual and odd.  Be like the bee and gather your honey from every flower and herb alike.

You should be like a little child who while it knows that its mother is holding its sleeve walks boldly and runs all round without being distressed at a little fall or stumble; after all, it is as yet rather unsteady on its legs.  In the same way, as long as you realize that God is holding on to you by your will and resolution to serve him, go on boldly and do not be upset by your little set-backs and falls; there is no need to be put out by this provided you throw yourself into his arms from time to time and kiss him with the kiss of charity.  Go on joyfully and with your heart as open and widely trustful as possible; and if you cannot always be joyful, at least be brave and confident.  

-Saint Francis de Sales