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.