Tuesday, December 29, 2020

We Were Created to be Listeners



To "listen" another's soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another. But in this scrutiny of the business of listening, is that all that has emerged? Is it blasphemous to suggest that over the shoulder of the human listener, there is never absent the silent presence of the Eternal Listener, the living God? For in penetrating to what is involved in listening, do we not disclose the thinness of the filament that separates person listening openly to one another, and that of God intently listening to each soul?

~ from GLEANINGS by Douglas V. Steere

Saturday, July 11, 2020

There is Only One Sadness - Not to Live in God's Desire for Life Abundantly

No more sadness...
For me life seems to present more meaning as I have been processing through the death of my mom. She passed away almost 2 months ago and I continue to find more joy in living fully knowing of God's Eternal Life to come.

From the Magnificat Meditation of the Day 

Faced with death, shall I be afraid? Ought I to be afraid? It seems to me, no. Well or ill, I have done what I could to keep on the track of my destiny. My eternal future is in the hands of God, I abandon myself to my heavenly Father. I shall go to Christ, that will be deliverance. I have a peaceful feeling about it. The Lord knows what I have suffered. If ever I felt the “comfort” of the spiritual life, that feeling has long ago left me. A spiritual destiny is a light bridge thrown across the abyss, or the peak of a rock rising above the ocean. If the bridge and the rock are proof against all hazards, the soul does not know it. She has a view of the world that makes her dizzy, whether it displays itself to her in its beauty or its madness. Because she is separated but not yet withdrawn from the world. The beauty, the intelligible consistence, the nobility, the justice of the divine world from which she receives life are essentially objects of faith. She lives by secret motions. The object of her love is veiled….

The divine Scriptures awaken in my soul the desire to see God; the desire to depart for eternal life. It is a desire which springs from the joy of the soul—and not from the sadness of temporal life. I love this daily life too and I love my beloved Jacques and [my sister] Véra and I love our friends, and all beauty: but perhaps God is beginning to call my soul and to train it to the hope of eternal life. At these moments of living faith and joy, the fear of God frightens me less. Sweet Jesus, have pity on me.
Raïssa Maritain
Raïssa Maritain († 1960) was born in Russia. She was a convert to Catholicism and the wife of philosopher Jacques Maritain. [From Raïssa’s Journal, presented by Jacques Maritain. © 1974, Magi Books, Inc., Albany, NY. All rights reserved.]
I found solace in these remarks and, when searching for more information on Raissa and Jacques Maritain, I stumbled onto Rabbi Mark Kinzer / Congregation Zera Avraham, as he describes with beautiful detail the impact of one, on the way to becoming a saint, and how his life made an indelible imprint on the lives of Raissa and Jacques Maritain HERE.  (An excerpt from his remarks.)
Jacques and Raissa were not your typical students. They thought and felt deeply about everything. They realized what this worldview implied about life: in the final analysis, all was meaningless. Truth, goodness, beauty were illusions. There was nothing worth living for – and so they were considering leaving life itself behind, and doing it together on their own terms. Then they read a book that changed everything. It was a novel by a devout Christian by the name of Leon Bloy. The final line of the novel took their breath away, and became a motto for their future life together: “There is only one sadness – not to be a saint.  
Imagine living life fully and unreservedly, fulling the purpose we were created for and knowing the treasure is Eternal Life in God.

Friday, June 12, 2020

The Real Presence Requires the Sacrament and the Church

ENCOUNTERING CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST


We need the living Christ, whom we can know only through our encounter with him. But encounter presumes actual presence—the Real Presence, which, in turn, requires the Sacrament and the Church that alone is authorized to give us the Sacrament, the Church that Christ himself willed into existence and continues to support. The Eucharist, at each new celebration, must be recognized anew as the core of our Christian life. But we cannot celebrate the Eucharist adequately if we are content to reduce it to a ritual of—more or less—a half-hour’s duration. To receive Christ means to worship him. We welcome him properly and worthily at the solemn moment of receiving him only when we worship him and in worshiping him learn to know him, come to understand his nature, and follow him. We need to learn once more how to rest peacefully in his gentle presence in our churches, where the Eucharist is likewise always present because Christ intercedes for us before the Father, because he always awaits us and speaks to us. We must learn again how to draw inwardly close to him, for it is only thus that we become worthy of the Eucharist. We cannot prepare ourselves to receive the Eucharist simply by thinking about how it should be done. We can prepare for it only when we try to comprehend the depths of its demands on us, of its greatness; when we do not reduce it to our level, but let ourselves be raised to its exalted level; when we become aware of the accumulated sound of the prayers offered during all the centuries in which generations of men have advanced and are still advancing toward Christ. It is petty and undiscerning to criticize such prayers because we do not understand them; it is an expression of a genuinely “critical” sentiment (of which, be it noted, self-criticism is also a form) when we begin to recognize their greatness and, opening ourselves to that greatness, let ourselves be deepened and purified by it.
From: Joseph Ratzinger, Roman homilies, October 12, 1982

Friday, May 15, 2020

True Life

True Life is experienced and reflected by living a life as a calling, breaking free from our hardness of hearts and 'old tapes' to remaining in His Love which is how our hearts were opened. The following meditation taken from The Magnificat by Father Maurice Zundel does a wonderful job of opening our eyes to this marvelous feature of being a member of this new creation in Christ.

Jesus wants to reintroduce us to the dialogue of love by breaking the seal of the stone of our hearts so that divine life may spring again and be communicated to us by his holy humanity as the fruit of his immolation. Thus Jesus redirects our life according to the Heart of God. By revealing love to us, by opening for us this unlimited credit, Jesus solicits our generosity to make us enter into the very movement of his being, to associate us with this wonderful detachment, to root our lives in divine poverty, to heal us of ourselves, finally to communicate to us all that he is.

To say that Jesus wants to communicate to us all that he is, is to say, since every grace is a mission, that the grace of the Incarnation given to his humanity does not concern it alone. It concerns all of humanity. All men are called to see, through Christ, their self in God by forming with him one sole body, one sole person. That means that the Incarnation, of the head that is Jesus, must be extended to us who are the members. Finally, Christian life, of which Christ is the center, according to the admirable words of Saint Paul to the Philippians: “For, to me, living is Christ,” this Christian life prolongs the Incarnation of Jesus, the head, in the members of Christ.

That entails admirable consequences made tangible to us by these great words of Saint Paul: You are the body of Christ, you are members of Jesus Christ, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. What a marvel! We are here in a church built of stone, before a tabernacle made of marble, and we approach this place with awe. We observe silence. We tiptoe our way ahead to the altar, we open ourselves to the radiance of this silence which is made different by the sacred presence of the Host…. He is there for us, to consecrate us, to transform us into a living host, so that we may truly be the sanctuary of the divinity.
Father Maurice Zundel
Father Zundel († 1975) was a Swiss theologian, poet, philosopher, liturgist, and author. [From Wonder and Poverty, Florestine Audette, r.j.m., Tr. © 1993, Éditions Médiaspaul, Sherbrooke, QC. Used with permission.]

Sunday, January 19, 2020

This quote from the book, "God and the World" provides us with a the image of our being and our relatedness to one another.


 Faith is not a magic formula. But it does give us the key to learning for ourselves. So that we can get answers and find out for ourselves who we are. It is always the case that a person first recognizes himself in others and through others. No one can arrive at knowledge of himself just by looking within himself and trying to build up his personality from what he finds there.

Man as a being is so constructed for relationships that he grows in relation to others. So that his own meaning, his tasks in life, his advancement in life, and his potential are unlocked in his meetings with others.

From the starting point of this basic structure of human existence we can understand faith and our meeting with Jesus. Faith is not just a system of knowledge, things we are told; at the heart of it is a meeting with Jesus

This meeting with Jesus, among all those other meetings we have need of, is the truly decisive one. All our other meetings leave the ultimate goal unclear, where we are coming from, where we are going. At our meeting with him the fundamental light dawns, by which I can understand God, man, the world, mission, and meaning - and by which all other meetings fall into place.


Benedictus
Pope Benedict XVI