The Rain

A scholar of the law to test Jesus asked, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

Jesus answered, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Before you can love God or your neighbor, before you can love at all, you must first love being you. If you wish to enter into love, you must first love your life with all your heart and soul. You must experience sheer joy at being alive. You must take delight not in persons or things or activities but in your life itself as it is given to you moment by moment.

As long as you depend on persons or things to make you happy, you are not living in freedom. You are empowering persons or things outside of you to determine your happiness, to give it to you or to withhold it. Only when you take the power of happiness to yourself are you free. And only when you are free can you love.

Only when you are happy for no reason at all, when you take delight in simply being you, are you free to love. Then you will discover that there is only one love, and that love of God and love of neighbor are just two different ways to say the same thing. You will then understand why it is that God sends the rain on the just and the unjust without distinction. Finally you will be able to love friends and enemies alike, because the distinction between the two will no longer mean anything to you.

Surprised by Being

If you go into the depths of your being in search of your true self, you might make an astonishing discovery. If you go deep enough to reach your innermost center and remain long enough in the silence that you find there, you will discover that you are not a self at all but a communion. Contrary to what you have always thought, you are not a stand-alone being. Your being is not a state but a process. You are not a noun; you are a verb.

At every moment you draw your being from the source of all being. This source is beyond your ability to grasp, yet you are intimately connected to it. You cannot comprehend it with your mind, but you can embrace it in your heart. You cannot know it, but you can love it. And loving it is the key to living in freedom and happiness.

This source of your being is God. The being that flows into you from God is like the breath by which you live. Yet breath is more than a metaphor of being; it is a manifestation of it. You breathe moment by moment. You draw in a life-giving breath, you hold it for a moment, then you let it go. If you do not let the breath go, you cannot have another. And without another breath, and another, and another, you cannot live.

And so it is with life-giving Spirit. Just as you must let go of your breath to have another and thus to live, you must let go of this moment to have another. You cannot live by clinging to moments frozen in time. To live in a fully human way, to live in freedom and happiness, you must be willing to let go of everything so that you can be continually surprised by new being.

The Way to Happiness

Alienation and loneliness take hold of us not when we are isolated from others but when we lose contact with reality. The only remedy for our feelings of being isolated is love. And the only source of real love is God. We try many substitutes for real love, and we sometimes even call them love. But they do not take away the deep anxiety that comes from feeling lost and alone. They do not bring us happiness. Only God can give us that. And God offers it to us right now. All we have to do to receive this happiness is open our hearts and accept it.

But if happiness is this easy, why do we live so much of our lives without it? We live in unhappiness because we live without God, and thus without true love. We live most of our lives unaware of the reality of God in the present moment. We constantly carry the burdens of our past into the uncertainty of the future without ever recognizing the wonderful gift of God's love in this present moment.

The first step on the way to happiness is to open our eyes and see.

The Gift of Life

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He Who Sees Me Sees the Father

In answer to our deepest longings for contact with God, Jesus says, "He who sees me sees the Father." This is what sets Christian faith apart from every other religion. We look upon Jesus on the cross and see not an ordinary man dying in ignominy but the Son of God reconciling all of humanity to himself. Christ crucified is God paying the price of our redemption from slavery to the destructive forces of this world.

And Christ crucified and risen from the dead remains with us through the power of the Holy Spirit, freeing us from the bonds of the flesh and the world and creating us anew in his own image. Through the gracious love of God we are restored to the innocence in which we were first created and assured of the promise of eternal life.

Easter 2009

Holy Saturday

Today is a day of bitter desolation. It is the day on which we keep watch at the tomb of Jesus and feel something of the abandonment of God.

The onlookers at Calvary who scoffed at the crucified Jesus seemed to have it right: "He saved others, but he cannot save himself!"

Jesus, who was God from all eternity, long before Good Friday had emptied himself of his divinity and became not just the appearance of a man but a true man with all the vulnerability of the human condition. And as a real man he experienced on the cross the utter abandonment of God as no one had ever felt it before. He drank the bitter cup of human suffering to the dregs. And now in the silence of the tomb it all seems to be for nothing.

But although Jesus was very much a man, he was a man perfect in faith. He knew by faith that God never abandons anyone. When we experience what seems to be the absence of God, it is really the hardness of our own heart that we are feeling. But Jesus' heart belonged to his Father completely, so he knew to the very end that God was with him.

Jesus died for us. He laid down his life so that we could know how deep God's love runs. So in the end this is not a day of bitterness at all, but a day of hope. God is with us forever through the life-giving Spirit of the Risen Lord. The darkness of the tomb will give way to the light of Easter.

Let prayer bring peace to your soul

In being raised up, the soul arrives at regions untouched by the agitation of transitory things. All movement ceases or grows less. The passions are calmed, the noise of the world, its cares, even our thoughts fade into the distance, and our attention is concentrated on Him alone who is silence, repose, and the God of peace. We feel invaded by calm and clothed in the divine immutability, which seems to communicate itself to our whole being. This is where prayer flourishes - that prayer which is a devout upsurge of love, which draws us toward God, who is unceasingly inclined toward us. His Spirit enfolds us, penetrates us, descends into our depths, and says, "My son...." Then, returning from the depths of our being, which he turns back to its Source, he answers for us: "Father." There is no greater or more profound moment.

Augustin Guillerand

The Humility Prayer

Winter

Authenticity

Valentine's Day