Easter 2008

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Miserere

The famous musical setting of Psalm 51 written by Gregorio Allegri in 1638. Pope Urban VIII thought it so beautiful that he decreed under penalty of excommunication that it was to be performed only in the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday and Good Friday of Holy Week.

Gregorio Allegri - Miserere

Prayer

The goal of all striving for perfection is this: that the soul, purged of every desire of the flesh, may be elevated more each day to spiritual things, until finally one's whole way of life and all the yearnings of one's heart become a single and continuous prayer.

John Cassian (360-435)

The Way

Faith is not about what you think or feel, but about how you live. God did not become man to teach new truth but to show a new way. He does not ask you to believe him but to follow him.

Jesus called his disciples the light of the world, and he urged them to let their light shine before men. But it was not so that others would hear their words and be convinced; it was so that they would see their good works and give glory to God.

Faith is not assent to truths but a response to a call. God cares little about your orthodoxy. His truth stands on its own; it does not matter whether you believe it or not. The tenacity of your convictions adds nothing to truth, nor do you diminish it in the least by your dissent. You are no more capable of judging God's truth than you are of holding an ocean in the palm of your hand.

The truth that God reveals is not the tenets of a creed. You can profess your creed all you want, but you will not even begin to grasp the mysteries that it points to. Nor is revelation a matter of God revealing himself. God as he is in himself will always be infinitely beyond your reach. Nor does he even reveal the truth about yourself. Your own soul, familiar as it seems to you, is far beyond your understanding.

What God reveals is a pathway. He shines the light of his truth before you so that you can see the way. He shows that the way to be fully human, and the way to achieve the purpose for which you were made human in the first place, is to walk in justice and compassion. God reveals not the way of right thinking, but of right living.

Your eyes are open to truth only when you see the image of God in the face of a brother. If you are to hear the word of God at all, it will not be in wind or thunder or mystery, but in the urgent voice of human need. The only way to find truth on this side of heaven is to do what is just, and strive for mercy, and walk humbly with God.

The Wonder of Christmas

May the birth of the Christ Child fill you with wonder during this holy season and throughout the year.

See a photo essay on the wonder of Christmas at A Grain of Wheat.

http://www.grainofwheat.net/christmas2007.html

Faith

The demands of faith are too much for most of us. You must deny yourself, give up your place as the center and focal point of the world, let go of everything that is important to you, and think only of God. You must be a humble and obedient servant. God must be everything and you must become nothing. Who would want to do such things?

This kind of faith is the downfall of most religion. It is why religion inevitably turns to ideology. Religion cannot sustain itself if it must become nothing. It cannot thrive on lowliness. It just does not sell. This faith is also intolerable to most individual believers for much the same reason. But it is the only faith worthy of the name. It is the only faith commensurate with a true understanding of all that God is.

You do not have to accept the demands of this kind of faith. You can choose to follow some other way, but if you do, you should call it by some other name. It is not faith. You should not claim to be a true believer, because you are choosing to believe in something other than God. Unless you deny yourself, God is not God for you. And it almost goes without saying that if you follow another path you should never presume to speak in the name of God.

True faith does not promise self-affirmation. On the contrary, it demands the sacrifice of your self, the emptying of everything you cling to, of everything that makes you who you are and at the same time separates you from God. If you wish to be a believer, you must first deny your very self.

This self-denial must be unconditional. It cannot be done with any ulterior motives. You cannot give up everything with the secret hope that you will get it all back as a reward for your sacrifice. You must give it up just because God is God and you are nothing more than your poor self. You must acknowledge your lowliness because it is the truth. You really are nothing and God is everything.

True faith is lived only under the sign and mystery of the cross. Difficult as it is to accept, faith demands that you die to your self. But somewhere beyond that death lies resurrection and new being. True faith leads with unshakable certainty to eternal life.

Sickness Unto Death

The greatest threat to religion today is not that atheists deny the existence of God but that believers deny the existence of sin. Denying the existence of God is of no more consequence than affirming it; in neither case do our words alter the reality of God who is infinitely beyond our grasp. But denying the reality of sin bars us from seeing the truth about ourselves. And this failure to see has dire consequences.

It is not that believers deny sin altogether. They know a sin when they see it, and they see it often enough in everyone around them. They see the smallest speck of it in a neighbor's eye even with a beam in their own. But they do not see the chronic condition of sin within themselves, the sickness of soul that they contracted even before they came of age, and that if left untreated will certainly be fatal.

The sickness of sin is a highly contagious disease found everywhere in the world. We all contract it in childhood, and we remain carriers throughout our lives. The symptoms are mild at the outset - harmless acts of willfulness, petty cruelty, bursts of anger, stealthful deceit. But over time the symptoms worsen and become hard to control. The condition becomes chronic and often debilitating.

The root cause of the sickness of sin is a deficiency of love. Our souls are sustained from our infancy by a continual ourpouring of grace. But as the condition of sin takes hold, it hampers our ability to receive this grace and we begin to starve. The soul craves nourishment but cannot absorb it. It tries to feed on what is not enriching, but the more it feeds the more its hunger is exacerbated. Sin becomes fatal when a soul finally starves to death for lack of love.

The sickness of sin will not go away on its own. Nor can it be cured by the many bogus remedies on the market today. Only the Divine Physician can heal the sinner. His medicine alone is the restorative that can nourish the soul back to health. We need only turn to the Lord for healing, and allow him to fill our hearts with the soothing balm of his love.

Beyond Belief

Whether or not you believe in God is a matter of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. For a mere human to assert that he believes in God is a little like dropping a pebble into an ocean. And choosing not to believe in God is about as foolhardy as deciding not to breathe. God does not need you to figure him out. He is infinitely beyond your grasp. You are no more capable of understanding him than a worm is. God will make the sun rise tomorrow regardless of what you believe. It is the fool who says in his heart, "There is no God."

But the foolishness of the atheist is not nearly as bad as the smugness of the believer. It is of no more consequence to believe in God than to deny him. Claiming to "prove" God is about as arrogant as a human can get. God does not offer proof, nor does he seek belief. He demands humble obedience.

God is more than inconceivable; he dwells in unapproachable light. This means that not only are you incapable of forming an adequate idea of God in your mind; you have no business delving into the matter at all. The only appropriate human response to the mystery of God is reverential silence.

What matters is not that you believe in God but that you love him with all your heart, that you have the desire and willingness to make him the Lord of your life and to live for him alone. What good is it to say that you believe that God "exists" and then turn and walk away? What is the point of crying, "Lord, Lord!" if you end up gnashing your teeth in the darkness outside the feast?

Three Questions

Just about everything you need to know about life is contained in the answers to three basic questions: Where did I come from? What am I doing here? And where am I going? And even though the answers to these questions are crucial to living well, most people never get around to even ask the questions, let alone think much about the answers to them.

The answer to all three of these questions is actually very obvious and quite simple. It can be reduced to a single word - God. You came from God, you are on this earth for God, and you are going to God when you leave here. If you came up with any other answers, you probably spend a lot of your time feeling lonely, confused, and downright unhappy.

But even though the answer to all of life's important questions is this simple and obvious, it takes a lifetime to understand it. In fact, since the answer is God you can never fully grasp it. In the end all you can do is reach out in love and trust and let God be your everything. Even if you have no idea what is going on, God has it all under control. You are in good hands.

Sacred and Profane

To set aside sacred spaces in a world otherwise viewed as profane is a universal human trait. So too is the designation of certain objects as sacred symbols, capable at least of putting us in touch with the Holy if not actually containing it, although this too is sometimes felt.

But the world as profane is an illusion, as is the dichotomy between sacred and profane objects and gestures. The Holy is everywhere. It is the creative power present and active in everything that is. We cannot escape the presence of God anywhere in the created world.

Sacred spaces and symbols are necessary at the outset because we are not capable of living continuously in the presence of the Holy. But growing in faith demands gradually closing the gap between the sacred and the profane.

In faith we pass through symbols to reality. Devotion to the symbols and rituals of our religion is a means to sanctity, not a measure of it. The true test of faith is not that we sense the Divine presence in symbols like wood or stone, or bread and wine, but that we see it clearly in the face of a brother or sister.

We know we are on the road to faith when we begin to see the presence of God everywhere along the way.

Learning to Pray

Almost everyone who tries to pray experiences difficulty with it. But the inability to pray is not so much a problem as it is a symptom of a problem. The reason why we do not know how to pray is that we do not know how to be.

You might think that there is nothing very complicated about being. All you have to do is let it happen. But unless you are fully engaged in being, nothing much is happening to you at all.

Most of us spend practically our entire life very close to the surface of our being. We rarely penetrate to the depth of ourselves. The true self who resides at the center of our being is a stranger to us. It is little wonder that we know nothing about God, that we cannot communicate with God in prayer, when we know almost nothing about our own being.

The Apostle Paul was getting at this when he wrote to his churches about living in the flesh as opposed to living in the spirit. We live almost entirely in the flesh, in the superficial, transitory world of earthly existence, with our hearts set on the passing things of this world. We seldom lift our eyes to the horizon of this earthly life, to the Eternal Being for which we were created.

We live in two worlds. We live in an earthly time and place, but Eternal Being is already present in the depth of our being, even though we are rarely aware of it. Time and eternity are in a state of tension within us, and this tension between the passing moments of earthly existence and the eternal Now of the Kingdom of God is the cause of our difficulties in prayer. We cannot pray until we learn how to be. Yet we cannot be in a deeply human way until we begin to pray.

Prayer is the narrow gate that opens the way to being. Once we pass through this narrow gate and begin to probe the depths of our being, we discover that what we encounter at our center is not simply our own being but the source of all being. And if we stay long enough at the center of our being we learn that this source of our being has a name.

But we are too lowly to speak the name of Eternal Being. So in awe and reverence we lift up our voice in a prayer at once most simple and most sublime, and call out to Being as Thou.

Finally we are learning how to pray.

Having Everything

Some day quite unexpectedly you might see as if for the first time the wonder of God's love all around you. At that moment you will realize that what up until then you thought was faith is not real faith at all. The real faith that bursts forth in that moment will truly set you free.

Just as you begin to see for the first time the love of God in everything that has been given to you, so too you will see that you can give it all up at a moment's notice without any regrets if such is God's will. If it is God's will that you give up what you have, it is only so that God can give you something better.

And when you finally give up everything, grateful for it all and trusting in God, he will give you his greatest gift - the fullness of his everlasting love. Then and only then, when you reach the point where you need nothing but this love, you will have everything.