Looking at God With Your Heart

When you feel invited to remain in silence at our Lord’s feet like Magdalen just looking at Him with your heart, without saying anything, don't cast about for any thoughts or reasonings, but just remain in loving adoration. Follow the whisperings of the Holy Spirit. If He invites you to beg, beg; if to be silent, remain silent; if to show your misery to God, just do so. Let Him play on the fibers of your heart like a harpist, and draw forth the melody He wishes for the Divine Spouse.

BLESSED COLUMBA MARMION

Recognizing God

If I can recognize you in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, I must be able to recognize you in the many hungry men, women and children. If I cannot translate my faith in your presence under the appearance of bread and wine into action for the world, I am still an unbeliever.

HENRI NOUWEN Circles of Love

Homily: Thirtieth Sunday of the Year B

The crowd wants Bartimaeus to shut up, but he refuses and shouts out all the more insistently, “Son of David, have pity on me!” My sisters and brothers, Bartimaeus may be blind, but he has clear insight - for he calls Jesus, Son of David, thus acknowledging Jesus’ royal lineage, and he knows what he wants, as he shouts out his confidence in the One he is sure can heal him.

Truth is Bartimaeus had grown accustomed to the sidelines, accustomed to ridicule; being shunned and looked upon with pity and derision. His blindness, after all, revealed that he or a member of his family had done something really bad. Sickness, deafness, blindness were after all, the direct consequence of sin; everybody knew that; all decent Jews in Jesus’ day believed it. It had to be someone’s fault. Bartimaeus is trapped. Case closed. Dead end. But today Jesus, Son of David has come to break the barrier with his mercy. 

For Jesus is magnetized by the urgency of Bartimaeus’ pleading; he draws near, and with great authority and majesty he stands still and commands that the blind man be brought to him. Bartimaeus the blind immediately throws off his cloak, for he is eager to leave his old life behind. And he rushes toward the Lord, probably stumbling, his hands feeling the air. And then almost comically Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Why else would this man be crying out to you, Lord? Jesus wants to hear Bartimaeus speak his desire. And so two desires meet. For Jesus has been longing to encounter Bartimaeus. He always makes the first move. 

“Master, I want to see,” says Bartimaeus. And immediately his eyes are opened. Then and there, all of Bartimaeus’ expectations are surpassed beyond all telling. A seemingly generic desire to see becomes, through Jesus’ desire to heal and console, a great epiphany. For Bartimaeus’ first sight is the blessed face of Jesus. Bartimaeus sees the Beauty of God there before him. “How truly blessed are your eyes, O Bartimaeus, because they see.  Truly, many prophets and righteous people for ages upon ages have longed to see what you are seeing but did not see it.” And having asked only to see, even better, Bartimaeus sees that he is seen, he sees that he is seen, looked upon with love by the Lord Jesus. And the beauty of this vision, the ecstasy of the encounter transform him.  

For the Promised One of God is present. God’s reign of compassion has begun. The healing of this once blind man signals God’s open welcome to all the sick and the marginalized and the inauguration of the kingdom. The people, this one man, who walked in darkness for far too long have at last seen a great Light. And so this once-blind beggar will now follow Jesus on the way; this is ultimately the way to Jerusalem where Jesus will be tortured and crucified. And it seems Bartimaeus wants nothing more.

As Jesus himself declares to Bartimaeus this morning, “Your faith has saved you.” Our faith will save us too, faith articulated in desire, urgently expressed. For our need, our poverty make Christ Jesus happy, not because he wants us to feel bad, but because they will allow him to save us. The admission of our need is an act of faith in him whose delight is to give himself away to us. Like Bartimaeus we are often so blind. For which one of us sees enough, sees clearly enough? 

We need faith to see and notice more and more the thinness of reality – thinness for that the Lord always here, drawing near, his beauty hidden behind and within ordinariness. Jesus has come to search for us endlessly. Eternity is always interrupting. And ordinary things - the beauty, the sorrow in human experience and in all of creation - beckon us to draw near to him, who is constantly seeking opportunities to engage us. For from “the very beginning God's intent was nothing other than this world,” a world that he longs to heal, transform and sanctify more and more. 

He longs to open the eyes of our hearts so that we see that there is more, always more- God’s beauty thinly veiled but truly present, precious things right in front of our eyes if we dare to notice. For the relentless, loving gaze of the beautiful Lord Jesus is upon us always. We need courage and faith to bear the disconcerting, relentless magnitude of it. We are seen, we are heard. 

One last thing. You know, several years ago a friend spent a summer ministering in a village in Bavaria. The feast of Corpus Christi came. There was a procession through the streets, he carried the monstrance with the sacred Host. Little girls tossed flowers, there were hymns and clouds of incense. The next morning a young reporter from the local newspaper came to interview him. “Father,” he said. “Why were you carrying that little mirror through the streets yesterday?” Mirror? My friend had to explain. Not a mirror at all. On second thought, perhaps a Mirror indeed. What did that German newspaperman know that perhaps we’ve forgotten? The beautiful, very fragile Bread we are to receive, is a mirror indeed in which we can see our own Beauty in Him, and the beauty of one another if we dare to gaze at Him gazing at us. What do you want? Who do you want? If we want him, want his presence, we must know that he wants this Holy Communion with us more than we can imagine.

Seeking and Finding

We ruin our life of prayer if we are constantly examining our prayer and seeking the fruit of prayer in a peace that is nothing more than a psychological process. The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek him successfully when we realize that we cannot find him unless he shows himself to us, and yet at the same time he would not have inspired us to seek him unless we had already found him.

THOMAS MERTON Thoughts In Solitude

Prayer Irrigates Our Being

When our heart prays, it breathes. Prayer makes us joyful, strong, and courageous. Prayer makes our heart beat and provides oxygen for our whole body. Prayer irrigates our being. Perhaps we are here putting our finger on the cause of so much sullenness in the Church and in society: the fact that the practice of prayer has reached a very low level. When that happens, the heart is weighed down by a dead weight. A Church that does not pray is like a batch of dough that has collapsed. No other leaven can raise it from its apathy. The Spirit prays in us. Surrounded by chatter, it whispers “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).

CARDINAL GODFRIED DANEELS, Le Consolateur: Paroles de vie, Noël, 1997

The Bread of True Life

The cross, suffering, all that is wrong with the world: (Jesus) transformed all this into ‘thanks’ and therefore into a ‘blessing’. Hence he fundamentally transubstantiated life and the world, and he has given us and gives us each day the bread of true life, which transcends this world thanks to the strength of His love.

POPE BENEDICT XVI

Loving and Knowing

Every lover is a knower; he “knows God…for God is love”, whereas the one who does not love is in ignorance.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Prayer, 215 

Avoiding Anxieties

To avoid the anxieties which may be caused by either regret for the past or fear of the future, here in a few words is the rule to follow: the past must be left to God’s measureless mercy, the future to his loving providence; and the present must be given wholly to his love through fidelity to his grace.

JEAN PIERRE DE CAUSSADE Letters, Book VIII, 1/433 

Spiritual Joy

I know no greater joy than to discover some weakness in myself that I did not realize before. I often taste this joy and shall always have it when God gives me his light when I am examining my conscience. I firmly believe, and in this I find joy, that God guides those who give themselves up to his leading and that he takes care of the least things that concern them.

SAINT CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Retreat Notes, Lyons, 1674

The Mystery of the Triune God

The dogma of the Holy Trinity is not an abstraction, mere information regarding God's “inner life”—kind of God to give us, but quite irrelevant in our earthly existence. No! It is a stunning blissful experience and is our experience, too, whether we attend to it or not. The God who created us is the God who came to us in Jesus Christ to take us back to his heart, and the same God, as the spirit of the Risen Lord is with us now. It was the actual experience of this threefold presence of God as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, that led our spiritual forefathers, guided, as promised, by the Holy Spirit, to infer that in some mysterious way, God is triune in nature. The Church in her liturgy is always holding up to our gaze the mystery of the triune God. She holds it up like a precious jewel against the light and turns it now this way, now that as she celebrates her mysteries or preaches the word, and so we may see it ever anew.

RUTH BURROWS, OCD Love Unknown, Ch. 2

The Poverty of the Phrase

When our lives are filled with a lot of excitement we can easily forget about God. We lose our hunger and thirst for God. In his lengthy discourse on the prayer, “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me,” John Cassian points out that the “poverty" of this phrase will keep us in close contact with God. In other words, we do not need a lot of diversity in our prayer. We do not need a lot of information in our reading. Instead, what may seem like a few poor words can form our hearts in the ways of prayer—“the poverty of the phrase." Such poverty keeps our minds sharp and hungry for more. It is a fasting of the mind, not the stomach.

BRENDAN FREEMAN, OCSO Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today

The Cistercian Patrimony

The first Cistercians began a manner of living which has through the ages attracted, sustained and brought to a happy conclusion the lives of tens of thousands of monastic men and women. The Cistercian Patrimony is not a matter of lifeless stones, but a living reality incarnate in the lives and labors of innumerable brothers and sisters and expressed explicitly by a substantial body of doctrine developed by Cistercian authors of all centuries. We inherit from the past not only buildings and artifacts, not only a lifestyle that many romantically believe has changed little from the Middle Ages, but a tradition of life communicated in a thousand humble ways from one generation to the next. Beneath the Cistercian reality lays a network of beliefs, values and core practices that embody the energy of the charism. The heart of the Cistercian Patrimony is a philosophy of life as validly applied to the 21st century as to the 12th.

MICHAEL CASEY “Toward the Cistercian Millennium,”Tjurunga 54 (May 1998) 

The Gift of Being Human

To be human is to be fundamentally a gift, for each and every human being bears in a unique manner the imprint of the God who created them in freedom and love. Nowhere is the character of that gift more apparent than in our own human capacity for freedom and love, not simply in terms of our earthly relationships but also in our openness to perfect fulfillment in union with the God whose likeness we bear. Such fulfillment has been made possible for us by Jesus Christ.

JOE EGAN The Godless Delusion (Peter Lang, 2009) 

The Ultimate Method

Having read many books containing different methods of reaching God, I felt that they would confuse me rather than help me find what I was looking for, which was to become completely God’s. This led me to resolve to give all for the All. I renounced, for love of Him, everything that was not Him, and I began to live as if there was nothing but He and I in the world.

BROTHER LAWRENCE OF THE RESURRECTION The Practice of the Presence of God

Taught of God

No man, wise in his own opinion, because he has studied all the sciences and is learned in external wisdom, will ever penetrate God's mysteries or see them unless he first humbles himself and becomes foolish in his heart, repudiating his self-opinion together with his acquirements of learning. For a man who acts thus and follows with undaunted faith those who are wise in things Divine, is guided by them and with them enters into the city of the living God, and, taught and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, sees and knows things which no one else can see or know. Thus he becomes taught of God.

ST. SIMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN Philokalia, Practical and Theological Precepts 

Intelligible Through Love

God cannot be comprehended by the faculty of intelligence, but is totally and perfectly intelligible through the power of love. Every single creature, moreover will know him differently. Dwell on this if you have the grace to do so, because to experience this for oneself is everlasting joy, and the contrary is everlasting pain.

ANONYMOUS The Cloud of Unknowing

Love is Greater Than Prayer

It can happen that when we are at prayer some brothers come to see us. Then we have to choose, either to interrupt our prayer or to sadden our brother by refusing to answer him. But love is greater than prayer. Prayer is one virtue amongst others, whereas love contains them all.

JOHN CLIMACUS The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 26th Step

Religious Instinct

Man, I am convinced, is religious by nature. The religious instinct belongs to his very nature, is part of his make-up. It is part of his make-up to be oriented towards God. True, for the vast majority of persons this orientation is unknown, unrecognized. Often it is directed towards things that are less than God; but in so far as the mind is constantly groping towards the ultimate meaning of things and in so far as man's desire craves to be satisfied by this or that good, then the unacknowledged, unrecognized, unknown search for God has begun. Many indeed of man's frustrations are attributable to the fact that he cannot, and does not, in his present condition, attain that ultimate in knowing and that ultimate in loving which belong, so it seems, to the very perfection of his nature. And in so far as he fails to attain it either in the realm of his knowing or in that of his loving, to that extent he remains a frustrated being.

CARDINAL BASIL HUME, OSB The Intentional Life

Thinking About Tomorrow

Don't spend your life moaning. Being miserable depresses us, diminishes us, discourages us; and expressing it makes it worse. The more we say, “It's hard”, the more miserable we become. No, nothing is hard, if we look at life from the point of view of him who gives it to us. We mustn't think about tomorrow. Almost the whole of our suffering comes from our imagination and from looking ahead pointlessly. We should live in the present moment.

DOM PAUL DELOTTE The Spirit of Solesmes

The Hidden Spring of Water

Where in my own life and experience have I found that spring of water in the midst of the garden of Eden that makes it possible for God to shape the Adam in me into a living being by softening the clay of the ground and making it malleable, responsive to the divine Sculptor’s hands? We must discover, at the center of the garden of our lives, the hidden spring of water that God has surely hidden there! We must continually return to it like the Samaritan woman to her well. Discovering that deep well within ourselves is perhaps the central activity of our spiritual search. That discovery goes hand-in-hand with my response to what the Lord says to us through Jeremiah: “Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” The hidden spring must water the clay of my being for as long as I am on that potter’s wheel.

ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS The Way of the Disciple, Ch. 1

Strength of Soul

Strength of soul does not mean lack of feeling. It is not unfeeling souls that are strong. Strength of soul consists and rising above suffering, in bearing it bravely, in setting before ourselves the highest motives for living, and in allowing ourselves to be guided by them. Of these motives, the highest and most powerful are the supernatural; in other words, the thought of God who alone can satisfy our hearts, and who offers Himself to us for that very purpose. But there are also natural motives, which we must not overlook. A man who is at the mercy of his trials and of his feelings is not fulfilling the end God has in view for him. He is growing smaller, and is no longer worthy of being called a man. Time passes with him, but more or less aimlessly. He plays no part in the world, and does no good. He hasn't the influence he might have.

A CARTHUSIAN They Speak By Silences

Humility and Self-Sacrifice

Humility reminds me that my life is not mine alone. I believe we are all meant to help shoulder one another’s burdens, share one another's joys, and affirm the goodness in one another. This is impossible if my choices and priorities are always made on the basis of what's in it for me. But the more I see of life, the more convinced I am that it's a mistake to take such a self-indulgent stance. “What are we here for?” asked George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch, “if not to make life less difficult for each other?” And several centuries earlier Saint Benedict said something very similar when he urged his monks to bear “one another's weaknesses of body or behavior” with patience (RB 72.5). It is what self-sacrifice is all about.

TRISHA DAY Inside the School of Charity: Lessons From the Monastery 

Interiorized Monasticism and True Love

In the misery and disorder of our lives, true love thus demands—like monasticism, but in a more humble and apparently more prosaic way—asceticism and sanctification. Moreover, it implies, with man as with woman, an “interiorized monasticism”… the healthy solitude that each must respect in the other in order to keep alive the sense of one’s otherness. At times, only distance allows one to perceive the unity; only an awareness that the more the other is known the more he is unknown creates the deepening and the renewal of love.

OLIVIER CLEMENT The Sacrament of Love