Is Providence not always with us? Two sparrows are not worth very much, and who can count the hairs on your head? But the Lord cares for the sparrows and counts the hairs on your head. Will He not also care for our souls, our life itself? So there is nothing to fear, for nothing can happen to us without our Father knowing. The Lord is the Creator of the sparrows, but to us He is even more: He is our Father.
SAINT JOHN XXIII
I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.
SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
Although it runs contrary to the way we normally use our tongues, God's Word tells us: “do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters” (James 4:11). Being willing to speak ill of another person is a way of asserting ourselves, venting resentment and envy without concern for the harm we may do. We often forget that slander can be quite sinful; it is a grave offense against God when it seriously harms another person’s good name and causes damage that is hard to repair. Hence God’s Word forthrightly states that the tongue is “a world of iniquity” that “stains the whole body”; it is a “restless evil, full of deadly poison.” Whereas the tongue can be used to “curse those who are made in the likeness of God,” love cherishes the good name of others, even one’s enemies. In seeking to uphold God's law we must never forget this specific requirement of love.
POPE FRANCIS Amoris Laetitia
At the root of all virtues there ought to be humility: not only that humility which is exterior and formed with words, but humility of the heart; not a forced humility that comes from delusions, displeasures, or the fear of not succeeding, but humility of the heart, willed for the love of God, born of the knowledge that God alone is great, while we are nothing. Our Lord surely does not love humility that is melancholy, sad, or of bad humor, urging us to set ourselves apart and to remain inactive. Rather, he loves that humility of heart that is happy to act and sacrifice self for God.
FR. GARRIGOU-LANGRANGE, O.P. Knowing the Love of God: Lessons From a Spiritual Master
If we often draw so little fruit from Communion, it is because we take it to be something it is not. People think they are supposed to experience some kind of sacred emotion or thrill. Such an attitude is entirely sterile; it prevents us from getting out of ourselves. It is still a search for self. To derive from Communion the benefit that should be drawn from it, we must above all remember that Christ wished to be our food in the Eucharist. We take in nourishment in order to replenish and increase our strength. We take Communion in order to increase our spiritual strength. We eat when we are hungry: our appetite decides the matter here, the equivalent of the physical appetite is the infinite (but powerless) passion to get out of ourselves, to forget ourselves—this being our only means of being assimilated to the Truth. Once this passion arises in us, we will soon experience a painful need of strength to achieve this “ecstasy”—and we will go to Communion to obtain this strength.
FR. CHARLES NICOLET, SJ
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This point of nothingness and absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us—as our poverty, our indigence, as our dependence, as our Sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody and if we could see it we would see these billion points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
THOMAS MERTON
PERFECT LOVE INDWELLS US
Over the last few Sundays we have seen in Mark’s Gospel how many groups with political and religious vested interests have accosted Jesus to challenge his authority, out of envy and self-righteousness, and often with murderous intent. But today a lone individual, someone very much like you or me, approaches Jesus on very friendly terms, even though, as a scribe, he is a member of one of those hostile groups. This man is different because he comes to Jesus by himself, as an earnest, non-prejudiced searcher for truth, without an axe to grind.
The scribe asks Jesus which is “the first of all the commandments” of the sacred Law. This question implies that, among the 613 commandments of Torah, there must exist a hierarchy. Since it is humanly impossible to comply with so many commandments, the hope is that, by obeying the greatest commandment, one can be said to obey God’s will in its totality.
We are so familiar with this text that we may not at first realize that Jesus’ reply to the scribe’s question is remarkable—stunningly creative and even provocative in several respects. For example, the scribe asks Jesus to proclaim only one commandment to be the first and highest of all. Instead Jesus replies by naming two commandments of the Law. By so doing Jesus refuses to separate a first commandment, concerning love of God, from a second commandment, concerning love of neighbor, thus hinting that the two stand or fall together, the observance of the one guaranteeing the observance of the other. Jesus’ ruling fuses the two commandments magisterially: “There is no commandment”, he affirms, “greater than these”.
Furthermore, while the first commandment is taken from the Book of Deuteronomy (6:5), the second commandment that Jesus yokes to it inseparably is taken from the Book of Leviticus (19:18). By so doing Jesus is introducing a major innovation into Torah, in fact creating a new text out of two ancient texts, and infusing both with new meaning. And his boldness is heightened by the fact that, in the context of Leviticus, the definition of “neighbor” has a very restrictive, tribal meaning and not the unrestricted, universal meaning Jesus is obviously giving it here. In other words, Jesus’ answer to the scribe shows him making love as such an absolute priority, giving it a preeminence it did not enjoy before. To do this is for Jesus to act as sovereign Legislator of the New Law of the Gospel, which gathers together scattered aspects of Torah and brings the Law of Moses to perfection by raising so-called “horizontal”, intra-human love irreversibly into the sphere of divine love.
Quite aside from Jesus’ unheard-of audacity in daring to alter in any way the text of the Law, the Lord’s indissoluble yoking of divine and human love into one imperative command is something which the Jewish authorities would have considered sheer blasphemy, an idolatry of man. And yet St John sums up this crucial issue unforgettably when he writes: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn 4:20). And in Matthew 25, in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, the Lord himself radically equates love for him with love for the least of his brethren. Surely it is the indivisibility of the divine and human natures in Jesus’ own Person as incarnate Word that impels him to revolutionize so drastically the biblical teaching on love, and to transform it into the absolute center of Christian faith and life, to which all else must bow.
The commandment in Deuteronomy quoted by Jesus would have us love God “with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength”. This triple repetition of the word all evokes in me an unsettling dismay as I wonder: ‘Am I really capable of loving God so thoroughly, with all my being?’ And the passage concludes with the words: “Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today.” As we have being hearing in rich detail from Pope Francis this week in his encyclical Dilexit nos, biblical anthropology views the heart as designating the center of the whole person, the heart as bringing together the whole of our being: bodily and psychic, rational and emotional.
For this reason we should wake up to the fact that the too familiar expression to love God with all your heart is nothing to be yawned at, because involves nothing less than the long journey of our total existence, an itinerary whose rigor we should never take for granted. We all know that in our hearts there dwell not only high and virtuous aspirations but also mean and shameful thoughts and desires that are far from what the Gospel expects of us. Therefore, the first step in coming to love God with one’s whole heart should be the honest acknowledgment that such fullness and intensity of love is still a distant goal for us, yet one toward which we strive with fervent hope.
Now, in order for the expression “to love God” to acquire credibility on our lips, we should stop turning the wheel of the same old tired and pious words that are totally disconnected from our concrete life. Instead we should struggle along as best we can, trying to practice what is quite difficult: to love the invisible God by putting on the mind of Christ as our own and by performing the actions of Christ’s Heart. To do this we must undertake the hard and sobering work of self-knowledge that leads us to recognize, name and accept (at the cost of sharp humiliation) all the negative forces and shortcomings that inhabit us, all the darkness that still lurks in our hearts. To love God with all one’s heart requires the courage to face the work of knowing one’s own heart, and this knowledge normally brings us unwelcome surprises. And yet, such a therapeutic effort is essential if we are ever to stand before God with some degree of authenticity. Knowing our limitations and distortions—whether moral or intellectual, physical or psychological, emotional or affective—is indispensable if we are ever to part ways with the ideal, glittering “I” that we construct for ourselves and present to others and to God by way of self-defense. True enough, this redundant, self-constructed self is a merely imaginary “I”; and yet, unreal though it is, it has all the power of deception and fascination of an idol. The purpose of this journey of self-knowledge is eventual adherence to reality, acceptance of that very particular being we are, with all its negative aspects as well as all its riches. As we read in the parable of the Prodigal Son, this difficult journey to the truth of the self is in the end (O consolation!) a deeply satisfying “coming back to ourselves” (Lk 15:17), a blessed “returning to our own heart”. We cannot meet the Heart of Christ except with our own authentic heart, in whatever state it may find itself, because this and no other is the heart Christ loves and avidly seeks.
The commandment “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…” is evidence of God’s trust in us, because God does not command what we cannot do. God believes in us and in our capacity to love, so much so that this commandment also sounds like a promise. The solemn declaration “You shall love” does not only drive home the supreme importance of what is involved, but it also instils a kind of joy about the certainty of its fulfillment: God trusts that we are, indeed, going to do it, and God knows it because he is ready to provide the means to guarantee it! Obedience to this commandment, our striving over and over to fulfill it as best we can, is what is going to shape our heart, making it more Christ-like, more like the Heart of God. Our loving God with all our heart is, after all, only a reflection of the fact that he has first loved us with all his heart in Christ, from the first moment of our existence. Only a faithful Lover can issue such a command! You shall love means: everything you do, do out of love, act out of love, pursue love. You shall love: your true “you” is the “you” who loves. You shall love means: do not be discouraged. The very love you do not see in yourself right now the Lord may give to you as pure grace, at a time you do not know.
And so the Letter to the Hebrews today inspires great trust in our hearts when it assures us that “Jesus, [our great High Priest,] is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them.” What a magnificent truth is proclaimed here! What Jesus lives for, the text says—the meaning of his very existence—is to unite us with his and our Father in love, by making us one with himself. Such is the pattern of perfect love that Jesus is the first to embody and which he holds out to us expectantly: to live exclusively to enhance the lives of others. Indeed, in just a few moments Jesus will give himself to us here and now from this altar as pure, undeserved gift, in his Body, Soul and Divinity—for God is the first to love with his whole being, holding back nothing! We can trust the fact that Christ’s life-giving presence in us will provide the energy of perfect love with which we can love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves: two objects of love but only one love.
Let us, then, strive to love, not out of our native feebleness and chronic half-heartedness, but out of the abundance of Jesus’ own invincible love, which he communicates to us as he now hands himself over to us, irrevocably.
The wonderful, unbelievable thing is that every difference and distinction of rank is missing here. If anyone happens to be in a position of worldly importance or conspicuous wealth, if he boasts of his birth or the glory of this present life, he stands on just the same footing as the beggar in rags, the blind man or the lame. Nor does he complain at this since he knows that all such differences have been set aside in the life of the spirit; a grateful heart is the only requirement.
JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
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
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
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.
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
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 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
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
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
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 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
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 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)
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 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
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
The Pharisee, we remember was condemned for being an hupocrites, a word that means play-actor, pretender, dissembler. Humility means setting aside the mask…. We present ourselves to others transparently, in all our imperfection and vulnerability. We depend on their goodwill for acceptance and love, not on the success of our efforts at self-promotion.
MICHAEL CASEY, OCSO A Guide to Living in the Truth: St. Benedict’s Teaching on Humility
Vatican II tells us that man is a being in dialogue, someone who does not know who he is until another reveals it to him. For man is that being to whom God speaks. By speaking, God reveals not only his own being to man; in a real way, he also reveals man to himself.
SAINT POPE JOHN PAUL II
Begin by knowing yourself, for it would be futile for you to consider others while neglecting yourself. Even if you are wise, your wisdom is lacking something, if it does not enlighten you about yourself. What does it lack, then? In my view, everything. You could know all the mysteries, have explored the surface of the world, the heights of the heavens and the depths of the sea, if you do not know yourself you are like someone who builds without a foundation; it is a ruin that you build, not an edifice. Everything that you do not construct on yourself as a basis is like a heap of dust that the wind will scatter. The person, therefore, whose wisdom does not extend to himself is not wise. The wise man will be wise about himself, and he will be the first to drink the water of his own well.
SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
The main aim of all rational creatures, defined by many philosophers as the greatest good, is to become like God. Actually this is not so much a discovery of the philosophers as something derived from Holy Scripture. The book of Genesis illustrates it when it describes the original creation of the human race in the words: ‘God said, “Let us make human beings in our image and likeness.” So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’
Notice that it says: ‘God created human beings in his image’ and says nothing about likeness.
This means that the human race received the dignity of God's image at the beginning of its creation, whereas the perfection of God's likeness is reserved for the end. Human beings must achieve it by imitating God in his works. The possibility of perfection is there right at the beginning by virtue of the image. In the end, human beings will reach perfect likeness by means of their works.
This idea has been put forward in a clearer form by the Apostle John. ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, we shall see him as he is.’ (1 John 3:2) He refers to the end of all things and, while simply admitting that the end is as yet unknown, he expresses the hope that we shall be made like God by virtue of our good deeds. Thanks to his intercession for us, we shall proceed from likeness to unity, since in the end ‘God will be all in all’. (1 Cor. 15:28)
ORIGEN Principles, 3, 6
The human being, who conforms to the model of the Son, gives glory to God because of having been made by the Father by means of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the whole person is like God and not just a part: the whole person, soul and body, receives the Spirit of the Father. This is the perfect human being. When the Spirit is united with the soul and with the body, then we have the spiritual person, the perfect person, the human being in the image and likeness of God. If, on the contrary, the soul does not have the Spirit, we would have a carnal and imperfect being. Such a person in having been created would be in the image of God, but would have no likeness to him. Likeness to God comes only from the Spirit.
IRENAEUS Against Heresies, 5, 6
In every worthy human endeavor there is an ideal that calls us forth. And there is the reality of the here and now: our very real human weaknesses and struggles. The danger is that we cling to the ideal, not accepting the real, and never settle, or we let go of the ideal and settle for the present “real,” going nowhere—a very stagnant and disheartening way to live. The exciting challenge is to cling to the ideal, letting it ever call us fourth, even as we embrace the real and bring it lovingly and gently toward the ideal.
M. BASIL PENNINGTON The Monastic Way
Have patience in persevering in the holy exercise of meditation, and be content to progress in slow steps until you have legs to run and wings with which to fly. Be content to obey; which is never a small thing for the soul who has chosen God as his portion, and resign yourself to be for now a small hive bee able to make honey. Be always humble and loving in front of God and men, because God talks to those whose heart is humble in front of Him, and enriches them with His gifts.
SAINT PADRE PIO
In this morning’s Gospel, we find Jesus and his disciples “on the way”. “One the way” is Mark’s term for the journey of Jesus and his disciples to Jerusalem. Peter’s confession of faith at Caesarea Philippi, which we heard last week, had marked a turning point, the beginning of Jesus’ journey toward his passion. Jesus continues along “the way” with his disciples, in which we find an image of our own call to follow Christ.
In this stage of the journey, they reenter Galilee, which is familiar territory for them, but this time there are not the crowds about them as in the early days of his public ministry; rather, this time, Jesus has taken care that no one know of his presence. For he wants this to be a time set apart for him to teach his disciples in private, where he can have their full attention, free of the distractions of the crowds that had pressed upon him. He uses this occasion to once again speak to them of his death and resurrection. “The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and three days after his death he will rise.” When I hear the words “is to be delivered”, my own tendency is to think immediately of the betrayal by Judas, but according to most commentators, the primary one who does the handing over is God. The passion is first of all a Trinitarian event, in which each of the three Persons has their particular part to play in bringing about our redemption. That God does the handing over, shows that he oversees the whole action, and that, throughout the drama, his will is being fulfilled.
This time the words of Jesus are not met with a voice of protest from Peter and the other disciples, rather there is only silence. Mark tells us only that they did not understand the saying and they were afraid to ask him. Throughout the day, they remain in this fear, uncertain of the meaning of the Lord’s but not knowing how to process it and unable to find the courage to ask about it.
At the end of the day’s journey the come to Capernaum and enter the house where they usually stayed. The daytime was a period of being on the road, of action, of effort, of being taught by Jesus. In the evening, as night falls, in the familiar setting and routine of the house, the mood is more that of rest, quiet and repose, a time to refresh themselves with food and drink, and for simply sitting down and giving their weary bones a rest. The situation is now one which encourages a more reflective state of mind, in which memories from the time on the road can come to the fore and be savored, examined and judged.
In this setting, Jesus has more teaching in mind, but he opens the discussion with a question. The disciples on their end, are disposed to be wholly available to the Lord. The conditions are ripe for an examination of conscience. As in an examination of conscience, it is the Lord who leads, he is the one to establish the right proportion and value of the events of the day, and which ones are to be given primary importance and how. The Lord does not ask them about his teaching, he doesn’t ask them for a summary of what he had said on the way but, rather, what they were arguing about. This is what pricks their conscience. And again they are silent. The Lord has brought them to a level of self-awareness that they did not have before, now they are now beginning to see things in his light. Confronted with the purity of his person the inappropriateness of their thoughts and words begins to take shape; just as when the Spirit of the Lord prompts us with an unpleasant memory, and we are forced to come to terms with it. Perhaps we too had been caught in an argument such as the disciples are here. Perhaps, at the time, it seemed justified, because in our mind, we were in the right, or we thought that the matter at hand was such that it should not be let go. Or, perhaps, we recognized that we were headed down a wrong path, but we lacked the ability to steer the conversation in another direction or ease our way out of it somehow. In any case, when, at a later time, in retrospect, the word of the Lord comes to us with the question “What were you speaking about on the way”, in the light of Christ, greater clarity falls not only upon the argument but our motives, how they were not so pure as we thought, but like the disciples, were perhaps tinged by envy, jealousy and a competitive spirit, and we begin to feel shame and, like the disciples, find that, we, too, are reduced to silence. If we are honest with ourselves and do not retreat but stick with the examination, we let the details of the event appear before our mind’s eye, we remember what we said, about what, and how.
Some things may make us wince, but then we look for a way to soften our responsibility, perhaps pass the blame on the others, or on our state of mind at the time, or something else that our mind reaches out to grab hold of, as a kind of life preserver to allow us to continue to float on the surface of our self-justification. But when we find that this does not restore peace to our troubled hearts, we have to decide either to remain in a state of unrest or go back to the incident and allow the Lord to shed his light on it with greater clarity until, although we may never come to complete self-knowledge, we are least no longer throwing up walls of defense around our heart, but place ourselves humbly before the light of the Lord and acknowledge our failure.
We see here that Jesus does not dwell on the failure; their silence is evidence of their knowledge that there were in the wrong. Instead he shows them the way forward. He takes their dispute and turns it into an opportunity not only to teach them the way of true discipleship, but to begin to come to terms with what they find too disturbing and painful to talk about among themselves and to ask him about: the idea of a suffering Messiah. Seated before them, in the position of a teacher, he tells them: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”
“If anyone wishes to be first”. The dispute over greatness shows just how far the disciples were from grasping Jesus’ solemn statement that he was to be delivered over, abandoned to the will of men. Jesus does not outright condemn the desire to be first, rather he redirects this natural desire for excellence according to his way, which is the way of God and not that of fallen human nature. In such a way that he reverses it, so that the wish to be first is fulfilled in being the last of all.
Jesus’ way, and the way of his Father, is the service of love, self-emptying, self-abandoning love, made visible in the Incarnation and culminating in the Cross.
Jesus illustrates his teaching by taking a child and putting him in the midst of them and taking him in his arms. The child has been suddenly taken away from whatever activity he had been engaged in and placed before the others. The Lord now uses him to teach others in the way that he wishes. In this way, the child represents the disciples, who in a similar way were called and chosen by the Lord, pulled out of their previous activity and placed before Israel to be wholly at his disposal and put to use as he wishes in order to be his messengers. The child is exposed, but he need not be afraid because the Lord has his arms around him. Likewise, the disciples are not to fear, because Jesus will always have his arms around them also. Whatever may come, he will never abandon them. He is the faithful and trustworthy Son of a faithful and trustworthy God.
The way they know that his arms remain around them is when they remain in the service of love, when they love as he loves. “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me…and the One who sent me.”
The child is also the neighbor, especially the marginalized, he, non-person, as the child was thought of in antiquity, he is to be loved by the disciple with the love that the disciple has received from the Lord. And the love that is the Lord is to be visible to the disciple in the child, for if the child is to be loved in himself, he is to be loved in the Lord, who will be present in the child just as concretely then as he is now with his arms around him. In this love they will truly be his disciples, and they will receive him, and his Father, and they will love them and they will know them.