With Potter

Separation, Day 2

My wife is out of town for most of a week, and so far I have been too busy to miss her much for most of the day.

But when I've come home from work the past two days, I've missed knowing there was someone who loves me to greet me. This little guy is always excited to see me, but it isn't quite the same.

And when I climb into bed, I miss being able to unpack the day with her, but even more I miss knowing that I'm going to spend the next 8 hours next to the person (besides God) who loves me the most.

Around Saturday evening I'm going to get a chance to catch my breath during the day, at which point I'll probably start missing her a lot more frequently. But I'm really glad this separation is only for a few days, and even if my waking hours are filled to the brim with activity between now and next Tuesday, I'm going to be really glad when she's home.

Seductions (revised)

"'You are locked in daily battle with the Devil. What do you see as Satan's greatest success?'
AMORTH: 'The fact that he has managed to convince people that he does not exist. He has almost managed it, even within the Church. We have a clergy and an Episcopate who no longer believe in the Devil, in exorcism, in the exceptional evil the Devil can instill, or even in the power that Jesus bestowed to cast out demons. '

'How does the Devil go about seducing men and women?'
AMORTH: 'He convinces people that there is no hell, that there is no sin, just one more experience to live. Lust, success and power are the three great passions on which the Devil insists.' "

These excerpts are from a recent interview with Rome's leading exorcist priest. In our modern, rationalistic society, the entire discussion seems a bit quaint and superstitious. How brilliant of our Adversary to convince us of the vast superiority of our supposedly advanced culture. We think we can explain all evil without the need to personalize it, and that belief in a malevolent being somehow reduces our personal responsibility for the wrong we commit. How perilous it is for us to fall for this deception!

As for Fr. Amorth's point about our seduction, I was struck by how well it matches what I heard from Chuck Swindoll last week concerning the three areas by which the world judges us. If we're rich, successful, or powerful, only then are we to be admired. Only then are we worthy of attention or emulation.

Each of these three passions represents a perversion of a gift of God, and each drives us unhealthily when we pursue it inordinately. Matthew Kelly says we can never get enough of what we don't really need, but I'd amend that just a bit. I'd suggest that there is no good thing which God has provided, to meet our true needs and to help us grow, which will not consume us if we become enamored of it and pursue it, for its own sake, beyond necessity. (Maybe that's really the same thing.)

Lust is a perversion of our need for intimacy. We need to be close to others, and particularly to God, but we get this need out of whack. Even married people are called to a chaste (that is, appropriately holy) life in the area of our sexuality rather than making an idol of sexual experiences. Conversely, even the celibate among us have a sexual element of their personhood that they must recognize and acknowledge in the context of their chastity.

The drive for success can be a perversion of both our basic physical needs - sustenance, shelter, etc. - but also of our need for self-esteem. Rather than finding our self-worth in God's love for us, in the gift of our personhood in Christ, we too often esteem ourselves only in comparison with others. This plays out in many ways beyond having the latest technological gadgets and the most impressive home. We see it in people who are more concerned over whether their spouses or their children embarrass them than in truly nurturing and loving them in the context of their relationships.

The pursuit of power is a perversion of our need for control and security. A healthy person controls their choices and their behaviors. An unhealthy one strives to control all of their circumstances in an ever-expanding sphere of influence, often for fear of vulnerability.

It seems to me that there's a lot of overlap between these areas, that the boundaries between them are not cut so clearly. We could probably expand on each one of them at length. Yet the transformation of each of these gifts into a passion represents a fundamental failure to trust God for what we truly need, to believe and take action on the knowledge that God's desires for us are more trustworthy than our own desires for ourselves.

The Interior Castle

I have begun reading this book by St. Teresa of Avila, which I presume is going to be a book about prayer. I'm struck by a couple things about it already, though.

First, in the preface, Father Raimundo Panikkar makes a point closely related to some of my earlier musings on holiness. Being a saint, he suggests, is not about our achieving perfection on our own efforts, but is about God dwelling in the person of the saint. I will certainly be reading the rest of this preface.

I don't like to spend too much time in the preliminaries of such a book, though, before beginning to get a sense of the body of the text. So I've also read St. Teresa's own prologue. In just two pages, I have encountered a humble, obedient soul, who I'm eager to journey along with for a while.

The Second Scrutiny

"But we see, you say, so your sin remains."

Is this as much an indictment of rationalism as it ever was of Pharisaism?
Are not both of these attitudes as prevalent today as they have ever been?

As pertinent as these questions may be, last night I found myself grappling instead with one that is of more value for me. After thirty minutes of (I believe) Spirit-led soul-searching, a technical glitch prevented me from posting what I'd written, the words vanished from my screen. So maybe I'm just supposed to post the question here, for reflection:

In what ways do I insist that I see, and so my sin remains?

Holy Spirit, you alone can reveal this. Show me, and heal me of my blindness.

The Annunciation

Ps 2: "Come, let us break their fetters; come, let us cast off their yoke."

This is still the outcry of the world against the Lord, misunderstanding the nature of his yoke. We want to determine our own destiny. Freedom to us means freedom to do whatever we want, and if the Lord tells us that some things are not best for us or for those around us, well, we're best suited to decide what's in our best interest. We don't need some oppressive set of moral restrictions! Nobody else is going to tell us what's right and what's wrong!

This solemnity of the Annunciation should paint a vastly different picture for us of what God is about, what he wants for us, and what he was willing to bear to reach us. The idea of being sinful, of being in need of redemption, doesn't sit well in the modern mind. Even when we've acccepted the idea of God, we've gotten so focused on the aspect of a loving God that we forget why that love is so important to us.

Christ's incarnation and his evenutal sacrificial death are so integral as to be inseparable. Our RCIA group had a rather lengthy discussion, early in the year, regarding whether we are saved by Christ's death or by his life. It is an impossible debate, because they are so intertwined. Had Jesus been put to death as an infant or toddler, along with so many of his peers, wouldn't he still have been the spotless sacrifice? Yet the public ministry that we needed in order to learn to recognize him, then and now, would never have occurred. Though his birth itself fulfilled prophecies, many other prophecies would not have been fulfilled, the church would never have been founded, and countless lives would never have been transformed. (In considering such mysteries, it is good to remember the idea of God existing outside of time, so that the utterance of a prophecy and its fulfillment are simultaneous.) Returning, then, to the aforementioned discussion, in baptism we both die with Christ and come to new life in him, and we cannot have one without the other.

So in the Annunciation, Mary's yes echoes the eternal Son's yes, to leave the throne of heaven and become fully human while remaining fully God. That yes would be reaffirmed in the Garden, and becomes our yes as we ask the Spirit to live within us, allowing Christ himself to shine through us.

"Let it be done to me as you have said."

Repentance and Holiness - Part III

Our holiness is a perfect gift from God, poured into our lives through our Baptism, but our response to it is often less than perfect. As a result, Christ has given the Church the season of Lent and the sacrament of Reconciliation as opportunities to open ourselves more fully to this marvelous gift, that he might transform us more completely in him. During Lent, we forsake those things that the Holy Spirit reveals to be distractions from God's love, or those the forsaking of which might remind us of God’s love. By our participation with this grace, we are then more open to recognize those ways in which we’ve closed ourselves off from God. In Reconciliation, we turn away from those sins by which we’ve obstructed God's grace, and are restored in our relationship with Him in a unique way. These ministrations of the Holy Spirit bring a joy to our life, and are manifested in a greater desire to seek God’s will ahead of our own. We know that this is all God’s gift to us, not our own accomplishment.

Of course, penitence often doesn't feel ministerial when we're in the midst of it. Sometimes it can feel more like that two-by-four getting our attention. Or it may feel as if we’re being pruned, and the more we've nurtured those wayward limbs, the more the pruning pains us. Yet when it's complete, not only will it not hurt anymore, but the Lord provides growth for new, healthy limbs in place of the old, unbalanced ones. These bring a joy far greater than the small pleasures which we so stubbornly resist giving up and to which we've limited ourselves, and they bear fruit that nourishes us and those around us.

While we are the ones now experiencing the painful death of some previously idolized part of ourselves, it might help us to remember that Christ bore that death long before we decided to participate in it. Our struggle is but the manifestation of his victorious sacrifice in our lives. In this way we may come to understand that it is not, in fact, we who are doing the work of transforming ourselves in some way. We're merely getting ourselves out of the way of the wonderful work he is completing in us.

It is good for us to recall, as well, that we are not the entire vine! As we continue to nurture sub-branches in our lives that grow in unhealthy directions, we're inevitably hurting other branches of the vine. The fact that our limited vision obscures their pain from our consciousness doesn't make it any less real. This is part of why it is so important for us to allow the teaching of the Church to inform our conscience rather than deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong.

Lent and Reconciliation, the season and sacrament of penitence, are about more than our own striving to avoid the sins that have marked our lives, stifled us, and hurt others. Rather, the season and the sacrament represent God speaking our holiness into being in new, unique, and wondrous ways. Each is the equivalent of Jesus giving Peter the opportunity to be reaffirmed and transformed in the aftermath of his denial. That reconciliation has reverberated in our world for nearly two millennia, and we believe that it will continue on for all eternity as we praise God around His throne. Like Peter, we are made holy by God's grace manifested in Christ. The song of repentance and reconciliation which God allows us to sing with Him will carry on in ways we can't foresee, for each voice is the echo of the grace poured out at God's command, the Word who is Himself eternal.