Jesus alone is "honey in th mouth, song to the ear, jubliation in heart," said Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. All knowledge of Jesus, if it is to be considered true, consists in a personal and profound experience of Jesus and of His love for us. The experience of His closeness to us, His friendship with us, and His love for us is that intimate encounter with Him.
Recently in Spiritual Life Category
O glorious Saint Vincent
de Paul, the mention of your name suggests a litany of your virtues: humility,
zeal, mercy, and self-sacrifice. It also recalls your many foundations:
Works of Charity, Congregations, and Societies.Inspire all charitable workers,
especially those who minister to both the spiritually and the materially poor. Ask
the Lord to grant us the grace to relinquish the temptation of material things
in our daily effort to minister to the poor. Amen.
H2O News has a news article on a meeting in Rome with Dr. Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican, where he made a presentation looking at how world of the senses articulates the world of the supernatural by drawing our attention more deeply into the Incarnation. Dr Moynihan says a few good things on the video clip.
Where and how do we seek communion in prayer with God? Catholics enter into communion with God through the Blessed
Trinity. I purposely ask the question this way because so often I meet Catholics who have fallen into a quasi-Protestant manner of thinking and praying. They say, "My prayer is a relationship with Jesus." They go no further. They also rarely give an indication that there are two other persons of the Blessed Trinity. Certainly, we all are to seek an intimacy with the Lord Jesus, but as Catholics
our theology and its manifestation in the spiritual life through the sacred
Liturgy and personal prayer is always in conversation with the Trinity: Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. This is an essential point in the spiritual life. You miss this point, you miss the point of Catholic prayer. In fact, all of our liturgical prayer, save for a few, is
directed to the Father, through the Son under the power of the Holy Spirit.
Catholics ought not be functionally unitarian: prayer exclusively directed to
one member of the Trinity but it ought to be trinitarian: Father, Son AND Holy Spirit. In 1989,
Cardinal Ratzinger, with his typical clarity, addressed this issue in a "Letter to the Bishops of the
Catholic Church on some Aspects of Christian Meditation." He said, in part:
"From
the dogmatic point of view," it is impossible to arrive at a perfect love of
God if one ignores his giving of himself to us through his Incarnate Son, who
was crucified and rose from the dead. In him, under the action of the Holy
Spirit, we participate, through pure grace, in the interior life of God. When
Jesus says, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9), he does not
mean just the sight and exterior knowledge of his human figure (in the flesh is
of no avail"--Jn 6:63). What he means is rather a vision made possible by the
grace of faith: to see, through the manifestation of Jesus perceptible by the
senses, just what he, as the Word of the Father, truly wants to reveal to us of
God ("It is the Spirit that gives life [...]; the words that I have spoken to
you are spirit and life"--ibid.). This "seeing" is not a matter of a purely
human abstraction ("abstractio") from the figure in which God has revealed
himself; it is rather the grasping of the divine reality in the human figure of
Jesus, his eternal divine dimension in its temporal form. As St. Ignatius says
in the Spiritual Exercises, we should try to capture "the infinite perfume
and the infinite sweetness of the divinity" (n. 124), going forward from that
finite revealed truth from which we have begun. While he raises us up, God is
free to "empty" us of all that holds us back in this world, to draw us
completely into the Trinitarian life of his eternal love. However, this gift
can only be granted "in Christ through the Holy Spirit," and not through our
own efforts, withdrawing ourselves from his revelation (20).
I would recommend reading Cardinal Ratzinger's full letter to the bishops; it is linked above.
Be united with one another, and God will bless
you. But let it be by the charity of Jesus Christ, for any union which is
not sealed by the blood of Our Savior cannot perdure. It is therefore in
Jesus Christ, by Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ that you ought to be united
with one another. The Spirit of Jesus Christ is a spirit of union and of
peace. How can you attract people to Christ if you are not united with
one another and with him?
Saint Vincent de Paul
We are weak, O God, and capable of giving in at the
first assault. By your pure loving kindness you have called us; may your
infinite goodness, please, now help us persevere. For our part, with your
holy grace, we will try with all our strength to summon up all the service and
all the faithfulness that you ask of us. So give us, O God, give us the
grace to persevere until death. This is what I ask of you through the
merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ with confidence that you will remember me.
Saint
Vincent de Paul
Prayer is more essential to us, more an integral part of ourselves, than the rhythm of our breathing or the beating of our heart. Without prayer there is no life. Prayer is our nature. As humans we are created for prayer just as we are created to speak and to think. The human animal is best described, not as a logical or tool-making animal or an animal that laughs, but rather as an animal that prays, a eucharistic animal, capable of offering the world back to God in thanksgiving and intercession. (Bishop Kallistos Ware)
Our methods of entering the divine mysteries are varied: some
use the spoken or written word (poet, some use photography, some will engage nature,
some may use music & dance and still others will use the time-honored
tradition of icons. Jesuit Father Stephen Bonian takes us through a variety of
fitting understandings of iconography and their use for prayer in his article,
"Gateways to Prayer."
For we see ...
"In God's beauty, all the earth is sanctified.
Tree and stone, wood and paint have glory
In His beauty.
Creation is transformed;
The fallen is made holy.
And man, beholding Beauty's vision,
Shares His life."
("On the Beauty of God" by an anonymous Orthodox author)
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