Fire Within--Finished

I finished reading the book Fire Within by Father Thomas Dubay, S.M. I've owned the book for many years, but I only read bits and pieces of it until recently. This time I was determined to read it from cover to cover and write notes in it as I read. I plan to re-read and meditate on it to let its message soak into my brain. The biggest and most important task is to put into practice what I have learned. For me right now, what I need to do is to set time aside each day to pray and to give myself more fully to the One who loves me. When I give myself to Him more and more generously in every aspect of my life, God will give me more and more of Himself. Christianity is a relationship, a radical love relationship, with God. I just need to live it better. There is no end to how well that relationship is lived and how intimate and close one becomes to God.

I want to share a few thoughts from the first chapter of Fire Within.
"A second thing I have learned is what St. Teresa herself learned regarding the sanctity and prayer of her companions in the early years of the reform: they were saintly women, and most of them had lofty infused prayer. That combination, holiness of life and radiant contemplation, is no mere coincidence. So it is today: men and women in any vocation who live the revealed word as Thomas More (married man), John Vianney (diocesan priest) and Catherine of Siena (consecrated virgin) lived it do enjoy a profound intimacy with the Lord they serve so completely and untiringly. Life-style and prayer grow or diminish together. If people today or in any age lack mystical prayer, it is not because it has been tried and found lacking. It is the Gospel that has not been tried" (p. 9).

Two pages later it continues:

"'I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I would that it were already blazing.' How perfectly this captures the contents of this book. The radiant Image of the Father's glory has come to light a fire in us, a burning love, a consuming yearning. There is nothing lukewarm about the God of revelation. Always radical and total, never does He reduce what He expects of us to fractions. Our communion with Him is to become a blazing fire, a perpetual ecstasy. These strong words will sound strange and exaggerated only to those who have not tasted that the Lord is good. They may have studied and read, but they have not drunk deeply.

"Reflecting like mirrors the very brilliance of the Lord, we are even in this life to be 'transformed from one glory to another into the very image that we reflect--this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit'. This text, too, is an excellent summation of much of this present work, namely, the gradual but inevitable transformation of a generous person that accompanies parallel growth in depth of communion with the indwelling Trinity. They who think that fullness of contemplation is meant to be confined to an elite few do not understand the contents of Sacred Scripture. Nor do they understand the great patristic commentators (e.g., St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century) who join with John and Teresa in writing of this transformation (p. 11).

"'Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it dawned upon our human imagination what things God has prepared for those who love him.' This pauline statement, astonishing however one understands it, refers not only to our final destiny in beatific vision and risen body but also to the unspeakable, indeed unimaginable, gifts God has in store on earth for totally generous lovers" (p. 11-12)

Everyone is called to this deep union with God; that, indeed, was why we were created. God made us to be His house, temple, bride and spouse. He is the Divine Bridegroom.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Pope Benedict XVI's Angelus Message of June 1, 2008

Following is the message from the Holy Father:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On this Sunday, which coincides with the beginning of June, I am pleased to recall that this month is traditionally dedicated to the Heart of Christ, symbol of the Christian faith, particularly dear to the people, to mystics and theologians because it expresses in a simple and authentic way the "good news" of love, compendium of the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption. Last Friday, after the Most Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi, we celebrated the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the third and last feast following Eastertide. This sequence calls to mind a movement toward the centre: a movement of the spirit which God himself guides. In fact, from the infinite horizon of his love, God wished to enter into the limits of human history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart. Thus, we can contemplate and encounter the infinite in the finite, the invisible and ineffable Mystery in the human Heart of Jesus, the Nazarene. In my first Encyclical on the theme of love, the point of departure was exactly "contemplating the pierced side of Christ", which John speaks of in his Gospel (cf. 19: 37; Deus Caritas Est, n. 12). And this centre of faith is also the font of hope in which we have been saved, the hope that I made the object of my second Encyclical.

Every person needs a "centre" for his own life, a source of truth and goodness to draw from in the daily events, in the different situations and in the toil of daily life. Every one of us, when he/she pauses in silence, needs to feel not only his/her own heartbeat, but deeper still, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible with faith's senses and yet much more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world. Therefore, I invite each one of you to renew in the month of June his/her own devotion to the Heart of Christ, also using the traditional prayer of the daily offering and keeping present the intentions I have proposed for the whole Church.

Next to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the liturgy invites us to venerate the Immaculate Heart of Mary. With great confidence let us entrust ourselves to her. Once again I would like to invoke the maternal intercession of the Virgin for the populations of China and Myanmar struck by natural calamities and for those who are going through the many situations of pain, sickness, material and spiritual poverty that mark humanity's path.

My thoughts:

The center of the Catholic faith, the source of truth and goodness, and the font of our hope is the Heart of Christ. Pausing in silence, we are to sense, at a level deeper than our own heartbeat, the heartbeat of Christ Who is always with us. Our life revolves around our awareness of and meditation upon the heart of Jesus beating within us. From His heart we have light, peace, joy and truth.
Mary, the one whose heart was most in union with the Heart of Jesus, shows us the way to give ourselves totally to Him. Entrusting ourselves to this most loving of God-given mothers, we have great confidence that she will be there for us and bring us more into conformity to her divine Son.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

The School Year is Over: The Plan for the Summer

Now that the students have gone home for the summer and all the many tasks that I do doing the school year have for the most part come to completion, I have more time once again. I have a multitude of things I need to do this summer, but my primary task is to make significant progress in my writing once again. Actually, the most important task for me is to live out what I am saying, to put it into practice. That means I must pray and be very committed to my prayer life. That means that I must take my personal relationship with Jesus very seriously, as the most important relationship in my life. I must take a good chunk of time for prayer each day, and I must make all I do a prayer. God made me with enormous and seemingly insatiable desires; those desires are the consequence of making me to be a home, temple and spouse of Himself. I am made for God; I desire to be perfectly known and loved; I desire to be completely happy forever, and all this makes the joys of this world to be of little consequence. The joys of this world can't begin to fulfill me--they are too little. Only God can and does give me the life and joy that, in my deepest self, I desire. The Good News is that my enormous desires are made to be fulfilled and that there is hope. That hope and fulfillment is a person: Jesus Christ.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.