Why We Were Made: Infused Prayer

Going back to my little book, The Spirituality of Saint Faustina, it says that Saint Faustina was often in the prayer of infused contemplation. It gives this example from the saint’s diary: “I more often commune with the Lord in a more profound manner. My senses sleep and, although not in a visible way, all things become more real and clearer to me than if I saw them with my eyes. My intellect learns more in one moment than during long years of thinking and meditation, both as regards the essence of God and as regards revealed truths, and also as regards the knowledge of my own misery” Diary #882. When God infuses Himself in a person through contemplative prayer, the person’s knowledge and love and all the other virtues grow very rapidly, much faster and far deeper than one can ever achieve without infused contemplation. This is evidenced by the fact that Saint Faustina had no theological training, and yet she had many and deep theological insights and a profound understanding. Her heroic virtue was also do to this infusion of God.

In another place in her diary, she wrote: “My communion with the Lord is now purely spiritual. My soul is touched by God and wholly absorbs itself in Him, even to the complete forgetfulness of self. Permeated by God to its very depths, it drowns in His beauty; it completely dissolves in Him—I am at a loss to describe this, because in writing I am making use of the sense; but there, in that union, the sense are not active; there is a merging of God and the soul; and the life of God to which the soul is admitted is so great that the human tongue cannot express it. When the soul returns to its habitual form of life, it then sees that this life is all darkness and mist and dreamlike confusion, an infant’s swaddling clothes. In such moments the soul only receives from God, for of itself it does nothing; it does not make even the slightest effort; all in her is wrought by God” Diary #767.

The sense are not able to contain God, so deep prayer requires that the sense be bypassed in order that the true receptacle of God, the soul, may be ready and waiting for whenever the Lord decides to act and infuse Himself into one well prepared for His wondrous self-gift. If one is inordinately attached to anything, he will not be able to be free to be attached to the only True Attachment, the Divine Bridegroom. Penance, suffering, humiliation, and deprivation all help prepare our sense to be bypassed so that we can get on with the real reason we were made. Obedience and trust prepare our wills so that it can come into perfect union and harmony with God, and so that He can infuse Himself into our wills. When one gives such a love to God, the Lord always gives so much more in return because He gives Himself, and He is God, the Almighty, Eternal One.


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

Pope Benedict XVI's Preliminary Message to America

Dear Brothers and Sisters in the United States of America,
The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you! In just a few days from now, I shall begin my apostolic visit to your beloved country. Before setting off, I would like to offer you a heartfelt greeting and an invitation to prayer. As you know, I shall only be able to visit two cities: Washington and New York. The intention behind my visit, though, is to reach out spiritually to all Catholics in the United States. At the same time, I earnestly hope that my presence among you will be seen as a fraternal gesture towards every ecclesial community, and a sign of friendship for members of other religious traditions and all men and women of good will. The risen Lord entrusted the apostles and the Church with his Gospel of love and peace, and his intention in doing so was that the message should be passed on to all peoples.
At this point I should like to add some words of thanks, because I am conscious that many people have been working hard for a long time, both in Church circles and in the public services, to prepare for my journey. I am especially grateful to all who have been praying for the success of the visit, since prayer is the most important element of all. Dear friends, I say this because I am convinced that without the power of prayer, without that intimate union with the Lord, our human endeavors would achieve very little. Indeed this is what our faith teaches us. It is God who saves us, he saves the world, and all of history. He is the shepherd of his people. I am coming, sent by Jesus Christ, to bring you his word of life.
Together with your bishops, I have chosen as the theme of my journey three simple but essential words: "Christ our hope." Following in the footsteps of my venerable predecessors, Paul VI and John Paul II, I shall come to United States of America as Pope for the first time, to proclaim this great truth: Jesus Christ is hope for men and women of every language, race, culture, and social condition. Yes, Christ is the face of God present among us. Through him, our lives reach fullness, and together, both as individuals and peoples, we can become a family united by fraternal love, according to the eternal plan of God the Father.
I know how deeply rooted this Gospel message is in your country. I am coming to share it with you, in a series of celebrations and gatherings. I shall also bring the message of Christian hope to the great assembly of the United Nations, to the representatives of all the peoples of the world. Indeed, the world has greater need of hope than ever: hope for peace, for justice, and for freedom; but this hope can never be fulfilled without obedience to the law of God, which Christ brought to fulfillment in the commandment to love one another. Do to others as you would have them do to you, and avoid doing what you would not want them to do. This "golden rule" is given in the Bible, but it is valid for all people, including non-believers. It is the law written on the human heart; on this we can all agree, so that when we come to address other matters we can do so in a positive and constructive manner for the entire human community.
[I removed the paragraph in Spanish]
Dear brothers and sisters, dear friends in the United States, I am very much looking forward to being with you. I want you to know that, even if my itinerary is short, with just a few engagements, my heart is close to all of you, especially to the sick, the weak, and the lonely. I thank you once again for your prayerful support of my mission. I reach out to every one of you with affection, and I invoke upon you the maternal protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary.


My thoughts:
First of all, the Holy Father asks us for our prayers for his upcoming visit; that I will surely do. He goes on to make a powerful statement: "without the power of prayer, without that intimate union with the Lord, our human endeavors would achieve very little [emphasis added]." The only way to achieve much of lasting value, to become holy, to be a saint, is a close, personal, intimate love relationship with Jesus our Lord. Apart from our union with Him, we are capable of very little. God made us for Himself, He made us to be holy, and the only way to be vessels of God and be holy is to have that union with Him that is only possible with a deep, daily prayer life.

The theme of his journey here to America is: "Christ our hope." Our deepest hope is to be completely and utterly happy forever and ever; this is not an impossible and unrealistic fantasy; it is the God-given hunger for Him. He is the fulfillment of our deepest hope, and, as such, Christ is our hope. He is the hope for every person individually and the hope for the entire human family; only in Him can we become a united family in fraternal love. The world has never had a greater need for hope, "but this hope can never be fulfilled without obedience to the law of God, which Christ brought to fulfillment in the commandment to love one another." There is no true hope apart from the truth and obedience to that truth given to us in the law of God. The Holy Father goes on to say that the golden rule is valid for everyone, regardless of their beliefs, for it is written on our hearts by God Himself. Hope is only possible if we obey that God-written law inscribed on our hearts. With this universal truth as our foundation, all peoples can work together for the benefit of the whole world.

As he stated the other day, the Holy Father again said, "I know how deeply rooted this Gospel message is in your country." We have much to be proud of in our founding and our history. He will remind us of the treasures we have been given. Lastly, he regrets that his stay is so short, but, he said, "my heart is close to all of you," and " I reach out to every one of you with affection." Let us reach out to him in return with our prayers and our loving affection.

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

Hosea 14: "From Me Comes Your Fruit"

The last chapter of the Book of the Prophet Hosea, the first reading for Mass today, is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Hosea, under God’s direction, marries a harlot named Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim. God had said to Hosea, “Go again, love a woman who is beloved of a paramour and is an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (Hosea 3:1). Hosea is to do what God does: love an unfaithful wife. Each of us sins, and so we are an unfaithful wife to God, but that does not extinguish God’s love for us. God hates our sin and calls us back to Himself; when we turn back to Him through God’s unrelenting tenacity, “in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband’ ” (Hosea 2:16).

The final chapter of this amazing book of the Bible goes like this:

Thus says the LORD: return, O Israel, to the LORD, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt. Take with you words, and return to the LORD; say to him, “Forgive all iniquity, and receive what is good, that we may render as offerings the bullocks from our stalls. Assyria will not save us, nor shall we have horses to mount; we shall say no more, ‘Our god,’ to the work of our hands; for in you the orphan finds compassion.” I will heal their defection, says the LORD, I will love them freely; for my wrath is turned away from them. I will be like the dew for Israel: he shall blossom like the lily; he shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar, and put forth his shoots. His splendor shall be like the olive tree and his fragrance like the Lebanon cedar. Again they shall dwell in his shade and raise grain; they shall blossom like the vine, and his fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim! What more has he to do with idols? I have humbled him, but I will prosper him. “I am like a verdant cypress tree”– because of me you bear fruit! Let him who is wise understand these things; let him who is prudent know them. Straight are the paths of the LORD, in them the just walk, but sinners stumble in them (Hosea 14:2-10).

And so the words of the prophet come to an end. If we understand what he is saying here, according to him, we will have wisdom. What is that wisdom? It is primarily this: “I am like a verdant cypress tree—because of me you bear fruit!” The RSVCE states it as such: “I am like an evergreen cypress, from me comes your fruit.” God is merciful and forgiving, and He will forgive and heal us if we are humble and turn to Him. We will be destroyed if we persist in our disobedience and separation from Him. Turning to Him and giving ourselves entirely into His hands, we will become like a lily, an olive tree, a Lebanon cedar, a blossoming vine, and the wine of Lebanon, God is like a tree who is always green, and from Him comes our fruit.

God makes us fruitful. We bear fruit through God’s power and grace. This is true on at least two levels. On the one hand, God is the one who provides children, and on the other hand, He is also the one who gives us the grace to do anything good that we do. Bearing babies is one way we bear fruit, and the other way we bear fruit is through all the good that we do. Both are fruit, and they were symbolized by the two trees in the Garden of Eden: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life symbolizes the heart which loves, trusts and obeys God; therefore, it is the tree which always does the good, and so it is united to God, the source of all life. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, according to my theory, is our power and ability to conceive children.

What we need to learn is, and where wisdom is found is in this passage here: God provides. He makes us fruitful. He is the source of life and children, and He is the source of goodness and every good action. In the Blessed Virgin Mary, these two forms of providing fruit are fulfilled. God makes Mary filled with His life and a plenitude of virtue and trust in Him; that trust in God within her heart is rewarded with the most exalted reality: God gave Mary His own Son to conceive, bear, and raise as her own Son. God provides life and virtue, and He provides His very own Son to be Mary’s Son.

What that means for you and me is that, on the one hand, we need to realize that anything good that we have ever, are doing, or will ever do is because God has given us the grace to do so. On the other hand, we need to realize that children are a gift from Him, and they are not to be shunned as a burden or sought after regardless of the means (i.e. in vitro fertilization) as if we had a right to them. We are to welcome and thank God for our gifts, both our virtues and our children.

God is Father. One of the primary roles of a father is to provide for his children. Unless we become like children, we cannot enter the kingdom of God because children are totally dependant upon their parents. God wants us to be totally dependant upon Him and upon His provision for us. This does not mean that He wants us to be childish or big babies. Parents don’t want their children to be helpless, hopeless, childish brats. We need to be strong and mature, all the while knowing that our strength and life and love come from Him. He wants us to trust Him, to cling to Him, to rely on Him for everything, to call Him “Father,” or “Abba” or “Dad.”

The danger of being “rich” in any way whether it is regarding money or fame, intelligence or abilities, beauty or health, family or friends, the danger of riches is that we tend to forget that we need God and that every good that we have is His gift. We are like the fickle, self-absorbed friend who only calls when he needs something; we tend to only remember Him when we are in trouble and we need something from God. No one likes to be treated like a sugar daddy or a slot machine or a fast food restaurant or a spa or an amusement park or an ATM machine or a witch doctor. God doesn’t let Himself be used like that for He isn’t an object for our use. He is a person (three to be exact), and He wants to be in the most intimate relationship with us; He is meant to be our husband, and so He is jealous for our love. He is the very best of husbands, and only in giving ourselves totally to Him are we truly happy and satisfied. Nothing else quenches the infinite longings of our soul because that is how He fashioned us. As Saint Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

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

Eat the Tree of Life

The first reading from Jeremiah 17:5-10 is one of those perfect readings that harmonizes so well with my theory. I will quote it here in full:

“Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, but stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth. Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: it fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; in the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit. More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it? I, the LORD, alone probe the mind and test the heart, to reward everyone according to his ways, according to the merit of his deeds.”

The first line of this passage is exactly, according to my theory, what the man and the woman did in the garden. They trusted in themselves and the strength of their flesh as their heart turned away from God and trusted in the serpent. My theory, which I have mentioned multiple times on this site, is that God made man to be His spouse. He created the first man and woman and gave them a test of faith.

He told them to be fruitful and multiply and then told them to remain virgins, to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This doesn’t seem to make sense. God told them to forgo the highest of the natural goods to obtain the highest of the supernatural goods; He wanted them to give up (sexual) marriage to a human being to obtain marriage to Himself; He asked them to give up the good and holy image of union with God (marital intimacy) to obtain the very thing itself: complete union with God forever in heaven in never ending bliss. Desiring to fulfill God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, they took matters into their own hands, trusted in themselves and their reproductive powers, distrusted God’s singular prohibition, and had marital relations.

They immediately realize they are naked and hide from God; their punishments revolve around bearing children and planting bad seed; the very first thing the man does after the punishments is re-name his wife. Now that she has conceived from the very first sin, she is no longer just woman, she is a mother. She has become a new reality, and so the man names her Eve, mother of all the living. The child she wanted and now conceived is Cain; when he is born, she names him “gotten,” i.e. Cain.

Back to Jeremiah, those who trust in man receive barrenness and death, and that is what the man and woman received: Cain the murderer. On the other hand, he who trusts and hopes in the Lord is fully alive. He is a tree planted next to the stream whose leaves stay alive in any condition and still bears fruit. It doesn’t matter how little rain falls, the tree is close to the stream, and so it receives all the water it needs. The tree flourishes and bears fruit because it trusts in God.

The tree of life is the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God. The heart that trusts God has its roots deeply inside God, the source of all life. The trusting, obedient heart is the conduit for receiving God’s life, for being in communion with Him; therefore, since it is the means by which we stay connected to God, the heart is the tree of life: a heart united to God is united to Life.

The passage continues: “More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it?” The heart is the location of the battle which determines where we will spend eternity. When a heart doesn’t trust, nothing, other than a miracle of God’s grace, can help it trust. All our actions, all our deeds, flow from the abundance within our hearts. If our heart is full of disobedience and suspicion toward God, we will do all sorts of evil deeds; if our heart trusts Him and longs to please Him in all we do, then of course we will most always do what is good. The passage concludes: “I, the LORD, alone probe the mind and test the heart, to reward everyone according to his ways, according to the merit of his deeds.” Our deeds matter and decide our eternity because they reveal what is in our heart. In the end, all that matters is that we love, trust and obey God—that we eat of the tree of life.


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

Ratzinger: the Cross and Eucharist=the Tree of Life

This weekend I went on my yearly silent retreat with Opus Dei, and that is why I haven’t written anything these past several days. While on the retreat, I read a short book that consists of four homilies during lent that Pope Benedict XVI gave back before he was pope or even the prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith. He gave the lectures during lent in 1981, right before he was the prefect (at least I don’t think he was just yet). Ratzinger didn’t publish them for five years; the edition I read was from 1995 and is titled: ‘In the Beginning…’ A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall.

One of the overriding themes of these homilies is that the belief that God created the world is extremely important to properly understanding not only ourselves, but reality and the Faith itself. I am not going to summarize the reasons for this, at least not tonight. I assume this point in everything I write, and it was encouraging to know that, hopefully, I can do a small part to lead others to re-examine the creation account. In the beginning of the preface of the book, Ratzinger laments how “…the creation account is noticeably and nearly completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology.” That was true when he preached these homilies in 1981. “Since then, from the perspective of my new work [as prefect], the critical state of the creation theme in the present-day kerygma has become so much more evident that I now feel pressed to bring out the old manuscripts again and prepare them for printing.” That is why he published them five years later and created the book I read this weekend.

I want to quote at length his conclusion to his forth homily:

“Thus Christ is the new Adam, with whom humankind begins anew….The cross, the place of obedience, is the true tree of life. Christ is the antitype of the serpent, as is indicated in John 3:14. From this tree there comes not the word of temptation but that of redeeming love, the word of obedience, which an obedient God himself used, thus offering us his obedience as a context for freedom. The cross is the tree of life, now become approachable….Therefore the Eucharist, as the presence of the cross, is the abiding tree of life, which is ever in our midst and ever invites us to take the fruit of true life….To receive it, to eat of the tree of life, thus means to receive the crucified Lord and consequently to accept the parameters of his life, his obedience, his ‘yes,’ the standard of our creatureliness. It means to accept the love of God, which is our truth—that dependence on God which is no more an imposition from without than is the Son’s sonship. It is precisely this dependence that is freedom, because it is truth and love.”

Of course, I love this quote; I do because it resonates so well with much of what I have been saying. For someone who only desires to write within the context of Catholicism, in the strict sense of the word, having the Pope say some of the very same things is sweet music to my ears. I am glad that I found this quote this weekend; I plan to work my way through the Pope’s most recent book, Jesus of Nazareth, so I can see what else he says that may resonate with what I am saying. Isn’t his next book coming out soon, too?

At the same time, what I am saying is only in part what the Pope is saying. I say that the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God is the tree of life, and that that is the way it was from the beginning with the man and the woman in the garden. Their hearts trusted in Satan and his wisdom, and so they brought death into the world for themselves and all their descendants. The problem with us then, is that we have hard hearts, hearts that trust in themselves, rely upon their own power, turn away from God, are disobedient and in love with self and the good things of this world. We need hearts of flesh that love, trust and obey God in all things, at all times, and against all difficulties even unto death. We receive that loving and self-sacrificing heart of flesh at Baptism when we are united to Christ in His death and resurrections; being united to Jesus, we receive His very heart which was crucified and pierced; every Eucharist is a celebration of our Baptism wherein we receive that Heart of Christ, crucified and risen. With such a heart, we are able to fully and truly love, trust and obey God. That is the awesome gift we receive at every Eucharist, but it is up to us to open the present and use it. Nothing less than sanctity awaits us when we take the heart of Jesus given to us and make it our own.

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

The Temptation of Christ was the Temptation of Adam

Tonight is the three month anniversary of my blog’s launch; technically, I started it late at night on the ninth, but I did not really put anything in my first post other than that I was going to start writing. I started writing on the tenth. This is my 83rd post in these past 90 days or so, and it has been much fun for me. One of the main reasons I had not written before was that I was simply too busy with life; that hasn’t changed. In order to write, I just get less sleep. Most of my writing takes place late at night; I try to finish before midnight, but it is usually sometime after when I can actually hit the hay. Since I love it, even though I wish I were doing a much better job of it, it is not difficult to keep going. Thanks to all the people who keep me and my writing in your prayers.

What better readings could there be today for this first Sunday in Lent for my three month anniversary! The first reading talks about the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the Fall itself. I will reprint the whole thing here. I usually use the RSCVE Bible, but of course the Mass readings are using the NAB; it will be interesting to compare the two. It comes from Genesis 2:7-9 & 3:1-7:

The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being. Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made various trees grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

One thing I like about this translation is that the various trees God plants in the garden are delightful to look at and good for food. The word Eden means delight, and the trees planted there are delightful. That makes sense. Part of my theory is that the Garden of Eden is not so much a place as it is the man and woman themselves; the garden refers to them and to their bodies. The trees refer to all of their abilities and powers as humans. God created us good, and how we are created is beautiful. Our bodies are beautiful, and our abilities are beautiful; in an unfallen state, we were perfectly harmonious and in order; we would not die or get sick; our will and intellect and body worked together toward one good common goal; all was well, and all was beautiful. We are still created good and beautiful, yet we are disordered and tend toward the evil; it is a battle to choose the good. It is a battle not to be selfish and not to forget about God. It is a battle not say, My will be done.

The two most important delightful trees, which are in the middle of the garden, are the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. My theory is that the tree of life is the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is our ability to have marital relations and conceive children. Since God had put us on earth but made us for heaven, and since He gave the man and the woman to each other as spouses but made us to be married to Him forever in heaven, He told the man and the woman not to have relations.

He asked them to forgo the greatest of this world’s blessings as a sacrificial test and trial of faith in order be given a child by God directly, virginally, and so also be given the greatest supernatural blessing: complete beatitude and union with God Himself forever in Heaven. We are first and foremost created for heaven, which is to be married to God forever; we are not made for earth or earthly marriage, ultimately; earth and earthly marriage are the pathway we take to prepare us for heaven, where there is no earthly marriage. God still requires this same sort of test for all those who live the priestly or religious life; it is the test of celibacy. And it still takes great trust and love of God to pass this test, but the fruit of a well-passed test is bountiful.

The responsorial psalm is the great penitential psalm David wrote after he acknowledged his sin with Bathsheba; there are a number of parallels between his sin and the Fall, as I see it. Perhaps the most important element of this psalm is David’s request to God to create a clean heart in him. David asks God for a clean heart. Repentance is a matter of the heart. Turning back to God is a matter of the heart. Being faithful and loving God is also a matter of the heart. Life comes through union with God, and in that respect, the faithful heart is the source or conduit of life. The heart is the tree of life.

I will include all of the second reading today from Paul’s Letter to the Romans 5:12-19:

“Brothers and sisters: Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned—for up to the time of the law, sin was in the world, though sin is not accounted when there is no law. But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come. But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many. And the gift is not like the result of the one who sinned. For after one sin there was the judgment that brought condemnation; but the gift, after many transgressions, brought acquittal. For if, by the transgression of the one, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. In conclusion, just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so, through one righteous act, acquittal and life came to all. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.”

I think Paul’s argument here is relatively simple. He is saying that through one man, Adam, sin and death entered the world. He was disobedient, sinned, and brought death upon his family, the human race. The implication is that all his children and their children, the sons of Adam or the sons of man, are born dead to God, born without sanctifying grace. In Adam, all sinned, all were condemned, and all died. The one man brought disobedience and death upon everyone. Adam is a type, as in typology or image, of Christ, yet Christ undoes what Adam destroyed. The one man, Jesus Christ, was obedient, and so He brings grace, acquittal, justification, righteousness and life to the many. The one man, the Son of Man, enables us, sinners, to have life again and have our relationship with God renewed.

How is original sin passed on? It passes on through human generation; each child born is born in the state of original sin. This is no personal sin on the part of the baby; it is a state of being not born with sanctifying grace in our souls. Without sanctifying grace, which is the very life of God, we are born dead to God. We need to be born again. That is the state of things Adam left us in by his one act of disobedience.

How do we go from being sons of men to being sons of God? How do we become children of God and born alive to Him? We need to be born again, born from above, born of God in the sacrament of Baptism. Baptism is being really, spiritually united to Jesus, specifically His passion, death and resurrection so that we can die, be set free from our old master, sin, and be born again to be married to our new spouse, Jesus (see Romans 7:1ff). As Adam gives birth to spiritually dead babies through natural generation, so Jesus gives birth to children alive in God through His death and resurrection, which we truly share in through the sacrament of Baptism.

One of my main points here is that both Adam and Jesus beget children; the first through disobedience because of the fear of death and trying to save his own life, begets dead children, and the other through obedience and going through the worst possible death, makes the dead into a new creation and alive to God. Each of these singular men, through their one act, beget children: the first begets children who are dead, and the second begets those dead children to new life in Him.

Lastly, we have the gospel which today comes from Matthew 4:1-11, and it depicts the temptation of Christ by Satan after Jesus fasted for forty days in the desert. Jesus was hungry; I think we can assume that He was most hungry; physically, I do not know how much longer one could possibly fast and still live. It would be difficult to be hungrier than Jesus was when Satan approached Jesus and told Him to turn stones into bread. Then Satan told Jesus to throw Himself down from the temple because, as the Bible says, God gives His angels to watch us to keep us from getting hurt. Lastly, Satan tempts Jesus by saying that he would give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would simply lay flat on the ground and worship him.

As the New Adam, I would assume that Jesus’ temptation would have some similarities to the temptation Adam underwent. My theory is that God commanded Adam not to have relations with his wife. Barrenness was death for the Jews, and wanting to be like God who creates, the man and the woman, fearing the death of not having children, disobeyed God to obey God’s other command to be fruitful and multiply. Abraham and Sarah, after God promised them a son, waited twenty-five years, from the time he was 75 until he was 100, before God actually sent that promised son, Isaac. They were hungry for a son; they were so hungry that Abraham had a son through Sarah’s maid in an attempt to fulfill God’s promise.

How long did the man and the woman wait to have a child? It could have been a very long time. It could have been very short, or it could have been decades or even centuries. We don’t know. I speculate that it was a long time and that they were extremely hungry for a child, to be creative like God and fulfill God’s command to be fruitful. And Satan hit them were they were most weak. Jesus was hungry for bread, so Satan proposes that He make bread from stones. The man and the woman were hungry for a baby, so Satan proposes that they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to have one. And they do, and they name him “gotten,” which is Cain.

When you purposely throw yourself down from a great height to test God and make Him protect you against your own stupidity, you of course sin, and obviously you will get critically hurt. You will probably die. This is similar to what Adam did. Adam was created without sin and unaffected by death and sickness; he had a great dignity and was the very first human created. He took all that dignity, all that height, and threw it down by his sin. He disobeyed God’s singular prohibition; that is as smart as jumping off a cliff, and it has the same consequence—death. He, the father of the human family, becomes the father of death by his stupid sin. One other thing, Adam was made as a temple of God, and by his sin he threw himself down from such a dignity as temple of God; he was made from dirt, but he was made to be God's temple; he forsook being God's temple and choose to be dirt.

Lastly, Jesus was offered all the kingdoms of the world if He prostrated Himself before Satan. This, too, has parallels to what Adam did, according to my theory. If the Fall was having relations with his wife, the woman, then they both would have been prostrate on the ground, as it were. They did it through the wisdom of the serpent, and by trusting in him, they were choosing to worship him instead of God. That, then, covers the falling prostrate and worshipping Satan. What about the having the kingdoms of the world? What are kingdoms made up of? People. If there are no people, there certainly are no kingdoms. There wouldn’t even be a state, city, town, village or hamlet. Adam, hungry for a child, could have also been promised as part of his temptation to be the father of all the people of the earth. By his trust of and obedience to the wisdom of the serpent, if my theory is correct, Adam did become the father of all the earth and in that manner possess all the kingdoms of the earth. Everyone on the earth is a son of Adam, a son of man. So the Son of Man came to undo what Adam had done, making the sons of men into sons of God.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
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Total Surrender

The readings for Mass on this second day of Lent are worth examining. The first reading comes from the end section of the book of Deuteronomy; the reading is 30:15-20:

“Moses said to the people: ‘Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’.”

Moses tells us that we have a choice between life and death; if we obey and turn our hearts toward God, we will have life and blessing; if we disobey and turn our hearts away from God, we will have death and the curse. We will have life if we love God and heed His commands; an obedient, trusting and loving heart will be blessed and have life. Again, my theory that the tree of life is the heart finds resonance in this passage from Deuteronomy. When our heart turns toward God, clings to Him, loves Him, and obeys Him, we have life. God is the source of life, and when our heart is attune to Him, our heart receives His life. The heart is the vehicle through which God gives us His life.

The theme of the heart continues in the responsorial psalm; today’s psalm is Psalm 1:

“Blessed the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent, but delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on his law day and night. He is like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. Whatever he does, prospers. Not so the wicked, not so; they are like chaff which the wind drives away. For the LORD watches over the way of the just, but the way of the wicked vanishes.”

The one who despises God’s law disobeys God’s law and is a wicked, insolent sinner; he is like chaff which vanishes in the wind. The one who delights in God’s law and constantly thinks about it is blessed, and he is like a tree planted close to a river. His leaves do not fall off, and in season, he bears fruit. Delight comes from the heart, and we meditate and think about reality in our heart; Mary pondered all that happened to her in her heart. Therefore, when our heart loves what God loves, we are a fruitful tree. When we love, trust and obey God, our heart is a tree of life.

The gospel for today takes a slightly different, yet related, route. It comes from Luke 9:22-25, but I will only quote the second half of it:

“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”

Immediately before Jesus said this, He was telling His disciples about His crucifixion. When Jesus says we must take up our cross and follow Him, the place He is leading us is to our own crucifixion. When we are following Him with our cross on our back, we are not out for a joy ride and a relaxing, pampered destination. We are on the way to our very own complete self-offering on our very own Calvary. Jesus died not so that we don’t have to, but rather, He died so that we would have the heart to do what He did. Jesus’ mission is to give us a new heart, His very own heart, so that we too can be a self-sacrificing lover.

When someone tries to save his life, it signifies that he does not trust in God. When one gains the whole world, he is trying to control his life and not need God. This saving of our life and this gaining the world is another way of saying that one has abandoned God. If we seek life and try to save our life, death is our keep. The reason for this is that life comes through trust in God. Life does not come through ourselves or our abilities. The heart that trusts God is willing to face death, embrace his cross, and follow Jesus to Calvary. The heart that trusts God will lose his life, lose the world, lose himself, and become a pleasing sacrifice to God. In no other way is there life. The trusting heart is the tree of life.

There is no difficulty trusting if everything is easy and everything is just as I would have it. There is no trust when all is well and I have whatever my heart desires. There is no trust when I am doing exactly as I would like to do. There is no trust when it is “My will be done.” Trust enters the picture when it is “Thy will be done.” Trust enters the arena when it is “Not my will be done.” Trust enters our hearts when all we have to hold onto is God, when we are racked with pain and suffering, deprivation and discomfort, and shattered plans and empty hands. When life is easy, we are dead for we cling only to ourselves. When life is a whirlwind and a hurricane, we are fully alive for only then do we cling to God, He who is life and existence Himself.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta said on page 111 in the book, Jesus, The Word to Be Spoken words that I think resonate, in part, with what I have been saying:

“Total surrender to God must come in small details as it comes in big details. It’s nothing but that single word, ‘Yes, I accept whatever you give, and I give whatever you take.’ And this is just a simple way for us to be holy. We must not create difficulties in our own minds. To be holy doesn’t mean to do extraordinary things, to understand big things, but it is a simple acceptance, because I have given myself to God, because I belong to Him—my total surrender. He could put me here. He could put me there. He can use me. He cannot use me. It doesn’t matter because I belong so totally to him that he can do just what he wants to do with me.”

“Lent is a time when we relive the passion of Christ. Let it not be just a time when our feelings are roused, but let it be a change that comes through cooperation with God’s grace in real sacrifices of self. Sacrifice, to be real, must cost; it must hurt; it must empty us of self. Let us go through the passion of Christ day by day.”

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

Obedience is Facing Death: the Faith of Ananias

Both of the options for the first reading for tomorrow’s Mass for the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul come from the book of the Acts of the Apostles. A portion of one I would like to examine tonight:

Acts 9:10-19
There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight and ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul. He is there praying, and in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him, that he may regain his sight.” But Ananias replied, “Lord, I have heard from many sources about this man, what evil things he has done to your holy ones in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to imprison all who call upon your name.” But the Lord said to him, “Go, for this man is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel, and I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name.” So Ananias went and entered the house; laying his hands on him, he said, “Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came, that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. He got up and was baptized, and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.

Six days ago on January 18th, I talked about the readings of the day which dealt with Samuel as a boy responding to God’s call saying: “Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will.” This same refrain is taken up later in Psalm 40. Here, too, in Acts, we have the same response this time spoken by the faithful man, Ananias: “Here I am, Lord.” All followers of the Lord should present themselves each day to Him with these words. These words are simple and rather easy to say. Where these words lead is another matter.

These words say: “I will obey you, Lord, wherever you lead.” Sometimes He leads us into dangerous or terrifying or illogical places. He led Ananias into the mouth of the lion, Saul. Not long before, Saul oversaw and approved the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. Saul had come to Damascus to imprison Christians. Ananias knew this and protested to God that it was not a good idea to have anything to do with this Saul. God tells Ananias that Saul is His chosen instrument so Ananias must go to Saul. Prudence would tell one that this was not a good idea. Faithfulness, which is comfortable in the dark, would say that it is by obedience that we love God.

Stepping out in trust of God’s word and risking his very life, Ananias went to Saul and told him about Jesus. What trust in God Ananias had! And it was this act that played an important role in the conversion of the Great Apostle Paul. In Ananias’ obedience, very good fruit was borne.

Obedience is a very difficult matter to digest. If I tell you that you have to take the million dollars I am going to give you, you would not have too much trouble doing as I say and taking the money. If I told you that I wanted you to do whatever you wanted to do, that would not be too hard either. That has little to do with obedience. Obedience comes in to play when one is told to do something very difficult or what one would rather not do or what seems to go against all reason. True obedience brings about fullness life and joy; disobedience brings about death and destruction. Ananias faced the lion of obedience with the awesome power of a humble and trusting faith; he slayed the dragon with his faith, and he reaped a harvest of abundant fruit in the man, Saint Paul. It is the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God that bears much fruit and gives God’s life to the world.

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

"To Do Your Will, O My God, Is My Delight"

I want to say a few more words about Psalm 40, which was also last Sunday’s responsorial Psalm. The heart of Psalm 40 is the quote: “To do your will, O my God, is my delight.” It is a remarkable statement; would that all of us cherished that mentality within our heart.

There are two basic attitudes to God’s will: either disobedience or obedience. The former belongs to demons and Satan who said when tested: “I will not serve.” The latter belongs to the angels united to Saint Michael who said: “Who is like God? I will obey.” Michael literally means “who is like God.” Depending on whether we obey or disobey, decides to which side we align ourselves. Are we on the side of our own will, together with the demons, seeking our life and receiving only death and destruction? Or are we on the side of God’s will, together with the great hosts of angels and saints and all people of good will, seeking what pleases Him, denying ourselves and being enriched with His life?

On the side of those obeying, there are three basic levels or degrees of obedience. The first, the level of a slave, is not always faithful to God and often seeks to do his own will. A slave is worried about getting into trouble and is mostly concerned about not going to hell. If it weren’t for all God’s rules, the slave would have much more fun; whenever he can, the slave tries to get away with whatever he can. The slave asks, “How far can I go before I sin mortally?” The slave is reluctantly obedient; if it weren’t for hell, the slave would rather sin with abandon. Of course, it is better to be an obedient slave than to be disobedient.

The next level of obedience is the level of child of God, son or daughter of the Great King. Here, the son seeks to please his Heavenly Father and has left behind the poverty of the slave mentality. The son truly loves God and desires heaven. The son has peace and a unity with God in a similar manner to a father who has a close relationship with his son. It is in this environment that obedience begins to grow and flower and bear good fruit.

The culmination of obedience is when God becomes our spouse. When we have become one mind and heart with God, we desire what He desires and we say, “To do your will, O my God, is my delight.” God loves us with passion of a husband; this love led Him to His Passion. In His pursuit of us, we give ourselves entirely to Him and are ready to do whatever He seeks from us. Of course, obedience only really shows itself when something difficult, something we do not want to do, is asked of us. If it is something we want to do, there is not much obedience in that. Obedience comes alive when we are tested and we rise to the occasion. The spousal obedience does not mean that we have an easy path; on the contrary, Jesus was asked by His Father to endure the Passion; Jesus replied: “If possible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will, but Thine be done.” Spousal obedience with God is beautiful, but it always leads us where it led Our Savior: to the cross.

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

Reflections on Psalm 40: Delight in God's Will

There were some especially beautiful readings at Wednesday’s Mass which were taken from the first Book of Samuel and from Psalm 40. The first reading from Samuel comes from chapter three, and it is the story of the boy Samuel who is asleep while called three times by the Lord; each time Samuel thinks the elderly priest Eli is calling him. After the third time this happens, Eli realizes that God must be calling the boy, so Eli tells Samuel that the next time he is called he should say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” God calls a fourth time, and Samuel replies as instructed.

The selections from Psalm 40 revolve around this theme of obedience, and the response to the Psalm is the similar sentence: “Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.”

The first stanza is this: “I have waited, waited for the LORD, and he stooped toward me and heard my cry. Blessed the man who makes the LORD his trust; who turns not to idolatry or to those who stray after falsehood.” He who trusts in the Lord and is obedient toward Him will be patient as he waits and will remain forever faithful to Him. The obedient one will not go after false gods nor seek falsehood; he will cling to God and to the truth.

The second stanza is even more powerful: “Sacrifice or oblation you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Burnt offerings or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, ‘Behold I come’.” The slaughter of animals as sacrifices to God is not what He wants; those sacrifices were only necessary because the people were worshipping false gods symbolized by those animals; animal sacrifice was added because of idolatry. Attempting to keep the hearts of His people from straying after these false gods, God had them kill their gods so that they would be less encumbered by them and free to worship Him. The sacrifices were the means, and mostly a negative one, but the end is a heart that loves and obeys God. God seeks our obedience and our willingness to do whatever He asks us to do. Ultimately, God delights when we offer up our entire selves as a sacrifice to Him.

The third stanza is the power punch: “In the written scroll it is prescribed for me. To do your will, O my God, is my delight, and your law is within my heart!” This is what God wants of us; this is why He came and died for us. He has made this very thing possible. He desires us to delight in His will, to have His law within our heart. It is one thing to say, yes, I will obey. It is a whole higher level to say, Lord, I delight to please You. This is only possible with a heart transplant; God gives us a new heart, a new tree of life, so that we can love and obey Him.

We are not even talking about the slave mentality which says, I will obey because I do not want to get into trouble. This is better than disobedience, but it still comes from a heart of stone with the laws written on the outside. The worst is disobedience which is not doing God’s will. Next is the slave mentality which merely doesn’t want to get into trouble; although, when the opportunity arises, a slave is just as likely to disobey when he doesn’t think he will get caught.

A loving child will want to please his parents, and so he will obey because he knows the parents will be pleased. This is good, and it is a world away from the slave mentality. Coming to the knowledge that one is a beloved child of God is an awesome realization, and much good fruit will be borne if one continues down this path.

The highest level is delighting in pleasing God, delighting in His law, and delighting in God’s will. When we are pleased in the extreme simply in pleasing God, we have reached a mature faith. This is the stage, the final one, where we become espoused to Him and eventually married. Once God’s will becomes our will, and there is no longer two wills but one only, God’s, then we are fully alive as His beloved spouse. This is our goal, our hope, our summit, the reason for which we were created.

When we have reached this stage, it is completely normal to say as the Responsorial Psalm ends: “I announced your justice in the vast assembly; I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.” When God becomes the love of our life, we tell all the world.

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

The Bridegroom Has the Bride

Today I want to take a look at the readings of the Mass. I’ll start with the responsorial psalm, Psalm 149, which is the one that was the inspiration for the poem I posted on January 4. The response is, “The Lord takes delight in his people.” God loves His people, and his people sing, praise, rejoice, and dance for Him. The love is mutual and deep. Remember that Eden means delight and often has a spousal connotation. Here, again, God delights in his people and seeks us as His spouse.

The first reading is the conclusion of Saint John’s first letter. A few sentences before the end, he says, “We know that anyone begotten by God does not sin; but the one begotten by God he protects, and the Evil One cannot touch him. We know that we belong to God, and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One” (1 John 5:18-19). The Evil One has power over the entire world and can touch anyone within his power. The children of God are under the authority of God and are not subject to the Evil One. One is either a child of God and belongs to Him or a child of the Devil who belongs to him.

The children of God belong to God and so do not sin (at least not with mortal sin which he just finished explaining). He is not saying that God’s children never commit a mortal sin; the point is that belonging to God and sinning mortally are mutually exclusive. When a child of God sins mortally, he gets himself quickly to confession and makes everything right once again, or else he ceases to be a child of God (at least as long as he stays away from confession).

Once one is made a child of God in baptism, God protects us. He protects our heart so that we can know, love and serve Him, so that we can be faithful and obedient to His will. The woman in the garden was made from the rib, and as such, was made to protect the man’s heart and lead him to heaven. She did the exact opposite and betrayed her love with a kiss in the garden. Then God sent the angel to guard the way to the tree of life. This guarding by the angel is not to keep man from eating the tree of life; the guarding is the giving of our guardian angel who protects our heart, our tree of life, so that it stays faithful and true. His mission is to help us get to heaven, and there is no way there except via a trusting and obedient heart.

To protect us, we also have the New Eve, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the New Rib, Our Rib, who only leads us to her Divine Son and shows us how to love, trust and obey Jesus. There is no greater human protector of our heart than Mary; she is the true port in the storms of life. Her heart was sorely tested on numerous occasions, and it was spiritually crucified during at least two trials of faith. She knows what it takes to have a healthy and fruit-bearing tree of life, and she longs to protect our trees of life so that they can be a true and holy home for God and give birth to Christ in our life.

John’s gospel today has a very powerful sentence: “The one who has the bride is the bridegroom; the best man, who stands and listens for him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice” (John 3:29). John the Baptist is saying that he is the best man and Jesus is the groom. The groom is the one who ends up with the bride, and together they start a family and have children. Jesus’ bride is the Church; He will always remain faithful to her, even when she is not faithful to Him. He will never, nor has He ever, divorced her; He gave up His life for her, and He will remain with her to the end.

As each of us is one of her members, in that manner Jesus takes us on as a bride, too. All followers of Christ, all members of the Church, are thereby also His brides; we are brides in the one bride, the Church. This is the way it was from the very beginning. As God says in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image.” Being made in God’s image means that God made us to be His spouse. Jesus comes to fulfill, above all else, this reality that was from the very beginning, from the very first words of the very first sentence that has anything to do with man in the Bible. We are made to be God’s spouse, and so now the Divine Bridegroom has come to take us to Himself. All we have to do is give ourselves to Him in return, as a bride gives herself to her bridegroom. If we do and only if we do, will we bear good fruit.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
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We Keep His Commandments

The end of today’s reading from the first Letter of Saint John struck me: “For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers the world is our faith” (5:3-4). If we replace “keep his commandments” with “obedience,” it would say, “The love of God is shown in our obedience to Him.” Jesus said the same thing: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). We show our love through our obedience.

Love gurgles up from a faithful heart that obeys; therefore, God’s laws are not difficult because we have conquered the world through our faith and become His children. When we love God above all things, then we want to please Him above all else, even over all the allurements of the world. In seeking His will only, we conquer the world and faithfully obey our Heavenly Father’s every command.

The united and interwoven themes today are love, obedience, faith, and God’s children. It is the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5 & 16:26) that reveals and proves our love, the love of a child for His father. Jesus came to make us children of God and a new creation and to give us a new heart, a new tree of life that loves and trusts in Him and so obeys Him. Now we can draw close to God and give ourselves entirely to Him; He gives us the grace to become one with Him. That union is a foretaste of heaven. That union, when it comes to complete fruition, is the mystical marriage when our heart and will and life are totally taken up into God. Therein is pure peace and joy. That is the goal of life.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
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A Living Sacrifice

God promised a son to Abraham when he was seventy-five, and God gave him that son twenty-five years later when he was 100 years old. Isaac grew up and became a strong young man. “After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you’” (Genesis 22:1-2).

Abraham had failed his first major trail of faith fifteen years before when he listened to the voice of his wife and went in to her maid to try to fulfill God’s promise. Ishmael was the fruit, and circumcision was his penitential punishment and symbolized what needed to happen to his heart. This, now, is Abraham’s second chance to live by faith, eat of the tree of life, and trust God in the face of death. God’s asking Abraham to sacrifice his son is the fulfillment of what circumcision symbolized: a heart of faith that trusts and obeys God even when intellectually it makes no sense.

What is the significance of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son? This was the promised son who took twenty-five years for an elderly barren couple to birth at the ages of 100 and ninety. They had waited what seemed like forever, and all human hope had long ago vanished that they would ever conceive a baby. When they heard of the updated promise that he was still going to come to them, they simply laughed. It was preposterous that a ninety-nine and eighty-nine year old should conceive a son, so all they could do was laugh. And they did.

Beyond just the extremely long and impossible waiting for the promised son, this son was incredibly important. This was the boy through whom God had promised to make Abraham a multitude of nations and a father of descendants greater than the sands on the sea shore. This Isaac and no other was the one who would marry, have a family, and be the beginning of an enormous number of people. This Isaac was the one God asked Abraham to sacrifice.

This makes no human sense. God had promised both to give Abraham a son and that this son would be father of an innumerable quantity of descendants; it is similar to God’s command for our first parents to be fruitful and multiply. God then asks Abraham to kill this son which God had given him; this is similar to God asking our first parents and Mary to remain virgins (which normally means one is not going to have children). All of these appear to be contradictory commands/directives from God. They don’t make sense. Our intellect does not know how to handle this discrepancy.

All Abraham has left is his faith to pass this test. He has to eat of his tree of life, which is to believe in his heart that God knows what He is doing, and obey what God asks of him. “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.’ He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead” (Hebrews 11:17-19). Abraham’s descendants would come through Isaac, so if God asked him to sacrifice Isaac, God must be planning to raise Isaac from the dead. That is how much Abraham believed in God, that, even though he had never seen it, Abraham believed that God would raise his son from the dead.

The quest for a son that Abraham embarks on many years before comes to completion here when he offers up his only son, Isaac. This quest and Abraham’s faithfulness in the face of his only son’s death, is one of the very most important events in the Old Testament. God stops the hand of Abraham, and He Himself provides the sacrifice: a ram caught by its horns in a thorn bush. This prefigures what God will ultimately do when He sends His only Son crowned by thorns. Abraham’s sacrifice is also the first Passover, for Isaac was passed over. It is his faithfulness which brings down God’s blessings and grace and is the reason for the Israelites’ Passover which set them free from Egypt.

May we eat of the tree of life and so imitate our self-sacrificing Savior and bring down God’s grace and blessings to all those around us; let us offer up our bodies in penance and lay them down in the service of others; let us be willing to be a sacrifice as Isaac was, and if God sees fit, let us be a sacrifice as Jesus was. There is the prayer of the heart, and there is the prayer of the body; we need both, and together they are very powerful. “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (Romans 12:1).


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

"He is Like a Tree:" Reflections on Psalm 1

Tonight I want to examine Psalm One. This is the very first psalm, as you might have already guessed, and as such initiates the series of psalms known as the book of prayer. I think its pole position in this collection of 150 others is no small matter. Let’s see what this rather short psalm says.

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

First, on the negative side, a man is blessed if he does not delight in what delights the wicked; the way of the wicked will quickly die and be wiped away like so much flimsy dust. Second, on the positive side, the blessed man will delight in and continually ponder what pleases God; as such, he will be known by God—he will be of one heart and mind with Him. Instead of being dead dust like the sinner, the righteous man will be a fruitful tree near flowing water that bears its fruit regularly.

Death results from what sinners do, how the wicked think, and how scoffers are proud of heart. To have life and bear fruit, one must be obedient, believe in God’s words and laws, and be humble of heart. The tree of life is the heart, so those who shun this tree by disobedience, pride and unbelief, produce only death. When one embraces the tree of life and eats from it by obedience, belief, and humility, abundant fruit are produced. The heart of flesh, the living tree of life, loves God and the things of God and spends all its energies on knowing God better. As the four rivers were used to symbolize the heart/tree of life in Genesis 2, so here the tree of life/heart is closely linked with living/flowing water and abundant fruit. The one who seeks God with his whole heart and inwardly cries out to Him night and day continues to grow and bear fruit, in fact, everything that he does brings success in the true sense of the word.

The message of this first entry into the Book of Prayer is to open your heart to God and give your entire self to Him by believing in Him, being so in love with Him that you meditate on Him continually, humbly listening to all that pleases Him, and faithfully obeying His commands and wishes. Therein lies life, life to the full. A heart that has God as its one, primary desire, is a fruitful tree, bearing much beautiful fruit. I think of Saint Therese of Liseux and her beautiful little way of drawing ever so close to the Beloved.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.

Bear Fruit For God

Paul says in his letter to the Romans: "Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God" (7:4). The context for this quote is marriage and how one is bound to one's spouse as long as the spouse is alive. If one's spouse dies, he is free to marry. In a similar manner, we have died to our old spouse so we may now belong to another, Christ.

How did we die? In baptism as it says a chapter earlier in Romans: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (6:3-4).

The situation is this: we were married and it wasn't to God. God made us to be married to Him, but with sin we ended up in bondage to sin and satan and the law which was added due to sin. The only way to escape that bondage is for either one of us to die, but that seems impossible. There is no way out with our adversary ready to devour us. A symbol of this in the Old Testament is when the Israelites were up against the Red Sea unarmed and loaded down with goods and little ones while Pharaoh's highly trained and highly agitated army readied itself to revenge the death of all their first-born. All hope was lost. Yet God broke in and saved Israel through the water while at the same time destroying their enemy. This is a symbol of baptism.

We are married to a tyrannical murderer who hates us with a complete hatred and only wants to destroy us; he is not going to die, and if we die, well then we are dead. So God becomes one of us, dies on the cross, and is raised from the dead. In a spiritual and real way, we are united to Jesus in both His death and resurrection through baptism. Jesus provides us a way to die so that we are no longer bound to sin and satan as spouse, and then we are free to marry another and have Him as our spouse.

We walk in newness of life because we have become a new creation in baptism and have been married to a new spouse. United to our new husband, Jesus, we are now able to bear fruit for God. "Thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart ... having been set free from sin..." (Romans 6:17-18). The place we bear good fruit is in our tree of life which is our heart. Our old stony heart has died, and with our new creation we have been given a new, living, loving, obedient heart of flesh with God's law written upon it; now we desire and seek to please God, our spouse, since we love Him and want to make Him happy.

One of the main points of the entire Old Testament is that man was entrapped by sin and that his heart was hard and unbelieving; the point is that we needed a new heart. Jesus responds to that problem by giving us a new heart, His very heart, so that we can eat of the tree of life once again and love and trust God no matter what test we have to undergo. Now we are given the heart, the courage, to lay down our life for another and be faithful to God to the point of shedding our blood in love of Him. With Him and His heart beating within us, we may bear fruit for God.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.

MY MAIN THEORY--THE HEART OF WHAT I AM SAYING

Immediately following the first mention of the tree of life in Genesis Two, God tells us about the four rivers. This is a symbolic geographical representation of our physical heart. After discussing the heart, the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is given for the first time. The very next thing God does is seek a suitable partner/helper; none of the beasts of the field or birds of the air would do. Then God takes one of the man's ribs, makes it into the woman, and presents her to the man as the sought-after helper for the man who responds "At last." The pattern I see here is: mention the tree of life followed by a presentation of the four rivers and worshipping and obeying; mention of not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil followed by the presentation of the woman. There seems to be a connection between this second tree and the woman.

If man is God's Eden/delight, with a garden planted in the east/front of the man, the first tree in our fronts is the heart/tree of life. By worshipping, obeying, trusting, and loving God with our hearts, we bear good fruit in the good things we do. How else do humans bear fruit? What else could be a tree planted in our front in the middle that would be a source of production? What is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Is it possible to know? If we don't know yet after thousands of years, why would we find out now?

I think it is possible to know; not with an absolute, certitude and with a perfect logical syllogism, but there are many clues that point to what it is, and many realities make sense and fit together once it is understood. It is as I think Cardinal Newman said something such as: it is so based on 10,000 convergences; nothing directly spells it out, but almost everything points to the reality being thus.

So what do I think the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, and what does the woman have to do with it? I think it is an idiom referring to sexual knowledge, i.e. intercourse. Marital relations, it could be argued, is the greatest natural good of this world; it is so good and great that Paul says it is a great mystery referring to the relationship between Christ and His Church (Eph). The test God is giving the man and the woman is two seemingly contradictory commands: be fruitful and multiply and do not have marital relations. This does not seem to make sense: presto, we have our grand trial of faith and the bypassing of the intellect. All that is left is to see if they will eat of the tree of life and believe that what God has commanded them is good for them. Of course, they did not trust.

I will explain my thoughts on this much much more, but for now I want to draw your attention to Mary, the New Eve. I think she underwent the very same test. After explaining her test as I see it, I will call it a night and give you more to ponder soon.

Mary's Test
I'll try to make this brief. The first principle to understand is that when God makes us to be something, that is what we will be good at and that is what we will desire. Among other things, God made me to be a husband, a father and a teacher, and it is those things which I desire. God made her to be the mother of His Son and the mother of the Church; as such, she was created as the most exalted mother of all human history. Being created to be the most exalted mother means that she would have desired to be a mother more than any person who has ever or will ever exist.

The second principle of my understanding of Mary is that she consecrated herself as a perpetual virgin and arranged with Joseph that they would remain virgins perpetually in their marriage. The reason I think this together with the Chuch Fathers is that her response to the Angel Gabriel does not make sense unless this were the case. In the first chapter of Luke, Gabriel says to Mary that she will conceive and he uses five other future tenses when telling her what will happen in the future. He does not say or imply that this will happen right now.

Mary replies, "How shall this be, since I have no husband." She says this when she was already betrothed to Joseph; in many respects what they understood as betrothal, we would understand as marriage. In fact, if they wanted to end the betrothal, a certificate of divorce was required. It was perfectly normal to get pregnant during this time; that is why Mary does not get into any trouble being only betrothed and pregnant. The only significant difference between betrothal and marriage was that the bride had not permanently moved in with her husband yet. Even if she just had to wait until they were officially married, then she could conceive just fine and would expect to do so. It makes no sense for her to say she will not be able to conceive a son since she will not have a husband. She already has a husband! She has just made a life-long commitment never to have sexual relations.

This was the test then: she who longed to be a mother more than anyone ever to exist, knew that God was asking her to commit herself to Him as a perpetual virgin. In her heart she was told to be fruitful and multiply while at the same time not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For the people of the Old Testament, not having children was tantamount to death. One was considered cursed if barren. There was little worse in this life than to not pass life on to ones offspring. In Mary's acceptance of virginity, she would have thought that she had given up her greatest desire (other than union with God):children. Her acceptance of virginity was her crucifixion.

The Annunciation is Mary's Reward, Not Her Test
As soon as Mary and Joseph agreed and permanently decided to never have relations, then the angel Gabriel payed his visit. In offering Mary to be the Mother of God, there was nothing more pleasing to her in all creation. Her hesitation was that she did not understand how it was going to happen because she knew God wanted her to remain a virgin. As soon as she knew that God would provide the Son, she said yes. Never in the history of man was there ever such a joyous and receptive yes as that amen at the Annunciation. Her greatest desire had just been granted.

Mary's test was sacrificing that which was most dear to her on this earth, and her reward was getting that very thing but multiplied infinitely. The first Eve tried to gain her life by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and received death and a son named Cain. The New Eve lost her life for love of God and gave up that which she held most dear and was given the very Son of God as a reward for passing the most difficult test in man's history.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil Must Have Been Good

The only point I am going to make tonight is that the tree must have been good. God told them not to eat of a good tree. If it were in any way bad, the man and woman would not have been attracted to it. They were only attracted to the good; they only wanted the good. The crux of the test was believing that abstaining from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was good for them, for why would God command them not to eat of a good tree? If God truly was looking out for the man and woman's best interest, why would He forbid them to eat of a good tree?

I would suggest that it wasn't just a good tree but the best tree. It was the greatest of all natural goods on this earth. Now the case is stronger: why would God forbid us to eat of the best tree? That is something that does not make sense; all they are left with is the decision to trust in God or not to trust. Faced with that scenario, they turned their hearts from God and trusted in the wisdom of the serpent. They did not eat of the tree of life, i.e. they did not have faith in God and so obey Him. Instead, they hardened their hearts and ate the good tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.