Pentecost is Coming: Come Holy Spirit!

The Great Feast of Pentecost is Coming. Keep Praying: Come Holy Spirit!

Today at the Pope's Wednesday general audience, he said that, "the Church is always, so to say, in a state of Pentecost. Gathered in the Cenacle, she prays incessantly to obtain ever new effusions of the gifts of the Holy Spirit ... and is not afraid to announce the Gospel to the furthest confines of the earth. This is why, faced with difficulties and divisions, Christians cannot resign themselves or give way to discouragement." The Church, in a certain way, is always in the upper room praying to God to send the Consoler. We are always asking that the Holy Spirit renews the face of the earth, starting with our own hearts. Our renewed heart is not afraid. In the face of trails and roadblocks, we are not afraid to proclaim the Gospel to all the nations.

Benedict XVI continued: "This is what Christ asks of Christians: to persevere in prayer in order to keep alive the flame of faith, hope and charity...." Continuing in our daily prayer and in our hourly prayer and in our minute by minute prayer, we stay alive. Prayer is the breath of the soul. Our bodies require that we breathe rather regularly and frequently, almost daily. We only need to pray as often as we breathe.

I haven't been writing as much lately. The main point of my book and my blog is that God wants to marry each one of us. That marriage only happens through a deep and regular prayer life and radical commitment to the One we love more than anything or anyone else. And I am saying that this is for everyone. That got me thinking. I figured that I should at the very least get my own prayer life in better shape. If I am telling everyone else that they are called to deep communion with God, I should have a deeper relationship with Him myself. How can I tell everyone else that they should be doing it when I am not doing it?

I haven't stopped. I've just begun. Also, I'm not living my faith life in a totally inept manner; I would be a much bigger jerk and idiot if I were.

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

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.

I Got a Comment!

Since this comment is buried in an old post, and since I am so long-winded in my answer, I thought it best to use it as my post tonight so others could read it and in case others had a similar question. Let me know what you think.

Mary Anne asked: "Who creates one's soul, then? Is is a mere natural entity? or one that springs from Satan?"

I responded:

Hello Mary Anne,

God is the Creator, and He still is the one to create us, both body and soul. Satan has no part in creation, nor is he capable of creating anything, other than a mess. He is a powerful and potent creature, but he is still only a creature and a twisted and, in the true sense, impotent one, too.

What I am saying is that God creates the soul, and the soul is meant to be a home for Him. The original plan was virginal conception wherein God would provide the fruit; thus, the children would be born His true children and endowed with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is not made to be passed on through physical generation, so once Adam and Eve chose the route of having children through physical generation, children were born without grace. Because they trusted in the wisdom of the serpent to achieve this new life of a son in direct disobedience to the one command, they somehow covenanted themselves to satan. Satan, thus, steals God's spouse and takes us to himself, in some sense. Humanity, then, is stuck in a deed-end relationship with an evil master bent on destroying us without any human hope for escape; this is symbolized when the Israelites were trapped up against the Red Sea with the Egyptian army bearing down upon them to slaughter them...and God saved them through the water of the Red Sea. The passage to a new life, the destruction of the enemy, is what happens in baptism wherein we are born again, born from above, and made God's actual children.

Baptism frees us from our bondage from sin and satan so that we can belong to our new spouse, Jesus. Then we spend the rest of our time in the desert on our way to the Promised Land being fed by the bread from heaven, the Eucharist.

I am not sure I have answered your question.

What I am saying is that the soul is created by God, but it is empty. It is made to house God's life, but we are born without that sanctifying grace. Satan doesn't do any creating; all he does is steal God's spouse, and as such, he has some claim against us so we are not free to go to heaven. Since in baptism we are born again, our old self dies thus breaking the bond we had with the serpent. Baptism frees us to be united to our One True Spouse.

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