This fear that God's love will make exorbitant demands accounts for the many learned men and women who have come to a knowledge of God, yet have refused to venture in His sheepfold. The world is full of scholars who speak about extending the frontiers of knowledge but who never use the knowledge that has already been acquired; who love to knock at the door of truth but would drop dead if that door ever opened to them. For truth implies responsibility. Every gift of God in the natural as well as in the supernatural order demands a response on the part of the soul. In the natural order, people refuse to accept the gift of friendship because it creates an obligation. God's gift likewise involves a moment of decision. And because accepting Him demands a surrender of what is base, many become bargain hunters in religion and dilettantes in morality, refusing to tear false idols from their own hearts. They want to be saved, but not at the price of a cross; there echoes through their lives the challenge of old, "Come down from the Cross and we will believe."
( 3 ) We want to be saved, but in our own way, not God's. - Very often one hears it said that people ought to be free to worship God, each in his own way. This indeed is true, so far as it implies freedom of conscience and each person's duty of living up to the special lights that God has given him. But it can be very wrong if it means that we worship God in our way and not in His. Consider an analogy: The traffic situation would be tangled and desperate if we said that the American way of life allowed every person to drive a car in his or her way and not according to the traffic laws. Catastrophe would result if patients began saying to the doctors, "I want to be cured in my own way, but not in yours" or if citizens said to the government, "I want to pay my taxes, but in my own way and not in yours." Similarly, there is a tremendous egotism and conceit in those popular articles and lectures entitled "My Idea of Religion" or "My Idea of God." An individual religion can be misleading and uninformed as an individual astronomy or an individual mathematics.
Persons who say, "I will serve God in my way, and you serve God in your way" ought to inquire whether it would not be advisable to serve God in God's Way. But it is precisely this prospect of a stable, universally true religion that frightens the modern soul. For if his conscience is uneasy, he wants, instead, a religion that will leave out hell. If he has already married again against the law of Christ, he wants a means that a person wants to be saved, not in God's way, but in his. In thus refusing to moult his vain desires, he misses the flight to that "Love that leaves all other beauty pain."
If many souls fail to find God because they want a religion that will remake society without remaking themselves, or because they want a Savior without a cypress crown and a cross, or because they want their own blueprints and not God's, it remains to inquire what happens to a soul when it does not respond to God. Among many other effects several may be mentioned.
First, such a soul passes from a state of speculation to submission. It is no longer troubled with the why of religion, but with the ought. It wishes to please, not merely to parse Divinity. There is a world of difference between knowing about God through study and knowing God through love - as great as the difference between a courtship carried on by mail and one by personal contact. Many skeptical professors know the proofs of the existence of God better than some who say prayers; but because the professors never acted on the knowledge that they had, because they never loved the God Whom they knew by study, no new knowledge of God was given to them. They liked to talk about religion but did nothing about it, and their knowledge remained sterile as a result.
With the God-responsive soul on the contrary, a little knowledge about God was received with love. As a result, new portals of wisdom and love were opened. In such souls, the love of God brings a knowledge of God that in its certitude and reality surpasses the theoretical information of the professor. The sublime truth is expressed in Sacred Scripture: "If any man love God, the same is known by him" - 1Cor. 8:3 - (The woman at the well was an early skeptic: Wanting to keep religion on a purely speculative level, she raised the question as to whether one should worship in Jerusalem or Samaria. Our Blessed Lord took the discussion out of the realm of theory by talking about her five husbands, reminding her that she had avoided making the moral amendments that true religion demands.)
The God-responsive soul thinks of religion in terms of submission to the will of God. He does not look to the Infinite to help him in his finite interests but, rather, seeks to surrender his finite interests to the infinite. His prayer is "Not my will, but Thine, be done, O Lord." No longer interested in using God, he wants God to use him. Like Mary, she says, "Be it done unto me according to Thy Word" or like Paul he asks, "What will you have me to do, O Lord?" or like John the Baptist he says, "I must decrease, He must increase." The destruction of egotism and selfishness so that the whole mind may thus be subject to the Divine Personality does not entail a disinterest in the active life; it brings a greater interest, because the person now understands life from God's point of view. Because of his unity with the Divine Source of energy, he has greater power to do good - as a soldier is stronger under a great general than a poor one. "If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will and it shall be done unto you. In this is my Father glorified; that you bring forth very much fruit." - John 15:7-8 - It is hard for self-centered creatures to realize that there are some souls that are really and truly passionately in love with God. But this should not be so hard to understand; whoever loves the light and heat of the candle should surely love the sunlight even more.
Life for God-responsive souls now begins to move from a circumference to a center. The externals of life, such as politics, economics and its daily routine, matter less, while God matters more. This does not mean that humanity is unloved, but only that it is loved more in God. The now-moment becomes a servant to the Eternal-moment. The uninteresting, the unreal, is now what is not used or cannot be used for God's purpose. There is no dart in the quiver of a Godly soul for anything but the Divine Target.
The very reproaches the egotists hurl upon the saintly are devices for covering up their own self-reproach - they suspect they ought to understand. Yet they scoff, as sometimes people say of human loves, "I cannot understand what he sees in her." Of course not - for love is blind! It is blind not only to defects in the beloved; it is also blind to all but the beloved. Love has its own eyes. All others but the lover see only with the eyes of the body and wonder what there is to love. But the lover sees through the eyes of the heart and finds in the other a sweetness and a love that blind hearts do not perceive. Lift this analogy to the Divine level, and one understands why the uncovered souls think Divine Love is foolishness; they cannot see what a saint can see in God.
The secret of our happiness is centeredness. The God-responsive soul becomes deaf to the promptings of the senses, for to him God is everything. Like great cosmic dynamos these souls generate energy by which other souls on the circumference can live. Pope Pius XI, speaking of the contemplative souls, said, "It is easy to understand how they who assiduously fulfill the duty of prayer and penance contribute much more to the increase of the Church and the welfare of mankind than those who labor in the tilling of the Master's field. For unless the former drew down from heaven a shower of Divine graces to water the field that is being tilled, the evangelical laborers would indeed reap from their toil a more scanty crop."
The truly God-centered soul is not governed merely by its own habits of goodness or even by its virtues; it is moved directly by the Spirit of God. There is a difference between a person rowing a boat and the same person being driven by a sail full of wind; the soul that lives by the Gifts of the Spirit is swept forward directly by God, rather than by its own reason. Such a soul has a wisdom that surpasses all book learning, as was the case of young Catherine of Alexandria, who confounded the philosophers. Such a soul is endowed with a prudence and a counsel that is wiser than anything derived from its own experience.
Philosophy explains this in greater clarity. Every mind has two sides, a speculative side, which studies theory, and a practical side, which directs and guides human affairs. A sinful life does not destroy the first; that is why an evil person can be as good a mathematician as can a saint. But an evil life ruins the practical intellect; hence a learned mathematician who turns to writing on moral s and religion is often a bundle of confusion. The God-directed person, because his practical intellect as well as his speculative intellect is illumined by God, is capable of guiding and directing others better than persons who know more, but in a purely theoretical fashion.
Not everyone can give guidance - the divorced cannot guide the married; the teacher or psychologist whose heart is not purified cannot guide the young. "If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit." - Matt. 15:14 - Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from someone who does not say his prayers, even though he or she might know a thousand times more about a ganglion or a thyroid than the person of prayer. As the eye with the telescope can see the stars better than the naked eye, so the faith-illumined reason understands reality better than the naked reason.
Divine wise souls often infuriate the worldly-wise because they always see things from the Divine point of view.
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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