Saint Thomas tells us that our reason looking out upon the order of the universe immediately concludes there is some governor behind it. As the mind concludes to a watchmaker on seeing the watch, so, too, it concludes to a Divine Mind on seeing the order of the cosmos. This immediate knowledge of God, however, is not clear and distinct; that is why a more refined study is necessary to bring out the nature of God. The distinction between this confused knowledge of God and the reflex-refined knowledge that comes with the formal proofs for His existence is very much like the difference between the knowledge that most people have of water and the knowledge that the chemist has of it as composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.
Reason clearly used can prove that there is a Power behind the universe, which made it, a Wisdom directing its laws, and a Will to make all things attain their goal. God is closer to us than we know, "For in him we live, and move, and are." - Acts 17:28 - Saint Teresa once said, "Some unlearned people used to say to me that God was present only by His grace. I could not believe that because as I was saying, He seemed to me to be present Himself. Finally, a learned man delivered me of his doubt for he told me that He was present in the world and in us and how He communed with us, and this was a great comfort to me."
Francis Thompson, the poet, elaborating on the idea of Saint Thomas that God is in all things intimately wrote,
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
God is easy to discover in at least a confused and primitive sort of way through every striving and aspiration of our will and our heart. For the great difference between an animal and a human is that an animal can have its desires satisfied but a human cannot. All that any animal wants is to have its immediate needs granted; man wants their immediate needs granted too, but wanted more and much, much more. This is never the case with man. Man is animated by an urge, an unquenchable desire to enlarge his/her vision and to know the ultimate meaning of things. If man were only an animal, he/she would never use symbols, for what are these but attempts to transcend the visible? No, man is a 'metaphysical animal' a being ever longing for answers to the last question. The natural tendency of the intellect toward truth and of the will toward love would alone signify that there is in man a natural desire for God. There is not a single striving or pursuit or yearning of the human heart, even in the midst of the most sensual pleasures, that is not a dim grasping after the Infinite. As the stomach yearns for food and the eye for light and the ear for harmony, so the soul craves God.
There are many who mistake the nature of this Infinite and seek to satisfy the craving elsewhere than in God, just as there are those who know that food is necessary for the stomach and nevertheless ruin their stomachs by constant diet of gin. Many a soul is like a magnetic needle that quivers first here, then there, seeking at morning when it flees at night, and then, finding all the other compass points to be fraud, it comes at last to rest in God alone.
God is not hard to find, because He gives Himself to us as the Divine Gift. Natural life is a gift. The soul has to come into the body from without, directly as a gift from the hands of God. And the supernatural life, too, is given to us from without. The whole meaning of Christianity is contained in the simple phrase of the creed, "He descended from Heaven." To each single soul, Our Lord addresses the words He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well: "If you knew the gift of God, and it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." - John 4:10 - As Saint Paul told the Romans, "The grace of God, life everlasting, in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Rom. 6:23 - And later on, to the Ephesians, "By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God." - Eph. 2:8 -
God presented simultaneously through the Sacred Scripture as both the Gift and the Giver, for such is the nature of Love. No one can buy the Divine Gift (though one may sell it, after it had been received, as Judas did) If God's gift were truth alone, some feeble minds might shrink from seeking it. If the gift were justice alone, our sins might arise and frighten the gift away. But when God's gift is love, then there should be none who would not take His Heart as theirs.
If, then, God is so easy to find and can be discovered either through the beauty of the stars or in every tiny pleasure of earth, which like a seashell speaks of the ocean of Divinity, why is it that so few souls come to Him? The fault is on our side, not God's. Most souls are like people living in a dark room during the daytime and complaining that the light is hard to find - when all that they need to do to discover it, is to raise the blinds.
God is the most obvious fact of human experience. If we are not aware of Him, it is because we are too complicated and because our noses are lifted high in the air in pride, for lo! He is at our very feet. We need only to "turn a stone and start a wing." The grace of God comes to us in just the degree that we open our souls to it; the only limit to our capacity to receive Him is our willingness to do so. Some thirsty hearts open up once only a crevice, while others, with complete abandon, surrender their empty cisterns to be filled with the waters of life. A few souls suffocate, locked in their own unconscious minds with their loathe-some frustrations and fears, refusing to open the door and let in the refreshing air of God's grace."Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me." - Rev. 3:20 -
The latch is on our side and not on God's, for God breaks down no doors. We bar His entrance. Sometimes we even run away from Him, like chicks in flight from a mother hen. "How often have I desired to gather your children together as hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" - Matt. 23:37 -
Why do we behave so? It is hard to believe, but we have the Divine warrant for it that some people "love darkness rather than light." The added tragedy of sin is that after we do wrong we may not let God help us to do what is right and good. We smash the bow so that He cannot play on our violin. We keep Him at arm's length because we refuse to be loved. We are drowning and will not clutch at His helping Hand because in our pride we say that we must "work this thing out for ourselves." The truth of the matter is, not that God is hard to find, but rather that we are afraid of being found. That is why we so very often hear in the Sacred Scripture the words "Fear not." At the very beginning of Divine life in Bethlehem, the angels found it necessary to warn the shepherds, "Fear not." In the midst of Our Lord's public life He had to tell his frightened Apostles, "Fear not." And after His Resurrection He had to preface His words on peace with the same injunction, "Fear not."
Our Lord finds it necessary to warn us not to fear because there are three fears that keep us away from God: ( 1 ) We want to be saved, but not from our sins. ( 2 ) We want to be saved, but not at too great a cost. ( 3 ) We want to be saved, but in our own way, not God.
( 1 ) We want to be saved, but not from our sins. - The great fear that many souls have of Our Divine Lord is for fear He will do just what his name, "Jesus" implies - be "He Who saves us from our sins." We are willing to be saved from poverty, from war, from ignorance, from disease, from economic insecurity;, such types of salvation leave our individual whims and passions and concupiscence untouched. That is one of the reasons why social Christianity is so very popular, why there are many who contend that the business of Christianity is to do nothing but to help in slum clearance or the development of international amity.
This kind of religion is, indeed, very comfortable, for it leaves the individual conscience alone. It is even possible that some peoples are prompted to courageous reforms of social injustices by the very inquietude and uneasiness of their individual consciences: Knowing that something is wrong on the inside, they attempt to compensate for it by righting the wrong on the outside. This is also the mechanism of those peoples, who, having accumulated great fortunes, try to ease their consciences by subsidizing revolutionary movements.
The first temptation of Satan on the Mount was to try to induce Our Lord to give up the salvation of souls and to concentrate upon social salvation by turning stones into bread - on the false assumption that it was hungry stomachs and not corrupted hearts that made an unhappy civilization. Because some people think that the primary purpose of Divinity is to relieve economic adversity, they go to God in the moment of trial and then rebel against God because He does not fill their purses. Sensing a broader need for religion, others are willing to join a Christian sect so long as it concentrates on social "uplift" or the elimination of pain but leaves untouched the individual need of atoning for sin. At the average dinner table people do not object to the subject of religion being introduced into a conversation - provided that religion has nothing to do with the purging of sin and guilt. Thus many frightened souls stand trembling at the gate of bliss and dare not venture in, "fearful lest having Him they have naught else besides."
( 2 ) We want to be saved, but not at too great a cost. -
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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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