A Joyful Attitude

I was reading todays meditation from In Conversation With God by Francis Fernandez. It talks about how our attitude affects others. "Alongside charity we have to also show the world our joy...It is essential to the apostolate. Who would be attracted by a sad and negative critic or gloomy complainer?" (Ouch! I resemble that, as the saying goes, much of time.) "The apostolic fruitfulness of the first Christians was the result, in good part, at their joy in being heralds of the Good News. They were the messengers of the One who had brought salvation to the world. They shone forth as happy people in the middle of a world in anguish. Their happiness spread abroad their faith in Christ. It was a special gift that they shared in their families and among their friends....at every moment, since it was their reason for living."

I had to cringe reading this, thinking back on today as I grumbled and whined at work when it got hectic. I catch myself doing that a lot. I have to make a conscious effort to correct that! What do I have to complain about? I have a job, family, roof over my head and most of all my heavenly Father who is always there for me.

"Let us ask ourselves whether we reflect Christian joy in our ordinary life. We have so many reasons for being happy: the wonder of our divine filiation, the comfort of divine mercy, the knowledge that we are on the road to heaven..., the joy of being able to receive communion often!"

I think I definitely need an attitude adjustment. Per St. Josemaria Escriva in The Forge, number 858: "The first step in bringing others to the ways of Christ is for them to see you happy and serene, sure in your advance towards God." Bingo.

Neverending Light

Jesus, Light of the World
This is one light that will never go out
Fr. Tom Forrest, C.Ss.R

 I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me a long time ago. I had to take a plane trip from Boston to New York City. I got on the plane, and everything began to progress in the usual way. We got clearance from the tower, moved away from the gate, rolled out onto the tarmac, and then stopped moving. And we sat there, and we sat there, and we sat there. Finally, I looked out the window and what I saw was absolute darkness. There wasn’t a single light on in the airport. All the lights had gone out. Then the pilot came on the speaker system and told us that not only were there no lights in the airport, there were no lights anywhere in the city of Boston, anywhere in the state of Massachusetts, or anywhere in the New England region of the United States.

It was the “Great Blackout of New England.” That whole corner of the United States, where sixty or seventy million people lived, was suddenly without light. So, I had to get off the airplane and with great care find my way back to the house where I had been staying. There were no street lights. Traffic was jammed up at every corner. No electric trains were working. There was very little security protection for the people on the streets. Elevators in skyscrapers stopped wherever they were, most of them between floors. People had to walk down from the top of the highest buildings in the world, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, even one hundred floors, to get out on the street and try to get home.

Restaurants couldn’t serve meals. Shopping malls and movie theaters went totally dark. People couldn’t get to the hospitals. Mothers about to give birth had great difficulties. Doesn’t that sound sad? But that’s not the worst. Wait till you hear how sad it gets. For thirteen or fourteen hours, that whole area of the world was without television. How sad! What were they going to do with their lives? How could life be worth living without television?

Best-selling books were written about this great blackout. They even made a comical movie telling the story. And for years and years afterward, the people of that area shared with each other their personal experiences of where they were when the lights went out. That’s how powerful an impression the darkness made on them.

People Trapped in Darkness. Now, dear people of God, there are many people in this world, perhaps countless millions, who live their whole lives in darkness. Why? Because they are living without the light that has come into the world. They are living without the light whose name is Jesus Christ.

I’m not just talking about places like Africa or China where there isn’t a strong Christian tradition. I’m also talking about the West. In Europe and the Americas, the light of Jesus Christ is fading. In Ireland, for instance, for the first time in its history, people are saying that young people aren’t coming to church. And in the United States, statistics show how relatively few come to give God Almighty even one hour of the 168 hours he gives us every week.

We had better take notice of this fact because we--let me rephrase that--because you have the job of getting the light back on. It isn’t enough to say, “Well, we have Jesus Christ in our history. We have Jesus Christ in our art, in our music, in our literature.” No, we have to get the light of Jesus Christ shining brightly again in human hearts. And we have to start with our own hearts.

Living without the Light. Being without spiritual light is far worse than being without physical light. Without the light of Christ, we have no protection. The devil loves the darkness. He’s called the “Prince of Darkness.” Without the light of Christ he is free to kill our hope and fill us with fear. Without the light of Christ, we are unable to move forward, unable to grow in holiness as God calls us to. Without the light of Christ, we are spiritually paralyzed, just as those planes on the tarmac, those cars on the streets, those trains in the city, and those elevators in the buildings were paralyzed without the light.

Without the light of Christ, our human actions have no traffic lights. We have no red light saying, “stop,” to our selfish passions, emotions, and self-interest. Even more importantly, we have no green light telling us, “go, get moving,” in accomplishing the good works that God created and destined for us. We have no red light saying, “don’t do evil,” and no green light saying, “go, produce fruit in abundance.”

Without the light of Christ, human beings are engulfed in the utter darkness of egotism and selfishness. Do you know what the selfish person wants? He wants the right to be the only selfish person on earth. He doesn’t want anybody around him to be selfish, but he thinks that being selfish is his right. What a sadness!

Another darkness is resentment. If you have any resentment in your heart, please be healed of it. It does you more harm than the person you’re resenting. It’s poison in your life. Bad memories, bad relationships--this is the darkness for so many people. Greed is another one: wanting more than you could ever use. Imelda Marcos was said to have had three thousand pairs of shoes. I calculated that if she were a centipede, she could put on a new pair of shoes every day for two months. There’s also the darkness of addictions. What a horror in our world! People are addicted to alcohol, drugs, food. What are they hiding from? They’re trying to hide from the darkness, but they only enter into it more and more deeply.

Longing for Peace. For so many people, the darkness in their hearts makes it impossible to say, “I have peace. I have enough.” What a blessing peace is! This is what evangelization is all about. St. John called Jesus the light that shines in the darkness, then he went on to say that Jesus is the light that darkness cannot overcome (John 1:5). Jesus, and only Jesus, can fill our lives with light.

Have you ever lived through a hurricane? I have several times while I was in the Caribbean. During a hurricane, it’s as if your whole world is filled with darkness and wind and rain. But when the hurricane passes, it blows away with it every cloud in the sky, and the sun comes out again. After so much fear and worry, the world is filled with light. That’s the way Christ should come into our lives, bringing us beauty, bringing us color, bringing us goodness. Well, like John the Baptist, each of us must be a witness to the true light that gives light to every man. Our job is to turn the light on in this world so that people can walk in light and never return to darkness.

Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesied what would happen when the Messiah came. He said that the Messiah would shine on those who sat in darkness, and in the shadow of death (Luke 1:79). This isn’t the death that ends our time on earth. It’s the death called sin, the death called fear. This is what you must be doing as an evangelizer. And it’s your mistake and your sin if you don’t get at it. Zechariah’s next words tell us what we have to do: We must guide people’s feet into the way of peace. That’s what we do when we bring light into someone’s life. Now, if you’re in utter darkness, you won’t see where to put your feet. You won’t know where to walk. But the light shows you the pathway, and Scripture says the path takes you to peace.

How many people in the world are hunting for, yearning for peace? All the alcoholics, all the drug addicts, all those mad, mad, shoppers who think material things will give them peace. No, the Prince of Peace gives us peace. Jesus calls himself the Light of the World, the Light of Life (John 8:12). He doesn’t give light to your streets, he puts light, color, joy, happiness, and direction into your very life.

Live as Children of the Light. How good Jesus is to us! This is how he expresses his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind” (Luke 4:18). Who are the blind? They’re the poor people we’re talking about, the people who are spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically blind. They have no understanding of where they came from, where they are right now, or where they should be going. They are emotionally paralyzed. But Jesus said, “I have come to the world as its light to keep anyone who believes in me from remaining in the darkness” (John 12:46).

Oh, it’s so beautiful, it’s such a wonderful, kind thing to do. We give it a fancy name--evangelization--but it really means bringing sight to the blind. What an incomparable act of love and kindness to light the pathway of someone who is lost in darkness! What an act of love it is for us to proclaim with Paul, “There was a time when you were darkness, but now you are the light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8).

It’s not that you have to go from darkness to light. It’s more than that. You have to go from being darkness to being light in this world. Paul goes on: “Well then, live as children of the light. Awake, O sleeper! Arise from the dead”--from the darkness of the tomb--“and the light of Christ will shine upon you” (Ephesians 5:8-14).

This is why we call the gospel good news. We can walk in the light. Without any doubt, evangelization is the supreme Christian service of teaching the spiritually blind to cry out like that man in the gospel, “Lord! That I might see!” (Mark 10:51). And so many blind will see if they just cry out those words.
 

The Point of It All

The point of Christianity cannot be contained in words because the point of Christianity is the living Christ. He is not an ancient ideal but a real person here and now, ready to barge in and transform our lives. Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs. It is more like being well-possessed than well-dressed. It is like being haunted by the Holy Spirit. We are haunted temples.

The love of God is the answer not only to (1) the quest for the supreme value–the summurn bonum–and to (2) the quest for the supreme reality-the fundamental principle of the cosmos-but it is also (3) the answer to a third quest, the quest for life's deepest meaning and purpose.

Kant said there were ultimately only three important questions:

(1) What can I know? (2) What should I do? (3) What may I hope?

What I can know is truth, truth about being. Since the ultimate nature of being is love–either in God or in some creature that reflects God–God's love is the answer to Kant's first question.

Love is also the fundamental value. It is the answer to Kant's second question, "What should I do?" On the two commandments to love God and neighbor "depend all the law and the prophets" (Mt 22:40).

Finally, love also gives my life meaning and purpose. It gives me a goal or a hope to shoot for. Hopelessness means purposelessness. Since the ultimate purpose of my life is to learn to love, love is also my hope.
What to Believe, How to Live, and What to Pray For

Thomas Aquinas said that there are only three things we absolutely need to know, and they correspond nicely with Kant's three questions: what to believe, how to live, and what to pray for. Aquinas then says that the Creed answers the first question, the Commandments answer the second, and the Lord's Prayer answers the third. Therefore if we fully understand just these three things, the Creed, the Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer, we will know everything needful, What do these three things have to do with love?

On close inspection, each article of the Creed, each of the Commandments, and each petition of the Lord's Prayer is a form of love. They can be rightly understood only relative to that center. Let us sample each of them to see how this is so.

"I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth." The point of each word of this first article of the Creed is unlocked by the key of love if we really think about it. "I"–what is the I? What is the center of the self? What most fundamentally determines who I shall be? Answer: How and what I love. Lovers of God or of self, of good or of evil, of persons or of things-these are different I’s.

"Believe"–what does it mean to believe? What determines belief? Is it logic and evidence? If so, why don't all believe the same things? The evidence and the logic is public and universally available. No, the key to faith is love. We believe only if we love. Trust is the middle term; only if we love, do we trust; and only if we trust, do we believe.

"In"–what is the difference between just believing that and believing in? To believe in God is to trust Him and to love Him. I believe that the sun will appear tomorrow, but I do not believe in the sun as I believe in the Son. Belief that something is so is just an opinion. I would not die for an opinion. But belief in someone is a personal relationship of faith and trust and love. That is worth dying for.

"God"–who is this God we believe in? "God is love."

"The Father"–God is our Father. What does a father do? He loves his children into existence and into maturity.

"Almighty "–why is God almighty? What is the secret of His power? What was the secret of Christ's power? He did not march on Rome with arms. He did not compel anyone's will with miracles. He did not even save Himself from death on a cross. Yet no man ever had more power over the human race. The secret of power is love. Amor vincit omnia: "Love conquers all." It may take time, and it may work invisibly, but it works infallibly.

"Creator"–why did God create? He needed nothing, being perfect and eternal. There is only one possible motive: altruistic love, sheer generosity, the desire to share His goodness and glory with others.

"Heaven and earth"–it follows that Heaven and earth, the whole creation, is a song of love because Love is the singer.

Do you see the pattern? Each article in the Creed, each word of the Creed, is about God's love. Rather than going through every other word in the Creed, I will assume that the pump has been primed and let you the reader finish the meditation. That would have more educational value than leaving someone else do it for you. All you have to do is to think deeply about the meaning of the words, and you will find God's love. You don't have to stretch the point. You don't even have to connect each article with love, as if love were something extraneous. You just have to look, and you will see love lurking there at the center each time.

The same is true, of course, for the Commandments. They are ways of loving. Everyone knows that Jesus made it perfectly clear that "on these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets"–to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is not just that the Commandment to love is the most important one. It is really the only one. "Love, and do what you will", wrote Augustine dangerously but accurately. It is dangerous because the saying seems to invite the misinterpretation that "doing what you will" could be anything at all. But it is accurate nonetheless because if we do love God, then we will love His will and His law. We will keep His Commandments, but out of love and not just fear or even duty.

Each Commandment makes sense only when you see it in the light of love. Take the first, for example: "You shall have no other gods before me." Why? Because God is an egotist? No, because God is a lover. What lover wants half the heart of his beloved? Also God is a realist. He knows that false gods simply cannot make us happy, however many times we are deceived into believing and acting as if they could. Love, of course, seeks the beloved's happiness. It is God's love of us, not self-love, that is behind His jealousy.

The one Commandment that may seem not to conform to the pattern–love does not murder, love does not steal, love does not bear false witness against neighbor–is: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." It seems that it is precisely love that does commit adultery. But it is not true love, not unadulterated love. True love respects marriages and will not lay them waste.

Each of the Commandments is specific and clear. They show us how to act out of love in different situations. We must love only the beloved and not graven images. Love honors the name of the beloved and does not take it in vain. Love takes time, a sabbath, a sabbatical, or a honeymoon with the beloved. Love honors the authors of its being, the father and mother whose love gave birth. Love does not defraud, deceive, debunk, debar, devour, or dehumanize. Love is the fulfillment of the law.

Finally, everything we are commanded to pray for in the world's most perfect prayer–the only one straight from the lips of God Incarnate in direct answer to the request, "Teach us to pray" (Lk 11:1)-is also love.

We call God "our Father" because we believe in His fatherly love and care.

We want His name hallowed and loved and praised, because we love Him and want others to do the same.

We want His kingdom to come because His kingdom is the kingdom of love.

We want His will to be done, even in preference to our own–we will the abolition of our own will when it is out of alignment with His–because we know His will is pure love. Ours is not.

If this is done on earth as it is in Heaven, then we will approach heaven on earth, the annihilation of lovelessness.

We ask for our daily bread because we know His love wants to give it. Love longs to fulfill the needs of the beloved.

We ask to be forgiven as we forgive because love forgives. "It is not irritable or resentful" (1 Cor 13:5).

We ask to be delivered from temptations against love and fromthe evil that comes when love leaves, because we know "the one thing necessary".

Finally, we praise His kingdom, His power, and His glory because they are nothing but the reign of love.

"Why do you speak of nothing else?" "Because there is nothing else." John the Beloved Disciple knew the point of it all.


(This excerpt is taken from chapter two, "The Point Of It All," of The God Who Loves You.)

Excerpt on Sola Fide

The Scott Hahn Conversion Story:

But the more I studied, the more I came to see that for the ancient Hebrews, and in Sacred Scripture, a covenant differs from a contract about as much as marriage differs from prostitution. In a contract you exchange property, whereas in a covenant you exchange persons. In a contract you say, "This is yours and that is mine," but Scripture shows how in a covenant you say, "I am yours and you are mine."

Even when God makes a covenant with us, He says, "I will be your God and you will be my people." After studying Hebrew, I discovered that 'Am, the Hebrew word for people, literally means, kinsman, family. I will be your God and father; you will be my family, my sons and my daughters, my household. So covenants form kinship bonds which makes family with God.

I read Shepherd's articles, and he was saying much of the same thing: our covenant with God means sonship. I thought, "Well, yeah, this is good." I wondered what heresy is involved in that. Then somebody told me, "Shepherd is calling into question sola fide." What! No way. I mean, that is the Gospel. That is the simple truth of Jesus Christ. He died for sins; I believe in him. He saves me, pure and simple; it's a done deal. Sola fide? He's questioning that? No way.

I called him on the phone. I said, "I've read your stuff on covenant; it makes lots of sense. I've come to pretty much the same conclusions. But why is this leading you to call into question Luther's doctrine of sola fide?" He went on to show in this discussion that Luther's conception of justification was very restricted and limited. It had lots of truth, but it also missed lots of truths.

When I hung up the phone, I pursued this a little further and I discovered that for Luther and for practically all of Bible Christianity and Protestantism, God is a judge, and the covenant is a courtroom scene whereby all of us are guilty criminals. But since Christ took our punishment, we get his righteousness, and he gets our sins, so we get off scot-free; we're justified. For Luther, in other words, salvation is a legal exchange, but for Paul in Romans, for Paul in Galatians, salvation is that, but it's much more than that. It isn't just a legal exchange because the covenant doesn't point to a Roman courtroom so much as to a Hebrew family room.

God is not just simply a judge; God is a father, and his judgments are fatherly. Christ is not just somebody who represents an innocent victim who takes our rap, our penalty; He is the firstborn among many brethren. He is our oldest brother in the family, and he sees us as runaways, as prodigals, as rebels who are cut off from the life of God's family. And by the new covenant Christ doesn't just exchange in a legal sense; Christ gives us His own sonship so that we really become children of God.

When I shared this with my friends, they were like, "Yeah, that's Paul." But when I went into the writings of Luther and Calvin, I didn't find it any longer. They had trained me to study Scripture, but in the process, in a sense, I discovered that there were some very significant gaps in their teaching. So I came to the conclusion that sola fide is wrong.

First, because the Bible never says it anywhere.

Second, because Luther inserted the word "alone" in his Germantranslation, there in Romans 3, although he knew perfectly well that then word "alone" was not in the Greek.

Nowhere did the Holy Spirit ever inspire the writers of Scripture to say we're saved by faith alone. Paul teaches we're saved by faith, but in Galatians he says we're saved by faith working in love. And that's the way it is in a family isn't it? A father doesn't say to his kids, "Hey, kids, since you're in my family and all the other kids who are your friends aren't, you don't have to work, you don't have to obey, you don't have to sacrifice because, hey, you're saved. You're going to get the inheritance no matter what you do." That's not the way it works.
So I changed my mind and I grew very concerned. One of my most brilliant professors, a man named Dr. John Gerstner, had once said that if we're wrong on sola fide, I'd be on my knees outside the Vatican in Rome tomorrow morning doing penance. Now we laughed, what rhetoric, you know. But he got the point across; this is the article from which all of the other doctrines flow. And if we're wrong there, we're going to have some homework to get done to figure out where else we might have gone wrong.

I was concerned, but I wasn't overly concerned. At the time I was planning to go to Scotland to study at Aberdeen University the doctrine of the covenant, because in Scotland, covenant theology was born and developed. And I was eager to go over and study there. So I wasn't particularly concerned about resolving this issue because, after all, that could be the focus of my doctoral study.

Musings of Thomas Merton

“New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.”
― Thomas Merton

Wisdom of St. John of the Cross

“I came into the unknown
and stayed there unknowing
rising beyond all science.

I did not know the door
but when I found the way,
unknowing where I was,
I learned enormous things,
but what I felt I cannot say,
for I remained unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

It was the perfect realm
of holiness and peace.
In deepest solitude
I found the narrow way:
a secret giving such release
that I was stunned and stammering,
rising beyond all science.

I was so far inside,
so dazed and far away
my senses were released
from feelings of my own.
My mind had found a surer way:
a knowledge of unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

And he who does arrive
collapses as in sleep,
for all he knew before
now seems a lowly thing,
and so his knowledge grows so deep
that he remains unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

The higher he ascends
the darker is the wood;
it is the shadowy cloud
that clarified the night,
and so the one who understood
remains always unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

This knowledge by unknowing
is such a soaring force
that scholars argue long
but never leave the ground.
Their knowledge always fails the source:
to understand unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

This knowledge is supreme
crossing a blazing height;
though formal reason tries
it crumbles in the dark,
but one who would control the night
by knowledge of unknowing
will rise beyond all science.

And if you wish to hear:
the highest science leads
to an ecstatic feeling
of the most holy Being;
and from his mercy comes his deed:
to let us stay unknowing,
rising beyond all science.”
― San Juan de la Cruz

Saying What You Mean

No band played; no flags waved. A car honked. My son picked up his bag and kissed his mother goodbye. Then he shook my hand and said "So long." "Good luck, son!" I said. We walked him to the door. We waved, and the car drove away. Our son was off to war. I wish I could have told him how much I really loved him. Later I thought to myself how foolish we are with our children, always wanting them to fit our dreams, never accepting them for what they are.

Howard O'Brien never saw his son again; he died in battle.

(from A Contemporary Walk with Jesus, by Mark Link)

Hymn

Oh God beyond all praising,
We worship you today
And sing the love amazing
That songs cannot repay;
For we can only wonder
At every gift you send,
At blessings without number
And mercies without end:
We lift our hearts before you
And wait upon your word,
We honor and adore you,
Our great and mighty Lord.

Then hear, oh gracious Savior
Accept the love we bring,
That we may know your favor
May serve you as our king;
And whether our tomorrows
Be filled with good or ill,
We'll triumph through our sorrows
And rise to bless you still:
To marvel at your beauty
And glory in your ways,
And make a joyful duty
Our sacrifice of praise.