Shattering

"One of the keys to real religious experience is the shattering realization that no matter how hateful we are to ourselves, we are not hateful to God. This realization helps us to understand the difference between our love and His. Our love is a need, His is a gift. We need to see good in ourselves in order to love ourselves. He does not. He loves us not because we are good, but because He is... The free and confident access of a soul that stands face to face with God and understand His mercy and is not consumed with self-hatred because of sins which, it knows, have already been consumed by His mercy--this is the parrhesia  which is ours since the 'goodness and kindness of God our Savior appeared.'" -Thomas Merton

In this passage Merton talks about God's infinite love and mercy in a way that I have not heard before. Merton notes that we need to see some good in ourselves to be able to love ourselves, God does not. God loves us in spite of our sin and wretchedness. His mercy envelops our sin and consumes it. I am reminded of the lyrics of Wholly Yours, "But the harder I try, the more clearly can I feel the depth of our fall and the weight of it all." The sin we find ourselves in not only reminds us of how weak we are, but it allows us to intimately feel the love of God.

Jesus says in Luke 7:47, "the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little." The depths of my fallen humanity have forced me to see my own hatefulness, but that seems to be where my reflection ends. It should also illuminate to me the immensity of the Divine Love. The depth of our fall should not simply point out how weak and sinful we are, because if that was it who would want to be a Christian? The weight of it all is not only found in how depraved we are, but in how immense God's love is. St. Paul understood this paradox of our hatefulness and His love. He wrote in his letter to the Romans, "But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." Why else would the Church proclaim that the fall was the felix culpa, the happy fault, if it did not bring us ultimately into the depths of God's love?

Merton also talks about the soul that truly understands the mercy and depth of God's love and is not consumed with self-hatred can truly partake in the parrhesia, that is, free speech. In the original state, Adam talked to God without fear and, in some sense, almost as an equal. God wants us to partake in this freedom of speech with Him. Rob Bell said once, "God can handle what you're thinking. God can handle how you're feeling. God can handle what you're saying. Prayer, if it's anything, is truth. It's being honest with your Maker." So, here we stand, broken, in need of God's hand. Only the soul who really understands God's infinite mercy and how it consumes all of our guilt that can cast aside the temptation to let guilt come between us and our relationship with God. He wishes to be united to us, He wishes to help make us like Himself, but if we continue to wallow in our shameful existence then how can we ever come to love? This life is a battle between the "old self" and the "new self" that God wishes to transform us into, far too often the "old self" continues to impose its guilt on us. We have to own the fact that despite our hatefulness, we are not hateful to Him.

Victory

"O, death, where is your sting?

O, hell, where is your victory?

O, Church, come stand in the light!

OUR GOD IS NOT DEAD!

HE'S ALIVE! HE'S ALIVE!"

The song "Christ is Risen" by Matt Maher has been on my heart a lot lately. The lyrics are based off of 1 Corinthians 15:55, "Death is swallowed up in victory, where, o death, is your victory? Where, o death, is your sting?" Christ is risen from the dead, in His passion and death He united Himself to us. Sin holds no power over us, but more often than not it seems that sin is more of my reality than grace is. The key, I suppose, to true holiness and, by default, to true happiness is found in the cross. It is in denying ourselves radically and truly practicing the art of growing in virtue that sin and death no longer hold sway over us. Christ has risen from the dead, trampling over death by death, but in order to partake in the fruit of Christ's death, we too must partake in His death. This must take root in our souls and change our very lives.

God Himself is extending His arms out to reach for us, we must reach back in the same fashion. Just as He reached out His arms on the cross, so must we reach out our arms on our crosses and crucify that which is within us that keeps us from Him. Saint Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but He lives within me." Let that be my reality. His death must become the death of me, because it is only in dying that we truly discover what life is. In uniting ourselves with the cross we can too revel in the glory of resurrection. This is Christianity, not some abstract theological concept, no, it is what is meant to touch the very center of our existence and transform it into something greater. Our God is not dead, He's alive, He's alive! 

Detached

I am called to be detached from everything. My friendships, my things, my family, even my expectations of prayer I need to let go of altogether. If there is one thing that I am certain of it is this: my heart needs to be firmly rooted in my God and nothing else. In order to grow and be made perfect I need to let go of all that I allow to capture my heart. Jesus says in the gospel that we are to be perfect. He says to the rich young man, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me (Matthew 19:21)." Jesus said to go and give all you have and in order to do that we need to be truly detached.

 

Nothing can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ except those things that we choose to latch on to. Christ came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly but how many times do we just settle for the things we hold on to? The apostles left all they knew on the shores the day Jesus called them to cast aside their nets and follow Him. Luke's gospel confirms that the apostles, "left everything and followed him." They left behind all of it, the good, the bad, the triumphs, the sorrows and followed Him. God alone suffices and if we cannot detach ourselves from the things that we hold so dear we have absolutely no right to call ourselves Christians. If we cannot drop all that God has given us the instant He calls us to something new then we can be certain that the only reason we loved God, if indeed it can be called love, is for His gifts. I'm tired of seeking the gifts, I want to be detached to fall truly in love with the Giver. Christ, be the center of my life.

Alone

"For You alone are Father, and You alone are good,

And You alone are Savior, and You alone are God...

I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive,

I'm alive, I'm alive..." -David Crowder

There is something glorious about realizing and proclaiming that here, now, at this precise moment in time I am alive. I think that this awe-inspiring good  is far too often overlooked. This is it, the starting of my Senior year of college and once again God has placed me in St. Joseph hall. Sick twisted joke? Or Divine providence calling me back to Himself? The fruit of this year will show the answer to that, one way or another. 

In reality, the relationships that I cherished as keys to my relationship with God actually became a hinderance last year. The simple fact of the matter is that God is calling me out of my save zone and challenging me once again by asking me, "Are you here for the community, or are you here for the God of the community?" This question has continually popped up through my faith walk and once again I'm just now coming to realizing that praying with the community, and talking about God with the community is not the same thing as being in relationship with the God of the community. My relationships with my brothers are always going to hold a special place in my heart, but right now, at this moment in time, I'm alive. Just as I want to proclaim that from the rooftops to my God as a song of praise, God wants to proclaim that exact same phrase to me even more than I could even imagine wanting to exclaim it to Him. This is it, this is God shouting out to me that He is alive and He is doing wondrous things in me, and if it took me being dragged from my group of friends and being shoved back into the Joe as an RA, then amen, so be it.

Tonight

This past week has been bizarre. I've been home alone at the McGown's, which I am so thankful for, but it was still quite strange to just be living at their house and not having any of them here. Today I just had this resounding desire to be at home, I don't know why, but it weighed heavy on my heart all day. I think in part it was spurned on by talking with Stacy last night on the drive to O'Malley's. Talking with her and reminiscing about my time in Life Teen at St. Tim's just did something to me. I don't know, it's weird.

I bought the Black Eyed Peas song, "I Gotta Feeling" and the bridge just goes, "I got a feeling that tonight's going to be a good night, that tonight's going to be a good good night." That's all that it says and like it just sunk in with me and resonated with something that Billie Sue had told me a couple years ago. She told me one afternoon, "Well, we can't change everything around us, but we can change our perceptions of everything around us." This song by the Black Eyed Peas, aside from the materialistic side of it, kind of brushes on this idea. I need to change my perception of everything to make things seem lighter for me.

Relentless

I just felt the need to write, just for the sake of writing. As I've been home this past week and a half, I've been renewed piece by piece. It's been very good for me to come home and I've definitely relished my time here. Despite how good my time at home has been, I've become lax in prayer, the eternal struggle of every summer. As I've distanced myself from this previous year at Benedictine, there's something that I really came to realize that attributed to why I think last year just sucked. When I looked at this past year and I was entirely honest with myself, I came to realize that I slipped into apathy in prayer, I mean, yes, I had the relationship with God, but I didn't really work at it. Just as with any friendship or relationship in general, it requires work, it requires sacrifice in order to maintain a good relationship with God, my heart was veiled from my God this past year, and I'm still not entirely sure how it happened or why it happened, but that was the fact of the matter. Why is it that my prayer always becomes so stagnant? 

The thing that really separated sophomore year for me was, honestly, the tight-knit relationship I had with the Lord. There would often be times that I would simply go to be with God, I always talked with God about everything and I withheld nothing. It was a legitimate relationship with God that I had, prayer was my world, not a  part of my world. Therein lies the major problem with my walk with the Lord this past year, my prayer was defined by my life, my life was not defined by my prayer. There is something to be said for faithfully coming before the Lord, but more often than not I perceived my prayer times this past year as irksome intrusions on my time, not the high-point of my day like it was when I was a sophomore. It was coerced, and I didn't revel in the joy of the Lord this past year as I had the year before. Aside from that I was under attack throughout the year: not having Andrew with me first semester; not doing as well as I usually do in my classes first semester; the random emotional flare-up on the retreat I helped with; the RA position and finally wrapping up the year finding out my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It was like I was being stripped of everything, and was being made low. 

The fact of the matter is, I still don't know why God allowed all of those things to happen, I do not know how to get my prayer life back on track to where it was, and I especially do not know what is in store for me this upcoming year. The simple fact remains that God is God and I am not. I remember reading this book a few years back called, "Furious Pursuit" and on the back cover was this quote that essentially summed up the entire message of the book, "You are not defined by what you've done or where you've been, you're defined by who pursues you." God is relentlessly pursuing me and trying to unite me more intimately to Himself. How? I don't know. Why? I'm not even entirely sure of that, but having that little shred of truth is what is giving me hope to make it through this next year.

Gravel

"He has broken my teeth with gravel, 

pressed my face in the dust;

my soul is deprived of peace, 

I have forgotten what happiness is,

I tell myself my future is lost, 

all that I hoped for from the Lord."-Lamentations 3:16-18

The prophet Jeremiah just nails where my soul is at right now in the entire third chapter of Lamentations. I fell like my face keeps being pushed into the dirt. Earlier on in the chapter, Jeremiah says that he is, "one whom he has led and forced to walk in darkness, not in the light." Wow. Sometimes, no, most times lately, I feel like I'm wandering around in the dark without any sense of direction. 

Something that is interesting though is that Jeremiah says that he has been led and forced to walk in darkness. I suppose that is what God is doing with me right now. He was led there by the hand of God, that should bring some comfort to the situation. I guess I should take a page out of Jeremiah's book. Led into darkness, there needs to be such a trust, one greater than I possess, to be willing to be led into that darkness. I guess that is what's happening in my life, I am being led and forced to walk in this darkness. Jeremiah writes on and says, "He has hemmed me in with no escape, and weighed me down in chains; even when I cry out for help, he stops my prayer; he has blocked my ways with fitted stones, and turned my path aside." It seems as if Jeremiah felt backed into a corner much like I do, yet God was there, He was the One doing the backing in. Just like St. Paul says, "God chastises those whom He loves."

God is here. No matter how distant He seems, He is here. He has placed His hand upon my shoulder and has led me into this darkness. He is doing His work in me, and just like Jeremiah I need to force myself to realize that His mercies are not spent, He has brought me into this state for a reason. The Lord may be shoving my face into the dust, but it is only because He sees a greater good to come from it. Lord, I surrender it all to You in regards to this next school year, even in regards to this summer. I am placing it all in Your hands. I'm taking the leap of faith and trusting that You will catch me. It's all for You, it's all for You, I'm letting go, I'm letting go. You are God and I am not. I trust in You.