Look at the crucifix

If you would like to know God …
Look at the crucifix.

If you would like to love God …
Look at the crucifix.

If you want to serve God …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder what you are worth …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder how much God loves you …
Look at the crucifix.

If you want to know the need for self-denial and sacrifice …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder how much you should forgive others …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder how much you should do for others …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder how much your faith demands of you in
humility, poverty, charity in every virtue …
Look at the crucifix.

If you want to know what unselfishness and generosity are …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wonder how far your own unselfishness should
go to bring others to Christ …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wish to live well …
Look at the crucifix.

If you wish to die well …
Look at the crucifix.

Everything is Precious

Those who have abandoned themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which there appears to be nothing unusual. The simplest sermon, the most banal conversations, the least erudite books become sources of knowledge and wisdom to these souls by virtue of God’s purpose. This is why they carefully pick up the crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot, for to them everything is precious and a source of enrichment.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J.

Divine Love

The great thing about God’s love is that it’s not determined by the object. God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. It takes our whole lives for that to sink in because that’s not how human love operates.

Human love is largely determined by the attractiveness of the object. When someone is loveable, nice, good, and attractive, physically or in terms of their personality, we find it much easier to give ourselves to them. That’s the way humans operate outside of the economy of grace. Divine love is a love that operates in an unqualified way without making distinctions between persons and without following personal preferences. We almost don’t have an outlet in our head to receive that notion! Divine love is received by surrender, a word frequently used by the mystics.

Richard Rohr

The Spirit of Prayer - 1

An inescapable characteristic of the human spirit is its persistent restlessness, its insatiable searching: "You have made us for yourself alone, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." Complete personal fulfillment can be attained only in consummate loving union with God in himself.

This restlessness initially manifests itself to our consciousness in an obscure pull towards something more in life something more than what actually is: something beyond the status quo. Upon deeper examination, however, we discover that this quest is not actually a desire for some-thing at all. It is rather the manifestation of a mysterious yearning for some-One, for Him Who Is. This "something more" which irresistibly draws us is ultimately the fullness of transformation in Christ: Our "innermost being is consumed with longing" for God (Jb 19:27).

Nemeck & Coombs

Majesty and Poverty

Shortly before 10:00 a.m. my father and I took a cab to the cathedral. It was packed, but I was able to get my father a seat in the front row, which was reserved for the elderly. The service was festive, solemn, and very "royal" - processions, incense, candles, and many servers.

The archbisop of Freiburg presided and gave the homily. "Does this cathedral help or hinder us in understanding the mystery of Christmas?" he asked. I was fascinated by the question, since I had just been thinking about the fact that such a hidden and poor event as the birth of Jesus had inspired the creation of such a majestic building and such a rich liturgy. What had all the Gothic splendour, the paintings and sculptures, the robes, staff, mitre, and long ceremonies to do with the little baby born in Bethlehem twenty centuries ago?

Henri Nouwen

Sabbatical Journey

Right Living and Right Speaking

To be a witness for God is to be a living sign of God's presence in the world. What we live is more important than what we say, because the right way of living always leads us the right way of speaking. When we forgive our neighbors from our hearts, our hearts will speak forgiving words. When we are grateful, we will speak grateful words, and when we are hopeful and joyful, we will speak hopeful and joyful words.

When our words come too soon and we are not yet living what we are saying, we easily give double messages. Giving double messages - one with our words and another with our actions - makes us hypocrites. May our lives give us the right words, and may our words lead us to the right lives.

Henri Nouwen

Our Call to Holiness - 9

Integral to the universal call to holiness then is the call of every person to contemplation, at least in death. Contemplation is not reserved solely for those few called to the "contemplative life," nor is it apart from the usual process whereby God makes each of us holy. Always remaining God's free gift, contemplation is nevertheless the "ordinary" outcome of a full life of grace. "Contemplation is the summit of the Christian life of prayer" for every Christian!

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 8

With the beginning of contemplation God thrusts us headlong into a world of mystery. Here we must quite literally let go all ways to follow in the darkness of faith Christ who alone is the "Way" (Jn 14:6). From here on, progress in holiness consists in willingly letting God immerse us into ever more mysterious depths of personal encounter with him, and in our undergoing its consequent transforming and consuming effects, until we come to the perfect contemplation of God "face to face" (1 Co, 13:12).

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 7

The genesis of our personal holiness attains a most critical threshold with the beginning of contemplation wherein the very nature of our personal encounter with God is transformed. Our loving receptivity, having passed through the growth process of being "first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear" (Mk 4:27 28), is now ready for harvest. Instead of God communing with us principally through the mediation of images, objects, emotions as he had previously done in discursive meditation, he now communicates himself directly to the soul in contemplation. God's transforming and consuming love thus becomes ever more operative in this immediate encounter. This more interiorized phase of transformation is accompanied by a radical intensification directly by God himself of the soul's own loving receptivity towards him as he is in himself. This affects not only prayer, but attains every aspect of life.

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 6

Progress in holiness, then, is characterized by an intensification of our receptive stance before God. "Night and day, while he sleeps and when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing. How? He does not know" (Mk 4:27).

God himself nurtures our growth in receptivity gradually and mysteriously, often for a long time even without our being aware of the fact. In each individual this seed of receptivity sprouts and grows in a uniquely personalized manner. Its emergence is specifically tailored by God to our individual personality and vocation. He uses all the particular events, circumstances and persons that affect us in any way as instruments through which to quicken our contemplative orientation to life.

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 5

Our response
Since our call to holiness is God's gift of participation in his divine life, our response must be one of loving receptivity. We become holy by letting his will be done, both directly within us and through the activity we exert towards the building up of his Kingdom. Moreover, our very ability to remain lovingly receptive to him is itself gift. When God first began to create us by his love and make his home within us, he implanted this contemplative thrust deep within the inner dynamism of our life.

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 4

To put this truth in other words, the inscrutable love of God produces two interacting effects within the soul: (1) Transforming it in himself by participation, God (2) purges the soul of the slightest vestige of immaturity. So perfect is this loving union that the soul can be said "to have become God" - "deified," "divinized "7 - "by participant transformation," yet always in such a way as to enhance the soul's individuality and to achieve the maximum potential of its personality.

This theology explicates the insight of St. Paul grappling with the mystery of the resurrection. "That God may be all in all" (1 Co 15:28), and that Christ may "fill all in all" (Ep 1:23).

The process of transforming purging love begins with the act of individual existence and reaches its apex in one's personal death resurrection: "Though this outer man of ours is falling into decay, the inner person is renewed day by day" (2 Co 4:16).

In common parlance this process is termed "call to holiness," or simply "sanctification."

Nemeck & Coombs
_____
7 Expression used by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, Basil and Athanasius

God has positive answers

You say:     It's Impossible
God says:   All things are possible - Luke 18:27

You say:     I'm too tired
God says:   I will give you rest - Matthew 11:28-30

You say:     Nobody really loves me
God says:   I love you - John 3:16

You say:     I can't go on
God says:   My grace is sufficient - II Corinthians 12:9

You say:     I can't figure things out
God says:   I will direct your steps - Proverbs 3:5-6

You say:     I'm afraid
God says:   I will be with you - Isaia 43:2

You say:     I’m not smart enough
God says:   I give you wisdom - I Corinthians 1:30

Our Call to Holiness - 3

Love by its very nature effects union. But when God loves, the union produced by his love is transforming union "Oh night which united lover with Beloved, lover transformed in the Beloved." [St. John of the Cross - Night, stanza 5]

St. John of the Cross quite effectively synthesizes his theology of transforming union in these words: "To love is to work for God at being stripped of all that is not God. The soul then remains illuminated and transformed in God." In fact, "God so communicates his supernatural being to it that the soul seems to be God himself, possessing whatever God himself has." Moreover, "so perfect is this union that all the things both of God and of the soul are one in participant transformation." Thus, "the soul seems more God than soul. Indeed it is God by participation." Yet the soul always remains truly distinct from God. Actually it reaches the pinnacle of its personal individuation in this transformation.

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 2

Since God alone is the source of all holiness, the one and same holiness to which all are called irrespective of their duties of life is an actual participation in his holiness. It is a true participation in his very being. This participation is pure gift. It is bestowed not because we merit him or have attained him by our own efforts, but solely out of the superabundance of his love.

Nemeck & Coombs

Our Call to Holiness - 1

(1) Our call to holiness is the invitation to an enduring, personal encounter with God in himself, and as a direct consequence of this, (2) we are gradually transformed into his likeness and are progressively purified of all that is un-God-like in us.

Nemeck & Coombs

Being empty and useless

Prayer is not a way of being busy with God instead of with people. In fact, it unmasks the illusion of busyness, usefulness, and indispensability. It is a way of being empty and useless in the presence of God and so of proclaiming our basic belief that all is grace and nothing is simply the result of hard work.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

To be perfect

To live is to change,
and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Blessed John Henry Newman

God's View of Time

There is no "after" after death.
Words like after and before belong to our mortal life,
our life in time and space.
Death frees us from the boundaries of chronology
and brings us into God's "time," which is timeless.
Speculations about the afterlife,
therefore, are little more than just that: speculations.
Beyond death there is no "first" and "later,"
no "here" and "there,"
no "past," "present," or "future."
God is all in all.
The end of time,
the resurrection of the body,
and the glorious coming again of Jesus
are no longer separated by time
for those who are no longer in time.

For us who still live in time,
it is important not to act as if the new life in Christ
is something we can comprehend or explain.
God's heart and mind are greater than ours.
All that is asked of us is trust.

Henri Nouwen

Rolheiser: Trưởng thành trong các mối quan hệ và cầu nguyện

[Nguyên bản:  Maturity in Relationships and Prayer]

Vài năm trước, một người bạn kể cho tôi nghe câu chuyện này: là người được giáo dục trong đạo Công giáo La Mã, cốt yếu là trung thành đi lễ, cố gắng sống đạo đức lương thiện, ở độ tuổi ngoài bốn mươi, anh cảm thấy mình có những nỗi nghi ngờ dằn vặt, không thể nào cầu nguyện, và thậm chí không thể nào (khi chân thành tự vấn) tin vào sự hiện hữu của Chúa.

Lo lắng về chuyện này, anh tìm linh hướng, anh đến gặp một linh mục dòng Tên, một vị linh hướng nổi tiếng. Anh nghĩ mình sẽ được nghe các chỉ bảo quen thuộc về đêm tăm tối của tâm hồn và cách thế những chuyện này sẽ làm đức tin được tinh tuyền, và, vì đã quen thuộc với những lời lẽ như vậy, anh cũng không chờ đợi gì nhiều. Chắc chắn anh không nghĩ mình sẽ nhận một lời khuyên như anh đã nhận.