He begins with a curious comparison to olden times, and says, like we always do, that his contemporary times had become lax and superficial in the spiritual well-being department. I wonder what he would say today!
What he says is that the people of the Gospel events were “more upright and simple.”
“Then it was enough for those who led a spiritual life to see that each moment brought with it a duty to be faithfully fulfilled.” (Page 3)
It was natural for them to unfold time and live thoroughly through each moment with the idea that God was peering at them through it, and had personally delivered this moment as a gift and with an expectation that they who possessed this moment were to respond to it and move through it uprightly.
“Under God’s unceasing guidance their spirit turned without conscious effort to each new duty as it was presented to them by God each hour of the day.” (Page 3)
No doubt my contemporary day has lost this. We speak highly of spirituality, but the good father’s first page already sounds like it was written on another planet in an alien tongue.
For my part, I was never taught to receive each moment and journey through it purposefully. Horace’s carpe diem told me to make every moment count, but it did not tell me that every moment intrinsically counts, whether or not I am particularly involved. I could be out seizing the day and entirely missing the point.
God is using moments to communicate to me what is important … what He is doing … where He is acting. I am not using moments to hear this. I have my own agenda; my own definition of spirituality; my own ideas about who God is and what He is doing. I will only hear in these moments the parts that fit my script.
So much self has grown over the image of God and the redemptive presence of the Holy Spirit, that God’s voice, God’s ideas, God’s work, God’s very presence, is indistinct. I hear my stuff rattling around in my inner life and piously tell my friends God is hard at it within me, speaking, working, responding. What He is probably doing is suffocating under the dense overgrowth of self that provides him neither air in nor light out.
Father Jean-Pierre is right. We aren’t much good at this, and much is needed to help us regain this lost inner ground.
Whatever happened to, “Whatever You say, Lord”?
Without effort he moves nextly to the “utter self-abandonment” of Mary when confronted with the design of God to bring forth the Incarnate Son into the world – Mary’s fiat.
“Be it done unto me according to your word” contains “all the mystical theology of our ancestors,” he says. (Page 3)
This was Mary’s acceptance of God’s will “under whatever form it was manifested.” She was obviously prepared inwardly to take on such an abandonment. Her orders had changed, and the words of the angel would change everything about her. Is she ready for this?
Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
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