God reveals and speaks. Do we look and listen?

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 11-

Continued:

_{“Jesus has given us a master to whom we do not listen enough.” (Page 36)}

          How God’s everything is applied to us (or we to it) is done as a work of the Holy Spirit. The mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers continues; although, as Father C suggests here, the attention that is due to this mysterious indwelling is not paid.

Jesus was abundantly clear that he would send Another Helper – in the Greek, “another one just like me in every way.” (See John 14:16)

“Still, I am telling you the truth: it is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you.” (John 16:7. See also John 14, 15 and 16.)

The Incarnation (the Son of God becoming a man) told us that God delights in becoming a man. Pentecost told us that God delights in indwelling mankind – and that not as a generic life force, but a special indwelling brought about by grace through faith that indicates a personal relationship of love between persons.

To say that God is everywhere does not have the same meaning as when Paul says, “Yet, it is no longer I, but Christ living in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

The word to describe God being everywhere is “omnipresent.” The word describing God indwelling his people is “love.” God is with us because he loves us. If you just barely grasp the trailing, frayed threads of this truth, it would change your life.

It should be obvious to us that in the Apostle’s Creed, the third section, speaks of all of the Holy Spirit’s works: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

In the Nicene Creed the Holy Spirit is called “the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

The church is the church because of the Spirit of God. We are spiritually attached to all other believers (dead or alive) by the Spirit. Forgiveness, resurrection and life eternal are all provided and sustained by the Spirit.

Indeed, Paul says that our bodies are “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” (I Corinthians 6:19)

It is the Holy Spirit who is present to us in every moment. It is he who applies to us all the benefits purchased for us by Christ on the Cross. Caussade is contending that we have very little conversation with this truth. What we have by virtue of the Holy Spirit is not valued enough by us.

A soft, comfy spirituality is lukewarm by definition!

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 11-

We need to take a step back from the Caussade’s book to consider an assumption that he makes that may not be an assumption in our day.

The topic is perfection. The assumption is that Christians are working hard toward that end:

_{“… so many Christians pass their lives anxiously pursuing a multitude of means to perfection …” (Page 35)}

I can say that never in my life – through my many adventures in church services ranging from house churches to high liturgical churches – have I heard mention of the Christian’s need to advance toward, attain or maintain perfection. I often have been reassured that I am in the forgiving hands of God, but never have I been told to press on toward perfection. It is fairly safe to say that this is one landmark that has disappeared from the American Christian’s map.

Whether or not one’s church has a specific doctrine of perfection, sanctity or holiness, these certainly comprise the goal of the Christian life when properly understood.

Caussade and Company, and indeed the Catechism of the Catholic Church, usually speak of “perfection in charity.” In this context, man can act and love in the same way that God acts and loves, though understandably not to the infinite degree to which God is able.

“All Christians … are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.” (Catechism 2028, quoting from the Church’s lumen gentium)

“Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love.” (Catechism 1827)

“The essence of Christian perfection consists in union with God by charity.” (This from Divine Intimacy, by Father Gabriel of St. Mary Madgalen, OCD, Page 294.)

The biblical command from Christ to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” (Matthew 5:48) is said in the context of a short discourse from Jesus within the Sermon on the Mount about loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. (vv. 43-48) Whatever else that might be discussed in the doctrine of holiness (hagiology), and there is indeed much more in it, we can clearly connect love for others as a personal, practical form of holiness or perfection.

This obvious connection between love and perfection, or perfection in love, in no way dilutes the other demands of holiness. In fact, to think and behave perfectly in love is the central essence of the faith.  Holiness is connected to our love of man and God, and this love is made evident by obeying the commands of Jesus: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments … He who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will disclose myself to him … If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love; just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” (John 14:15, 21; and 15:10)

So obedience – the keeping of commandments – is a connected aspect of perfection in love. Clearly, love has first place in the Gospels as stated above in John 14, and even more pointedly in the answer Jesus gives to the question about the greatest commandment: “Jesus said to him, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.’” (Matthew 22:37-40)

Jesus is very emphatic here. You must love. This is the greatest and the first commandment. On these two hang the whole of the Scriptures. (At this time the Old Testament translated into Greek – the Septuagint or LXX – was the Bible in use.)

Twice the prophet Ezekiel spoke the word of the Lord to the people, assuring them that, although they were uprooted and disbursed from their country and separated from the temple for worship, he would do this work in them: “I shall give them a single heart and put a new spirit in them; I shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh, so that they can keep my laws and respect my judgments and put them into practice. Then they will be my people and I shall be their God.” (Ezekiel 11:19, 20. See also 36:24ff)

Note the connection between the new spirit, the interior work of God on the heart, and the obedience that is to follow.

What could be more important than striving for perfection along these lines then? That is the point of Caussade and Company. The starting point, I might add. In popular American Christianity this striving has gone missing. Getting by is seen as an incredible accomplishment.

We cannot criticize the barely-adequate American pop Christian faith without realizing that we are a product of this soft and comfy religion that looks more like the inside of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory than real faith meeting real life in the real world.

Before we can advance toward perfection, we are going to have to become uncomfortable with our own mediocrity. If we want to live safely and comfortably, we will not follow the Christ of the gospels who told us to pick up our crosses, to expect persecution, to anticipate disorder and strife in our families caused by our faith, to be hated by the world, to appear foolish to those around us and even to be killed by people who believe they are doing so to serve God. We will, instead, live the lives of the barely adequate; the lukewarm.

Our protracted American comfort zone is killing our souls. American faith and Christian faith only have religious words in common – and scarcely those.

God's will is always present, even if we can't do the math

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 10-

We will want some reassurance through all this talk of God’s “will” and his “secret operations,” lest we be left to tread water as best we can in angry, unsearchable seas with no night sky or compass to assist us. The topic of God’s will often gets very weird, very quickly.

When the subject is spirituality, we cannot be blamed for speaking and writing from a less-familiar perspective than, say, traffic regulations or a casserole recipe. This does not mean that “spiritual” should be equated with “ethereal.” There should be no offshoot of the faith that takes us into the land of dreams and fantasies. When we advance towards the spiritual, we are not abandoning the real. With a proper world view that includes God, the believer is the one who can work with the spiritual aspect of things and maintain footing in reality.

Although spiritual subjects are not usually as precise as something like diesel mechanics, they are not merely voices in the mist either. As Caussade’s book progresses, more becomes clear. We start to see a spiritual landscape with recognizable features forming as we give some of this thinking at least an owl’s glance in our heart to bear the fruit of understanding and of making connections between what we might call theoretical spirituality and practical spirituality. Obviously, Caussade’s chief aim in teaching as he does is to assist in the holiness of his hearers; not just in posing ideas, but in hopeful and helpful thinking so that his students may more firmly unite themselves to the divine action of God in every moment.

“Every moment” is indeed the cantus firmus in Caussade’s thought:

_{“the present moment is always the ambassador who declares the order of god … the ‘one thing necessary’ is always to be found by the soul in the present moment.” (Page 33)}

There is no escaping how central and how vital the good father makes the God-filled moment to the believer. And he is not merely asking or even demanding that we see this as he sees it. Rather he is expounding for us what the “moment” truly is – what it contains and what it means to those who seek to follow God.

Our guide is going to show us how to perceive the will of God in each moment as the “one thing necessary” always present therein. This phrase, which Caussade puts in quotes at least twice in this section, has to be a reference to the words of Jesus to Martha in the Gospel of Luke, (10:38-42) while visiting the house of Martha and Mary.

As the New Jerusalem Bible renders it, Martha “was distracted with all the serving,” while Mary was seated “at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking.”

Both women were sharing the same moment with Jesus in the same house, and yet they were worlds apart. When we realize that Martha was interrupting Jesus, who was “speaking,” and indicated that she would rather have Jesus be quiet so Mary would free herself from her place of respect for Jesus, we start to see how outrageously Martha was behaving. She was busy serving, but she was missing the moment. Many preachers have tried to give Martha the benefit of the doubt here, saying that we always need someone to look after the details. However, the idea here is that Martha was missing the point. When Jesus is in the house, priorities change.

Here is where Jesus says to Martha: “You worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one.” The New American Standard Bible translates this, “only one thing is necessary.”

Father C assures us that “the one thing necessary” will faithfully present itself in the instances of life, so that the moment will produce what it should according to “God’s design.” (Page 33)

Caussade reveals even more weight and glory present in the moment, as he reminds us that “the sufficiency of grace” from God is made current and accessible in the moment. Thus, everything in the life of the self-abandoned becomes a means to holiness and a means to understanding that God is hidden there “by so many veils, or shadows or names…” (Page 34)

_{“what happens at each moment bears the imprint of the will of god and of his adorable name.” (Page 35)}

With what greater courage, then, can we face what the moment brings us; knowing that it is God in the garb of the ordinary, or God clothed in the difficulty we meet, or God cloaked in the suffering we encounter. God and his everything is still present in our many darknesses with a light that is known only by the heart kindled by its love of him, and enlightened by its faith.

Does this mean that once we realize the moment is his divine action, God will make himself obvious, remove his disguise and then explain to our satisfaction what is happening and, of ultimate importance to us, why it is happening? No. Even the most mystical of the mystics would not expect God to submit a paper outlining his ways and his thoughts on the matter. Rather, the heart learns to accept God’s presence and to back away from its demand for an explanation.

Here is a page from my own ordinary life. While writing on this very section it happens that it had become necessary for our family to have our cocker-spaniel put to sleep. For months I had denied that this had to happen, but it became clearer with each passing day that, since they don’t have convalescent homes for dogs, we would have to make the final move.

Taking her to the veterinarian was no easy task. Even so, I kept thinking that this, too, must be divine action hidden in this awful moment. For me this was my heart’s acknowledgement that God was present and involved. It was never clearly stated how he was present and involved – no miraculous healing of my dog in the lobby, for example. There was only a quiet courage.

In that moment, when many other things seemed unclear, my only solid thought was that God was in this and was available and accessible. I can’t really say I felt better. I can only say my heart had a knowing of something beyond what was happening.

Is there such a thing as Wal~mart spirituality?

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 9-

Have you ever lost your party at Wal~mart?

This is how it happens: You are with a group of people, or even one other person. You are talking and sticking fairly close together. Something catches your eye and you stop to look for a moment. When you look around, your party is gone. In the case of my family, we call one another on our cell phones and say things like, “Where did you go?” “Where are you now?” “Meet us in electronics.”

Welcome to Wal~mart spirituality.

I say I am a follower of Jesus, but sometimes I get interested in something and, when I look up, I realize I stopped following. Here I am, looking at men's socks, and Jesus is in sporting goods looking a fishing nets. Soon the loudspeaker announcement is heard: "Will the party that was following Jesus please come to the service counter. Your party is waiting."

To deny yourself and follow Christ means, in this case, no browsing on your own.

While our faith is of old, it is also present and current. It is informed by the Scriptures and by the lives and writings of those from the past that have followed Christ as disciples. Our faith is transformed by the ever-present God who is at hand for us moment by moment. Thus, our spiritual director here can say, “you have not far to go to find the source of living waters.” (Page 32)

There can be no denying the importance and the richness of that which we have in Christian thought through the Bible, church history and through the life of the Church over the centuries with Christ at the head and the Apostles the neck and shoulders of this glorious body. These, to the mind of Caussade, are given; they are in place. They are so established and so unassailable that he can freely demand that we bring these glories current – that we realize that the church is not a museum for faith but a contemporary center for divine inspiration.

Father C is constantly emphatic: God’s “inexhaustible action” has not ceased. God has not merely spoken and paused in silence. He has not acted and now sits in heaven with hands folded. Caussade complains, “Oh, Unknown Love! It would seem that thy marvels are over and that all we can do is copy thy ancient volumes and quote thy words of the past!”

What then would bring such marvels current, thriving and active now but that God’s Holy Spirit continues to work, minister and flourish in the lives of today’s believers? The key to integrating this current life of God in life, the good father says, is “simply to live in a perpetual self-abandonment to [God’s] secret operations.”

To say “simply” here could be deceptive. There is nothing particularly easy about leaving one’s will in the dust and radically changing the center of one’s life from self-service to selfless service. To say “simply” here does not mean ease, but rather it is a clear statement of the cost. A current, God driven life of faith will cost you perpetual self-abandonment.

Jesus was clear about this to his listeners: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me … anyone who loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24)

Gone is any shallow idea that we would merely annex Jesus to our life as it is. This is possibly my most burning concern about the quality of faith in my culture – where Jesus has become an additional interest in one’s life, rather than the singular, unequivocal motivator as Lord of everything one does and thinks.

When we pray, “Thy will be done,” or we read of Jesus in the garden praying, “Not my will but thine,” we are hearing this cost of the journey again. The quest for God’s will does not necessarily mean I am interested in actually following it. It just means I am interested in it. Maybe I am just browsing and do not have it in me to afford true discipleship. A living Christian faith, however, demands that we know and follow God, especially when his direction and intent differs from our own.

Sound doctrine and love do not exclude one another

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 8-

Whenever we hear one of our spiritual guides tell us that “God speaks to us personally,” or that “we only know perfectly what experience has taught us through suffering and action,” most of us will react.

The faith, we would contend, is based on objective, propositional truth; not on one’s subjective religious or non-religious experiences that have, after all, made God into some rather strange shapes through concocted theologies. We are aware of enough of this to become nervous when someone says to us that God “spoke to me,” or that it is their belief that the Holy Spirit is holed up in their basement or their suitcase. The mystics are sometimes blamed for pushing us away from objectivity and leading us in the direction of a “God-is-in-this-fruit-salad” sort of thinking.

Paul warned Timothy of such people in his second letter to the young church leader:

“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 2:2-4)

Far from inviting us to dispense with the truth by which we learn of God, Caussade is here beckoning us to live life on more than theoretical terms. He is not in favor of people making up ridiculous notions about God; starting up movements or religions based on clumsy thinking and ham-fisted theology. When the good father is pulling us away from book-learning, it is because he wants us to walk with God, rather than discuss walking with God or read about walking with God.

He even says we can become like “dreamers” who know maps, but not places. He and we alike would balk at the idea of only knowing God in theory. Yet, every time we try to write against it, we are suspected of turning God into a bag of gummy bears.

We cannot help it. Talk of an “interior language” will give us the willies. We have to get used to the idea that experiencing the love of God does not comprise a departure, denial or defiance of the Scriptures.

Truth and love must work together as much on our part as they do on God’s part.

Additional note from Tim: We need to discover that we, as individuals, are created to be loved by God. We have not made much of a dent in this.

A life we call 'empty' is in fact full of God

                        Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 7-

Lest we relapse into that shallow notion that the will of God is just so much useful information that we happen by either mystically in contemplation, observantly in study, or experientially in the ordinary, we are reminded that any realization of God’s will in our lives by these means is an incidence of God giving himself to us.

_{“all crosses, all actions, all spiritual impulses that are in the divine design give us god ….” (Page 30)}

Here he compares God giving himself to us moment by moment in love to the giving of himself that God expresses in the Eucharist.

It must be in the back of every Catholic mind that the Bread and Wine of the Eucharistic Sacrament is a very humble step for the Lord to take, time and time again. In these years as a Catholic convert, nothing has been more striking to me than the words of the priest at Mass, when he holds before us the Bread and the Cup and declares, “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

Only faith allows me to keep my place in the sanctuary at this particular moment. If I do not believe that the Bread has become the resurrected Body, and the Wine the risen Blood, then I would need to run from the room for fear of idolatry. Only an idiot would call something manmade and ordinary his god. In the Mass, there is no mistaking the declared identity of the One being shown to us by the priest – the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That is Jesus Christ, and no one else.

There is a significant line in the sand drawn here. Either the Catholic Church is wrong – and the Eucharist is the worst idolatry to ever infect the church, or the Catholic Church is right – and the Eucharist is a living, mysterious sacrament that many believers snub.

Whether one is disposed to believe this, it is undoubtedly the good father’s view that the Eucharist is an incident wherein God gives us himself in a special, sacramental way.

He means to make the sacrament and the ordinary moments of our lives touch with this thought in common: Out of his love for us, God gives us himself in mysterious and surprising ways – even in ways that “might appear to injure” us.

Again we are given hope that a life that has been invaded by poverty, illness, loss, suffering, blandness, discord, disability, incompleteness or injustice, is a life that has meaning because God has given himself to the one so invaded through those very unattractive means. A life that we might call “empty,” is in fact full of God mysteriously giving himself to the suffering one.

God is often hidden, but never absent

 

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 6-

There have been times in my life when I have felt alone and irrelevant. A spiritual person is bound to feel himself out of sync with everything, occasionally, as he does his best to bring his life to bear upon the God who made him, saved him and guides him. Surely nothing else and no one other than God can fill the combined role of maker, savior and guide. Not truthfully anyway.

I once shared these feelings of malaise with a loving old Cistercian monk during a retreat at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah. While in the loving embrace of his full attention, I heard him say to me, “Saint Bernard once said, ‘Never less alone than alone.’” The monk actually said it twice, knowing that sometimes the wisdom of the ages fails 21^st Century man on the first pass; and I, at any rate, am not the best student.

“Never less alone than alone.”

God is especially present when he seems to be absent. This is a wonderful aspect of the hiddenness of God that the writings of John of the Cross had brought to my attention. He wrote, “Neither the sublime communication nor the sensible awareness of his nearness is a sure testimony of [God’s] gracious presence, nor are dryness and the lack of these a reflection of his absence. . . Even though he does abide with you, he is hidden.” (See Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 1, Sections 3 and 8.)

Our guide touches again on this subject:

_{“A mystery is life to the heart through faith, but for the rest of our faculties a contradiction … the darker the mystery the more light it contains.” (Page 30)}

We must again be cautious when reading Caussade and Company, lest we spoil a good faith with elements of Gnosticism or other heresies. We are back to this concern about God acting in ways that are beyond our ability to see. The mystical writers would not suggest that we find some special knowledge or a special means to acquire the vision that it would take to see God’s divine perfection at work in every moment. They would advise us instead to take the path of love to the Christ of the gospels. The pathway is love, and the pavement is truth. (Truth and love are very distinctive themes oftentimes paired in the Psalms.)

Caussade has already hinted that he would cover this topic, and he does so eloquently and succinctly:

_{“we wish to reduce god’s action to the limits and rules that our feeble reason can imagine.” (Page 29)}

Just about every lad I went to school with would take exception to this statement; arguing that God’s truth is propositional and rational. We are able to communicate about the Cross and its meaning. Children are able to comprehend the love and forgiveness of God through Christ, and faith can be talked about, studied and outlined. We are not indeed Gnostics who would contend that they have had a personal experience of God through special knowledge that cannot be shared due to its loftiness.

I agree with my classmates, but, we have to admit that while God is rational, he is also beyond expression. The extent to which he loves, the beauty that he truly is, the depth at which he works within a person or within a country’s history – these are beyond us.

Although worried about this misunderstanding, let us not lose the point that is made here – that God’s will is all that matters. Really. All.

 _{“and i tell you that the will of god is the only thing necessary and that therefore all that it does not grant is useless.” (Page 29)}

This emphasis is made because believers can treat the will of God poorly. We can turn from it because it is not what we expected, or because we don’t understand it, or because we don’t recognize it, or because to obey it could bring unpleasant ramifications.

I am reminded of the priests of the Jews during the time of Christ. They were every one of them a Sadducee. They had been given position, authority and wealth from the Romans. While Christ was making his way to the salvation of all, the priests were concerned that the rabblerousing of Jesus and his followers would bring Rome crashing down on Palestine, and the priests’ prosperity would be ruined. (See John 11:47)

They were looking at the wrong things while God was acting. Deliver us, Lord, from this easy miss.

Caussade’s wording in this section is particularly harsh – possibly in order to bring us up short lest we believe we are immune to weakness and frail thinking about God and his involvement in our lives. We are, perhaps, no less Sadducee than the priests at the time of Christ. Would we, indeed, follow the will of God if we knew it would mean worldly ruin for us?

Caussade tells us God’s will, “his adorable will is blasphemed by his children who do not recognize it” (Page 29). We do this by labeling God’s participation in our lives as “misfortunes, mishaps and contrarieties,” he says. Jesus was mistreated and called names by those who would not know him. Now, Caussade contends, we who know God are no less culpable for our own name-calling when we abuse God’s will as expressed in our lives.

What then? Is the will of God a bad thing? Or is it that we have an “incapacity for divine truths”?

Lord, I have capacity. Help me in my incapacity.