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December 31, 2017 - December 27, 2018
is the voice that announces a whole new way of being, a being in the house of love, the house of the Lord….The house of love is not simply a place in the afterlife, a place in heaven beyond this world. Jesus offers us this house right in the midst of our anxious world.
It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition.
When you run away from it, your loneliness does not really diminish; you simply force it out of your mind temporarily. When you start dwelling in it, your feelings only become stronger, and you slip into depression.
The spiritual task is not to escape your loneliness, not to let yourself drown in it, but to find its source.
You might find that your loneliness is linked to your call to live completely for God. Thus your loneliness may be revealed to you as the
The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence.
Unless our questions, problems, and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect answers that are really our own….This is a very difficult task, because in our world we are constantly pulled away from our innermost self and encouraged to look for answers instead of listening to the questions.
There we also can become present to others by reaching out to them, not greedy for attention and affection but offering our own selves to help build a community of love.
When we know that God loves us deeply and will always go on loving us, whoever we are and whatever we do, it becomes possible to expect no more of our fellow men and women than they are able to give, to forgive them generously when they have offended us, and always to respond to their hostility with love. By doing so we make visible a new way of being human and a new way of responding to our world problems.
It seems crucial that you realize deeply that your worth and value does not depend on anyone else. You have to claim your own inner truth.
The more you can come to realize this, the more you will be able to forgive those who have hurt you and love them in their brokenness. Without a deep feeling of self-respect, you cannot forgive and will always feel anger, resentment, and revenge.
in short, whenever we opt for and not against one another, we make God’s unconditional love visible; we are diminishing violence and giving birth to a new community.
In the seclusion of our hearts we learn to know the hidden presence of God; and with that spiritual knowledge we can lead a loving life.
The table is the place of intimacy. Around the table we discover each other.
Precisely because the table is the place of intimacy for all the members of the household, it is also the place where the absence of that intimacy is most painfully revealed.
The real mystery of marriage is not that [two people] love each other so much that they can find God in each other’s lives, but that God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminders of God’s divine presence.
together we look at God, who calls us to God’s service.
what matters increasingly is getting to know Jesus and living in solidarity with him.
Everything we know about Jesus indicates that he was concerned with only one thing: to do the will of his Father.
His obedience means a total, fearless listening to his loving Father. Between the Father and the Son there is only love.
We realize that we are in the center, and that from there all that is and all that takes place can be seen and understood as part of the mystery of God’s life with us.
What matters is to listen attentively to the Spirit and to go obediently where we are being led, whether to a joyful or a painful place.
But life is no longer boring, resentful, depressing, or lonely because we have come to know that everything that happens is part of our way to the Father.
God sent Jesus to make free persons of us. He has chosen compassion as the way to freedom. That is a great deal more radical than you might at first imagine. It means that God wanted to liberate us, not by removing suffering from us, but by sharing it with us. Jesus is God-who-suffers-with-us.
This is what Jesus means when he asks you to take up your cross. He encourages you to recognize and embrace your unique suffering and to trust that your way to salvation lies therein. Taking up your cross means, first of all, befriending your wounds and letting them reveal to you your own truth.
My true spiritual work is to let myself be loved, fully and completely, and to trust that in that love I will come to the fulfillment of my vocation.
That’s why it’s so important to make the Eucharist the heart and center of your life. It’s there that you receive the love that empowers you to take the way that Jesus has taken before you: a narrow way, a painful way, but the way that gives you true joy and peace and enables you to make the non-violent love of God visible in this world.
The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will never get lost—not even our mortal bodies.
But it does reveal to us that, indeed, love is stronger than death.
After that revelation, we must remain silent, leave the whys, wheres, hows, and whens behind, and simply trust.
God who is moved by our pains and participates in the fullness of the human struggle.
Easter brings the awareness that God is present even when his presence is not directly noticed. Easter brings the good news that, although things seem to get worse in the world, the Evil One has already been overcome.
You were seen with eyes of perfect love long before you entered into the dark valley of life.
The spiritual life starts where you dare to claim the first love. “Love one another because I have loved you first” (see John 4:19).
Home is the place where that first love dwells and speaks gently to
But when we grasp the truth that we already have a home, we may at last have the strength to unmask the illusions created by our fears and continue to return again and again and again.
But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.
the intimacy of God’s house excludes no one and includes everyone.
It is of great importance to see the inner connection between intimacy and solidarity. If we fail to recognize this connection, our spirituality will become either privatized or narrowly activist and will no longer reflect the full beauty of living in God’s house.
But when you fully own your pain and do not expect those to whom you minister to alleviate it, you can speak about it in true freedom.
Then sharing your struggle can become a service; then your openness about yourself can offer courage and hope to others.
is this pain that reveals to you how you are called to live in solidarity with the broken human race.
It is a struggle to keep distinguishing the real pain
from the false pains. But as you are faithful to that struggle, you will see more and more clearly your unique call to love. As you see that call, you will be more and more able to claim your real pain as your unique way to glory.
We are healed first of all by letting them be available, by leading them out of the corner of forgetfulness, and by remembering them as part of our life stories. What is forgotten is unavailable and what is unavailable cannot be healed….
He connects them with the pain of all humanity, a pain he took upon himself and transformed.
But the more we dare to reveal our whole trembling self to him, the more we will be able to sense that his love, which is perfect love, casts out all our fears.
Whenever Jesus says to people he has healed: “Your faith has saved you,” he is saying that they have found new life because they have surrendered in complete trust to the love of God revealed in him.
Trusting in the unconditional love of God: that is the way to which Jesus calls us. The more firmly you grasp this, the more readily will you be able to perceive why there is so much suspicion, jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, violence, and discord in our world.
