GOD'S LENTEN BECKONING TO OUR SOULS

Across the world, souls who yearn for deeper awareness of God's Loving Merciful Presence in every moment, are now directing their gaze with excitement and holy joy toward Ash Wednesday. 

                        This is the time of God's beckoning.

We are being invited to encounter Him in new ways during our Lenten days; to accompany Him in the Holy Week prior to and during His Passion; to celebrate with Him and in Him with holy joy on Easter Sunday. When Spirit Lord draws us along this way of our soul's transformation, His Divine Inspirations are our beacons and we hear Him speak with words that have no sounds:

"Jesus needs neither books nor Doctors of Divinity in order to instruct souls; He, the Doctor of Doctors, He teaches without noise of words."

 

A deep yearning groans in our souls to "know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in our world," and Christ's passionate love for us and His Desire for Intimate Union with our soul fills us with silent awe. 

"Between God and the soul, secret things are always happening." 

And they are happening in the ordinariness of our days, unseen, intimately hidden as Holy Spirit speaks to us. As we surrender our selves, our opinions, our hopes, our families, our expectations, our control that was never ours, spiritual miracles begin to reshape our desires and transform our relationships. 

This is the Lenten time when Spirit Lord asks our permission to purify our soul. When we give our YES, our FIAT to Him, in the ordinariness of our Lenten days, in our common daily work, we allow Him to shift and discard the residual dross of our past sins that silences the Voice of the Divine Three Who dwell so humbly within our souls in love beyond all telling. 

When we give Him our permission to purify us during our Lenten pathway, Spirit Lord begins to transform us into the glorified being whom God has chosen to be His instruments of love:

"The Fire that purifies is an Intelligent Fire. It regulates the violence of Its Flame according to the effect It wants to produce."

Spirit Lord is the Flame. He knows what we look like in our glorified state in Heaven and the trials and the sufferings God permits us to endure are His tools of purification which will transform us into the glorified being God ordained us to be. 

Sufferings conform us to Christ Crucified. Yet at times, a quiet taunt of complaint may enter our thoughts....

"Does He not see our anguish and the burden that weighs us down? Why does He not come and comfort us? ...

He knows that it is the only means of preparing us to know Him as He knows Himself, and to become ourselves Divine!

"God already sees us in glory and rejoices in our everlasting bliss. I understand now why He lets us suffer."

During our Lenten purification, smiling through spiritual pain and suffering is difficult because in our weak and fragile humanity, spiritual trials may bruise us, and we find ourselves confronting that weapon so well utilized by satan ... discouragement. 

"Our whole being objects to the announced suffering. Our poor human nature and our faith need to be sustained. Let us say to Our Lord: Show me the distant light at the end of the tunnel so that we might walk towards this luminous point shining in the dark." 

And little Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face reminds us of some "how to" ways to walk away from discouragement and to walk to towards that luminous point in our darkness of purification, to assure Jesus Lord of our love for Him and to join Therese in winning souls for Him ... when she suffered much, instead of wearing a melancholy look, she would wear a smile; when she was in a state of spiritual dryness and couldn't pray, she looked for smallest trifles to please Jesus, like not crossing her ankles during long hours of community prayer; or speaking a kindly word when she would rather be silent; or when we have been wrongly accused we do not defend ourselves and so allow God to mete out the justice. 

Our Mother Mary, the Immaculata of the Holy Spirit, concludes our thoughts as we strain toward Ash Wednesday and our Lent of Transformation.

Blessed Marie-Eugene imagines the way our dear Mother looked at the dead body of her son Jesus taken down from the Cross and laid in her arms. 

Fr Marie-Eugene offers us a Lenten meditation:

"Maternally, you look at his wounds, his face, you discover his majesty and you kiss him. Allow us to kiss him after you: his forehead, his feet and his hands, the wound of his heart."

          Our Lenten journey into self-abandonment. self-emptiness and self-surrender to God's Will begins as we stand, silently, beside Christ's Mother and our Mother.

                 * ALL QUOTATIONS ARE FROM ST THERESE OF THE CHILD JESUS AND THE HOLY FACE (OCD) AND FROM BLESSED MARIE-EUGENE OF THE CHILD JESUS (OCD)

----

Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com

Advent

  ADVENT : THE SAVIOR PREPARES TO COME. THE WORLD PREPARES TO RECEIVE HIM.     

"I will go and tell the world: I will go seek my bride and take upon myself her weariness and labors in which she suffers so; and that she may have life, I will die for her, and lifting her out of that deep, I will restore her to you”        

                                       "...the Lover becomes like the one he loves"      

 "....for He would make himself wholly like them, and He would come to them and dwell with them; and God would be man and man would be God, and He would walk with them and eat and drink with them; and He himself would be with them continually until the consummation of this world" (St John of the Cross).

"IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD, AND THE WORD WAS GOD.” (John 1:1)

AND MARY ANSWERED,

"BEHOLD! I AM THE DOULY (BOND-SLAVE) OF THE LORD. LET IT BE DONE UNTO ME ACCORDING TO YOUR WORD." (Luke1:38)

“AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US." (John 1:14)

We journey together again through Advent. The greatest love story of all time is being re-told. A mystical door is opening from Heaven to inflame earth in the "burning Furnace of Love" that is God's passionate Love affair with His people. He is madly in love with our soul and His love is revealed in and through "The Word." 

We search and dig and pray to try to hear and understand what this "Word" is saying to us. His language is sometimes beyond us because we are finite. He is Infinite. He is totally Other. We are totally dependent on Him.  

                                             "When God loves us, He is loving Himself in us."

Inherent in these words is a staggering truth... that if God loves Himself in us, then He must be Present within us. 

                                   

                                      How to fathom such a profound and eternal meaning?

In Sacred Scripture, The Word speaks, so we go there to "sit at His feet" to hear His Voice. 

                                   

And to hear Our Father's response.

Jesus, The Word, spoke in the darkness of the stable of His Birth. We sit at the mouth of that cave and we look inside. We see His Poverty. In this, we hear Him inviting us to let go of attachments that make our hands stick to things that can do damage to our souls. "Attachments can be dangerous because they prevent us from relying on faith. And they can ultimately make us prey to the devil. Detachment is non-possessiveness and opens a soul-space for God to fill it with poverty of spirit."

Like Mary, the Douly of the Lord, we say our own YES to that gift of poverty.

And the Father sees His Son's Poverty growing within us. God the Father is seeing and loving in us something of what He saw and loved in His Son. As He gazes on us, we hear His delight with our small gift and He proclaims to all the hosts of Heaven: 

                  "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." (Mt 3 :17)

                    

During His life on earth, we see Jesus, Savior, Son, as Humility enfleshed. He is the Doulos, the Bondslave of God. Everything He said and did and had, came from His Father. In Matthew 3:6, John is baptising many in the waters of the Jordan. To be submerged in the waters was an external marker for an interior confession of sin and a desire to repent. Jesus, Son of God, Redeemer before time began, approaches John to ask to be baptised. In that moment, He, the Innocent One, not only aligned Himself with my sins, He was expressing ownership of them. For all of us. In full view of the great number of sinners waiting to confess and to repent, He, the Christ, waited in line and was submerged in our place. 

And when the Savior came out from the waters, the Voice of God was heard:

                       "BEHOLD! THIS IS MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED."

When we wait in line to confess our sins and our spiritual pride tempts us with a hundred reasons to abandon such a place of humiliations, we may be given the grace to attend to another whisper: God can use even my sins for the salvation of my soul. But more, much more, we can offer our humiliation to God for the soul of another, one who never prays and who will not do penance, to be brought back to God through my offering. 

 And at the words of absolution, the Father sees more of His Son in us and we hear His delight:

                                 

                       "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

It was a shocking and terrifying and electric moment when Jesus, Lord raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. The scorching sun must have blazed on that scene among the caves of tombs. And into that stunned silence, Christ Jesus walked to the entrance of the tomb. Suddenly, He raised His hands and arms high into the air. His head was thrown back and His eyes stared up toward Heaven. And then He gave a great shout that must have rocked the silent crowd. 

"Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I know that you always hear me but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me." (John 11:38-44)

Jesus was addressing His Father and His Voice was filled with holy joy.

In deeply challenging circumstances, when even friends don't fully stand by us, when all that should be just isn't, do we ever throw our hands and arms high in the air and shout a great shout of utter holy joy in the midst of our storm: Father, Thank you. I know that you always hear me?

And the Father's Gaze sees the faith and holy joy of His Son alive in our soul, and He replies:

                                        

                          "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

Our fallen human nature is being pursued by Love in every passage and event in Sacred Scripture. The Word is speaking Himself into life in, through and with us. Christ is the Father's "entire Locution and Response, given to us as Master, Brother, Companion, Ransom, Reward." (St John of the Cross)

This is never more miraculous and powerful and uncontained than at that moment when we leave our seats to walk forward to the Altar where the Unbloodied Sacrifice has been offered to the Father at the hands of the priest. On our way up the aisle, we offer ourselves: all that we were, all that we are, all that we have, all that we will be.  

                                

We receive the Word made Flesh, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

To give Himself to us, the Son had to be totally annihilated so that we can be totally filled with God. The Breath of the Father, through the Spirit, breathes in the Son, now actually and Physically Present on our tongue or in our hand. We are breathing the Breath that empowers us to communicate with God and the Hearts of the Trinity are now beating in our own. 

           

AS HE GAZES ON AND IN US, THE FATHER CAN NOW PROCLAIM IN FULLNESS TO ALL OF HEAVEN:

                              "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

                                                      And the Word speaks into our depths...

                                                   "DON'T CLING TO ME... GO AND TELL" (John 20:17).

“WHEN GOD LOVES US HE IS LOVING HIMSELF IN US. HE THUS MAKES US HIS EQUAL" (St. John of the Cross).