Embracing God's Will With Joy... And Even a Few Laughs!

Donkeys have no sense of humor, especially wooden donkeys. But
human beings do. And I need a pic so I can post this to Pinterest. :)

"I want to do the will of God."

Really? Perhaps that's true, or has begun to be true, after 52 years of life.

It's about time. The hairs... they are getting even more gray, no?

Even so, "wanting to do God's will" remains an intention that I still don't manage to sustain, or even remember, through much of the day.

I know that "doing God's will" is not an abdication of my humanity, but -- on the contrary -- it is the path to the realization of my true self, created in the image of Infinite Love and unable to be free and happy with anything less. The "will of God" -- His wisdom, goodness, and love for me -- is what awakens my freedom, draws me, encourages me, whispers within my heart that fulfillment in this Love is possible.

Indeed, it is a promise.

I think, however, that in order to "do" God's will, I have to "want" more. I must ask for the grace to embrace His will -- to let Him embrace me with the grace that shows the beauty of His love while also raising me up to His measure, which is beyond all things, incomprehensible, and that opens up a path so often unfamiliar and "strange" in its ways.

Your ways are not my ways, O Lord.

At the same time, "Your ways" are the only ways in which my heart hears the echo of the promise, and finally comes to rest forever in the Love for which it cries out in every moment.

The Mystery is revealed and comes to dwell with us, not to cease being Mystery, but to accompany us, to be our companion, to dwell in the very stuff of our lives and give Himself through it.

So, what does it mean to "embrace the will of God?"

It means -- by God's grace -- to rejoice, to have gratitude, to affirm the reality of this moment... fully, with complete trust, without running away. It means to embrace my circumstances with their joys and possibilities and disappointments and frustrations and sufferings in the conviction that these circumstances have been shaped by the mystery of God's love, that He is with me in and through it all, that He is giving Himself to me and opening me up to be able to receive Him more.

I don't think I do that very often. I don't know that I ever do it. But I can't do it by my own power. He has come into the world to give me the transfiguration of humanity and the energy of love that makes this possible. He has united Himself with my life because He wants to heal me and raise me up to share in His life, to give me the gift that enables me to receive Him, the One who is Gift.

So I must take this heart of mine that cries out for Him, that longs for Him and begs for Him, that is already a total need for Him, and I must ask Him to enable me to embrace His will, to love the One who loves me and even to love the ways He loves me. This does not mean to understand His ways, or master them, or even to "feel good" about them. It is to love them; for it is love that "recognizes" and embraces and draws the whole of us beyond ourselves.

We are called to this embrace of God's will, of God's ineffable wisdom and infinite love present in our concrete lives. This embrace is the only thing that can bear up the weight of life. It is not enough to drag life with sadness and fear, for that turns everything into slavery and leads only to disgruntled conformity or desperate revolt.

In the embrace we will find the joy, the "lightness" of the burden -- our hearts and minds will glimpse it, if nothing else, though the miracle of humor. We will learn to laugh, at least a little bit, but even this is a triumph: those little bits of laughter are the buds of wonder. We may not even be aware of them, because humor is small and tender and moves through us swiftly so as to give itself away. We may not notice our own laughter, but it will be a song that will lighten the burdens of others.

The necessity and difficulty of this embrace of God's will -- God's way of loving us -- struggles against the discouragement that turns away from it and the fear and violence that attempt to avoid it or escape from it.

This constitutes the true and profound work of our lives, and it is the real existential drama that underlies the world we live in today.

A Heart For Everyone

"And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart" (Luke 2:19).

This is what the Gospel tells us about Mary's personal response to all the great events of these days. She reflected on the things (or pondered, as some translations have it, which evokes "weighing" these things, entering their depths). And she did so in her heart.

And "these things," of course were the mystery of what we are celebrating, the Nativity: the epiphany of God who was truly born from her womb, and the encounter of God, her son, with His people.

As soon as she had given birth to Him, they came. The first to come were the poor, those who counted for nothing in the world. They were shepherds, and they were weary and burdened. The young ones had no hopes for their lives beyond the flocks, and the old ones awaited the end of their days, grizzled, toothless, with gnarled faces and tired eyes that had watched more nights than they could remember.

But then messengers came forth from the Mystery (whose Name the shepherds dared not speak), the Mystery beyond the stars, and the messengers filled the sky with light and song and proclaimed that something new had begun in the world.

And so the shepherds came with joy and expectation to see the One who had been announced to them as their Savior, the One whose coming was meant to be "a great joy for all the people," the One who was the Glory of God and the bringer of peace.

And Mary showed them her child.

She was with them when they saw the Glory of the Lord, the Glory of the Mystery who creates and sustains all things, the Glory that is not like the ideas of power and domination that human beings seek to grasp and possess. They saw the Glory of the Lord as an infant, born an outcast (from a town that had no room to take Him in), wrapped in cloth bands and lying in a feeding trough.

The Infinite Mystery, so Great beyond all greatness that His glory shines through the "smallness" of taking flesh under the heart of Mary. His glory shines through His coming into the world as the son of an insignificant mother who takes refuge in a shelter among the poorest of the poor.

His glory was in sharing the night of the shepherds, because He wanted to bring joy and peace to the grizzled, toothless, wrinkled, tired old men.

They had hearts, and they had hope. He would not leave them disappointed....

His glory was, and is, the revelation of His love, the revelation that He is Love.

And Mary kept these things and pondered them. She pondered the humility of the One who had placed Himself in her hands so that she could give Him to everyone. She pondered her mysterious motherhood of the God who had become her child, and who wanted to be the brother of every person, first of all of those who were the least, the poorest, the most forgotten.

She kept these things in her heart. She said "yes" to all the multitude whose lives her son had come to embrace. She said "yes" to being mother to the shepherds' joy, and she kept saying "yes" -- to His disciples, to the crowds who would follow Him, to those He forgave on the cross, to those who waited in the upper room for the Spirit to come, to Israel and the Gentiles, to every human being, to you, to me.

Mary kept and pondered in her heart. That means she loved.

This love was and is for everyone. Mary is our Mother.

At the center of it all -- of all our searching and finding and fulfilling of our destiny -- there is the heart of a woman who loves, a mother....

Of course. How could this not be true?

Why Does Jesus Matter So Much?

Hand carved, olive wood, Bethlehem

Why do I care so much about Jesus?

Some people might be glad that I have a "belief" in my life that makes me "feel good" (though as I've said again and again, Jesus is not about feeling good or comfortable in handling problems, oh no...).

Jesus is not a drug that helps me dull my pain. Nor is He just my particular “philosophy of life” or my “support community”—something that “works for me” but might not necessarily “work for you.” He is for me, because I am a human being. That means He is for you. I am sure of this.

But how? Who do I think I am anyway? What makes me so sure that my ideas about the meaning of life are true for everyone? That is just the point: these are not “my ideas”—this is a relationship. He is here, in my life, in a relationship with me. In fact, He started it—not me.

I could never give myself this certainty, not even with all the philosophy of all the ages. What else could sustain this certainty in a blockhead like me? I am amazed at myself, at the fact that I am so certain about this. I haven’t seen any miracles. I haven’t had any visions. And it is definitely not because I have a “deep spirituality”—I am a spiritual wimp.

What make me certain? It is Jesus Himself—not just some vague ideals about “goodness” or “the importance of Christian ethics” or even “my understanding about the value of suffering.” It is Jesus, the objective, actual, true Son of God, the living man who is with us now.

He is here. It is because He is really here that the world is redeemed. Because He is here, I am able to find the good in things, the positive value of all reality, the fact that every circumstance in my life is radically for me. Because He is here, because He is Love, and because He has won the victory, everything belongs to Him.

He does not take away or "solve" all my problems. Rather, He empowers me to engage them and embrace them, even when all I can do is suffer them. Every event that happens in my life is His gift to me to shape my fulfillment in relationship to the Ultimate Meaning of my life, the realization of my true self, the desire of my heart to find life and love without end.

I cannot comprehend this mystery of Love which is the reason why I exist and the destiny to which I have been called. I cannot understand Him, but I don't have to, because He has come to be with me. I cannot understand Him, but I can stay with Him, always.

He is here. Jesus. That is why there is hope for me, and for you.

Real Life, Real People, Real Love

"If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9).

The name of Jesus is a prayer. When I confess that Jesus is Lord, I am doing so much more than just saying words. I am expressing my commitment in a perceptible way. I am bearing witness. I am lifting up my soul in prayer to the One for whom everything has been created, the One who was born and died and rose from the dead, the One who established Himself as the center and the fulfillment of history, the One who draws all things to Himself, the One who has entered my life, my history, and has proven that the meaning of my life is to belong to Him.

I confess that Jesus is Lord.

He is my Lord. I exist for Him, in a world that exists for Him, this God who became a man and poured Himself out in love on the cross. He pours Himself out in love for me in this moment; He begs me to open my heart and let Him love me in this moment, so that He might fill me with His Spirit and free me to love Him and be transformed in His likeness and cry out "Abba!" This is life. God. Love.

My mouth. This is the reason my mouth was created: to say, "Jesus is Lord!"

For me, this is not an abstract idea. Jesus has grabbed hold of my real life. Every day I see faces that remind me that this is a fact. My confession of faith is not made in solitude. I belong to the Church, and this "Church" is not a faction, not an organization defined by some agenda. It is "living stones," it is real people.

Even as I type these words, I am not alone. The Church is in my living room. Here are six people who remind me that Jesus is Lord of this moment. We are a family. Sometimes we drive one another crazy and get frustrated. We are always falling short, and failing one another. Still, He is Lord, and He is changing us through this life. He is shaping our lives right now, in this moment. Here is this woman and these children (watching a hockey game, doing homework, driving a toy truck on the arm of my chair); without Jesus this moment would have been impossible. Without Jesus, we would not be together.

 

This moment is entirely the fruit of a history of belonging to Him.

The commitment of marriage and family does not have its source in my own generosity. I know very concretely that without Jesus, I would never find the courage to share my life with another human person, much less to surrender myself with this other person to the creative freedom of God so that new human persons might come into the world and experience love through us.

Without Jesus, this doesn't happen.

I am certain that those who aspire to live marriage and family in a true way are sustained by the grace of Jesus Christ. If they do not know His name explicitly, still it is His grace that engenders within their hearts the seeking, the hope, the longing to see the face that makes love possible. In that longing, that poverty, He draws them and sustains them and shapes their hearts and their voices so that one day they will sing the glory of His name.

I am certain of this. I know that without Jesus, my own life is impossible.

Without Jesus; without the Church and her enduring witness; without the supernatural strength of the sacraments; without the people (beginning with my own mother and father, my brother, and others--you know who you are) who confessed with their mouths and lived with their lives this faith, and who communicated to me a love of God that is greater than all my fears...without this reality I have no life.

I have seen life. I have seen with my own eyes that Jesus makes it possible to live a marriage and not be afraid of life, of children, of the mystery of children who need love that is greater than anyone can give.

I have lived with these people, who can give themselves in little gestures, who witness the love of God in their  goodness and their confusion, who struggle and endure and suffer and find joy. I know these people who are so inadequate and broken in themselves, but who are not defeated by their own failures; these people who find forgiveness and extend forgiveness and carry on with a hope that is greater than their weakness.

And I have known certain real people who love Jesus with a vividness that sacrifices everything in an exclusive commitment to Him, a commitment to speak His name to all, to go anywhere, to pour themselves out for persons they have never met....

Without the experience of such a love for Jesus and for me, my life would be nothing. I would have my solitude, my sickness, and the prison of my own thoughts. And a deep desperate cry to an unknown Someone: "please, come!"

Jesus is Lord.

I have seen this. And it is real life. I tell fun stories about my family, and we do have a lot of fun, but family life is hard. Its mysterious and overwhelming. Its messy. Its exhausting. Its a human family, and Jesus doesn't do magic. He doesn't make our humanity disappear; He embraces it and transforms it in His patience, in time.

The name of Jesus is not magic. There are many people who talk about Jesus and do stupid things. Even crazy things. There is nothing surprising about human failure.

The miracle is this life which amazes us, which makes us go forward, stumbling, falling, forgetting, being sorry, being forgiven, stumbling and going forward, convinced that He is with us and that His love is greater than everything.

I have seen a life that is only possible because He has conquered fear, He has conquered death. He has really, truly been raised from the dead, in transformed and glorified flesh and blood. I believe this in my heart. It is His flesh and blood and His glory that makes my own life. It conquers my weakness, renews my spirit, sustains my hope.

Does God Give Us Personal Fulfillment?

"A man is not justified by observance of the law but only through faith in Jesus Christ" (Galatians 2:16).

St. Paul's point is very direct, and it corresponds to Jesus's own testimony. We cannot find our true fulfillment by any kind of action that is within the scope of our power. This is because we are made not for self-generated achievement. We are made for relationship with God. We find our true destiny in the "loss" of our "selves," that is, the self-abandonment, the giving of ourselves over in love to the Infinite One who is the Source of all that we are, and who invites us to share in His own Infinite life.

We think that we can achieve our destiny by actions that we can understand and carry out by ourselves; actions that we can possess entirely, without any relational context, without any loss of ourselves. St. Paul knows that God's people Israel have the Law, with its rituals and precepts. But they are not capable of entering into the interior reality of the Law by themselves. The Law is an expression of the Covenant, which is, in turn, a promise of something greater than itself.

Some in Israel seemed to think that the Law was a formula, a way of conjuring God somehow, a way of making themselves worthy of God while still remaining radically independent of God. They wanted to become god-like without giving themselves to God.

But the Covenant was never meant to be a prescription for self-justification. It was never meant to be a "list-of-things-to-do-to-make-myself-righteous" and thereby secure God's approval while remaining within the enclosure of my own self-satisfaction. The Law points beyond itself; it was given to engender hope, to turn the people of Israel outward, to awaken their desire for a more profound and intimate relationship with the God of the Covenant. To "observe" the Law alone is impossible, except in a superficial, outward sense. The entire Old Testament is alive with the cry and the poignant plea to God for "something more," but also a confident hope that God would bring Himself close and enter into a relationship with His people:

Lord, listen to my prayer:
turn your ear to my appeal.
You are faithful, you are just; give answer.
Do not call your servant to judgment
for no one is just in your sight.

Lord, make haste and answer;
for my spirit fails within me.
Do not hide your face
lest I become like those in the grave.

In the morning let me know your love
for I put my trust in you.
Make me know the way I should walk:
to you I lift up my soul.

(Psalm 143:1-2, 7-8)

Jesus Christ is the answer to this prayer. "Faith in Jesus Christ" draws us into a gift of ourselves to Him, through that hopeful and loving trust engendered in us by His grace that awakens us to mystery of our vocation. God calls us to share in His life, to become "like Him" in a way beyond anything we could have imagined. We are called to share in Jesus's love for the Father in the Spirit.

It turns out that "giving myself away totally to God" is not something that demeans my freedom or results in the loss of my dignity as a person. On the contrary, it is the realization of freedom and of the person. For God Himself is Infinite Self-Giving Love. The Trinity reveals that total self giving is at the very root of what it means to be a person.

Jesus says, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:11). And we will fulfill the true meaning of ourselves as persons, we will achieve the destiny and fulfillment for which we have been created, by abandoning ourselves to Him and trusting in Him: "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39).

We have been created to become gifts, to realize our freedom as love, to live in relationship as persons, and to "find ourselves" forever in relationship to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Death Opens To Something Completely New

But how do we Christians respond to th[e] question of death?

We respond with faith in God,

with a look firm with hope

founded on the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So death opens to life,

to eternal life,

which is not an infinite doubling of the present time

but something completely new.

Faith tells us that the true immortality to which we aspire

is not an idea, a concept,

but a relation of full communion with the living God:

it is being in his hands, in his love,

and becoming in him one with all our brothers and sisters

that he has created and redeemed,

with the whole of creation.

Our hope, then, rests in God’s love

which shines on the Cross of Christ....

This is life that has reached its fullness,

life in God;

it is a life that now we can only glimpse

as one glimpses calm skies through the clouds.

Benedict XVI (Homily, 11/4/12)

Walking in the Afternoon

The sun is shining. The air is warm.

There is goodness.

Goodness will endure.

The storm and show of evil is not the final word.

All the clatter that shakes our thoughts

will not be silenced by a better idea.

Our hope is that hope has an answer

that whispers like the still small voice.

The Poverty of Who I [Still] Am

Here it is mid January 2013 already. Its hard to believe that its been almost two years since I began this peculiar literary exercise. Among other things, blogging is a kind of workshop for writing. It feels personal, but its also "out there" in a way that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago (I remember, because I kept detailed written journals from 1990-1992). Since there is at least a potential "readership," I shape what I write here in certain ways.

Clearly, I'm not afraid of being repetitive. This was my post from one year ago today, January 16, 2012. I could easily have written the same reflections today, using pretty much the same words (except I don't have the energy to write so much text today). Here we find the same person with the same preoccupations. Its also digital data that I can scoop up and toss out into the blogosphere again, so that someone might stumble upon it in a fresh way. Without further ado, take it away, last year's JJ:

I put myself out and push myself into relationships with other people, but I am not receptive. I'm always in a kind of desperation, like I'm trying to invade the other person's interiority with all of my large, clumsy, awkward personality and then do everything I can to impress, to amaze, to draw out some reaction, to somehow get the other person to love me, because in the end I just need to be loved, so badly.

I want to be loved. And I am so afraid of being alone. This is the poverty of who I am.

Other people don't usually regard me as pushy or obnoxious. If anything it's the opposite: I don't "promote" myself enough. This may be true in the professional sphere. And with people I am "nice," accommodating, non-controversial, and always leaning on my sense of humor. I also use my intelligence to illuminate things, to encourage and inspire. But in all of this there is a "push" of myself, which comes out of the abyss of the poverty of who I am. In everything I say and do there is always this cry that says, "Please love me, accept me, approve of me, affirm me."

But why is this a problem? I am surrounded by loving, accepting, affirming people. Why, then, am I restless? Why do I feel "unloved"?

Pathology plays a part in this, undoubtedly. I describe it in my book; it is something I call "the cloud" (see Never Give Up, pp. 18-28 [http://t.co/ddwYeqX]). But "the cloud" has been brightened considerably, even since I wrote the book. My restlessness goes deeper than any pathology. It goes right to the root of who I am. I am a person. I need to be loved. And I need to love.

Where does this all end?

Of course I know the answer from the Catechism. I do not want to underestimate the fundamental importance of this basic knowledge: that I have been created by God, that God loves me, that union with God is the purpose of my existence. Yes. Millions and millions of people walk the earth and do not know this truth about themselves. That stirs something else within me, something that remains in many ways confused, but that is gradually taking hold of me and changing me.

But it takes time. I ask forgiveness from my wife, my children, my family, and my friends--indeed from all the people God has placed in my life. There is something here that echoes the desire that Alyosha discovers inThe Brothers Karamazov: the desire "to beg forgiveness from everyone, for everything." And I am willing to forgive, yes, to struggle on the path of forgiveness. Forgiving but begging too, because I know that I have not loved enough.

Jesus, I bring to You my broken heart,
broken by the desire to be loved
and the confusion over how to love well and truly.
O Lord, forgive me.
I have not loved You as I should,
and I am self-seeking and divided in all my relationships.
How can I love people truly,
with the "detachment" that recognizes that they belong to You alone,
and also with the passionate attention
that recognizes in each of them
the beauty of Your image and the glory of Your redeeming power?
Jesus, open my heart to receive Your healing mercy.
Change my heart,
and make me silent,
patient, and tender,
full of awe and wonder and gratitude
before Your gift of Yourself to me
and to every person I meet.
I am so in need of healing.
I am so in need of conversion.
Have mercy on me,
and make me the person You will me to be.

Working a Wonder

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Our relationship with God is mysterious, and our sufferings are a profound part of this mystery. We are called to share in the infinite life and love of God; we flesh and blood human beings, who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning even on a good day.

We are called by God to a relationship that is destined to transform us into His likeness, to “divinize” us. This is going to take some stretching, to say the least. And on top of the simple fragility of being a human being, we all have the effects of original sin and our own personal sins with which we must contend.

This is why we suffer. But Jesus has suffered for all of us, and suffers in all of us. He is the reason why redemption and glory are destined to rise up out of our own suffering, if we adhere to Him in faith, hope, and love. The grace of His Spirit reaches us especially in our weakness.

I only see the surface of my life. Deep down, God is working a wonder, and the means He is using penetrate my whole life with its joys and sorrows, and all that is yet unknown. What God wants for me is so much more, so much greater, so much more glorious and joyful, than what I think I want for myself.

Why am I afraid that I can’t trust Him?  Could I have really given myself a better life than the actual life that God has given me?  And can I construct a better future for myself than what God has planned for me? Should I not trust Him?

In eternity, we shall see all and rejoice in all. Here, we see through that dark glass called faith. Sometimes it is very dark, but we must trust God to give us what we need to sustain hope, and to grow in the capacity to respond to His mysterious Love with our own self-abandoning love.