Pages

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Divine Intimacy

+
JMJ

Feast of St. Joseph of Coppertino of the Order of Friars Minor

Not really understanding my life and how it’s been going…?
I’m 23 with dreams and determined. I’m big on God and church! I love praising God and making him proud of me and my doings. One thing i can’t say is that i’m not blessed. I WILL NOT sit here and say i’m not blessed and have alot of good things going for myself. I have my own car, nice place, my bills get paid, can get SOME things i want, pretty good health, a part time job, in school fulltime with everything paid for and my gas daily to school paid for…i can go on and on with my blessings. But I am missing some things. I’ve never really had a close relationship with anybody. The closest in my family is my grandma, and outside of my family was my ex, but we have been broken up for years, and i’ve just been so lonely and empty feeling since. Due to issues from when i was younger, i have always been moreso a reserved, quiet, not so outgoing person. That’s not the way i want to be, but it’s just how it is. I don’t want God to think i don’t appreciate my blessings, because i do, i just have things i don’t quite understand that is causing me deep, long-term pain. Not having friends or people to date is hard. I continue to live and hang in there, although i’d rather have those things. Any good advice?” – ‘nextkobe1986′ @ Yahoo!Answers

It’s far a greater blessing for God to penetrate more and more fully into your life, into your heart. When the Spirit of Light and Truth came upon the disciples of Our Lord on Pentecost day, He filled the whole house where they were sitting (Ac 2.2). It’s common for us to live in compartmentalized dwellings where we have a room and space of our own and the same, sadly, happens even in that life which we claim to be “new” in, with, for, and by Christ – the Christian Spiritual Life. But the Christian Spiritual Life is not where God remains at the periphery of our whole self and being – the mastery of which we try to keep in our hands. We “try to keep” because our self is broken (if not shattered) and it comes with the more poignant realization of our powerlessness in dealing with it followed, in one extreme, by a debilitating resignation to our helplessness. The effect: the doors of our heart shut us in in gloom, preoccupied with our self – which preoccupation is always the starting point of our disordered relationship, first, with God; second, with others.

However, the Crucified teaches us that there’s a kind of resignation that does not debilitate and degenerate us – but this from the viewpoint of God, not according as we would judge the “Scandal” of the Cross: compressing the whole point of the Cross of Calvary into a single point of sensation or emotion or intellect which is all but a very limited department of our being. His is that childlike resignation in the arms of His most tender loving Father Who, in the depth of the richness of His mercy and benevolence, works not only in consideration of our good and happiness but even of those who surround us, those who have become part of us – especially even those who dealt us pains and hurts, and those who will still become part of us.

The vacuum in our heart can never be filled in by our self. Neither can other passing creatures (material or persons – broken like we are and seeking comfort and consolation as we do) do so. Deep calleth on deep (Ps 41.8, DRV). Our heart is restless unless God’s excessive love – pouring forth from the Crucified – penetrates and fills it. As this excessive love of God on the Cross of Calvary saturates our heart and burns brightly in it, it supplies us the impulse to return love to Him with that love the Crucified returned to Him. And as this excessive love of God on the Cross of Calvary enriches and expands our poor heart, then it begins to see, not those whom it desires to draw to itself to seek from them their poor love, but those whom it may embrace rather with the love of the Crucified – which Divine Love is enough for it to have found as its reward and consolation. Seek the solution of God in Calvary: intimacy with Our Crucified Lord.

No comments:

Post a Comment