Day 27: Obedient Listening

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Friday of the Fourth Week in Lent

You know me and you know where I came from.
Yet I have not come of my own accord:
but he who sent me is true;
You do not know him,
but I know him
because I have my being from him
and it was he who sent me. John 7:28-29

Fellowship with Jesus Christ is not a commitment to suffer as much as possible, but a commitment to listen with him to God’s love without fear. . . .

We are often tempted to “explain” suffering in terms of “the will of God.” Not only can this evoke anger and frustration, but also it is false. “God’s will” is not a label that can be put on unhappy situations. God wants to bring joy not pain, peace not war, healing not suffering. Therefore, instead of declaring anything and everything to be the will of God, we must be willing to ask ourselves where in the midst of our pains and sufferings we can discern the loving presence of God.

When, however, we discover that our obedient listening leads us to our suffering neighbors, we can go to them in the joyful knowledge that love brings us there. We are poor listeners because we are afraid that there is something other than love in God. This is not so strange since we seldom, if ever, experience love without a taint of jealousy, resentment, revenge, or hatred. Often we see love surrounded by limitations and conditions. We tend to doubt what presents itself to us as love and are always on guard, prepared for disappointments. . . .

For this reason we find it hard simply to listen or to obey. But Jesus truly listened and obeyed because only he knew the love of his Father: “Not that anybody has seen the Father, except the one who comes from God: he has seen the Father” (John 6:46). “You do not know him, but I know him because I have come from him” (John 7:28-29).

He came to include us in his divine obedience. He wanted to lead us to the Father so that we could enjoy the same intimacy he did. When we come to recognize that in and through Jesus we are called to be daughters and sons of God and to listen to him, our loving Father, with total trust and surrender, we will also see that we are invited to be no less compassionate than Jesus himself. When obedience becomes our first and only concern, then we too can move into the world with compassion and feel the suffering of the world so deeply that through our compassion we can give new life to others.

The world in which we live today and about whose suffering we know so much seems more than ever a world from which Christ has withdrawn himself. How can I believe that in this world we are constantly being prepared to receive the Spirit? Still, I think that this is exactly the message of hope. God has not withdrawn himself. He sent his Son to share our human condition and the Son sent us his Spirit to lead us into the intimacy of his divine life. It is in the midst of the chaotic suffering of humanity that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Love, makes himself visible. But can we recognize his presence?

Our Prayer

Merciful God,
you know our weakness and distress.
Yet the weaker we are,
the stronger is your help.
Grant that we may accept with joy and gratitude
the gift of this time of grace,
and bear witness to your work in our lives.

Day 26: Glory

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Thursday of the Fourth Week in Lent

How can you believe,
since you look to each other for glory
and are not concerned
with the glory that comes from the one God? John 5:44

I have gradually become aware how central this word “glory” is in John’s Gospel. There is God’s glory, the right glory that leads to life. And there is human glory, the vain glory that leads to death. All through his Gospel John shows how we are tempted to prefer vain glory over the glory that comes from God.

Human glory is always connected with some form of competition. Human glory is the result of being considered better, faster, more beautiful, more powerful, or more successful than others. Glory conferred by people is glory that results from being favorably compared to other people. The better our scores on the scoreboard of life, the more glory we receive. This glory comes with upward mobility. The higher we climb on the ladder of success, the more glory we collect. But this same glory also creates our darkness. Human glory, based on competition, leads to rivalry; rivalry carries within it the beginning of violence; and violence is the way to death. Thus human glory proves to be vain glory, false glory, mortal glory.

How then do we come to see and receive God’s glory? In his Gospel, John shows that God chose to reveal his glory to us in his humiliation. That is the good, but also disturbing, news. God, in his infinite wisdom, chose to reveal his divinity to us not through competition, but through compassion, that is, through suffering with us. God chose the way of downward mobility. Every time Jesus speaks about being glorified and giving glory, he always refers to his humiliation and death. It is through the way of the cross that Jesus gives glory to God, receives glory from God, and makes God’s glory known to us. The glory of the resurrection can never be separated from the glory of the cross. The risen Lord always shows us his wounds.

Thus the glory of God stands in contrast to the glory of people. People seek glory by moving upward. God reveals his glory by moving downward. If we truly want to see the glory of God, we must move downward with Jesus. This is the deepest reason for living in solidarity with poor, oppressed, and handicapped people. They are the ones through whom God’s glory can manifest itself to us. They show us the way to God, the way to salvation.

Our Prayer

How often have I lived through these weeks
without paying much attention
to penance, fasting, and prayer?
How often have I missed
the spiritual fruits of this season
without even being aware of it?
But how can I ever really celebrate Easter
without observing Lent?
How can I rejoice fully in your resurrection
when I have avoided participating in your death?
Yes, Lord, I have to die —
with you, through you, and in you —
and thus become ready to recognize you
when you appear to me in your resurrection.
There is so much in me that needs to die:
false attachments, greed and anger,
impatience and stinginess.
O Lord, I am self-centered,
concerned about myself, my career, my future,
my name and future, my name and fame.
I see clearly now how little I have died with you,
really gone your way and been faithful to it.
O Lord, make this Lenten season
different from the other ones.
Let me find you again.
Amen.

Day 25: Father, Son, Spirit

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Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Lent

In all truth I tell you,
by himself the Son can do nothing;
he can do only what he sees the Father doing:
and whatever the Father does the Son does too. John 5:19

Jesus’ obedience means a total, fearless listening to his loving Father. Between the Father and the Son there is only love. Everything that belongs to the Father, he entrusts to the Son (Luke 10:22), and everything the Son has received, he returns to the Father. The Father opens himself totally to the Son and puts everything in his hands: all knowledge (John 12:50), all glory (John 8:54), all power (John 5:19-21). And the Son opens himself totally to the Father and thus returns everything into his Father’s hands. “I came from the Father and have come into the world and now I leave the world to go to the Father” (John 16:28).

This inexhaustible love between the Father and the Son includes and yet transcends all forms of love known to us. It includes the love of a father and mother, a brother and sister, a husband and wife, a teacher and friend. But it also goes far beyond the many limited and limiting human experiences of love we know. It is a caring yet demanding love. It is a supportive yet severe love. It is a gentle yet strong love. It is a love that gives life yet accepts death. In this divine love Jesus was sent into the world; to this divine love Jesus offered himself on the cross. This all-embracing love, which epitomizes the relationship between the Father and the Son, is a divine Person, coequal with the Father and the Son. It has a personal name. It is called the Holy Spirit. The Father loves the Son and pours himself out in the Son. The Son is loved by the Father and returns all he is to the Father. The Spirit is love itself, eternally embracing the Father and the Son.

This eternal community of love is the center and source of Jesus’ spiritual life, a life of uninterrupted attentiveness to the Father in the Spirit of love. It is from this life that Jesus’ ministry grows. His eating and fasting, his praying and acting, his traveling and resting, his preaching and teaching, his exorcising and healing, were all done in this Spirit of love. We will never understand the full meaning of Jesus’ richly varied ministry unless we see how the many things are rooted in the one thing: listening to the Father in the intimacy of perfect love. When we see this, we will also realize that the goal of Jesus’ ministry is nothing less than to bring us into this most intimate community.

Today in the Gospel reading of the liturgy, Jesus reveals that everything he does is done in relationship with his Father. . . .

Jesus’ words have a special meaning for me. I must live in an ongoing relationship with Jesus and through him with the Father. This relationship is the core of the spiritual life. This relationship prevents my life from being consumed by “keeping up” with things. This relationship prevents my days from becoming boring, fatiguing, draining, depressing, and frustrating. If all that I do can become more and more an expression of my participation in God’s life of total giving and receiving in love, everything else will be blessed and will lose its fragmented quality. This does not mean that everything will become easy and harmonious. There will still be much agony, but when connected with God’s own agony, even my agony can lead to life.

Our Prayer

And so, I pray to You, Yahweh,
     at the time of your favor;
in your faithful love answer me,
     in the constancy of your saving power.
Answer me, Yahweh,
for your faithful love is generous;
in your tenderness turn towards me;
do not turn away from your servant.
     — Ps. 69:13, 16

Day 24: A Clean Heart

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Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Lent

Jesus met him in the Temple and said, “Now you are well again, do not sin any more.” John 5:14

Prayer heals. Not just the answer to prayer. When we give up our competition with God and offer God every part of our heart, holding back nothing at all, we come to know God’s love for us and discover how safe we are in his embrace. Once we know again that God has not rejected us, but keeps us close to his heart, we can find again the joy of living, even though God might guide our life in a different direction from our desires.

I hardly remember what it was, but a small critical remark and a few irritations during my work in the bakery were enough to tumble me head-over-heels into a deep, morose mood. Many hostile feelings were triggered and in a long sequence of morbid associations, I felt worse and worse about myself, my past, my work, and all the people who came to mind. But happily I saw myself tumbling and was amazed how little was needed to lose my peace of mind and to pull my whole world out of perspective. Oh, how vulnerable I am.

The milieu of this place fully of prayerful people prevents me from acting out, from getting angry, from bursting open. I can sit down and see how quickly the little empty place of peace in my heart is filled again with rocks and garbage falling down from all sides.

It is hard to pray in such a mood. But still during Terce, the short prayer immediately after work, standing outside in our dirty work clothes, we read: “Is anyone among you in trouble? He should turn to prayer.” Indeed prayer is the only real way to clean my heart and to create new space. I am discovering how important that inner space is. When it is there it seem that I can receive many concerns of others in it without becoming depressed. When I sense that inner quiet place, I can pray for many others and feel a very intimate relationship with them. There even seems to be room for the thousands of suffering people in prisons and in the deserts of North Africa. Sometimes I feel as if my heart expands from my parents traveling in Indonesia to my friends in Los Angeles and from the Chilean prisons to the parishes in Brooklyn.

Now I know that it is not I who pray but the spirit of God who prays in me. Indeed, when God’s glory dwells in me, there is nothing too far away, nothing too painful, nothing too strange or too familiar that it cannot contain and renew by its touch. Every time I recognize the glory of God in me and give it space to manifest itself to me, all that is human can be brought there and nothing will be the same again. Once in a while I just know it: of course, God hears my prayer. He himself prays in me and touches the whole world with his love right here and now.

Our Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ,
you who forgave the sins of the paralytic
before you let him walk again,
I pray that this Lenten period
may make me more aware
of your forgiving presence in my life
and less concerned about performing well
in the eyes of my world.
Let me recognize you
at this virginal point in the depth of my heart
where you dwell and heal me.
Let me experience you in that center of my being
from which you want to teach and guide me.
Let me know you as my loving brother
who holds nothing —
not even my worst sins —
against me,
but who wants to touch me in a gentle embrace.
Take away the many fears, suspicions, and doubts
by which I prevent you from being my Lord,
and give me the courage and freedom
to appear naked and vulnerable
in the light of your presence,
confident in your unfathomable mercy.
I know how great my resistance is,
how quickly I choose the darkness
instead of the light.
But I also know that you keep calling
me into the light,
where I can see not only my sins
but your gracious face as well.
Be with me every hour of my days.
Praise and glory to you, now and forever.
Amen.

Day 23: Faith in God’s Love

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Monday of the Fourth Week in Lent

He went again to Cana in Galilee, where he had changed the water into wine. And there was a court official whose son was ill at Capernaum; hearing that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judaea, he went and asked him to come and cure his son, as he was at the point of death. Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and portents you will not believe!” “Sir,” answered the official, “Come down before my child dies.” “Go home,” said Jesus, “your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus had said and went on him way home. John 4:46-50

The descending way of Jesus, painful as it is, is God’s most radical attempt to convince us that everything we long for is indeed given us. What he asks of us is to have faith in that love. The word “faith” is often understood as accepting something you can’t understand. People often say: “Such and such can’t be explained; you simply have to believe it.” However, when Jesus talks about faith, he means first of all to trust unreservedly that you are loved, so that you can abandon every false way of obtaining love. That’s why Jesus tells Nicodemus that, through faith in the descending love of God, we will be set free from anxiety and violence and will find eternal life.

The mystery of God’s love is not that he takes our pains away, but that he first wants to share them with us. Out of this divine solidarity comes new life. Jesus’ being moved in the center of his being by human pain is indeed a movement toward new life. God is our God, the God of the living. In his divine womb life is always born again. . . . The truly good news is that God is not a distant God, a God to be feared and avoided, a God of revenge, but a God who is moved by our pains and participates in the fullness of the human struggle.

Our Prayer

Integrity and generosity are marks of Yahweh
for he brings sinners back to the path.
Judiciously he guides the humble,
instructing the poor in his way.
Adoration I offer, Yahweh,
to you, my God.
     — Ps. 25:8-10

Week 4: The Seclusion of Our Heart

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Fourth Sunday in Lent

God does not see as human beings see; they look at appearances but Yahweh looks at the heart. 1 Sam. 16:7

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self that is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. “Compulsive” is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated, or despised. . . . The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same — more work, more money, more friends.

These very compulsions are at the basis of the two main enemies of the spiritual life: anger and greed. They are the inner side of a secular life, the sour fruits of our worldly dependencies.

It is not so strange that Anthony and his fellow monks considered it a spiritual disaster to accept passively the tenets and values of their society. They had come to appreciate how hard it is not only for the individual Christian but also for the church itself to escape the seductive compulsions of the world. What was their response? They escaped from the sinking ship and swam for their lives. And the place of salvation is called desert, the place of solitude. . . .

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into the furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant (“turn stones into loaves”), to be spectacular (“throw yourself down”), and to be powerful (“I will give you all these kingdoms”). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity (“You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone”). Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter — the struggle against the compulsions of the false self and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.

Our heart is the center of our being human. There our deepest thoughts, intuitions, emotions, and decisions find their source. But it’s also there that we are often most alienated from ourselves. We know little or nothing of our own heart. We keep our distance, as though we were afraid of it. What is most intimate is also what frightens us most. Where we are most ourselves, we are often strangers to ourselves. That is the painful part of our being human. We fail to know our hidden centers; and so we live and die often without knowing who we really are. If we ask ourselves why we think, feel, and act in such or such a way, we often have no answer, thus proving to be strangers in our own house. They mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears and to make our own deepest self known to us. In the privacy of our heart, therefore, we can learn not only to know Jesus but, through Jesus, ourselves as well.

Our Prayer

Almighty God,
your eternal word is the true light
that enlightens every human being.
Heal the blindness of our hearts,
that we may discern what is right
and love you sincerely.

Day 22: Conversion

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Saturday of the Third Week in Lent

Come, let us return to Yahweh.
He has rent us and he will heal us;
he has struck us and he will bind up our wounds;  Hos. 6:1-2

Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion my be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness. 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. Our conflicts and pains, our tasks and promises, our families and friends, our activities and projects, our hopes and aspirations, no longer appear to us as a fatiguing variety of things that we can barely keep together, but rather as affirmations and revelations of the new life of the Spirit in us. “All these other things,” which so occupied and preoccupied us, now come as gifts or challenges that strengthen and deepen the new life that we have discovered. This does not mean that the spiritual life makes things easier or take our struggles and pains away. The lives of Jesus’ disciples clearly show that suffering does not diminish because of conversion. Sometimes it even becomes more intense. But our attention is no longer directed to the “more or less.” 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.

Poverty, pain, struggle, anguish, agony, and even inner darkness may continue to be part of our experience. They may even be God’s way of purifying us. 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 house of the Father.

Our Prayer

O Lord, this holy season of Lent is passing quickly.
I entered into it with fear,
but also with great expectations.
I hoped for a great breakthrough,
a powerful conversion, a real change of heart;
I wanted Easter to be a day so full of light
that not even a trace of darkness
would be left in my soul.
But I know that you do not come to your people
with thunder and lightning.
Even St. Paul and St. Francis
journeyed through much darkness
before they could see your light.
Let me be thankful for your gentler way.
I know you are at work.
I know you will not leave me alone.
I know you are quickening me for Easter —
but in a way fitting to my own history
and my own temperament.
I pray that these last there weeks,
in which you invite me to enter more fully
into the mystery of your passion,
will bring me a greater desire to follow you
on the way that you create for me
and to accept the cross that you give to me.
Let me die to the desire
to choose my own way and select my own cross.
You do not want to make me a hero
but a servant who loves you.
Be with me tomorrow and in the days to come,
and let me experience your gentle presence.
Amen.