Monthly Archives: November 2022

Nov222022

Will power

The strength of the soul to love, for better or worse, is always subject to the will. As our will rules and as it chooses, so our soul is shaped and fashioned, with the help of grace. And what does the will rule exactly? All the bodily and mental and emotional life of the human person is under the governance of the will-all the faculties, passions, and appetites. The thoughts and mental life, the feelings indulged, savored, and pursued, the choices adopted in action, all this is under the mastery of the will. A short paragraph in the opening section on the will in book 3 of The Ascent to Mount Carmel attests to the importance of the will in determining how fully the soul responds to grace and turns all its strength of love toward God. Inasmuch as contemplation is dependent on love, the purification of the will for greater love is an essential condition for any deeper contemplative union with God. “The strength of the soul comprises the faculties, passions, and appetites. All this strength is ruled by the will. When the will directs these faculties, passions, and appetites toward God, turning away from all that is not God, the soul preserves its strength for God, and comes to love him with all its might” (AMC 3.16.2).

Father Donald Haggerty “Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation”

spacer
Nov212022

Stripping away desires

“Supernatural union exists when God’s will and the soul’s are in conformity, so that nothing in the one is repugnant to the other. When the soul rids itself completely of what is repugnant and unconformed to the divine will, it rests transformed in God through love. … A soul makes room for God by wiping away all the smudges and smears of creatures, by uniting its will perfectly to God’s; for to love is to labor to divest and deprive oneself for God of all that is not God. When this is done the soul will be illuminated by and transformed in God.” (Ascent of Mount Carmel)

Saint John of the Cross will teach repeatedly a particular lesson that must be mastered over time. The refusal to give into the desire for the gratification of the appetites is the underlying principle that must motivate all practices of self-denial. Deprivation of the senses has value only inasmuch as it purges and purifies the will in its craving and coveting for immediate satisfactions. The goal is a nakedness of desire, a poverty of desire, so that interior desire is consumed, instead, with an intense longing for God. Desire does not die like a fire with no fuel to feed it; rather, it becomes a concentrated fire of greater desire that can be directed to God and his pleasure. Self-denial of all kinds can pave this inner transformation. –Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation

spacer
Nov182022

Encouragement from St Theresa of Lisiuex

January, 1889.

My dear little Celine, 

Jesus offers you the cross, a very heavy cross, and you are afraid of not being able to carry it without giving way. Why? Our Beloved Himself fell three times on the way to Calvary, and why should we not imitate our Spouse? What a favor from Jesus, and how He must love us to send us so great a sorrow! Eternity itself will not be long enough to bless Him for it. He heaps his favors upon us upon the greatest Saints. What, then, are His loving designs for our souls? That is a secret which will only be revealed to us in our Heavenly Home, on the day when “the Lord shall wipe away all our tears.” Now we have nothing more to hope for on earth – “the cool evenings are passed” – for us suffering alone remains! Ours is an enviable lot, and the Seraphim in Heaven are jealous of our happiness. The other day I came across this striking passage: “To be resigned and to be united to the Will of God are not the same; there is the same difference between them as that which exists between union and unity; in union there are still two, in unity there is but one.” Yes, let us be one with God even in this life; and for this we should be more than resigned, we should embrace the Cross with joy.

spacer
Nov022022

Eternal Rest

Brothers and sisters:
Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death?
We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,
so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father,
we too might live in newness of life.

For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his,
we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.
We know that our old self was crucified with him,
so that our sinful body might be done away with,
that we might no longer be in slavery to sin.
For a dead person has been absolved from sin.
If, then, we have died with Christ,
we believe that we shall also live with him.
We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more;
death no longer has power over him.

Romans

spacer
Nov012022

Eternal Hope

Alas! If an unsubstantial vision of the temporal birth of the Son of God so powerfully ravished and delighted the heart of a child, what will it be when our minds, gloriously illumined by the blessed light of glory, will see that eternal birth, by which the Son proceeds, true God of true God, divinely and eternally born of the Father? Then will the soul be deified, filled with God, and made like to God, by an eternal and immutable participation of God, uniting Himself to it as fire does to the iron which it penetrates, communicating its light, brilliancy, heat, and other qualities, in such a manner that both seem one and the same fire. –-St Francis de Sales

St Francis de Sales

spacer