The more we allow the quiet love for God to enter our daily lives, the more we will understand how accessible He is. For He is never absent. Every space is filled to overflowing with His presence, if we have practiced opening ourselves to receive Him. In time we can become so capacious and willing as to not recoil from or close off any of His generous advances. He suffuses every pore, resides in every center, in every interstice. He transpermeates all things with His transpermanence. He is the glory of every station at every step. He is the insurmountably “poor” reality of things, and oh how grand it is to know Him best found there, in the poorest. When this we know, all other knowledge and its mental edifice fizzle out. For here in our poverty we know there is nowhere else, when once we’ve learned to find Him in all the humble, unassuming, simple places. To reach this point we must simply affirm we love Him, over and over, giving Him the reigns and taking off the pressure. For in His eyes there can be no greater accomplishment than to know and love Him, prayerfully and gratefully, in all times and places: for He wants to be so near to us that we cannot even conceive He could be gone.

My recommendation to those struggling with doubt (see video above):

1) Put less stress on apologetics, debates, arguments, anything theological that feels too abstract for you, that makes you “go mental”, that sends you through some labyrinth of proper names, that locks your consciousness at the level of concept or language or history.

2) Instead get to know the saints and holy people—Jesus above all! Take them as your models and exemplars. Absorb their personal witness into your soul. Learn their stories, glean lessons from their lives, read their diaries and letters and spiritual works. Admire what they aspire to, think about the goal they set for humanity. Pay attention to what they taught in terms of virtue, asceticism, personal reform, purifying of desire, etc. Get a feel especially for how they contemplate, how they find and rest in God: how they love. Incorporate some aspect of that love into yours. Then:

3) Patiently put their advice into practice, letting your models’ composite greatness be your goal, better yet, the source of your imagination. Conduct life at the heart-level, from your inner soul. Follow what activates your devotion as much as if not more than the mind. Clean your person in the mirror of these other honorable persons. Do not stress or worry, but trust it’s all in God’s hands. Above all, let your intuition be educated by the holy ones, by contact with the Holy One. And let yourself be changed.

4) Don’t underestimate yourself. Think of yourself as a saint in training, ready to undergo any trial, any aridity, any darkness for his love.

What I mean is this: Avoid controversies, quarrels, analysis, general or secondary issues, and instead seek to have first-hand experiences of putting on the mind of Christ and renouncing self. Let the deepening inner experience and time spent in attention to God shape your outer life and habits more and more, so that subjective and objective grow in unison. Remember that the prerequisite for spiritual knowledge is moral transformation. This is one core aspect of faith: to prepare your vessel to receive God while he is yet hidden from you.

By learning from divine, holy, sage, wise, and God-realized people—their number is so many!—, we are inspired to emulate their commitment and sacrifice and gain a stable experience of the presence of God. Once we have a taste of that, the soul is coming awake and we can live from the memory of that taste in full trust. Then we need no longer guess. God is no longer a matter of arguments, but palpable guidance whenever we call on him. Once we have the encounter, the effect is irreversible, even if ups and downs come. Work on attuning your inner compass to heed every hint of the Spirit. Obey when it’s time to say Yes and when it’s time to say No. The more we respond, the clearer our response becomes to us. The more we let ourselves rest in his presence, the more we will know that his presence goes with us everywhere.

Here is the trick: you will never think your way to faith. Focus on matters of the heart, inner devotion, prayer, repentance, service, love and striving to be without sin. Try to recollect God in every instant, aspiring to make real contact. “Knock and the door shall be opened.” All we have to do is learn how to knock and keep knocking. Keep it personal. Imagine how much God loves you. Close your eyes, quiet your mind, turn off your desires, wait on him. I guarantee the doubt will clear. We need only make ourselves available, make an empty space for him. He desires nothing more than to fill us with himself. Always remember that, and it will happen.

Of course, this approach to having “doubts” will not answer every question at the intellectual-reflective-propositional level of “beliefs,” but love and trust in God will take care of that. Love will elevate us into an intimate knowledge that is profoundly anti-fragile, that is not about right or wrong and its anxieties. Once we know him, we can take refuge in the wisdom of the Church and focus on “abiding in God.” That’s what all our beliefs are supposed to serve anyway! He will never disappoint us. From that basis I think we will solve our theological and ecclesiastical quandaries to satisfaction, such that they do not trip us up anymore, but increase our surrender to the mystery of his love.

5) Go to daily Mass.

Prolonged exposure to the vision-worlds of humanity’s great saints, mystics, and theologians—they go in various cultures by so many names—leaves one feeling strangely squished. What can I possibly have to add to this wealth? Here I am witness to heroic levels of sacrifice, of dedication to understanding Divinity without bounds; feats of asceticism and interpretation and teaching which startle the imagination; zealous acts of mercy and love which hardly seem possible for humans. And then witness the diverse array of these persons, how they spoke holy words in every dialect on earth, arose from every background in every land. And yet how, in broad outline, they agree! And how, in the final analysis, they are fated to converge in a practical synthesis for the future of the human spirit. For each of these efforts was animated by a similar astonishment, by love for a similar ultimate. The panoply of greatness indeed astounds the mind and what is even more astounding, for the believing person, is to realize that “God” has made all this possible—all this mind-blowing and heart-opening access to the timeless truth and reality of love.

But the sober appraiser of humanity may quickly come to another, starker analysis. How can it be that these individuals have discovered so much, while we as a human community have put their discoveries into practice so little? As a whole, we have all but neglected our sage advisors, preferring to deem their quests for the rare few, for the eccentric and wan. But for the researcher in religion—I do not mean the scholar, but one who seeks salvation—the hypothesis of rarity cannot hold up, for the claims made by all the saints have a universal bearing, they pertain to every created spirit without exception. Here, we cannot help but notice: the advice to the seeker is always the same. It is the same advice since the dawn of wisdom, whether its guise is Platonic, Vedantic, Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, or otherwise. I hold aside the competition between idioms and ideologies for now, and focus on what might be called the “heart message” of them all. On this matter, they are all agreed or at the very least convergent:

“God” or “Truth” is realized through love; through withdrawal from our outwardly-tugged passions; through a quieting and disciplining of our mind to turn inward; through a cleansing of selfish habit and destructive tendency; through a meditation on death and the nothingness of our existence; through an “indifferent” practice of self-giving and unspoken sacrifice; through empathy with suffering and the rejection of violence; through a true apprehension of Being as such and as a whole and its beauty; through total self-surrender to the Absolute Mystery which is our hope and our home, our one “entitlement” and our future.

Yes, the heart message bears repeating, and with great rejoicing I will repeat it! This message will never be dulled, it will never go quiet, it will never be stifled, for “we can do nothing against the truth, only for it” (2 Cor 13:8).

And yet the stark analysis persists: humanity, as a whole, has yet to hear this plea of the pure in heart, the God-seers (Mt 5:8). Turn by turn we have chosen to complicate everything, in service to our own small demands. Our species is a sucker for wars of ideology and superstition, battles of membership and exclusion. We are easily triggered by divergences in ways of speaking and conceptualizing the world. We are even more easily diverted from what is humble and primary for the sake of some glossy secondary concern, which we choose because it seems easier and puts us less at stake, thus asking from us less of a change.

Meanwhile, what actually is primary continues to stare us in the face, an immovable archive of Evidence of Religion–evidence of what we could be. For although, on the one hand, we know we’re still babies in britches, at the same time we cannot survey all these spiritual riches and think there is anything essential yet to discover. No, we have everything we need. God has opened his mouth in every language, to every people. We have tools and methods and testimonies literally coming out of our ears! He has shaped his glory exactly to the nature of each vessel in each time and place, so they could receive him fully as they could within their bounds. This he has done enough to prove: he will do it for anyone who is “poor in spirit” enough to consent. For we too are one of those vessels he has created for himself; and as the positivistic world of technocratic conformism daily spreads its homogenizing pall over our bored overstimulated bodies, God sees fit to open the floodgates of spiritual knowledge for us all. It only takes our choice, our resolve in seeking the ultimate, for the gates of heaven to be opened and our souls to be washed clean and elevated by the most magnificent light.

What should we do with this opportunity? What shall we say? The world is less religious than ever, but the transcendence of the human spirit will never go away or relinquish its demands, for it is the very foundation of all knowledge and freedom. We seek a fulfillment of that transcendence, for we know it must have some term, some brilliant peg to fit the empty shape within us. And there is. We have been told its many names: Bodhicitta, Brahman, Peace of Christ. The Almighty is clarity and perfection, source and end of our being, goal of every free act, terminus of all knowledge. We need only turn in silence to our own heart and bring ourselves to a halt in that silent space. Then we will find all the proof we need of the eternal power dwelling there and giving us, continually, a participation in itself. That participation, that gift, is our very self. It is who we are beyond all temporal loss. It is the moving idea of us in God, who has predestined us to share his glory. There is life, joy abundant, our link to the Most High. There is the realization of the Perfect.

And so my tongue cannot despair, no matter how much we squander and miss our chances. I cannot sorrow in humanity’s neglect any longer, for God is there. He has proved himself with the force of ten-thousand angels, and though I am but an average sinner, bumbling along like all the rest, I understand now: the only crucial factor in all this is trust in Him. Trust in the essence of yourself–beneath ego and behind attachments, where your soul is one with Him because so in love with Him–and there you will find the grace of adoration to bridge over every garbled gap. There you will know the courage of the holy ones–it is simply the will to let go of whatever is not him, whatever comes before him, whatever stands in his way. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!” (Is 40:3).

So we have not yet acted on our discoveries! So we have not yet made the discovery of God for ourselves! So we are daily bungling our chance at liberation, forfeiting the offer of holiness which is constantly extended!… Yes, from a certain vantage, this is the most horrible waste imaginable—we could be like angels; but from another, it all seems in keeping with the uniqueness of each soul and the mystery of the dispensation in time of God’s openings. For he has his rhythm of concealments and disclosures, his balance of taciturnity and explosion. The reason of revelations we can only comprehend from the end, after having traveled the path faithfully to culmination, while today we are always in media res, combating the hells and demons that would drag us to the pit, and there are many. For no matter how grand the spiritual catalogue may be—and would you believe that every day it becomes grander?—it is set in the logic of things that each will have its trial to undergo, its ignorance to dispel, its low behavior to correct, its atonement to profess, its repentance to weep, its courage to muster, its self-reformation to engage, above all, its heart’s prayer to pursue through every darkness, every aridity, every jail.

No one can substitute for us in the spiritual equation, for God has made us irreplaceable in his eyes. He will never let us go. He wants us wholly, and so there are no shortcuts, and no one can make our quest for us. He will hound us until we understand this unconditional love he has for us, his impossible mercy suffering all our sin and failure, his overwhelming embrace of all we are. For he has deigned—we will never fathom this miracle—to include us in his creation. He wishes us to share in the power of his own creative act and in its glories. This points toward and culminates in what those stacks of books only dimly intimate, yet also infallibly obscurely recommend: the establishment of a mature and lasting intercommunication of spiritual persons, who are redeemed from every lie and falsehood and set free to resonate together in rapture and tranquillity at the sight of God’s insuperable divine majesty, and to do so for all eternity. They—we!—will keep moving toward this culmination through every step of our increasing dependency on him; through testimony, intercession, and worship of His Sacred Heart, which has poured itself out so we would wake up to this our destiny, which we find only in Him who exceeds all, yet is everything.

Why, then, does my hope never end? Because I have listened and heard, and behold, I, who by his grace see God, am no different from you. The invitation lies open and ready–let us take it on and take it in…

by Timothy Lavenz
Oct 22/Nov 10, 2022

The Gospels announce the Kingdom of God such that all worldly kingdoms, empires, and nations are brought down. This effects a total change of perspective, a world-inversion. Its primary concern is to make our relation to God primary above all things—over all earthly dominion, status, legacy, worth and power. This is the central Gospel motif, “What does it matter to gain the world if you lose your soul?” The question provokes a remembrance of what was lost in the Fall–personal intimacy with the Ultimate–and points toward its recovery.

To save one’s soul is to have one’s “portion” BE (with) God—to live and move and have one’s being in God alone. That is to “have eternal life”: to know oneself existing in such permanent communication with the Eternal that one conceives of no self-existence apart from the Eternal: we are created, upheld, and preserved entirely in God’s Love. To know this is to know oneself a child of God, a citizen in God’s Kingdom first of all.

Early Christians thus saw in Jesus a superabundant fulfillment of the “messiah” role, foiling expectations of a reunified and triumphant Israel but raising these expectations to a new level. It was nothing short of restoration of paradisaical justice with God: to walk with God as “children of the light.” (Emmanuel Levinas rejects this spiritualization of the messianic idea and insists it should have political weight. Jacob Taubes contests this: for him any attempt to bring redemption about directly on the historical stage is a recipe for catastrophe, and thus he sees its “inwardization” as crucial.)

As far as the world goes (as we think we know it in our ignorant state), Jesus radicalizes the insight of Ecclesiastes (“all is vanity”), yet also adds something quite unexpected: a cancellation of the curse. The curse to toil on the earth from Genesis is removed, as Jesus says “don’t worry what happens here, it is all in God’s hands, he is overseeing all with love” (Lk 12:22-24). Likewise, whereas wisdom once meant to bring prosperity, worldly stature, social repute, and so on (itself an echo of the curse), with Jesus putting your treasure where “moth and dust doth corrupt” is antithetical to wisdom. Now, you only “have” what you give: you are a libation poured out for the salvation of the world. This aneconomic gesture removes reward from the realm of the visible world and transfers it to the invisible reward with the Father in heaven. (In the Gift of Death, Derrida sees this as the genius of Christianity, since it renders gift-giving utterly exorbitant: “Do not let your right hand know what your left is doing.”)

Henceforth, what the Father sees in secret is all that matters. That relation is so primary, so preeminent, that we can no longer even evaluate things by looking at the surface. Acting in accordance with the Father’s will is the sole criterion. As this truth is absorbed and we come into accord with it–as we come to approximate the perfect obedience of Christ–something like a prelapsarian confident nakedness before God is restored (Gen 2:25). A shameless and blameless sanctity becomes possible in the Lord, because “everything exposed by the light becomes visible–and everything that is illuminated becomes a light” (Eph 5:13).

Paul invokes this world-inversion as well, the teaching that all creation was consigned to “futility” yet in expectation of the revelation of the sons of God (Rom 8:19-22). The futility of this world is counterbalanced by the recognition that all goodness has eternal import, even if we never see the result. This hope is not a vain wish but a knowledge of faith: that our true life is “hidden in God,” who sees what we only glimpse and knows what our minds could never grasp. And yet God lets us share in the knowledge of this mystery. We see the sufferings of this world as nothing compared to the glory of what is to come in the future aeon—which begins in us, for we are its first-fruits. Christ’s resurrection opens the door and is the pledge of ultimate fulfillment—such that life in this world IS crucifixion, the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, poverty and renunciation of power are the signs of blessedness and nobility, eternal life comes by “dying daily,” and so on.

What the Lord tells Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” summarizes the world-inversion at stake on the Cross. Also related here is how barrenness becomes fecund virginity in Mary: bearing spiritual bodies of light into the world, obedient to God’s Word, is what counts. It takes an attitude of faith in the heavenly dominion which walks by faith and lives with the “peace that surpasses knowledge,” “on earth as it is in heaven,” in prayer for God’s Kingdom to come and save all.

Jesus is thus able to say, “Yes, I am a king, but my kingdom is not of this world; if it were, my followers would be fighting to defend me. As it is, all power is from the Father. You can do nothing against him, and what you are about to do to me will prove that. For you may kill the body; but our being in God you cannot kill.” The world is inverted, it is “over”: its dominion is no longer primary, its demands have no priority. As Agamben points out, the Church has often forgotten its eschatological vocation as a vessel of preparation and hastening the end of the world–not a literal, spectacularly apocalyptic end but an end to its priority, an end to the illusion that the world has any independent existence apart from God.

For there is no kingdom except the Kingdom of God! That is the Truth to which faith bears witness: “Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand…” Come, let us share in the feast of the Lamb!

by Timothy Lavenz
November 3, 2022

1
If I had to share one lesson drawn from my life as a writer, it would be that every word we say is linked to an inner state of the heart, and it remains so linked.

“The mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Mt 24:34). Our language is wholly determined by the state of our heart.

2
In using words, we think we are telling stories, expressing opinions, arguing points, making observations, attesting truths, thinking things through. Indeed, we are doing all that. But in a more basic sense, we are manifesting the state of our heart.

This factor goes beyond the words, beyond intonation and silence, I’m tempted to say beyond anything “empirical” that science could record. Think of it as a “transcendental tether.” It is “in” language yet not linguistic: it is the person in language, “tethering” language to the heart.

Although, cognitively speaking, we are usually unaware and distracted from this manifesting heart-state by the *content* of what’s being said, I submit it is the primary thing that language manifests—that we broadcast far past the control of our minds.

Each word gives the whole person. You can’t state it, or force it to change by using words. The rosiest poem can be full of thorns, and the roughest screed may be booming with gentle love. It is the inner state that determines. The words are simply tethered to it. The less one is aware of that, the more chaotic and violent is this whole business of speech…

3
A writer is someone forced to reflect intensely on these facts. His first instinct is to say that we rarely accomplish saying what we mean, that our words are constantly *veiling* the true state of the heart. For the writer has this experience: hours, days, weeks go by, testing words, rearranging words, erasing and rewriting—all so that, by the end, word will correspond with heart. And that is, no doubt, a most admirable aim.

And yet, this strategy is like trying to push a tetherball with the tether. All you’re doing is flopping around a loose line, which makes loopy shapes but keeps going slack on the ground. So that if you want to get to the core, you have to put your hand directly on your heart. And that leaves you speechless. Not the tether itself, but the *need* of the tether disappears…

Seen spiritually, therefore, our first instinct to doubt the capacity of language is wrong. Really it is all about the stature of heart.

That is what the writer is really confronted with in all his scratches and sketches, fragments and drafts and old pieces: the stature of his heart. It is an inescapable recognition: he is (or has been) this way. This is what his heart sounds like today (or did). Whereupon he must ask in all earnestness: Do I want my heart to be this way? To sound this way? Is this how I wish to be for all eternity? “Be careful, lest the light in you is darkness…”

The writer gradually realizes that his language will be a prison until he liberates his heart and makes sure that the light in him is not darkness. Then he will start to sound as he really is. And he will never again feel like he cannot say what he means, for now he can trust that, if he *is* who he means to be, all his words will say that meaning.

4
If the heart cannot reveal something to itself, neither can words reveal it. They may help it get noticed, draw attentive crowds to the problem, but they can never get you all the way. Mere manipulation of words will never help, and there is great danger in using them as flags.

Many writers, I think, substitute change of words for a change of heart. As with everything in life, the temptation is to turn imprisonment into virtue, a sacrifice for art, etc. It is a very grave situation. Because the tether is so intensely alluring, it always seems that we can reach something else by messing with it. But this is simply not the case.

Every word remains tethered to the heart-state within, but it is only when the heart is free that this is a blessing and not a curse. Then, the priorities are straight, and the “writer” need “write” no more. That is, he can let writing assume its proper place: as the servant of holiness of heart.

Then, the words can and will be redeemed. They find their true importance, head to the right destination. Then, whether one writes or not anymore becomes a matter of indifference. Love of life in the heart—it is enough and more than enough, for then the Word is in everything…

5
“No one can tame the tongue—it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (Jm 3:8). So writes the Apostle James after comparing the tongue to a little rudder that steers a giant ship, or a tiny spark that starts a raging wildfire. He reminds his listeners that out of the same mouth come blessings and curses, praise and insults, invitations and judgments, beauty and crudity. Brothers and sisters, it should not be so!

Ours is a time flooded with content. With division of groups and competing worldviews. With a never ending stream of things to talk about, that’s for sure.

But in the end, what are we really talking about? We are only ever saying who we are, and where our heart is that day.

That is an incredible grace. It means, if we’re honest readers, we can always know where we are. If we are cruel in our speech, we know our heart is hurting. If we are gracious, we know our heart is full. The gradations and nuances are limitless here—the point is, we have a perfect ledger, a perfect gauge, a perfect seismometer of our inner state. We often wish to pretend it otherwise, excuse ourselves, down play the impact of our words and shrug off the inner truths they reflect. But finally, we cannot escape our speech, for it comes from inside the person. Though it gets lost in the world or in screen-scrolling, the psycho-spiritual effects do not decay. They can only be revisited, learned from, healed, and reformed. There is no anonymity at the source point, only the risk of self-neglect. And every instance of attention and negligence adds up.

We must find the person at the source of our speech, dive into awareness of the Heart, to verify if what we’re saying is worth our worth—or if it is not a kind of death sentence we’re pronouncing upon all. (Sadly, the way the Heart sees things, this is what is happening more often than not…)

We can learn to speak a better way, but only by changing and liberating our heart, ensuring that it is full of what is good and holy, so our mouths may speak this fullness—renouncing all curses and clearing all poisons, surrendering tongue and person fully to the blessings of the light.

by Timothy Lavenz
Oct 24, 2022

Before we fall in love with God, we have to make time for activities like prayer, meditation and worship. Once we have fallen in love, we see there will never be enough time in all our life to pray enough, meditate enough, worship enough, as the love of God is worth.

It is like what two committed lovers feel, only at the magnified intensity of the all-encompassing: we never want to part from God’s presence, we are never satiated with giving and receiving love, we are constantly meeting ever-deeper riches of Who God Is. The mystery of the other person, our beloved, is inexhaustible; how much more so for the Beloved Above All!

Although today we are still lacking in our love for God, we nonetheless have moments of total wonderment and gratitude at the fact of existing. These are signposts, in our experience, of the eternal quality of our life as a communion of persons, as an inexhaustible relationship between I and Thou (finite and infinite). We cannot adequately conceptualize this eternal quality, because it is freely bestowed to us with existence itself. We intuit this whenever we are open to its majestic gift-quality. We cannot grasp the Thou before Whom we are, and yet our very being is a gift from the eternal Thou. We never reach the end of measuring the depth and grandeur of this gift we are, nor of the Giver who gives us to ourselves.

Likewise, we never reach the end of asking, what is the meaning of our being here? Not because we anxiously stand in a lack of answers, but because the final answer—we are here because God gives us to be, incessantly and forever—remains an unfathomable mystery we can only approach through prayer, meditation, worship—surrender to the gift of God’s everlasting love for us.

Therefore it is wise to attend each day with a sensitivity for wonderment at being, with gratitude for being. It is wise to recall our “history of graces”: all those signposts in our life so far which have indicated our blessedness, our belovedness in God’s eyes: whatever love we have received, whatever encounters have enriched us, whatever thoughts have deepened our appreciation of things, whatever events have shaped us and taught us on. Including especially our moments of loss and deepest trial, for these confront us with the mysterious unity of mortality and the immortal interwoven in time. This exercise of memory is itself a form of prayer because, finally, our being is an act of worship, regardless of whether or not we pray to a deity. For we did not give ourselves being, and yet we are.

All goodness, all truth, all beauty that we make or discover, emerges in homage of this mysterious source over which we have no control, yet which loves us.

Yes, the source of being loves us, “loves us into being” second by second and for all eternity, regardless of whether or not we love it back, acknowledge it, or render conscious homage. That is the irony of ingratitude: we could not even be ungrateful, we could not even overlook the gift, had we not the time to do so! and time is through and through a gift beyond comprehension, not caused by us but received by us. All is gratuity.

Time prepares and preserves us in a unity with the eternal time of the incomprehensible Thou, Who is the living presence from Whom we have drawn life all our life, and forever will.

Let us remember then that adoration is the fundamental movement of our being. Our time is here for us, an evident fact, flowing from and back into an infinity we will never grasp. It is our amazing privilege to catch even the slightest glimpse of this miracle: that we are and continue to be in being, without having done a single thing to deserve or produce such a rich and marvelous reality. Seeing this, I think we cannot help but fall in love.

*
O God,
Eternal rock of Creation and Beloved Above All Else,
You give us everything—all we have to enjoy and understand, play with and create—You give us ourselves.
Even when we pay You no mind, You abide with us and permit our joy.
Even when we squander what is not ours to waste, You give us all this time to live, explore, and make mistakes.
When we dishonor and betray these gifts, You are not pleased. But You are a loving Father, patient as the child learns to walk. If we turn to You, You forgive us, You stand us upright. For it is Your greatest desire to see us, Your children, flourish and run to the heights You have designed for us—vistas of glory and love in existence that we could never dream!
Thus even in our ingratitude, Lord, we give You thanks. Forgive us.

Holy Source of Peace,
Grant then that we may pierce the veils which separate us from clearer knowledge of You, from apprehension of Your true nature in our daily, embodied lives.
Help us to grow in holiness, which is our living approximation to the honor You are owed.
Keep present to our minds everything You have done for us, great and small.
Increase our love for You, O God,
Be the time of our lives, to the utmost,
That we may give You thanks forever for Your love,
And rest with You eternally in that very same love which You have prepared for us, and predestined us for, from before the foundation of the world,
Amen.

Henri Nouwen’s book In the Name of Jesus deserves the widest readership among Christians. After twenty five years as a “successful” priest, academic, author, and lecturer, something was missing for Nouwen. He was led by God to join L’Arche, a community started by Jean Vanier that serves and lives with disabled and mentally challenged persons. This experience brought Nouwen far outside his comfort zone and nearer to the wounded beauty of the Body of Christ. This challenged him to rethink what it means to “lead the flock” and “tend the sheep.”

In the Name of Jesus records the fruits of this transformation and presents a compelling vision for Christian leadership. In three thematic sections, he diagnoses a main problem facing Christian leaders and offers a solution. In what follows, I’ll reflect on these three main themes in hopes that it will inspire the reader to read the whole book. I’ll leave out my favorite part though, the story of Bill, a mentally challenged man from L’Arche who travels with Henri and accompanies him on stage for his big presentation–and reaches everyone with his delight and simplicity.

Relevance → Prayer

The worldly attitude tells we are the Doer, the Shower, the Builder. We are supposed to take big tasks upon ourselves, prove our relevance and the relevance of our project. Recognizing that this attitude often results in us closing off from others, obsessing over our own works, and calculating everything for some idea of success, Nouwen turns it on its head. The Christian leader is called instead to be completely irrelevant. They are to stand on the side of invalid, anguished, disabled, oppressed peoples, without reputation or “use” in the world. God does not love because we are useful, successful, and accomplished: God loves us because he created us, because we are his, and for the Christian this is the central reality to inhabit and communicate. Likewise, against the image of the polished self who has it all put together, instead we are to bring our naked, vulnerable self to every situation, not afraid to show our weakness and the areas where we need strengthening.

For the Christian leader, a real, steadfast, genuine love for Jesus should be the top priority, and nothing should ever replace it or get in its way. That alone is relevant and pertinent for our grounding in a Christian life. We should know–not only intellectually, but deep in the heart–that the heart of God is love. Only thus are we preserved from fear, isolation, and despair. Only then can we look on obstacles or failures with the eyes of faith, knowing everything is in God’s hands.

Wayne Teasdale in his book Bede Griffiths speaks well of the fruits of “intermystical exploration,” and I can personally attest to these fruits. My relationship to God would not be where it is today without such exploration, and to say I’ve gained from it immensely would still be an understatement. In fact, I do not think I would have the deep Catholic faith I have today, had I not studied and practiced other traditions at various junctures of my life. (This is not to set it up as a requirement, only to legitimize it in the eyes of skeptics.) It would be too much to recount, but since my high school days I have had a passion for understanding and integrating into my religious life elements of Buddhism (Zen, Mahayana, Shambala), Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita, Advaita Vedanta), and especially the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. To this day I draw inspiration and clarification from research into non-Catholic ways of approaching the divinity. Intermystical exploration for me now always confirms these two fundamental truths:

1. God is the Creator of everything and everyone, and wherever there is goodness, truth, beauty, his Spirit is present in some way (Phil 4:8, Acts 16:23). Whatever genuinely draws us to love and oneness must participate in the ground of Being, because no one but He is the source and end of the human quest for divinity, meaning, etc.
2. Jesus Christ is God’s unique and final dispensation of redemption (Heb 1:1-3). While humanity’s quest to the Divine everywhere meets limits or fails, God speaks his own Word of redemption, sending his only Son for our justification and sanctification–and in countless ways, Jesus turns everything humanity expected from religion on its head.

Nonetheless, it is our duty as members of a common, historical humanity to seek out convergences between other traditions and the Catholic faith, through both reason and contemplation. This will enrich our own perception of God’s grandeur, both in seeing the movement of Spirit in the non-Christian quest and in marveling at the radical revolution effected in Christ. It will also assist those of other faith backgrounds to see the light of Christ, for evangelization becomes much smoother and effective if we engage other cultures in a dignified and thorough way, knowing them from the inside rather than judging them from without. Then we can best highlight what is so unique about God’s revelation in Christ and graciously present the Gospel invitation to become “partakers of the divine nature,” of the triune life. Teasdale offers a nice framework for understanding this engagement:

“Intermystical exploration” for Teasdale is a kind of osmosis of other traditions through study and practice, without of course slacking in one’s Christian faith. In that process–which is life-long and need not rush to conclusions, since Jesus Christ alone is “our hope” (1 Tim 1:1)–not only is our own faith illuminated, but there is an “interior assimilation” of the different faith-systems. This means that the point of complementarity is found, not in mental speculation, but in mystical contemplation. A Christian practitioner of Vedanta may then come to see both Sacchidananda and the Trinity as experiences of the deep unity of reality which lie on one and the same “ontological continuum.” This is only logical, after all: as they both stem from man’s encounter with the highest divinity, they are bound to “converge.” However, existential convergence does not mean equality or equivalence, for, as Teasdale describes it, this ontological continuum is also a “spiral of realization,” meaning that there are deeper realizations of that same deep unity (which is the ultimate “matrix of convergence”). This allows Teasdale (and us) to uphold the Trinity as the most penetrating realization of the highest divinity, as revealed by God in Christ, while still highly valuing Vedantic truths like Sacchidananda–and even “worshiping” with them, where and insofar as they resonate favorably with the deep essence of revealed Christian truth.

While that idea may put off some readers, we must remember that Christians from the earliest days took an approach of assimilation, integration, and transformation with other cultures. Many detractors of Christianity today mock it for having so many ‘pagan’ elements–but the Catholic ought to embrace the fact that the Church, in its wisdom, knew how to utilize for the truth of Christ whatever piece of truth, symbolism, ritual, and beauty it found out in the world. Remember also that many Church Fathers borrowed Greek and Neoplatonic categories to make the Christian revelation intelligible, just as Jean-Luc Marion uses categories from Phenomenology and Modern Metaphysics to do the same. One might argue that some theologians go too far in relying on those tools, but the Church is here for the long haul. It will always self-correct by returning to the Gospel and the joyous revelation of God in Christ.

As Christians, we ought to be bold and threatened by nothing. We ought to know that the “evolution” of the religious consciousness of man is in God’s hands. We needn’t rely on the borderlines we draw; rather we might project ahead a few centuries, when all the borders we now rely on will have changed, and the face of Christianity, too, will have “evolved” to bring its ageless truth to new ears and eyes. We can and must take this chance–“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”–because we believe that Christ is God’s final word and the Trinity is the highest realization of the highest divinity. None will surpass it, and all may find a place within its loving embrace through Christ–though in finding its place, each will no doubt be transfigured and led to the Cross.

Thus, while the Trinitarian distinction-in-unity of Persons, which shows that the Divine Life is a communion of Being, is indeed farther along the “spiral of realization” than Advaita, the intuition of Sacchidananda still points toward the deep, personalistic Center of revelation. If we read Ramanuja or the Svetasvatara Upanishad, we will see that even among Hindu scripture these lie further along the “spiral” heading in the direction of the Sacred Heart of God. They do not make any leap from the One Reality to the Communion of Persons, nor can they anticipate the sin-shattering event of the Cross. But they do know that the Divinity resides in the heart, they do affirm the supreme Lordship of God, they do seek to live in service of Him with the highest degree of adoration they know. Not knowing Christ, they could not praise Christ; but in praising the most glorious Lord to which heart and mind and soul had access, their praise leads to Christ unknown and–for the perceptive, gentle, generous explorer–even today enriches our own praise of Christ.

A Christian Vedanta is thus possible. We must accept that the established forms of Christianity on earth have hardly caught up with the momentum of Jesus Christ. We have hardly manifested his full intention for the transformation of man’s religious consciousness, and every century and region has its own work to do. At the same time, the Holy Spirit has so established his Church on earth that she will forever protect the essentials–Incarnation, Trinity, Eucharist, Sacraments. As Teasdale puts it, the Church is the “universal form and vehicle” for humanity to attain its destiny in the Divine. She gives (above all in the Sacraments) but she also acquires–for “all spiritual riches belong to Christ.” This is not about syncretism or a confusion of differences. Intermystical exploration leads rather to a realization of the overarching reality and underlying selfsame fabric connecting all religious thought and experience on a continuum leading to Christ. Thus we can be sure that, no matter where we are at on the “spiral,” no matter how we enter upon it, if our aspiration is sincere it will lead us into the deepest Mystery of God there is–the Mystery of Triune love as revealed by Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Light and Life and Savior of the world.

Upon finishing C. S. Lewis’ book The Problem of Pain, I can highly recommend it. The reader will perhaps not agree with all of Lewis’ positions, but the treatment is deliberate and delightful enough to allow anyone of good mind the space to think deeply along with him. Some highlights in no specific order (supplemented by my readings in another book I would even more highly recommend, Margaret Turek’s Atonement):

1 – Pain differs from sin and error in that pain, once it has run its course, does not proliferate but rather leads to joy. Sin and error, on the contrary, proliferate. Sin leads to more sin, error leads to more error. Correlated to this is Lewis’ insight that, while sin and error are masked evil, pain is unmasked evil. Sin and error do not want to be seen for what they are–falsehood and evil. They want to hide, unconfessed, unseen by anyone and especially not by God. And they want to pretend as if they do not have consequences, do not produce a worse world. Pain, however, is the obvious, material testimony to the fact that sin and error do have consequences. Even if I, the sinner, do not encounter the repercussions of my bad acts (at least not right away), someone else does. Sin has an objective aspect which, moreover, is not cancelled by the subjective act of repentance. Imagine an addict who gives up their addiction, who makes the initial conversion to a new form of life, who has fully resolved in their heart to never return to the addiction. Still, there will be consequences that the contrite person will have to face; and that other, perhaps unknown people will have to face, given that the past sin made its imprint on the world. In this scenario, the pain that the contrite heart feels when confronting the consequences of their past sin, however, is restorative and redemptive. It means not only that one is finally accepting the truth of one’s actions, in all their ugly dimensions. It also means that one is materially atoning, through one’s pain, for the sin of one’s past, and through that atonement bearing the sin in a way that reverses it and turns it around. For unlike the masked evil of sin, which perpetuates itself blind to its own falsehood, the unmasked pain one undergoes through repentance and atonement will not continue past a just point: for past that point is joy, a restored relationship with the Lord, for which the pain of atonement is a segue.

2 – Pain is therefore the sinner’s opportunity for amendment. Confronted with pain, he can either continue in rebellion or adjust, repent, and atone. Pain removes the veil which had been there between the evil act and its consequences: they cannot be overlooked anymore. Even if, in response to seeing them, the rebellion intensifies.

3 – Our true joy is had through our collaboration with God, that is, when our will and God’s will are aligned, when we live in obedience to Him (and so “live in” Him). But this means that the criteria for our action is not happiness first of all, but obedience. It is not the agreeableness or pleasantness of our life that counts, in fact, Lewis implies that these contribute more to our disobedience than anything. This is where pain can play the role of focusing us back to Him. When pain, suffering and loss shows us (or remind us of) the futility of seeking our joy in mutable things, we have a chance also to see that what we really want to seek is God. God wants to make us blessed. He does not want mediocrity but the superabundance of Himself to fill us and be our food. So, Lewis argues, God sends misfortunes and sufferings to break us out of our (perhaps well-intentioned) illusions. Pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world” and thus to provoke a response in us–a response that moves toward active collaboration with God more in accordance with the laws of the Kingdom of God. The idea that we are self-sufficient must be shattered, and God can use any means of fear or trouble to produce this result.

4 – The culmination of this argument is to advocate for a “daily death” to self. This is to finally act with the proper motivation–not a natural motive or support like security, contentedness, ample possessions, or any natural good, but rather this: to act in obedience to God because obedience to God is intrinsically good, for it reverses “the act by which we fell” (i.e. rebellion, disobedience). The perfect example of this obedience is Christ, who went to the Cross in atonement for sin because it was the will of the Father. He did so with no self-interest, no desire to aide him, save the highest desire and interest: to do the determined will of Goodness itself. To emulate the Son in filial obedience is the only road to Heaven–and we now know that that road goes through the Cross. The question is how to recover this self-surrender. For Lewis, to fully act out our surrender to God “demands pain,” for it means correcting our rebellious nature day in and day out. There is no avoiding that this will be unpleasant at times, but here we see again that pain and pleasure are no longer the criteria: obeying God is.

I may add to this list some very interesting things Lewis says about Heaven and Hell, but for now I will leave it there. A recommended read!

It’s one thing to say that we have an inadequate or illusory picture of our self and body. It’s quite another thing to say that, because our picture is inadequate, there is no true picture whatsoever. Just because we cannot comprehend the unity that we are, does not mean there is no unity—no unity between body, perception, intention, deeds etc., or no “person” in the Christian sense: a responsible being whose actions can be judged, a lovable ‘thou’ who really is ‘thou’ to other ‘I’s.

In other words, just because our mental conception and view of who we are is riddled with falsehood (perhaps congenitally so), does not mean all selfhood is false. (Because we do not see as we ought, in God, we do not see ourselves as we could.)

St Paul sets as a horizon “to know, even as I am known.” To know himself then, even as God knows him now. For God knows us better than we will ever know ourselves, at least in this life. The Psalms, too, record in an almost rigorous fashion that God knows us as a unity, confirms us as a unity, even if we do not perceive or grasp this unity. God has knit together this unity from the womb; we have not knit it ourselves. But again, just because our fabrications miss the mark, does not mean all unity is mere fabrication; only that its source, the ‘source of our self’, is transcendent to us. God knows us, infinitely, knows the whole reason for our coming to be and our returning to him. That self is a gift, not a production. (As C.S. Lewis put it, the soul is a hollow “made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance.”)

So I would agree that the unity of the human person is not a unity we can see or deduce by our own mental workings, and certainly not the whole of who we are. But mind is not the only mode of apprehending reality. There is a heart-mode, and the heart (mysteriously) can see persons. We do treat each other as responsible wholes and we do hope for wholeness—ultimate wholeness which Christianity views through the lens of the resurrected body. These modes of apprehension and comportment are “God-given”, for we are acting as if we could see us as God sees us. ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God.’ (1 John 4:7)

Do we believe that persons exist in God, that persons are of eternal value to God?

As a Catholic, I affirm that God does love us–not a mental fabrication, not our passing impression of identity (which is often deluded), but rather God loves the whole creature he created (made of desire/will, intellect, sense-affections; goodness, truth, beauty). He loves the person he gives us to be, who we are most fully us when we are in God qua God. Each human thou really is constituted a unity of mind, body, soul, and spirit: a whole person in Christ our Lord. This is a wholeness only he can give and ‘conceive’. The medieval German Catholics taught that God has had an idea of us from all eternity, and true freedom is to realize that eternal idea of us. This eternal idea of ourselves obviously far exceeds our cognitive capacity to grasp it, since God sees every instance and connection and consequence of our life simultaneously, whereas we see only one bit at a time, in other words, hardly any of it! (Hence the need for faith, to trust that He sees our way, even when we see no way at all…).

Likewise, by grace we are given the capacity, the heart-sight, to love other persons as whole persons—and so to love a bit like God loves (in a way that is obviously antithetical to ego). God gives us a glimpse of the vision he has of us, so we can understand the other person as an inherently lovable unity, for they are forever such a unity in God.

The Jesuits pray to see their gifts, not as they see them, but as the Holy Spirit sees them, and for the courage to surrender to what God sees and wills for them in the use of their gifts. There is plenty of self-illusion to burn through on that journey, but that is not the end of the story. There is a true and free self to become—the one God wills to be with our will. Or as Kierkegaard put it, to “will to be oneself” is to rest transparently in the power that establishes the self. Then perhaps we have a chance to “know, even as we are known.”