Priests’ Recollection
13 December 2012
OUR INNER ATTITUDE
“Hail, full of
grace.” And in the interchange between Gabriel
and Our Blessed Mary he declared, “With God nothing is impossible.” Quite true
with regard to his creatures. But with regard to the Godhead, we can ask with
all respect: Did God create himself? Can God destroy himself? Can God create
another God? (God exhausts all being. “Clash of competencies?”)
When God creates,
he cannot help but create limited beings, including limited being like us
humans. And this limitation we are very
much aware of. Our intercessory prayers are expressions of our limitedness. The
great number of worshippers praying together in the liturgy brings out the
phenomenon of a fuller humanity, a good way of overcoming our limitedness,
though not absolutely. We pray in unison and exchange the kiss of peace –
another way of assuaging our limitedness. Then we go back, each one to his
tasks and life. And the sense of limitation returns as strong as ever.
There are two
ways of overcoming our limitation: either by dialogue or by domination. By
dialogue. Remember the Book of Genesis describing God coming down, walking hand
in hand with Adam and Eve and enjoying the cool breeze of the evening?
Beautiful intimacy! Recall God forming a covenant with Noah, Abraham, Moses and
the people he calls his own. And finally and definitively reaching out to us in
his Son Jesus Christ who establishes the new and
eternal Covenant in his Pascal Mystery that is extended from age to age and
expressed in the celebration of the Eucharist where we overcome our
limitedness. The Eucharist is never ending. We extend it into our lives, each
one of us. How? By spending time with Jesus in
the Holy Eucharist. I beg you to understand me when I say you must spend time
with the Eucharistic Lord, the Alpha and Omega – all time belongs to him. Begin
with 4 minutes and go on to 40. You will begin to enjoy it. St. Thomas Aquinas
says that whoever finds true joy in spending time with Jesus is already marked
out for heaven. Here there is true love of God and neighbour.
But we
are sinners, and so the
other way of overcoming our limitation is by dominating others. I need not
mention the names of the so called dominators in world history, who came to
grief trying to conquer the world. In our own little world we want to exercise
power, which makes us feel great; a spurious product, indeed. This is the
perennial onslaught of anger and jealousy. Anger is symptomatic of hatred for
the other, and jealousy is self-hatred for lacking the gifts that we see others
having. Depression is another sign of self-anger. Think of the story of Cain
and Abel. Both offered gifts in sacrifice, but Cain lacked the right
dispositions – there was hatred in his heart. God looked at the heart and not
the gift.
In the sacrament
of Reconciliation we usually confess individual outbursts of anger and/or
feelings/sentiments of jealousy. But we ought to examine if the malaise is not
deeper, the real sickness or inner dispositions. Expressions of anger and
jealousy only feed the sickness in us – the dispositions getting more and more
entrenched.
As we know, Jesus
internalises ethics. Thus it is not enough to exclude adultery as long as the
underlying lustful mentality remains intact. Not only exclude murder but more
the contempt and cruelty that expresses itself in words of hatred and gestures
of derision. Not only vindictive actions and hurtful words but rather the
spirit of vindictiveness itself. God requires not the performance or avoidance
of certain actions as much as the development of certain kinds of persons. For
example, the transparently honest person, the inflexibly loyal friend, the
God-oriented man of prayer, and so on. That’s how we want to live and die.
Passage from Newman:
Passage from
Teresa of Avila:
Passage from
Newman: (awaiting our friend)
.
