INNER ATTITUDE

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)

 

 

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