Thoughts on the mystical life

 

Living a Mystical Life

Freedom is the core of the spiritual life. It comes from claiming in your heart that unconditional first love that allows you to love your neighbors freely and unpossessively. Jesus shares this word of hope in our world full of violence – violence in our families, in our communities. In our personal relationships, a moral life is not enough. We must also live the mystical life, a life which is embraced by the God who says, “I love you fully and unconditionally.”

“To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”   - Mark 12: 33

Thoughts on hell

 

Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 13:22–30

Friends, our Gospel for today features a question that people have been asking from time immemorial and that they still ask today: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” Heaven, hell, salvation, damnation, who will be in and who will be out? We have remained fascinated with these questions for a long time. Here’s how I would recommend we approach this issue. The doctrine concerning hell is a corollary of two more fundamental truths—namely, that God is love and that we are free. Love (willing the good of the other) is all that God is. He doesn’t go in and out of love; he doesn’t change his mind; he’s not loving to some and not to others. He is indeed like the sun that shines on the good and bad alike, in the words of Jesus. No act of ours can possibly make him stop loving us. In this regard, he is like the best of parents. However, we are free. We are not God’s marionettes, and hence we can say yes or we can say no to his love. If we turn toward it, we open like a sunflower; if we turn from it, we get burned.  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on corruption

 

Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time

Matthew 23:1–12

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus turns his sharp eye and withering critique on the many ways that religious leaders fall into corruption. What precisely is bothering Jesus? Some religious leaders get their kicks from burdening people, laying the law on them heavily, making demands that are terrible, exulting in their own moral superiority. At the core of Jesus’s program is a willingness to bear other people’s burdens, to help them carry their loads. And this applies to the moral life as well. If we lay the burden of God’s law on people, we must be willing, at the same time, to help them bear it. Another classic problem with religious people and especially religious leaders: They use the law and morality as a means of inflating the ego. The trouble is that this drug wears off rather quickly, and then we want more of it. We need a greater title, more respect, more recognition. What is Jesus’s recommendation for those caught in this dilemma? To be great is to be a servant: lowly, simple, often forgotten. Eschew marks of respect; don’t seek them. Be satisfied with doing your work, whatever it is, on behalf of God’s kingdom. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on salvation

As we read words from scripture, some words can “stop us in our tracks,” some can strongly encourage us. The scriptures for this coming Sunday have both words for us. As Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem someone comes up to him and asks, “Are those to be saved few in number?”  When the person asked this question, they certainly must have assumed that the kingdom of God was only for those chosen people rather than for outsiders, non-believers.

 

Jesus’ answer must have come as a shock—"strive to enter through the narrow gate…many will attempt to enter and not be strong enough.” He declared that entry to the kingdom can never be automatic but is the result of a struggle. It is easy perhaps for one to believe that simply belonging to a Christian civilization means that one is truly a follower of Christ, but a person who lives in a Christian civilization is not necessarily a Christian. They might be enjoying all its benefits, living on what you might call “Christian capital” which others have built up. But we cannot live on borrowed goodness. “We ate and drank in your company; you taught in our streets.” In response Jesus speaks shocking words: “I don’t know where you come from.”

 

The encouraging words are words of God through Isaiah: “I come to gather nations of every language; they shall come and see my glory.” God has come to gather all of us in. It can be a struggle, but, as our second reading encourages, “Strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet.” Our Collect prayer for this Sunday asks God to grant us to love what God commands and to desire what God promises—so that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts will be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. And that can be our prayer these days!

Len Kraus, S.J.

Thoughts on Heaven

 

Memorial of Saint Pius X, Pope

Matthew 22:1–14

Friends, today’s Gospel likens the kingdom of heaven to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. Notice that the father (God the Father) is giving a banquet for his son (God the Son), whose bride is the Church. Jesus is the marriage of divinity and humanity—and we his followers are invited to join in the joy of this union.   The joyful intimacy of the Father and Son is now offered to us to be shared. Listen to Isaiah to learn the details of this banquet: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”   Now there is an edge to all of this. For it is the king who is doing the inviting, and it is a wedding banquet for his son. We can see how terribly important it is to respond to the invitation of the King of kings.   We have heard the invitation of God to enter into intimacy with him, to make him the center of our lives, to be married to him in Christ—and often we find the most pathetic excuses not to respond.  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on detachment

 

Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time

Matthew 19:23–30

Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Lord explains why it’s hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Don’t think in terms of some specific measurement of wealth. Think in terms of a frame of mind. A rich person is convinced that joy will come from filling up the ego. So Peter asks: “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us?” And Jesus replies, “Everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.” It’s so important to note that this is not a sort of capitalist calculation: Just make a good investment and you’ll get a spectacular return; you’ll have all the houses and money you want. Once you let go of the world in a spirit of detachment, once you remove the things of this world from your grasp and see them without distortion, you will really have them. They will appear as they are, as God intended them. They will no longer be objects for your manipulation or possession but beautiful realities in themselves. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on children

 

Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Matthew 19:13–15

Friends, in our Gospel for today, Jesus proposes that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are like children. Why? For starters, children don’t know how to dissemble, how to be one way and act another. They are what they are; they act in accordance with their deepest nature. “Kids say the darndest things” because they don’t know how to hide the truth of their reactions. In this, they are like stars or flowers or animals, things that are what they are, unambiguously, uncomplicatedly. They are in accord with God’s deepest intentions for them. To say it another way, they haven’t yet learned how to look at themselves. Why can a child immerse himself so eagerly and thoroughly in what he is doing? Why can he find joy in the simplest thing, like pushing a train around a track or watching a video over and over or kicking a ball around? Because he can lose himself; because he is not looking at himself, not conscious of other people’s reactions, expectations, and approval. Mind you, this childlikeness has nothing to do with being unsophisticated, unaccomplished, or childish. Thomas Aquinas was one of the most accomplished men to ever live, the greatest intellectual in the history of the Church, and one of the subtlest minds in the history of the West. Yet the terms that were used over and over to describe him were “childlike” and “innocent.” Childlikeness has to do with that rootedness in what God wants us to be. Thomas was born to be a theologian and a writer, and nothing would get him off of that beam: neither the critiques of his enemies, nor the blandishments of his religious superiors, nor the temptations to become a bishop. He was and remained who God wanted him to be, and thus he was like a great mountain or a flower or, indeed, a child. Bishop Robert Barron