Practical Signs: Rising Spiritual Life and Growing Maturity

I started my career in quality measurement. One of the fundamental maxims of the field is to set SMART goals that help you and your team know which direction your plans, projects, and programs are really going. 

From MOBE, LLC ("Put your goals within reach")

Advancing spiritually isn't so cut and dry. People of good will experience periods of both consolation and desolation, closeness to God and separation, ecstasy and trials. The three-fold path that St. John of the Cross pioneered includes a repeating cycle with purgative, illuminative, and unitive phases.

The work of the Holy Spirit rising in your life is often accompanied by the following practical, discernable signs (adapted from Eastern Wisdom for Western Minds by Victor M. Parachin):

• Looking and asking for guidance concerning spiritual growth.
• Finding an appropriate church community
• Reading inspirational or challenging Christian books
• Learning from gifted spiritual teachers, including a regular confessor, spiritual director, trusted friend, and saints who model heroic virtue in ways that speak to your life and unique personal mission 
• Experiencing the "condition of peace and joy" and bringing it to the troubled, distressed, and hurting (i.e., spiritual and corporal works of mercy)
• Living and acting more from interior convictions than to gain the approval of others. (This will be easier for "Questioner" personality types than "Obligers" in Gretchen Rubin's 4 Tendencies framework). See below. 

The "4 Tendencies" Personality Types
Created by Gretchen Rubin

• Forgiving others more easily when they hurt you -- a spouse, a parent, a friend, a co-worker
• Self-discipline in matters small and large
• Waking up many days feeling grateful--even very, very grateful--for no reason other than the opportunity to enjoy another day. 

Sunrise for the Restless Child

No Closed Doors

In one daily homily in March 2015, (Pope) Francis pointedly asked Christians who do not act mercifully toward brethren who have fallen away but want to reenter the Church community who they think they are. "Who are you who shuts the door of your heart to a man, a woman who wants to improve, to return back to the people of God, because the Holy Spirit has stirred his or her heart?" the pontiff asked.

The Church, he said, is "the home of Jesus and Jesus welcomes--but not only welcomes, (he) goes to find people." 

Joshua J. McElwee

10 Things Pope Francis Wants You to Know about the Family

 

Our Brothers' Keeper,
Southern Illinois

From Magnificat Year of Mercy Companion, Jubilee Holy Doors

• The Door to Our Hearts: Calls us to open our heart to Christ. Like Mary, who bore him deep within her body, Christ gives us the grace to open our hearts to the conversion, unity, and justice of the Kingdom of God.
• The Door to Our Homes: (C)hallenge(s) (us) to find ways to open the doors of our homes to our families, our friends, and all who need us.
• The Door to the Churches: The silent witness to all the moments of our lives. It is the door welcoming the new born child who years later is married by the priest and finally the witness at the end of life as the body of the deceased Christian is received into the Church. The Church door is the door to salvation, the portal of the Kingdom of God. Christ himself told us that He is the door to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Christ not only invites us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through Him, He even leaves the keys to his Apostles, assuring them that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Mt. 16:19).”

In the Cool of the Evening

(c) Review & Harold Publishing
"Adam is at the center of the picture now, and everything is described as being there for him and the woman: the garden, the rivers, and the animals."
from Time to Be Astonished (Sunday School Net)

This is My Body:A Call to Eucharistic Revival (Bishop Robert Barron)

(Adam and Eve) are to care for creation and, if I can put it this way, they are to be the spokespersons for it, appreciating its order with their illuminated minds and giving expression to its beauty with their well-trained tongues. . . Human beings were intended to be the means by which the whole earth would give praise to God, returning in love what God has given in love, uniting all things in a great act of worship.  

This is why . . . Adam is represented in . . . rabbinic interpretation as a priest, the one who effects union between God and creation. As he walks with Yahweh in easy friendship in the cool of the evening, Adam is humanity--and by extension, the whole of the cosmos--as it is meant to be, caught up in a loop of grace, creaturely love answering divine love.

from page 4 

      

 

Animated

 "The most basic petition, when animated with even the first hint of faith in Christ crucified, lifts even the most impossible situations into the warmth and light of God Himself."

"Christian Prayer and Fire from Above"

Fire from Above: Christian Contemplation and Mystical Wisdom

Dr. Anthony L. Lilles, PhD

St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, 1586 (engraving)
Agostino Carracci (courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art) 

Last Friday night was a 1st Friday, so I decided to go to confession in downtown Baltimore. The priest seemed like an Old World Polish cleric, and he gave me a longer than usual penance: 3 decades of the Rosary focusing on 3 Joyful Mysteries (the Nativity, the Presentation, and Finding the Child Jesus in the Temple). I was only able to pray one decade that night in the church, but was confident I could finish the penance before Sunday Mass.

Before even 24 hours from receiving absolution, I fell into the same habitual, mortal sin that led me to confess my sins in the first place. I still had two decades left of my penance. In the context of 15 years of trying to defeat this sin, it certainly feels like I'm in a "most impossible situation."  

Remember when our songs were just like prayers?

Like gospel hymns that you called in the air.

Come down, come down, sweet reverence,

Unto my simple house and ring,

And ring.

Ring like silver, ring like gold,

Ring like clear day wedding bells.

Now I've been crazy, couldn't you tell?

I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell . . .

Ring like crazy, ring like hell;

Turn me back into that wild-haired gale.

Ring like silver, ring like gold,

Turn these diamonds straight back into coal,

Turn these diamonds straight back into coal,

Turn these diamonds straight back. 

In a Distant Country

From The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming by Henri J. M. Nouwen; "Deaf to the Voice of Love" (Chapter 2: The Younger Son Leaves):

But there are many other voices, voices that are loud, full of promises and very seductive. These voices say, "Go out and prove that you are worth something." Soon after Jesus had heard the voice calling him the Beloved, he was led to the desert to hear those other voices. They told him to prove he was worth love in being successful, popular, and powerful. Those same voices are not unfamiliar to me. They are always there and, always, they reach into those inner places where I question my own goodness and doubt my self-worth. They suggest that I am not going to be loved without my having earned it through determined efforts and hard work. They want me to prove to myself and others that I am worth being loved, and they keep pushing me to do everything possible to gain acceptance. They deny loudly that love is a totally free gift. I leave home every time I lose faith in the voice that calls me the Beloved and follow the voices that offer a great variety of ways to win the love I so much desire. (p. 40)

Rembrandt and Saskia in the Scene of the Prodigal Son in the Tavern
Rembrandt (c. 1635)

 

 

What Plato Did Not See

The School of Athens
Raphael

From "Homestretch" in The Story of St. Monica and Her Son Augustine:

That a great pagan philosopher should present the theory of the Word seemed to confirm the doctrine of the Word in the teaching of the Catholic Church. In short, he was reading Plato, but he could not help doing so in the light of his childhood faith, the faith of his mother and of the great Bishop Ambrose.

However, it was soon apparent to him that Plato, for all his genius, had not reached the heights of St. John. It was impossible to find anywhere in Plato the magnificent thought that become the faith of Christians: "the Word become flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14). Plato had known nothing of the great themes of the Gospel: the fall of man through sin, God's mercy, the Incarnation of the Word, the redemptive death of Christ on the cross. Evidently, Augustine did not at first understand these things, but he has said that he kept hearing a voice crying out to him:

"Courage! I am the food of the strong. And you will eat me. But it is not I who shall be changed into you, for you shall be changed into me!" (Confessions, Book Seven, X). 

-Leon Cristiani

"Jesus Christ, Bread of Life

Mane nobiscum

-Taize

 

The Future Trap

Newburgh Pointe, The Last Twilight of 2021

From The Screwtape Letters, Chapter XV (in the voice of one demon to another):

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things: to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment--and of it only--humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing a  present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal and the Present. . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. . . Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

. . . To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too--just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the Future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it.

We do!

. . . (We) want a man hag-ridden by the Future--haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth--ready to break the Enemy's commands in the Present if by doing so we make he think he can attain the one or avert the other . . .    

-C. S. Lewis