Man Does Not Live By Bread Alone

As far as I know, my husband and I are the only Catholics on our block.  We are surrounded by Southern Baptists --- wonderful people who would do anything for you.  Most of them attend not only church on Sunday, but also Bible study during the week.  Their faith means everything to them, and they would love for us to attend their church.  

In spite of all of this, last Sunday, as I walked out of the house to attend Mass, I experienced a profound sense of sorrow and compassion for my neighbors because I was going to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in Communion, and I knew that no matter how powerful the music and the preaching at their church that day, they would not be receiving the Eucharist.

"Man does not live by bread alone!"  What more does he need?  We all know that children who do not receive love fail to thrive, despite being fed regularly.  Even animals need love and attention, and their joy overflows when they know we love them as well as feed them.  An animal in a shelter needs a family; they need adoption, even though they are being cared for physically.

Jesus knew that we would not only crave, but need, the same love and attention He lavished on His apostles and friends while He was on earth.  We were made for adoption into a family -- the family of God.  We were made to share in the Divine Life of the Trinity, and this is what He died to give us.  Although fully human, He also fully lived the Divine Life -- the love and fellowship and joy of the Father and the Holy Spirit.  We were designed for the same experience -- knowing ourselves to be the "beloved," and receiving the joy of adoption:  "Son, all that I have is yours!"

How is it possible for man, who lives exteriorly, to enter into the divine presence and to enjoy the love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit?  Christ "gave Himself" as our health, as our life.  He put to death on the cross our human nature alienated from fellowship with God, in order to rise as a New Creation -- a man risen from the dead -- and able to enter into Love.  In the Eucharist, we receive -- become one with -- the Risen Christ.  He does not become like we are, but instead, He gradually transforms our mortal bodies into His Risen Body.  

As we die to sin, we are transformed "from glory to glory," able to experience the same fellowship of the Father that He experienced in His mortal body.  He is the only - begotten Son; we are "sons by adoption."  The bread that He gives us is our very life -- not only our physical lives, but our spiritual, emotional, mental, psychological lives.  We experience joy because we have been accepted -- adopted-- into a Family.  We are able to love others as Jesus loves them because they too have been children of God. 

No matter how interesting or uninteresting our church service, it is the same Jesus who gives Himself to us at Mass.  It is His work in us, to change our mortal bodies into His glorious one, that ultimately counts.  We leave Mass changed, whether the music is good or poor, whether the sermon is fantastic or dull!  Christ Himself has become part of us; we have become part of Him!

I wish.....wish......wish with all my heart that my family, friends, and neighbors could come with me and receive this incredible Gift of Eternal LIfe -- to know the Father as the Son knows Him because the Son is in us and transforming us into His very own Person.  We live not by bread alone, but by every Word that comes forth from Him and enters into us -- and by the love and joy He communicates to us by His Presence in us!

To Know Christ Jesus

Now this is eternal life:  that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent (Jn. 17:3).

For You granted Him authority over all people that He might give eternal life to all those You have given Him (Jn. 17: 2).

If you knew Me, you would know my Father also (Jn. 8: 19).

No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known (Jn. 1:18).

It is clear from the Gospel of John that once we "know" God the Father, we have "eternal life."  Clearly also, the "knowledge" Jesus refers to is not intellectual knowledge, or "knowing about" the Father, for even the religious leaders of His day knew about God --- and yet, Jesus accused them of NOT knowing either Him or the Father:  "You do not know me or my Father," Jesus replied. "If you knew me, you would know my Father also."  "You are unable to hear what I say...The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God" (Jn. 8: 19 and 43 and 47). 

In the Hebrew language, "knowledge" was equivalent to "experience," rather than to intellectual understanding alone.  This is why tasting from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden in the Garden. Our God is not opposed to intellectual pursuit; He gave us a mind which seeks understanding of the world around us and even of spiritual truth.  What He does not want us "tasting" is the experience of evil, for once we taste evil, it has a hold on us.  In fact, the image of "eating" or "tasting" forbidden fruit is exactly right:  whatever we eat enters into us and becomes part of us.  We cannot "undo" it because the experience is now part of our DNA --- and, in fact, we unwittingly and unwillingly pass it on to the next generation as part of their inheritance from us.

The only remedy for the experience of evil that has become part of us is death; it is the only way to get rid of the part of us that would control us.  St. Paul calls it "the law of sin and death that rules over (our) members, overruling the law of God within our minds" (Romans 7).  Our only hope to be free of that "law of sin and death" is to be re-created, a "new creation," no longer bound by our taste or experience of evil.

To know Christ (Savior) Jesus to be made new, to have a new birth, freed from the law of sin and death that reigns in us.  It is to Know God -- that is, to experience God the Father --- and to know (experience) ourselves as children of God.

So, of course, then the question is, "How do we KNOW Jesus Christ?"  How do we EXPERIENCE Jesus as living in us, bringing us to new life (eternal life)?  How do we KNOW God?

Jesus Himself gives us the answer in Matthew 7 and Luke 11:  Ask and it will be given to you: seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you....If you, then, ….know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

The Holy Spirit is the key to knowing Jesus.  Jesus is the key to knowing the Father.  And knowing the Father...and Him who has been sent by the Father....is Eternal Life!

If we know nothing else in this life, our salvation depends upon knowing Jesus Christ --- not as a rabbi, not as a great teacher -- but as the Source and Wellspring in us of eternal life.  This is my prayer for my children, for my grandchildren, for my entire family, and for everyone I know  -- to know Christ Jesus and to taste the joy of eternal life, even now, in this lifetime and forever in heaven.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

(With Apologies to C.S. Lewis)

Recently someone said to me, "I believe in Jesus as a rabbi."  Because we were in the midst of another topic, I did not interrupt the conversation to say, "I'm sorry!" or "That's too bad."  And yet...the omission still haunts me.  I cannot think of anything more important to talk about, or any conversation more vital than this one.  

Every one of us has the right to be wrong or to be unenlightened on any topic, and still to be loved with our whole hearts and minds.  And this, it seems to me, is what we are saying to Jesus when we consider Him "a good man" or a worthy Rabbi:  I love you with my whole heart; no one has ever spoken as You have. Your words are spirit and truth, and I want to take them as the guide for my life.  But on this one aspect, You are mistaken.  You are not truly the Son of God come into the world.  You are a creature like the rest of us, and indeed, You and the Father will not come to dwell in us if we keep your words.

If Christ has not come to transform us by His Spirit, if He has no efficacy in us beyond His Words spoken 2000 years ago;  if it is up to us to listen to Him and to imitate Him, then we are beyond hopeless.  If the Jews could not keep the Law unto righteousness for 2000 years, how then should we think our goodness and strength is greater than theirs?  That might be the greatest arrogance of all!

As C.S. Lewis so brilliantly put it: Jesus did not give us that option -- to say that He was a good man, but mistaken in His belief that He was the Son of God.  Either He is within us today, doing the same mission given to Him by the Father --- healing, teaching, transforming us by the Spirit -- or He WAS simply another great teacher or rabbi in a long line of great teachers and rabbis.  Perhaps He was the greatest Prophet of all --- but He was still mistaken in His Divine Origin.

And why is that "too bad" if this is our belief?  Because then He has no power to transform us by His Presence in us.  His Resurrection Life in us is ineffective, and His Words in us have no power to effect what they say.  Like all men, we are the most hopeless of creatures, because then it is entirely up to us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and DO the things He said to us --- and if there is any truth in the world, it is simply that we have in ourselves no power to carry out the things we know we should do.

St. Paul said it well in Romans 7:  in my mind, I agree with the law, but in my body, the very thing I say I will do is the thing I do not do, and the thing I say I will not do is the thing I end up doing after all.  Unhappy man that I am!  Who will release me from the power of sin and death that reigns in my body?  ……..   Praise be to God, it has been done in me!  The Spirit of God has released me from the law of sin and death and put a new law in my members...the law of God!  Now I am a new creature, no longer subject to the law of sin and death.   (paraphrased and combined -- but read Romans 7 and 8).

If Jesus Christ is just a rabbi with wise words, He does not have the power today to make new creatures of us, capable of DOING the things of the Spirit and becoming sons of God, therefore making null and void all the words of the New Testament!  There is no Holy Spirit dwelling within us to overcome sin and death, and we are the most miserable of men, for our faith is founded upon our own power to make ourselves "good."  

O unhappy men that we are if Jesus is a Rabbi and not the Son of God!  

Learning to Pray

O my God, I do not know my right hand from my left,

nor do I know the end from the beginning.

I do not know how to pray to You,

You, the Alpha and the Omega--

the Beginning and the End of all Truth,

of all Creation.

But I trust

That You, the Incarnate Word,

Who takes on flesh,

will train my mind and my will

to know You and to choose You 

above all else.

No one has ever seen God,

but His Word was made flesh and dwelt among us

that we might see His Glory and understand

the Incomprehensible,

the Unknowable,

the Holy and Pure of Spirit.

He has made known to us

the Invisible Godhead

because He is the Exact Image

of the Invisible God.

And He will continue to make known to us

the Love of the Father,

Who speaks in us

His Son,

and Who breathes in us

His Spirit.

The Sacramental Life

"Coffee is not a vice; it is a sign that God loves us!"  

A few years ago, I ended up in the emergency room with chest pains. In talking to the young intern, I told him that coffee was my greatest vice -- and he immediately replied with the words above.  I have often looked back with laughter on his remark, but also with reflection on all the "signs" that God loves us.  

Of course, Jesus Christ Himself is THE GREAT SIGN of God's love for the human race.  He was so passionate about being "with us" (Emmanuel) that He took on human form to walk amongst us, to sit at table with us, to get in the boat with us, to heal, to teach, to console and comfort, to ensure that we would never be alone.  He is the great Sacrament of God's love -- not just a sign, but a visible reality of invisible grace.

We live in a world of sacraments -- signs that God loves us and cares for us.  The world itself is a sacrament in this sense: the breeze rippling across the waters; the sun coming up each day, the trees that clean our air and provide shade from the heat of the day.....   As the children of Israel escaped from Egypt and moved across the desert, God provided for them a "pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day"  -- both sacraments or signs of his love, as the fire overcame the chill of the desert at night and the cloud protected them from the blistering sun by day.

And we, too, if we are children of God, are sacraments to one another, providing shelter from the cruel winds of loneliness and isolation; food to the hungry; comfort to the sorrowing; friendship to the forgotten prisoner.  God is extending His passionate love for mankind through the sacrament of our lives.  St. Francis prayed, "Lord, make me a channel of your peace....."    In order for us to be channels of peace, signs of God's love, we must first know His love for us.  Only then can we escape the Egypt of our own slavery to sin and isolation and become signs of God's love to the world.

God said to Abraham: I will bless you and you will be a blessing -- not only to his own family (it always starts there), but to his nation and to all peoples of the world.   Abraham's life is a blessing extended throughout the ages to all faiths and peoples.  But following him is a whole host of those whose lives are blessings -- all the patriarchs of Israel, all the prophets and leaders of the nation, whose passion for peace and justice prepared the way for the Savior.  And after Him, His Spirit fills the earth in all those whose lives have become sacraments, or "signs that God loves us."  

The lives of the saints, the great mystics, philosophers, and theologians; the artists and musicians, the ones who feed the hungry and die as martyrs for righteousness, politicians and lawyers, teachers and parents --- all signs that "God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son that those who believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."  

The Catholic church embodies a procession of Seven Sacraments -- formal signposts on our journey through life:  Baptism, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Sacrament of the Sick.  These formal Sacraments are designed to form us into living sacraments, or channels of God's grace to a hurting world.  These are stops along the way, where we can pause and hear the very words of God to us:  I will bless you and you will be a blessing!  

Abraham heard these words once -- at the beginning of his journey to the Promised Land.  But though the words were said only once,  the blessings continued day by day along the way -- through sin and obedience -- until they were fulfilled.  And we too, hear the words only once, twice, six or seven times throughout our lives -- but the blessings are continuous as we live out the nearness of Jesus Christ in our lives.  If we are truly blessed by the continuous presence and aid of God on our journey, we too will eventually become signs/ sacraments of God's love poured out on a hurting world.

To see and to know

"Our work ought to be a dialogue with reality, and therefore, a conversation with God" (Thomas Merton, The New Man, 47).

Merton goes on to quote St. Augustine, who says:

           What greater or more wonderful spectacle is there, or where can human reason better enter into a dialogue with the nature of things, than when seeds have been planted, shoots laid out, shrubs transplanted, grafts inserted.  It is as though one were questioning each root and seed, asking it what it can do and what it cannot do; whence it derives the power to do it, or why it cannot do it; what help it receives from its own interior power, and what from exterior help and diligence. And in this dialogue we come to understand how neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but God who giveth the increase.  For that work which is applied exteriorly is fruitful only by the action of Him who created and ruled and ordered all from within.

Adam's first "work," after God had created all the beasts and birds of the air, was to observe them and to name them.  Thomas Merton points out that Adam's naming was a kind of "second creation," for "whatever the man called each of them, that would be its name" (Gen. 2:19).  Adam's function, according to Merton, was to observe creation, see it, recognize it and thus give it a new and spiritual existence within himself.  He "repeats....the creative word by which God made each living thing."

In a way, this was the beginning of science.  By his God-given intelligence, Adam was to discover the correspondence between the reality of things as they are in the mind of God (nature) and what man would call the thing.  By his contemplation, Adam "sees" and understands; by his dialog/communion with God, he acquires the wisdom -- the name  -- by which he can communicate his understanding to others.  From Adam's "naming" comes the seed of creative intellectual activity which will flower into poetry, science, philosophy --- thought systems by which men can share their vision of reality, both seen and unseen.

When St. Teresa of Avila wanted to instruct her nuns in contemplation, she remarked that she did not require them to have lofty thoughts, but only to observe -- to "look."  When we observe both inner and outer reality with the eyes of faith, that is, in communion with the Holy Spirit of Wisdom, we begin to "see" things hitherto hidden from our eyes.  And we know things beyond what our senses can tell us.  If we ask the Spirit of God to reveal to us what is going on, He will show us great and hidden things we do not know. And once we can truly "name" or identify spiritual realities, not only do we know what to do with them (Wisdom), but we can communicate what we see to others.

Our world today seems to conspire against the slowness and silence required for genuine observation.  So we cannot always tell what is real and what is false.  I once asked a class of 11th grade students if they had ever felt that God was "right there."  The only positive response I got was from a young man who habitually hunted and fished -- that is, he was alone in the woods and on the sea.  

Maybe, for those who love gardening as I do, that is the secret; our hobby draws us into communion with God by drawing us into communion with nature, that is, with reality, with the essence of things.  We are drawn to observe and to name what we see, and in the naming we find the delight of recognition:  I know you; I know what you are and what you like, what your nature needs to flourish and thrive.  And I have the ability to provide what you need, to "tend the garden" according to my observation and communion with God.

What I say about gardening should also be said about raising children, about teaching, about conducting scientific inquiry, about medicine, about philosophy and the whole hosts of man's occupations on this earth.  It all begins in humility and observation, asking the Holy Spirit to open our eyes that we might see and understand what we are called to do.

The Prayer of Jesus

I am not praying for the world, but for those You have given me, for they are Yours (Jn. 17: 9).

Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who "keep themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judging, analyzing the things which they have never truly known" (Evelyn Underhill: The Complete Christian Mystic, p.10).

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In studying the Prayer of Jesus this morning, I was struck by the fact that He said he was not praying for the world, but for "those you have given me, for they are yours."   But then he goes on to pray for "those who will believe in Me through their message....May they also be in us...."

Jesus has begun this prayer by acknowledging that the Father has granted Him "authority" over all people "that He might give eternal life to those You have given him."  The word here translated "authority" (power) is in the Greek the same word used in John 1:12 > Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right (power) to become children of God.

At the Last Supper, Jesus is praying not for the world, but for those who accepted His words and who believed that the Father had sent Him.  Jesus is praying here that the disciples might "be one as we are one," and that those who heard them might "be brought to complete unity....in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them."

I think I began looking closely at His prayer because I was praying this morning for those "the Father had given me," in a sense:  those with whom I have experienced some sort of communion, or unity.  Of course, as we pray, we begin with those closest to us -- namely our families -- that they might have in them the same spirit that has been given to us -- the Spirit of Jesus.  That they might have eternal life, even now, beginning in this life.  That they may continue to be united with us and not separated by evil and the temptations that separate us from love and unity.  

We pray for them also because, of all the people in the world, we know who they are and what they need -- they are in us and we are in them.  While I do pray for the world in general, it seems that each one of us must have a special mission to pray for those "the Father has given us."  I would think that we have no "authority" or "power" or "influence" over those Evelyn Underhill describes as "standing apart, judging, analyzing things they have never known."  

I am often led to pray for my neighbors -- not for all of them, but for those "the Father has given me," for those who "accept my words" and "believe in me."  Not that I am teaching them, of course, but in ordinary conversation, we have communion and sympathy for one another -- I, in a sense, am truly "in them" and they in me.  We are united, not "standing apart, judging and criticizing" one another.  And I desire their good, their health, their peace, their joy in a way that is possible only at a distance to those neighbors I do not know and who do not know me.

I think the Prayer of Jesus encourages me.  While I am discouraged at the state of the world, at the state of our nation, at the condition of the poor, the lonely, the "human refuse" of the world, and while I pray "Thy kingdom come" over all  these conditions, it seems that my "authority" in prayer really rests over those the Father has given me.  I cannot reach beyond what has been given to me -- but I do need to take care of what has been given.  St. John the Baptist said of himself: A man can receive only what has been given to him by heaven (Jn. 3:27).

Jesus did nothing on His own; everything came to Him from the Father and was returned by Him to the Father.  If we think of and pray for those the Father has given us and return them into His hands, we do well.