Here is my latest column for the Catholic Spirit! It’s a reflection on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Christ’s call for us to be perfect in love. It’s called“Full Hearts”
*Pray and Reflect with full guided prayer meditations on the Sunday Gospel reading in my book Take Time For Himand its series on Amazon and Kindle!
Today (October 1st) is the Feast Day of St. Therese of Lisieux! I owe so much to her witness, and St. Mother Teresa’s after her. I wrote this in honor of them 🙂
In such a big world we can easily feel lost. A big world of ideas – you can be whatever you want to be. A big world of globalization – from corporate industry to personal travel. Even a big virtual world that’s ever expanding. We are blessed to live in an age filled with so many possibilities, but we can also feel overwhelmed by them. God raises up saints in every age who discover a way to live the Gospels amidst the circumstances of their time, and in a way that can be instructive to us all. To guide us through this confusion and find the meaning and purpose we desire, the Lord gave us two great saints of modernity, St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897) and of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997). They illumine a path to greatness available to each of us: the Little Way of Love.
The industrial revolution brought with it rapid change to life and society. What had formerly been hand made by craftsmen and women became mechanized and mass produced in factories by technicians. Agrarian and close-knit communities became overshadowed by the growing masses of the city and the factory. The secret ingredient to any well-made thing from baked goods to business – personal creativity and love, was replaced with the higher priority of standardization and efficiency. In the subjugation of creation to science and steel, the supernatural and the personal went increasingly by the wayside. It inspired grand ambitions while at the same time overrunning others. On the one hand the world of opportunity seemed to grow bigger, and on the other the reach of an individual seemed to grow smaller.
In the face of such tensions, the answer of the saints is to embrace them with the supernatural light of Christ. St. Therese was inspired with great ambitions and wished to have a global impact. Though they were spiritual endeavors, she nevertheless had to grapple with the distance between the grandeur of her hopes and the limits of her personal reach. When she turned to Christ in prayer and Scripture as she wrestled with this, she learned several things that we can all benefit from.
Many people struggle with choosing which occupation to pursue, and research has shown that young people today become paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. St. Therese struggled with a desire to be every kind of saint and serve the Church in every possible role. This caused unrest and discontent, but she did not allow herself to become paralyzed. She actively sought help from the Lord and found her answer in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (chapters 12 & 13). St. Paul noted how in the body of Christ there are many parts, but each is of equal value and ordained by God. The only factor of stratification is love. Contrary to the hedonistic value of status and the modern industrial values of efficiency and output, God judges interiorly by the measure of one’s love in their self-gift. From this, Therese was freed from her anxiety and found her singular purpose, exclaiming “I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES.”[1] She found the secret that love gives every effort its value; the task itself is secondary. Love is the unifying factor of life rather than a particular career path.
Having discovered her vocation, her next hurdle lay in how to achieve it. Tempted by discouragement when she noted the difference between herself and the saints she wished to be like, she reasoned “God cannot inspire unrealizable desires. I can, then, in spite of my littleness, aspire to holiness.”[2] St. Therese’s logic always included the realness of the love and faithfulness of the Lord. She decided that she would “seek out a means of going to heaven by a little way, a way that is very straight, very short, and totally new.”[3] She looked towards human progress as an analogy for spiritual progress. Here, she focused on the relatively new invention of the elevator: “We are living now in an age of inventions, and we no longer have to take the trouble of climbing stairs, for, in the homes of the rich, an elevator has replaced these very successfully. I wanted to find an elevator which would raise me to Jesus, for I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection.”[4] St. Therese looked again to Scripture “for some sign of this elevator” and found it: “’Whoever is a LITTLE ONE, let him come to me’…The elevator which must raise me to heaven is Your arms, O Jesus!”.[5] And so, Jesus raised the young, cloistered Carmelite woman from Lisieux to the heights of sainthood and world renown. When Pope St. John Paull II declared her a doctor of the Church in October of 1997, God proved that a person considered small in every worldly measure, could achieve greatness through simple trust in the Lord and obedience to His will. When we feel tempted to over-systematize our life or discern our path through external values, St. Therese reminds us to acknowledge our desires for greatness by returning to their true origin and end: the Person of Christ as loved day by day and moment by moment.
St. Mother Teresa (inspired by St. Therese before her), lived this same spirituality but on the global stage. With the 24-hour news cycle and international media reach, it’s easy today to feel overwhelmed by the misery, poverty, and affliction we see experienced throughout the world. Tempted to despair, we ask ourselves “what can one person do?”. Certainly, many organized social and political structures have attempted to cure these ails, but no panacea has yet been found. Abiding by the Little Way, Mother Teresa cut to the heart of the matter. Every day she simply responded to Christ’s call to care for the poorest of the poor in India. In prayer, He told her “I thirst”, and she tried to alleviate His thirst for love and for souls by attending to Him present in the poor. Seeing her success, many tried to organize it, structure it, reproduce it, or expand it. Nevertheless, Mother Teresa held firm to the true foundation for her effectualness – love of the Lord and the movement of the Holy Spirit within individual souls. Programs don’t help people; people help people. Programs may be an organizing principle, but it all comes down to individuals responding with generosity and compassion toward other individuals’ needs. Moreover, that response of love resides in the little things towards those right in our own lives and communities. Inspired by Mother Teresa, many asked her how they could help, to which she responded to go home and love their families. This seemed so inconsequential! How could Mother Teresa, a global force against poverty, recommend such a mundane thing? In truth, although we may now have the technological and media infrastructure to view the world, real richness comes through a sacrificial gift of ourselves for those we love. We do live in a global community, but we are also essential and irreplaceable members of our family community. Our greatest impact is found not in numbers – a metric of industrial efficiency or personal vainglory – but in the quality of our love, which is the very center of our human nature made in the image and likeness of God, Who is Love. Knowing that the world needed God, not her, she didn’t succumb to secular hopes in a law of progress or the organization of a process. Instead, she placed her hope in God and disregarded the results altogether. Her famous words, “God has not called me to be successful, but to be faithful” has been one of the most liberating lines of wisdom in my life.
Both St. Therese and St. Mother Teresa took the Blessed Virgin Mary as the model of Faith and learned from her discipleship the original Little Way of Love. Consider the Wedding Feast at Cana (John 2:1-12). Jesus’ first miracle happened in response to a request by His mother about a need in his extended family: “They have no wine.” Jesus, of all people, actually did have a huge world-wide and history transforming mission. Yet, from His actions we can see the answer to His question “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” No need is too small. Jesus always cares about the person not the program. Mary’s trust in the merciful heart of Jesus was poignantly conveyed in her simple order to the servants “Do whatever he tells you.” Often our prayers ask Jesus to execute the plan we give Him. Instead, Mary shows us to simply bring the need to the Lord and do the task that He asks of us, even if we don’t see how it will turn out. We can learn from Mary, who was keenly aware of practical needs and realities within the concrete circumstances of life. As she encountered them, she put them before the Lord unobtrusively and attended to them with simplicity and love. She displayed concern but didn’t fret, she was grounded in trust.
Finaly, in our perfectionistic and increasingly artificial world, the culture’s definition of success and quality of life seems beyond the reach of many people. This despair is further multiplied when comparing oneself to what’s seen on media in our consumer culture. However, much of the competitiveness and comparison is due to the limited resources and status requirements in such a value system. But the re-valuation of life around love and the beauty of self-gift, offers a new way forward, for it relies on an unlimited resource from which everyone can draw and this affords much more variety. When St. Therese struggled with comparison, she again found her answer in prayer:
“Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. He set before me the book of nature; I understood how all the flowers He has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the Lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked with little wild flowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to Lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being what He wills us to be.”[6]
In consequence, rather than seeing points of difference as a matter of comparison, she realized they could be celebrated since each enhanced the beauty of the other by way of variation to the eye of the Beholder.
On earth we will experience many setbacks, limitations, and even failures. However, we learn from the Little Way that nothing is lost with God. As the famous Mother Teresa poem closes: “Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God; It was never between you and them anyway.”
I’m particularly thankful for St. Therese and St. Mother Teresa. In the fall of my freshman year of college, Mother Teresa passed away. I could no longer rest easily knowing there was a Mother Teresa out there saving the world, I knew I now had to get on it and start following in her footsteps more intentionally. That same fall, John Paul II named St. Therese a doctor of the Church and gave me the priceless gift of showing me what to strive for if I wanted greatness.
St. Therese and the Little Way continue to ground us amidst the many challenges of our present time. In a world of exposure, she calls us to draw within. In a culture of self-absorption, she shows us the higher beauty of giving of ourselves. Distracted by ambition, recognition, and external affirmation, she emboldens us to dismiss them all and set our gaze on the only glory that matters and that lasts – the enduring legacy of love.
Today you’re required to feast and to celebrate! This holy day of obligation in the Church, reflects on when, at the end of Mary’s life, the Lord brought her up to heaven, body and soul. We rejoice because Mary persevered to the end, and like St. Paul could say “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).
Mary was the first disciple of Christ, and she illumines the path for us all. Her trusting “yes” to the Lord made possible the Incarnation, and Christianity really. She followed Christ at every moment. She carried Him as an infant where the Lord led her to go – to the house of St. Elizabeth, to Bethlehem, to the Temple for His ritual presentation, to exile in Egypt while Herod sought to kill Him, and back to Nazareth in a quiet life while the Father desired Him to remain Hidden. During His childhood and young adult life, she prayed, she listened, she contemplated, and she loved Christ and neighbor in her acts of service.
When Jesus’ time had arrived for His public ministry, Mary accepted the pain of separation every mother feels when her child leaves home. Even more so, Mary knew that her Son’s path would include His suffering and sacrifice. Yet, she remained faithful to the Lord in every moment and every act, showing us the Little Way of Love that St. Therese would later articulate for us. She helped prepare the wedding celebration for neighbors in Cana, and rather than being distracted by getting to see her Son again, she noted their waning supply of wine and discreetly responded by asking Jesus to help. Even in this, she surrendered the impulse to control or coerce her Son when He questioned what it had to do with Him. Instead she simply told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Mary knew how to pray and how to pray purely. She didn’t try to control God but trusted the Lord and His creative and wonderful ways. She knew from experience and believed in her heart God’s words through the prophet Isaiah (55:8-9):
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
During Christ’s Passion, Mary was there every step of the way. She suffered alongside Him for love of us! She knew Christ willingly walked the Via Dolorosa to the Cross and she offered the sacrifice of her own excruciating maternal pain and suffering for the salvation of souls, uniting her yes to the Father’s will to her Son’s. She accepted her next mission from Christ on the Cross: to mother Him by mothering His Church.
“When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciples, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (John 19:26-27).
She did not lose faith when she held His limp body after being taken down from the Cross or when He was placed in the tomb. She did not lose faith when she went home alone that night with the apostle John; her Son away in death for three days. She did not curse God in her heartache, she blessed Him and she trusted Him. Mary faced the sacrifice of her Son with the courage and strength of a mighty spiritual warrior. Whereas Abraham’s hand was stayed at the last moment from sacrificing Isaac, Mary endured the deadly strike to her only child with a faith as great and greater than even that of Abraham.
When Christ rose from the dead Mary rejoiced with all of the disciples. When Jesus ascended into Heaven after forty days, she again accepted the bittersweet pull at her heart when He left His earthly home to enter His heavenly one. She waited in patience with the apostles in Jerusalem for Pentecost and witnessed the power of the Holy Spirit come upon them. She was at the center of the early Church and maternally ministered to Christ’s spiritual children as He had asked of her.
Finally, at the end of Mary’s life, she entered into eternal life body and soul. The Father had preserved her from Original Sin so she could be the Mother of Christ who is God (note: this miracle included an application of Christ’s merit on the Cross to her conception – thus she too is redeemed by Christ). She entered the world much like Adam and Eve in that way. However, unlike Adam and Eve, she willfully chose obedience and love of the Lord over every temptation she experienced. In consequence, she witnesses for us God’s original plan for mankind – that after our time on earth is completed and our choice is made – we would then enter eternal life without the necessity of death. Death is a consequence of sin, and Mary never inherited sin nor committed any personal sins. Her love of God grew to completion and she entered into her heavenly home with her Son at last. From there she continues to mother her spiritual children enjoy everlasting life with her beloved Son.
Christ promises that all who persevere in faith will one day enjoy heaven with Him in His Father’s house. Christ opened the gates to this ineffable home and honored His mother by bringing her there to be with Him. We rejoice at her Assumption into Heaven because we rejoice at the love of her Son Jesus for His mother, we rejoice at her unmatched faithfulness in discipleship to which we aspire to imitate, and we rejoice at her glory in heaven which we hope to one day share. Mary rejoices in the Lord as the source of every grace in her life, and we rejoice with her as one of the many generations that call her blessed.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty had done great things for me,
Fra Angelico, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What do Mother’s Day and preparing for Pentecost have to do with one another? Making room to receive divine Love.
As we celebrate our mothers in May, we also celebrate Christ’s mother Mary. Not only does she nurture, care, guide, and protect us, but she is also the very model from which we learn what it means to be a Church, – how to be a People of God and true disciples of Christ. She who first received the Holy Spirit, from Whom she conceived and bore Christ, was there in the Upper Room praying with the apostles when they too received the Holy Spirit from which the Church was born into the world. We can learn from her how to be more receptive to the gift of the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts at baptism, and for His creative grace to bear fruit in our lives.
Pope Benedict XVI offers rich insights into what the Church learns about herself in and through Mary in a work he did with theologian and priest Hans Urs von Balthasar titled Mary – The Church at the Source.
He asserts that “the Church learns concretely what she is and is meant to be by looking at Mary.” In contrast to our self-centered tendencies and our individualistic world, Mary shines as a woman completely open to the Lord, the mystery of His will, and participation in His saving work of love for mankind. He writes, “She does not wish to be just this one human being who defends and protects her own ego. She does not regard life as a stock of goods of which everyone wants to get as much as possible for himself. Her life is such that she is transparent to God, ‘habitable’ for him. Her life is such that she is a place for God.“
How can we be more “habitable”? How can we make a place for God? This was the work of the prayer and waiting that Christ commanded of the apostles between His Ascension into Heaven and Pentecost.
“And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, ‘you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.'”Acts 1:4-5
Relationships grow insofar as we open up to each other. It requires giving of oneself and receptivity to the other. In regard to intimate relationship with God, this requires making space for the Holy Spirit to dwell – not in isolation, but in a continual dialogue of listening prayer.
But how do we pray effectively? How can it be fruitful instead of sterile and dry? Again, Mary provides a model. First, we listen attentively, then contemplate and appropriate His word, then respond with action. Jesus had the greatest respect for His mother because of this. When Mary was praised for getting to be Jesus’ physical mother, He pointed instead to her strength of faith which made His conception possible:
As he said this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”Luke 11:27-28 RSV
How can we be followers of Christ, if we never actually listen and let Him guide us? If we rarely pray, and if that prayer consists solely of requests to God, then it remains a self-directed life rather than a God-directed life. Oftentimes we try to lead Christ along our path, asking Him to bless our plans and provide earthly prosperity. Instead, we need to pause and make the time and mental space to really listen to the Lord and what He asks of us. We do this through praying with Scripture – His Word to us – or reading quality spiritual books that draw us deeper into the mysteries of our faith. We can also meditate using the rosary, since it guides us in reflection on each of the key moments of Christ’s life.
“The important thing, when we pray, is not so much what we say to God but rather the work that He accomplishes in us while we remain silent in His presence, when we agree to let ourselves be cured of our lack of love. Prayer does not consist of laying a hand on God, but of letting God lay his Hand on us. Otherwise, our prayer will be sterile. Such prayer requires silence, recollection, interior availability, humility in the presence of God’s holiness.”
The apostles, who had asked Jesus to teach them to pray, knew the great prayer of surrender – the Our Father. They also knew from His example the importance of regularly drawing away from the crowds to converse in prayer with the Father, and always before a mission. They also had Mary with them, the first and longest disciple of Christ and a woman who constantly lived in a contemplative openness to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
“Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away; and when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”Acts 1:12-14
What peace Mary must have brought the apostles! Jesus promised He would not leave them orphans, and He never did. From the Cross, He gave them Mary as their mother, and on Pentecost the Holy Spirit – Who proceeds from love of the Father and the Son.
In closing, let’s take a lesson from Mary. Let’s make space for silence, for intentional listening to our Lord. From that listening, let us act on His calling in our hearts, in communion with the Holy Spirit.
“If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” John 14:23
Finally, a special shout out to all the mothers today! We honor you because you made space in your body and in your heart, giving life through your constant love and care!
peace Mary must have brought the apostles! Jesus promised He would not leave them orphans, and He never did. From the Cross, He gave them Mary as their mother, and on Pentecost the Holy Spirit – Who proceeds from love of the Father and the Son.
Take Time For Him 