On Finding God in the Heart

The human heart is a field of desire.

It’s so easy to want God, but then so many other things too. Trying to find Him, we are lost in the fields of desire. How can we enjoy the flowers of the field without getting tangled in the briers? It is unsettling to think that Satan’s bible is too about desire. And yet, the desire of the heart is one of the ways in which God leads us to eternal union with Him. Is there a North Star to guide us through these fields to the One who alone is eternal happiness?

As for me, even when I locate the North Star, remembering to look up at it is like trying to remember that God is there with me in the course of my hectic workday.  I tried placing objects and pictures around the office, but then couldn’t remember to look at them.  I learned all too soon that God is not in the objects and pictures, any more than He was in the wind or the storm for Elijah. I have learned that it is not a matter of remembering that He is present; rather I should make Him uppermost in my heart and my mind. He should be like the Beloved who permeates the mind and the senses at every moment of my day.

If you have ever fallen in love, then you know what I mean.  The beloved is on your heart and in your mind at every moment of every day, no matter what else you are doing. Then, the love shared between lover and beloved begins to burgeon and overflow onto everything and everyone around you.  The world and all your relationships literally spring alive with this love! Wouldn’t it be great to think that loving God – finding Him in our hearts – could be like that? After all, He tells us (in no uncertain terms) that there is an intrinsic connection between loving Him and loving each other.

So, if we are seeking to find God in the heart, then we have to fall in love with Him.

But isn’t falling in love with God a little like falling in love with a parent? Stay with me here. The child really doesn’t “fall in love” with parents like one falls in love with a lover, mostly because there is a developmental process to the relationship (just as there is a process to the lover becoming spouse). Parents love their child during a time when the child is not capable of understanding or experiencing love. The child is so profoundly dependent on the parent’s love that his existence is not possible without it. More typically, the child realizes the love for the parent at some momentous moment down the path of life — maybe at a time of tragedy, or a time of realizing, from the heart, all that the parent has sacrificed. Before that time, the child can only receive love. When the child separates, matures, becomes independent, then it is possible to recognize the profundity of the parent’s love, and the response of love is a spontaneous movement of the child’s heart.

Our spiritual childhood may be a little like that. We can’t “fall in love” with God, because He has loved us profoundly at a time when we couldn’t even know Him – since the moment of our creation and throughout the time when all we could do is receive His love. At some momentous moment in our life, though, we realize all that God has done for us – how He has provided for us at every turn and in ways that we didn’t recognize, how He has protected us from dangers we didn’t even know were lurking. Only gradually, little by little, do we become (spiritually) mature enough to realize and respond to His love for us. At that moment, the return of love to Him – as to the beloved parent – is a spontaneous movement of the heart.

So can we make it happen that God becomes uppermost in our hearts? Even as the child is unaware of all that the parent has sacrificed, so perhaps is the person unaware of God until that momentous moment when He makes Himself known to the soul in the way that only He can. At that moment the soul’s spontaneous love for God will transcend the bounds of a human heart hitherto lost in the temporal world.

Reflection on God’s Infinitude by Dr. Richard Dumont, OCDS

The peak of mental prayer is contemplative prayer. The very object of this prayer is the Blessed Trinity self-manifested supernaturally and sacramentally in the Catholic Church.

This reflection on God’s infinitude may be of some help in differentiating between contemplative prayer and meditative prayer.

11/30/2009

GOD IS INFINITE

It is better to contemplate God in prayer than it is to meditate on God. The God of the philosopher is infinitely removed from the one who prays. The God of the philosopher is reached in meditative prayer. The God of the person of faith is infinitely and even intimately close to and united with the one who prays. Why? The God of faith supernaturally reveals His own Triune Personhood to the Catholic Christian believer.

The reason that God remains infinitely removed from the philosopher’s prayer is that the philosopher is praying to the creator of the universe. God as the creator of the universe remains infinitely transcendent to the creatures within this universe of his creation. This is the case whether the creatures be angels, humans, or subhumans.

God as creator is not the principal attribute of God’s divinity. Were God never to create the universe in part or in whole, God would still be God in virtue of his own eternal, immutable, and transcendent sovereign divinity.

The Christian baptized pray-er who meditates on God in Sacred Scripture through the medium of the Catholic Church’s sacraments enters into a unity with God. Since this unity is not confined to the individual pray-er, it is more a com-union with God, for, it is also a communion with all those who are also in union with God’s divinity including all the angels, and the saints in heaven and those who are already in communion with him on earth. Furthermore, it is a com-union precisely because God in his Personhood is triune.

The philosopher who prays to God prays to the unitary infinite “Being of all beings” distinct in his divinity and infinitude from the finitude of all creatures. God is a divine eternal Being; in view of God’s Beingness every creaturely being is truly a being but never truly a divine or eternal being; this is also the case for the angels. While they are not created in the temporality peculiar to the beings in the physical cosmos, they have not existed from all eternity.

God is not only divine; God is divinity. The human person is truly human; however, no human person including Jesus Christ is humanity. There is only one humanity; humanity is the ideal human being in which all humans participate equally. No individual human being is ideal; every human person is a real human being. Christ is not a human person; He is a divine Person endowed with a human nature in addition to his divine nature.

A philosopher who prays to God as the source of all creation does not pray to the Trinity of God’s Personhood but, rather, to the divinity that is the unique and unitary nature of the Trinity of Persons. The philosopher is a pensive person who intelligently and ontologically knows and understands God as the very Beingness beyond all beings and the source of the existence of all creaturely beings. This encounter of the philosopher with God is not a personal encounter since God’s Personhood is Trinitarian and not reducible to God’s Unitarian divine nature.

Furthermore, a philosopher’s prayer cannot be personal in the sense that it is a prayer from one person to another person (viz. the very Triune Personhood of God). This does not mean that the philosopher’s prayer is not authentic; it is authentic. The philosopher truly is cognizant of God and in this cognizance is able to love God in God’s supremacy, sovereignty, divinity, and primacy. This is the case even while remaining ignorant of God’s very Personhood. This prayer is intelligible and viable; yet, it is not comprehensively intelligible. To know that a tree in front of the house is a plant without knowing its very species is a viable knowledge yet not a comprehensive knowledge.

The philosopher’s prayer is always meditative and musing and never fully contemplative. Why?  The critical difference between meditative and contemplative prayer is that the former always remains human while the latter takes on the very mode and style of God’s own divinity. In the philosopher’s prayer God is always understood by analogy; that is, by primacy and supremacy vis-à-vis the creature’s lack of primacy and supremacy. Every creature is finite; God alone is infinite. To recognize, acknowledge, and to reverently address this unitary Infinite Beingness of all beings is truly to attain to a divine and sublime Being of Beingness even while remaining ignorant of the very Personhood of this divine Being.

The man of faith (that is, the Christian Catholic faith mediated by Jesus Christ and ministered by his apostles), on the other hand, is enabled supernaturally and sacramentally to pray contemplatively. In this contemplative prayer the pray-er prays in the very divine and sublime presence of God’s very own self-revealed and sacramentally self-manifested Triune Personhood. To peruse and ponder Sacred Scripture is to gaze contemplatively in faith on the “Word of God.” To gaze contemplatively in faith on the Blessed Sacrament, on the other hand, be it the consecrated host or the consecrated wine, the person of faith is in the very presence of the “God of the Word,” the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. This may be amplified intelligibly by the discipline of theology. Nonetheless this prayerful gazing is not mediated by a philosophical understanding of God; this is mediated by God’s very own Personal Divinity made supernatually manifest in his incarnation in the Catholic Church’s sacramentality.

What is eminently the case in the Blessed Sacrament is also the case in the other sacraments albeit less eminently. In the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the Divinity of the Holy Spirit comes sacramentally to dwell within the soul, heart, and mind of the Catholic Christian person of faith. This indwelling invites contemplative prayer above and beyond meditative prayer. To such a person of faith prayer need not be that of the philosopher who prays to God meditatively and abstractly in spite of God’s infinite concrete Personal existence and sacramental Self-manifestation. This man of prayer may have a heart-to-heart and a mind-to-mind liturgical contemplative prayer in the very presence of the Holy Spirit whether through the Church’s public liturgy or privately within the privacy of the believer’s own soul, mind, and heart. For, there indwells within the person of faith the Holy Spirit sacramentally, personally and supernaturally. So also is this the case with all of the sacraments regarding God’s eminent Personal presence in the believer in the state of grace.

God is divinely endowed with many attributes that are personal to God alone. Yet, in these attributes God’s Triune Personhood remains hidden. God is not only Good, God is Goodness. God is not only beautiful, God is Beauty itself. God is not only True, God is Truth. God is not only joyful, God is Joy. God is not only intelligent, God is Intelligence. God is not only simple (i.e., without any composition), God is Simplicity itself. What is predicated of God and attributed to him, God not merely has; rather, God is in the very plenitude of His Godhead. God’s Beauty is not God’s Truth. Yet, due to God’s Simplicity, God’s Beauty is identical to His Truth. And, so with all of God’s attributes.

We may predicate of God only those attributes which are commensurate with and compatible with God’s eminent infinity. God’s infinity is the ultimate seal and warrant of God’s divine solitary, transcendent, and unique nature. God alone is the infinite plenitude of whatever can be predicated of his divine nature. Infinity is the signature of God’s divine nature. The color, green, considered ideally as greenness is infinitely every possible special shade of green that can exist in the physical cosmic universe. Greenness itself is not actually any specific shade of green; it is only virtually every actual shade of green that has ever existed; now exists, or ever will exist in the physical cosmic universe. Yet, one cannot declare or assert that God is greenness precisely because this ideal reality is finite in that it does not include an actual infinity; its infinity is only virtual. The actual plenitude of infinity is peculiar to God alone.

What is this infinity proper to God alone? It is the attribute that accentuates God’s divine supreme unexcelled sovereignty over and above every creaturely being. Consider a mere quantitative mathematical infinity, such as the geometric line. It may be infinitely long or even infinitely short. There is no line that could not be longer than it is long nor shorter than it is short. This is only a possible infinity, however; it is not an actual one. The physical cosmos may be increasingly expanding mathematically but it remains actually finite in its immensity. Again, it may be decreasingly contracting mathematically but it still remains actually finite in its density.

God’s divine infinity is neither a quantitative nor a mathematical infinitude. It is a divine attribute that is peculiar to God’s non-quantitative divinity. Indeed, no attribute of God is quantitative or mathematically measurable. Every attribute of God is immeasurable and ineffable precisely because it is not mathematically quantifiable. What, then, is this infinitude? It is that to which no further addition is commensurate. God is not only Good; God is Goodness. This is because God is infinitely Goodness while every creature is only good because every creature is only finitely good.

This finite creaturely existence proper to each of us is more distinctively expressive of our differentiation from God than possibly any other attribute. In spite of our finitude, God the Son in his incarnation has become miraculously and also sacramentally in his humility lower than our human creaturely finitude precisely because He has come as our servant and not as one demanding our service. He puts aside his supremacy and primacy as God and lives as a mere human creature at the redemptive service of every human person.

He has come to substitute his Selfless Self for our selfish selfhood as a scapegoat to ransom our creaturely selfhood from its own paltry finitude by introducing it gratuitously into God’s Triune infinitude. This is not an insertion of nature; we have no natural right to God’s infinitude as mere creatures who are not only finite but impotently selfishly self-centeredly finite. It is by adoption that Jesus Christ seeks to introduce us into the eternity of God’s infinite Trinitarian bosom.

The miracle of Jesus Christ’s incarnation may only be exceeded by the miracle of his resurrection and ascension into heaven. When he entered Mary’s womb under the auspices of the Holy Spirit he assumed a human body. When he resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven, the human body he assumed became divinized with the infinity of God’s Triune Godhead. In this resurrection and ascension the finitude of his human body is deified, divinized, sanctified, and glorified with the infinite glory and splendor of his own sovereign divinity. And, this is not only the case for his own human glorified body, it becomes the case mystically for all humans and their finite bodies who enter into the heavenly communion of saints through the entry of Christ’s glorified body.

This, however, is with one unavoidable provision. This is the provision that the Catholic Christian person becomes willing to substitute Christ’s Selfless Selfhood for her/his own by forsaking and renouncing her/his own selfish creaturely selfhood. This requires that a person embrace the cross of her/his own creaturely imperfections and selfishness in a manner comparable to Christ’s embrace of his cross of crucifixion. It is the malice of our own selfishness which crucifies his innocent Selflessness; it is the Selflessness of Christ’s own crucifixion which heals our selfishness providing we embrace the mercy of His sacrifice by suffering in our own trials and ills the justice of his humiliation by making it our very own.

The cross of Christ is never a challenge. It is always an invitation. We are never invited to carry it alone. To repudiate this cross is to repudiate divine merciful love that is infinitely benevolent and benignant. Indeed, it is only when our cross is heavy that it is our own that we are carrying apart from Christ’s crucifixion. Our cross becomes light when it is Christ’s very own cross that we assist him to carry. In this endeavor we are given the same strength which Christ received in carrying and dying on his cross; namely, the Holy Spirit that bound his human volition to the Holy Will of his heavenly Father.

We live in a time and an age when professional and pragmatic atheism is not only given a hearing but recognized politically and humanistically as being not merely on a par with theism but even more sophisticated and compelling. Why is this the case? It is because the man of faith, particularly of the Catholic Christian faith, addresses God as a being transcendent to his own creaturely finite existence. Even Jesus Christ who is manifestly human is much more than a mere human. It is this supra-human aspect of his divinity which raises the hackles of the atheist. The professional atheist is a humanist who will not acknowledge any reality which surpasses his own finite creaturely existence. The foolishness and insipidity of the atheist should be self-evident precisely on the issue of infinitude proper to God alone. The very inability of the atheist to grasp humanistically and comprehensively the amplitude and plenitude of God’s infinitude should be cause enough to acknowledge his own finitude. It is only foolishness that prevents the atheist from acknowledging and embracing wisdom incarnate by acknowledging that God is not only wise; God is wisdom and infinitely wise; and, so also is Jesus Christ.

Prayerfully and cordially yours in Carmel,

Richard OCDS

On Finding God at Work

It’s easy to find God at church. Relatively speaking, that is…when I’m paying attention and when I can break away from the cares and concerns of my life.

When I think of finding God at work, what first comes to mind is Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection who, in the midst of his duties as cook, throws himself down prostrate on the floor of the kitchen, and with a sincere heart offers the very omelette he is cooking to the Lord of the Universe.

If only I could have the presence of mind to do the same in my own workplace: to offer every class, every meeting, every report, every phone call, every problem to the Lord of the Universe…on the spot! But the reality is that I get so caught up in the demands of the day that I don’t give myself the space of mind and heart to do it.

Several years ago I started a campaign to find God at work, and I began asking my friends, my priests, my family how to keep Him present all the time in the office. One series of responses had to do with the environment: keep photos and reminders of the Beloved everywhere. That made some sense, so I spent a lot of time doing just that. As a consequence, my office is full of images, statues, and holy words, and in that rare moment when I have the presence of mind, I can for a second or two remember that He is there. He is there waiting for me amidst the problems of the day, but still I am aware of it only when I have the space of mind and heart to advert to Him.

How easy it is to forget even the boldest of reminders that are there! I get so caught up in the moments of the day that I forget the Lord of the moment. I put His picture on my desk, but the picture fades into the landscape of problems and paperwork; I pray His word in the morning, but then my own words fill the day.

So while populating my workplace with His image can help, it is not the answer. The answer lies not in the external object, but the internal space of mind and heart where He resides, and where St Teresa teaches us to dwell in such a way that we might find ourselves in continual union with His will. That space must be increased by our daily prayer, strengthened by the graces of the sacraments, stretched and exercised in the charity for all who enter it throughout the day. The challenge of seeking God in the souls of those who make the demands of each day, in the souls of those who criticize and tyrannize, and in the souls of each of those who seek help and understanding from me, that challenge makes me realize that perhaps I have not even known Him in church as well as I ever thought I did!

On Finding Ourselves in God

One of the things I love most about Carmelite spirituality is the attitude that finding God and being united to Him is the most important part of a day. How we go about seeking that – what method of prayer we use, what posture we adopt, where we go for retreat, what vocation through which we choose (or that He helps choose for us!) to serve Him – is much less important than the need we have to find our love expressed for Him in and through our own personalities and our own particular circumstances.

I have just discovered a fabulous novel: Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by the brilliant, and profoundly Christian author, C.S. Lewis. You may already be familiar with this work, and if you are, please share your thoughts…I have only begun to think about the implications of the story! Although it is set in the timeless world of myth, Lewis taps into the  real-time concerns of the human soul in the contemporary world: love, loss, suffering, beauty, justice, in short, all the Real Realities that we encounter in our personal relationships to God.

The myth that Lewis retells is that of Psyche & Cupid.  Psyche, as you may know, is the Greek word for “soul,” and so one could read the story of Psyche and her tribulations can be understood psychologically as well as spiritually. Because although it appears to be pre-Christian, with the characters addressing the gods and discussing the mysteries of their interactions with humans, it is quite clear that the truest ramification of the novel is Christian, as hinted in Orual’s cry of despair when she finally calls out, “Oh, Lord, I can no longer do this on my own strength!”

Just a bit more background: The story is retold from the perspective of Psyche’s oldest sister, Orual, whose abusive father, the King, has always reminded her that she is ugly compared to her beautiful sisters. Through her many sufferings, Orual eventually becomes the world’s wisest, most generous Queen the world has ever known. Beneath the veil that she has donned to cover her ugliness, however, she endures a deep bitterness, resentment and anger against the gods.

In the course of Orual’s journey, all revolving about her anguished love for Psyche, she learned much. Three of the lessons learned that particularly struck me are:

On loving others: sometimes we can love others so much that we hurt them with our very love….we love them selfishly; we love them jealously; we forget to love them to the extent that we can let them be who they need to be, and accomplish the work their souls need for them to accomplish.

On justice: On her way to court where she will be allowed to lodge her complaint against the gods, Orual asks whether divine justice is possible. Her wise mentor answers, “Oh child, if the gods were to render justice, what would become of us?”

On anger against God: This could be the major theme of the novel, and made the biggest impression on me. The novel begins with Orual writing out her bitter and angry complaints against the gods for having taken away from her all those she loved, especially her beautiful Psyche. Is not her anger against the gods so much like the anger at God that many of us have experienced?

Finally, after much suffering and tribulation, Orual is led to a court where all of her ancestors are present as witnesses, and is invited by the Judge to render her complaint. Loudly, she reads from her book of anger, and goes on and on until the Judge stops her by saying “enough.” In the utter silence that follows, she realizes for the first time what she had been doing. She had been rehearsing over and over the same complaints for years, “starting the first word again almost before the last was out of her mouth.”

And how often do we do the same with God? “Why God?” “I loved him so much and you took him from me!” “He was too young to die and you took him from me!” In bitter anger, we rehearse again and again the same course of events that God allowed to happen, and we accuse Him of the injustice of it all.

Orual would have kept on going ad infinitum with her tirade if the Judge hadn’t stopped her, and she realized that the voice, strange to her ears, was her own real voice, one that she had never heard before. As soon as she realized that, the Judge asked if she had her answer, and she said yes. Lewis writes:

The complaint was the answer….when the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I am intrigued by the last line, which of course gives the entire work its title. How can God meet us face to face until we have faces? until we find our voice? And how best does that happen? Only by complaining? Some of us do, maybe. It would be nice to think there are less painful ways to go about it, but I have to say that I can really relate to the plight of Orual. Have you ever found yourself angry with God, asking “why? why?” and hearing only a deep and profound silence in return?

As St. Teresa of Jesus pointed out, the journey to finding God, uniting ourselves to Him, means first coming to know who we are. C.S. Lewis seems to be showing us in this brilliant piece of writing how a vital relationship with Him means unveiling our real faces in all humility, no matter how unbeautiful they may be. It means digging deep beneath the babble and discovering the essential words, no matter how angry and bitter they may be, in order that the soul might speak and flourish in the divine life for which it was intended.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

To My Dearest Cincicarmers:

I returned home today to find the card with your prayers and holy wishes.  I am truly moved to tears, and miss you all more than you know.

As I was reading your words, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps we can keep our “communion of saints” alive by blogging! This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, so if you haven’t done it either, we’ll learn together.  The next item on my agenda is to link this to our CINCICARM website and make it so that everyone in our community can post. Actually, I think they can now.  I thought this might be a great way to share our thoughts and prayers…I KNOW that it will be a good way for me to keep my own vocation alive during the time that I can’t be with you at our community meetings.

What shall we blog about? Well, I’ve just read a fabulous book about the spiritual journey, which I’ll try to speak about next time. We could also blog about our prayers, trials, insights. Since you can post here, you can just add your tidbits of holy humor for us all to share!! And I’d love to hear about what you are studying in community, since I won’t be able to come so often.  In short, whatever is on the mind of a Secular Carmelite is, I think, good to blog about.

We can also blog about the extraordinary ways that God works in our lives.  I have felt all week a strong sense of God’s presence, in the beauty of the day and even in the midst of trials which kept me away from the even greater trials of the workplace. Having read your beautiful prayers, I know now where all those blessings came from! I am always amazed when I realize that our (your) prayers actually DO have a real effect in the world.

During the week, I had the opportunity to read that fabulous book which you may know:  Till We Have Faces. It is quite a masterpiece on love, finding God and oneself amidst what we Catholics call the communion of saints. I hope one of these days to be able to blog more on that incredible piece of work!

Until then, I look forward to hearing from you holy friends, and hearing what is going in your spiritual lives, very soon!

In Christ & in Carmel,

Joni

P.S.  If someone will send me a recent community photograph, I will post it on this blog, and also on the cincicarm website!