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Father François Brune: “The Bliss of Loving God”

Translated by myself, from French. Source: https://orthodoxe-ordinaire.blogspot.com/2019/08/le-bonheur-daimer-dieu-par-pere.html?fbclid=IwAR1xiPIu4266WWZh_w2jl_eTmXetVB6Ep1xndcMQgqPE-yGoZRLGzWH0Nf4

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Who am I? Who put me there? My parents, of course! But beyond this, before them, who did? And why? Why in that world, on that planet, in that country, in that culture, in that religion? Is there a meaning to all of this? What is it? And what must I do? All of this is something I have personally lived and experienced. It is not simply literature. I experienced it with particular intensity, since the world was barely coming out of the worst war in history. We were slowly discovering just how hateful powers can take over the hearts of human beings! The human being, the only living being on this planet that periodically slaughters its own species, together with acts of torture and the most refined studies on how much the adversary group can be humiliated and made to suffer before being extinguished! But, between two wars, there would always be times of reconciliation, of friendly relationships on new foundations. I would discover that the overall world, the overall creation, does not even know such times of peace. The world in which we live possesses two deeply opposed sides. On one hand it is marvelous: I will spare you having to hear lyrical praises of the beauty of nature, from mountains to plains, from rivers to oceans, from sunsets to northern lights. I will not tell you about the incredible fantasy of the many lifeforms on the earth, in the air, or in the waters... You know about all these things. But there is also another side: behind the foliage of the trees, through the varied birdsongs, in the ocean depths, all this abounding life is only a fearsome and giant hunt, each trying to escape from its predator, while also going after its prey for the sake of survival. Beyond the incredible peace of a beautiful sunset lis the transition between the hunt by day and the hunt by night, which is no less merciless. Even our own body is a fearsome battlefield, not only at its surface, but also in its depth, at the cellular level! I can accept that each, according to their character, may be more sensitive to either harmony or cruelty in nature. But, whether we like it or not, both sides are there. And I know that there is also the time of love and birth that is always shown in documentary on animals. But it is only a variant of the overall pattern, because those babies must then be fed! There are no vegan lions. Possibly, only herbivores are innocent victims in all of this, and even then we are beginning to think that maybe plants are not completely insensitive. And then what...? My character and my sensitivity have made it so that I have always been deeply moved by this mark of evil in the world. I would have probably slipped into complete nihilism, a bottomless despair, if I did not have from very early on a particular strength within myself that always permitted me to conquer over this deep pessimism. This little strength is called prayer! In the Roman Catholic Church, communion, the Body of Christ, is not given to newborns but only starting at the age of 7 or 8. In 1938, I was 7 and I was getting prepared for my first communion. In those times, we could also feel the nearness of war. I remember that, in the evening, in my bed, I would pray for the longest I could, until sleep would defeat me, so that this war may be avoided. I think that it is like this that a kind of encounter happened between myself and God. Nothing extraordinary, no ecstasy, no inner words, no vision of light or other phenomenons... But a knowledge of His presence and His listening to what I was telling Him, the knowledge that I mattered for Him because He loved me; yet I did not matter more than anyone else, but He loved us all, truly.

I believe that it is this encounter with God, with Jesus, that permitted me to go through all these years of trials without falling into despair. When I was 15 or 16, we used to live in a small town in the Paris suburbs. After afternoon classes, which ended at about 5 p.m., I would go almost daily to the the cathedral not far from school and I would stay there alone, silently, to pray. It was the chapel of the Virgin, the Mother of God, behind the choir of the cathedral, a wonderful gothic church from the 13th century that had survived to the bombings.

I was then in 12th grade and we were divided into two sections. Those in "scientific" studies only had three hours of philosophy per week, but as for us in the "literary" studies, we had 9 hours of it, with a teacher who was a Catholic believer, but became an atheist and a communist. I owe him much, but he is not the one who helped me find the meaning of this world. It was my little daily prayer that helped me, even as I was in absolute darkness, a complete lack of understanding of this world and even of the silence of God! I understood absolutely nothing at all, but I kept on trusting in Him, maybe only because I had no other help.

Philosophers have attempted to explain this horrifying state of the world though various theories which actually only end up being another way to accept the existing situation, that which we cannot change. They tell us that this world needs, for its existence, complex laws that are often contradictory. Without these laws and the tensions they create, this world could not exist. God Himself, with all His intelligence, could not have invented and created a more simple world, one without these conflicts. The cow, when it moves, necessarily crushes thousands of insects. The diversity of lifeforms necessarily creates all these conflicts. But this very diversity is why this universe is beautiful. Now, go and explain that to a mother who just lost her child! The French philosophe Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist, completed these traditional explanations with the notion of evolution: It is physically (or metaphysically?) impossible for God to make a perfect world. If the world reaches a state of harmony and perfection, it can only be the result of a lengthy evolution. But until this ultimate state, evil and suffering continue their reign. Father Teilhard does not seem to explain, in any of his works, why it would be impossible for God to do otherwise. Seemingly, it was evident for him, who was trained in paleontology.

In this world that's constantly troubled by wars, revolutions, revolts, conspiracies, terrorism, how can we find a meaning to all this and find a meaning to one's own life?

"Oh, may we be our great-great-grandparents! The wing of a gull, the head of a dragonfly, that would already be too much and suffer too much", exclaimed Gottfried Benn, a great German poet, and a surgeon during the last war.

We remembr the apology imagined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson: The world would be happy, harmonious, but all this happiness would be possible because, somewhere, far from seeing eyes, someone would be forever horribly tortured. So the philosopher said: the lack of a happy world, the lack of anything, would be better than this monstrosity!

How many times I would have destroyed the world! Yes, nothingness is preferable to suffering!

This world is evidently not the one that God willed! It is a twisted world, it is disfunctional. Even this endless struggle to survive, to the detriment of others, saving one's life through the loss of others', this is proof that this world cannot have been created and willed by God like this.

I remember that, in his autobiography, Cardinal Newman (a theologian of the Anglican Church who became Catholic), seeking to make evident the tradition of "Paradise Lost" communicated in the first book of the Bible, came to a vey simple yet very efficient demonstration. Let me cover its point: Go into the street or the subway station and look at the faces around you. They are evidently the survivors of a terrible cosmic catastrophe, carrying on their faces its scars. They are not creatures that shine forth with happiness, they are not thankful for life, smiling, fulfilled, feeling protected by the benevolence of their peers, or attracted by God. This is not the world that God has made. This is impossible! Read the newspapers, watch TV shows, and you will hear about people killing and shooting each other. Even in operas: new composers replace music with the sounds of dishes being broken with a hammer, the sounds of doors creaking, and other disturbing noises. This is truly a reflection of our world!

In ancient literature, we find the texts of Stoics, in which one of these philosophers, consolating a father who had just lost his son, explains to him: "A beautiful vase broke! But you knew well that vases break easily!" The Buddhists, who seem to have had a link to the Stoics, likewise push their followers to not love too much those they share their life with. There will be less suffering when misfortune will happen. It is a refusal to live fully, a half-suicide! It explains nothing; it does not explain why the world is in such a state. It is a kind of attempt to "deal with it", to continue to live anyway.

All these attempts to explain the state of this world do not imply the existence and work of a creator God, at best they have a honorary God, with no real relationship to the world. Scientists today are more and more open to the idea of a God Who would have made the vastness of the universe. But their agreement is not what mattes. Paul Evdokimov, a French theologian from the Russian community, said it best: "One does not prove the existence of God, but experiences it." He agrees with the affirmation of Evagrius of Ponticus, a monk from the 4th century: "No one is a theologian if they have not seen God." To see God, to experience Him! It is the only true knowledge of God, far from all philosophical ideas. Yet, what all the mystics experience is not only His greatness and His power, but primarily His love. God is absolute love. He has therefore certainly not made a world that is halfway eroded by hate and suffering. Only love came out of Him. The experience of those mystics is today confirmed by the witness of millions and even dozens of millions of people who were thought to be dead for a few seconds or minutes, but who returned to life and communicated the extraordinary experience they had during this temporary death. I gathered an anthology of such stories in my book "The Dead Speak to Us". There are variations from one story to another, but the schema always stays the same: an encounter with love that's incomprehensible, perfect, infinite, no matter one's deeds. No reproach or the desire to humiliate. Sure, we discover all the path to take to reach this love, but there is only love. These witnesses do not know which words are strong enough. They felt "immersed" in love, "crushed" by love. The narrative in the Book of Genesis distords everything. God never chased us away from His love! That would be to reject Himself, to reject that which constitutes Him. This God did not create for us a world that is broken, rotten with evil, like a kind of trap set up to see our reaction. He does not experiment on us like we experiment on rats. The trials and horrors of this world do not come from God. No. From Him can only come love, without scheming, without trickery. God does not play with us, with our lives and feelings. The evil of this world cannot come from Him!

Unlike what is claimed by many philosophers and even theologians, God, the maker of billions of galaxies, knows very well how to make a world empty of suffering and of evil. He has done so, and millions of temporary dead and of mystics have witnessed it. They have seen, or rather discerned, during a short experience, those worlds from beyond, with harmony, joy, lack of suffering, but also without hate, rivalry, lust for power, or pride.

So then, where does this evil come from? Why are we not dwelling in those worlds yet? The issue is that, to be able to live in these worlds of love, we must be able to love in the same manner as those who already live there. Love is not forceful. It can only happen when there is absolute freedom. Yet, love is the only thing that God cannot make. He can suggest it, He can encourage it, He can inspire it, but He cannot create it. He could have made us a thousand times smarter and able to compute better than the world's most powerful machines. He could have made us able to fly like birds, or even to move in outer space like rockets. He could have made us immune to any danger from viruses, fire and water. God knew how to make flowers, billions of them, each different from the others. He even knew how to make the smile of a happy baby, which is probably the summit of creation. But he could not make machines programmed to love. This mysterious power that is the bliss of the saints, the mystics, and those temporary dead, is of a different nature from everything else. It cannot be created directly by God. This mysterious power can only come from within each one of ourselves, from our deepest. Robots can do extraordinary things, but they cannot love. God does not expect from us to be robots with mechanical obedience, nor even to be slaves or servants who expect for their obedience a little reward, maybe a raise or a promotion. Love is something so marvelous than not even God Himself can create it in us, make it spring forth from within us, without our input. He can offer us to participate in His love, to love with Him, in Him, but for this He needs our consent. Love always implies absolute freedom. God does not desire to be tolerated; He desires to be called for, expected, hoped for, sought after. If we do not seek Him, His love will not make us happy. This means that we can accept His love or reject it. And it seems that we, on this planet, have not really accepted or desired the love of God.

François Varillon, following Maurice Zundel, a great Swiss mystic from the previous century, analyzed very well what is implied by love:

"The lover tells their beloved: 'You are my joy', which means 'I am joyless without you'. Or else: 'You are my world', which means: 'I am nothing without you.' To love is to desire to exist through and for the other . . . Thus the one who loves the most is the most poor. God, Who loves infinitely, is infinitely poor . . .

"Love and the desire to be independant are incompatible, at least apparently. The one who loves the most is therefore the most dependant. God, Who loves infinitely, is infinitely dependant (which is unintelligible if God is not pure Love, by which I mean if we simply concede to the idea that love is an aspect of God and not His very being, as infinitely intense as it is infinitely pure). The lover says to the beloved: 'I cannot look down upon you without failing to fulfill love.' If the lover is in any manner greater than the beloved, their love is only love if they deny their superiority to make themself equal to their beloved. The one who loves the most is therefore the most humble. God, Who loves infinitely, is infinitely humble. That is why we can only see God in His true being by looking upon Christ, Who signifies divine humility through the washing of feet."

I am sure that many of the faithful pursue internally some dialogue with a deceased person whom they loved dearly, or with their guardian angel, the Mother of God, or God Himself. As for myself, it is usually directly with Christ. Oh, I am not a fool, I know very well that anybody would tell me that it is myself doing a back-and-forth discussion in my head. There is surely some truth to that. But the saints and the mystics have all known and practiced this kind of inner dialogue and often the following events in their lives proved this dialogue to be true. So, with Christ, with God, I pursue this internal dialogue, and I feel that He accepts it and responds to it. I believe in fact that I can feel when it is myself doing the responding, and when it is Him. It sounds wrong when I am the one responding to myself. So, with Him, I permit myself to be without shame, I joke around and say idiocies, He loves me so much that I can do and say anything with Him, like a child with its father or mother, like with somebody who has been following me in everything I do, not to control me but to protect me, even from myself if necessary, as with somebody who knows everything about me but loves me in spite of it. To love God in such a way is to share in the love that the three divine persons give to one another. All mystics, even non-Christian ones, have understood this, but this is evidently difficult to understand apart from a Trinitarian context.

I have therefore this incredible freedom with God within myself. But this is not a unique privilege. God loves you just as much, each one of you. You simply do not dare to believe it. Do not think either that, as long as you are a lower class citizen, God will not pay as much attention to you as He does for more distinguished characters. Whether you are a street cleaner or an emperor, God cares about you and loves you just as much and infinitely so. Accept the place in the world that was granted to you by God and, from there, seek to discover what it is that He expects from you. As incredible as it may seem, this God, the maker of billions of universes, is madly in love for each one of us. He is ready to die on the cross thousands of times, indefinitely, for each one of us, if it could help to save us. Such is what He affirmed to Julian of Norwich, an English mystic from the 14th century. She could ot see in God any anger toward us, not even a little resentfuless for our sins, but only boundless compassion.

God loves us all infinitely, despite what we may do, and when He forgives us it is always solely to bring us back to Himself, not to humiliate us. This is what was felt perfectly by Gabrielle Bossis, a French mystic of the past century. Gabrielle did not live in a convent, lost in prayer. She did not found any religious or charity organization. Nothing was extraordinary about her. She was a simple young woman, rather talented artistically: she would write short comedy sketches for female boarding schools, and she would also fabricate the backgrounds and costumes herself. But she simply pursued this internal and continuous dialogue with Jesus throughout her activites.

During one of those inner dialogues, here is how He forgave her: "Tell me about the pain of your faults, not because they sullied you as much as because they saddened Me. For you have had this unfortunate audacity to sadden the God-Man Who gave His life for you. And yet you knew about it. You ignored His pained stare toward you, you did everything that you wanted and that He did not want.

"Know the resulting sorrow—a sorrow without tears—that lies in your renewed will, and that will lead you to humble love, to knowledge of your nothingness. Then, I will rush to you like an eagle eager to ravish his prey, and I will take you to the solitary alleys of the walled-off garden. You will seek to talk to Me about the past. I will close your mouth with My hand. You will hear the gentle words of mercy that will melt your heart."

Our "faults" are not ignored, however they are not understood as "crimes", but as scars given to the love of God, and God does not wish that we would dwell on the past, even so that we may ask for forgiveness. "I will close your mouth with My hand."

But, obviously, such a love also implies, without even saying it, the fearsome expectation of the same love in return. Have we not, all of us, all of humanity, felt this love to be too oppressive, too absolute, too demanding? And yet this love also can be delicate, forebearing, discreet. God can encourage us to do something, but He cannnot force us. If we refuse to do it, He immediately withdraws. Observe it yourself, within yourself. You will feel it well, if you are sincere with yourself.

When does the rejection of this love begin? Is it the beginning of the creation of man, as in the symbolic story of the Book of Genesis in the Bible, as an initial cosmic catastophe like Cardinal Newman pictures it? But we know now that, at a deep level of reality, time is not real. So then, if evil is so powerful in the world, it may be because a great part of this world rejects the love of God, today, now, at any time. We should probably distinguish between cause and effects. The effects unfold within time. We can clearly see this.

But the cause, as modern physics permit us to understand, can be apart from time. The symbolic tale in the Bible about the sin of Adam and Eve probably represents a deep truth. In Hebrew "Adam" means "Man". We are all Adam. And if, on a level beyond our comprehension, there is no time, then there can be no reincarnation either. There cannot be an incarnation previous to this one, nor the passage from one incarnation to the other.

Men would have refused to play the game of the infinite love of God. They would have claimed the right to seek happiness on their own. We have seen it: love is not forceful.

Contemporary science comes closer and closer to admitting that matter and spirit are only two sides of the same coin. Some experts in quantum physics are beginning to suggest this hypothesis. One of them who is the farthest along researching this topic is certainly Emmanuel Ransford, an Australian scientist who usually writes in French. He speaks of "psychomatter" or "holomatter" to try to express this presence of spirit within matter and of matter within spirit.

Those who have read my books know that I give great importance to some messages from beyond that were given to us by people who were perfectly dead but who could communicate with us. They are always messages received by "automatic writing", an esoteric word referring to this process. The receiver holds their pen, but barely so, so that it may not fall while an invisible force moves this pen to write words, then messages. This usually begins with scribbles but, slowly, letters begin to appear, then entire words.

It is a subject I have well studied and that can be found in many languages. I could thus observe that most of the messages that are received, whether in German or Spanish, in English or in Italian, contain nothing of interest, not even in French. It is a real flood of "revelations", nonsensical fantasies, often useless, sometimes dangerous or even very dangerous, since the receivers do not have the ability to discern those messages themselves. It is a true revival of the "gnosis" of old.

Sometimes, however, some of these messages are exceptions and may even be of very great interest. This is notably the case of those messages given by Pierre Monnier, a young French officer who died in 1915 during World War I, to his mother, after his death, until 1937. These texts are known as the "Letters of Pierre". I have already discussed them in length in "The Dead Speak to Us" and "Christ and Karma". On April 14, 1920, Pierre explained from beyond to his mother that: "You do not know yet how to associate two manifestations that seem to be diametrically opposed to each other . . . Science will reveal to you the materiality of spirit, and the spirituality of matter, which will remove any barrier between the two worlds, separate in their visible results but identical in reality, matter and spirit being one and the same thing, condensed to different degrees."

If spirit and matter are really this close to each other, one implying the other, then we better understand the possibility of Christ's body passing from the carnal state to the spiritual state, and, inversely, matter and spirit being alternatively dominant, we better understand the various appearances to Mary Magdalene, to the pilgrims of Emmaus, in the upper room with the doors closed, and at the end of the Gospel of St. John—Christ, at the edge of the lake, waiting for His apostles who went fishing—and, finally, at the Ascension. All these back-and-forths between manifestations in fleshly matter and disappearance into the spiritual world then cease to be so extraordinary, and the Resurrection of Christ is nothing else than this passage from our carnal and material world to the spiritual world, the opposite phenomenon happening sometimes during some of Christ's appearances.

It is then not difficult to also understand that our thoughts and feelings can shape the world in which we live. The constitution of this world depends on the creative power of God, which is a power of love, but it also depends on our thoughts and feelings, and here it is too obvious that there is not only love. Very often, jealousy and hate come out as victorious, carried by selfishness. However, we are not totally depraved either. We are also able to produce a little love. But, among us, the great power of love is that of Christ, with and most importantly in ourselves. But, likewise, with and in ourselves, there is a power of hate, of pride, which is particularly strong. Tradition gives it several names: Satan, Lucifer, the devil, the evil one.

Permit me to quote Pierre Monnier again: "Then, brethren, return within yourselves and observe where is the crack from where the strength of your soul is leaking. This great wound has a cause: your selfishness, born from pride, the generator of sin on earth. The king of the world, the evil one, is pure pride and he is the one who attracts men to the path of perdition, by pernicious compliments that destroy the soul."

Take a look at the history of the world. You will quickly understand that civilizations were often pushed to massacres and atrocities by prideful fools such as Napoleon, Hitler, and many others. I will let you finish the list! But, these could have not done anything if there were not entire masses with the readiness to share into the same deluded pride as them.

The bliss of loving God! There is already the well known bliss of being loved by God. It is easy to understand that feeling loved by God is a wonderful experience, filled with sweetness. This love can even manifest itself sometimes with extreme strength, almost with violence, as witnessed to by all the mystics who have made the experience of this love in ecstasy, and by those who momentarily died. They felt "immersed", "crushed" with love. But those are very short experiences, almost instantaneous even. After this remains the memory of living them, but they are not experienced again. But the memory of them can suffice to sustain an entire lifetime of searching for God. They are like marvelous and fearsome nostalgia.

But, most often, God makes His love known in a simple manner, with wonderful gentleness. Oh! But of course, in this world we encounter pleasures of much greater intensity, such as the happiness of mutual love, or the love of a child one is raising. But in the love that God sometimes lets us known gently, there is an extraordinary purity that cannot be found in our human love, and this happiness increases little by little, to the measure of our own response to it. And then it can be greater than any pleasure of this world.

But this happiness of feeling truly loved by God is not given to everyone. Many faithful people, who have profund piety, who are men of prayer and charity, have not known it. But this does not mean that God does not love them as much. God gives to each what is proper, depending on their personal spiritual progress and on the mission given to them in their environment.

It remains necessary to open one's heart to God so that one may experience His love. Many men and women are like sleepwalkers. They work, they have fun, they entertain themselves without ever wondering why they are in this world or looking to know what they should expect after. It would seem that, as in a fairytale, an evil wizard cast a spell on them, not to freeze them with sleep like in "Sleeping Beauty", but to turn them into people who walk without being awake, into "zombies", as in some horror movies. Yes, that is right, and this wizard who uses every method to turn us away from what matters is somebody you know well: it is Satan, who always tries to corrupt the works of God, especially the greatest one: the heart of man.

It is essential to understand that God is absolutely not involved in this evil that eats away and slaughters His works. He is innocent! On the contrary, through His Incarnation, He came to share in our misery to help us out of it. He is not on the side of the executioner but on the side of the victim, with us and for us. It is absolutely important to understand that. I personally spent many years proving the innocence of God regarding that which destroys His world here or there. Intellectually, it was well understood to me, I was even convinced of it. But everytime I would learn about a new injustice, a new monstrosity, a new horror, I would feel within myself the rise of an inaudible accusation toward God which I was trying to suppress in vain. Why do You permit this? Why do You not act more? Yet, as long as one is not truly convinced of the innocence of God, one cannot truly love Him. When faced with all the horrors that are multiplying throughout the world, I know that God suffers more than I do, because He loves more than I do and that He suffers directly through those who suffer from them. This needs to be intellectually understood, but also, and most importantly, it must be psychologically acquired in depth. Our subconscious must be completely permeated with this affirmation, so that this vicious accusation toward God may not reach the depth of our heart. Then we can know a very deep happiness, we can let ourself be loved by God without restrain, we can enjoy the bliss of being loved by God even in the middle of all the suffering in this world. But we can also, little by little, know a happiness that will probably be new for most of us and that will be an extraordinary help to conquer all the obstacles of life: the bliss of loving God.

For there is a greater bliss than to know one is loved by God: it is to love God. This too was experienced by the mystics, and they felt that this pleased God. As incredible as it seems to be, here is God, the maker of billions upon billions of worlds, waiting humbly at our door, that we may open the door of our heart and love Him. Truly, this is insanity! To make God happy by loving Him! But such is the washing of feet that Father Varillon spoke about. Such a task was supposed to be for the wife of the head of the household. He could also demand it from his foreign slaves, but not from his other slaves, Jews (Hebrews) like himself. A small detail confirms this: Jesus first girded Himself with a towel and used it to wash the feet of His apostles, which the experts say was the characteristic role of the slave. Think about the power of such a gesture! God takes among us the role of the foreign slave, the one from whom anything can be demanded, even the most abasing services. It is St. John who conveys this scene, at the narrative point where the three other evangelists convey the Passover meal with the institution of the Eucharist. But, for St. John, this washing of feet, which he is alone to retell, is even more important. God, the maker of billions upon billions of worlds, shows us with this gesture that He is ready to kneel in front of each one of us to wash our feet. I am not making this up. I am only making explicit what is implicit in the story of St. John. Or else, for what purpose would he have recalled this scene? We are in the midst of folly here! We cannot comprehend the power of such a love. This is so much bigger than us! God is indeed infinite, almighty, but it is an infinity of love. The saints in their ecstases and those who have had a near death experience have begun, not to comprehend it, but to experience it.

The bliss of loving God! We can measure it from the pain of those who have known it and then lost it. It is this bliss that ceased to be felt by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. Teresa, now considered a saint in the Catholic Church. She had not at all lost faith in the existence of God, unlike what is often claimed, but she could not feel love for God anymore. She could very much say the loving words of the liturgy or the psalms, but these words did not have emotional weight anymore: they were as hollow as those of a phone book or of a train schedule. Such a horrific loss! Such a terrible trial! It is not that she had lost her reward from God. But it can happen that God associates His saints to His Passion, some of them sharing in His Crucifixion—as it happened for St. Francis of Assisis or Padre Pio—and some of them sharing in His abandonment on the cross.

He created us out of love for us. He desires to know that we are thankful for it and if we are really thankful for His love. He will know by the response of our love. This expectation of God has been felt by many mystics. This caused them to be completely surprised and troubled.

But sometimes God goes even farther. He calls for our love, He demands it; He almost begs for it. Thus was said to Gabrielle Bossis: "Are you still surprised by My love? Such is the folly of a God. It is the great explanation. Simply believe in this love from an Almighty Being and of another order than yourself . . . Be defeated by love and ask for grace. Take My love to love Me." He is indeed an Almighty Being, but "of another order"!

"Is this not a strange thing, that a creature could bring consolation to its God? My love reverses the roles like a new method given to you, like a protective gentlness to return to Me." Zundel and Varillon had well discerned this "reversal" of the roles that is implied by true love.

"Do not leave Me! I am as a terrified child who asks to not be left alone . . . I see hell unleashed and I am alone to defend Myself: pray with Me!"

This latter text may seem excessive, but let us not forget that, by His Incarnation, Christ is in all men and so in the heart of every monster of humanity, of every torturer from every concentration camp of every nation. The struggle between good and evil, betwee love and pride, is taking place within each one of us, between Christ and the evil one. It is up to us to choose who is our master and who is our enemy.

You too may pursue an inner dialogue with God throughout your life, through each circumstance you encounter, trying to fulfill the will that God has for you. It is the first way to love Him.

Accept fully the country and the language that you were given. Accept your social condition. You could maybe change all of this based on circumstances and on the will of God. I was born in a practicing Catholic family. I was ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church, and, after a lenghty road, I became an Orthodox priest. What matters is what happens within your heart. And this effects the fate of the world, whether you are a street cleaner or an emperor. What matters is to love God and to seek His will.

But to love Him also implies that we seek to please Him and thus to do what He would want us to do. This is what some of us, under the influence of Satan, have refused to do. And here we even find something like a progressive purification of the conscience. First we do what He wants for the major things, but then we do what we prefer for the things that appear to be minor to us. But everything is important in love. The love of God is wonderful, yet it is also consuming. He gives everything, but He also wants everything. So, progressively, we must learn to turn what we like into what He likes. This is the conversion of the heart, the replacement of the old man with the new man as St. Paul says.

So that the will of God may coincide with our own will, we must slowly get used to doing everything with Him, for Him, even the most insignificant things. Then this bliss of loving Him will become more and more evident and more and more intense, for it is participation to the love with which God loves Himself, the intra-Trinitarian love.

For as long as God will pemit you to, you must develop within you this bliss of loving God. Develop it for the sake of your own happiness, and, even further, develop it for the greater happiness, the overwhelming happiness of God which you could not imagine, that which He knows when He loves you and when He receives your love in return, because His love is of "another order".

#religion #eastern orthodox #jesus christ #god

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romancatholicreflections · 6 years

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3rd December >> Sunday Homily & Reflections for Roman Catholics on the First Sunday of Advent, Cycle B

First Sunday of Advent

Gospel text : Mark 13:33-37

vs.33 Jesus said to his disciples: “Be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the time will come. vs.34 It is like a man traveling abroad: he has gone from home, and left his servants in charge, each with his own task; and he has told the doorkeeper to stay awake. vs.35 So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn; vs.36 if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. vs.37 And what I say to you I say to all: “Stay awake!”

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We have four commentators available to choose from:

Michel DeVerteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels – Year B

Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for Advent& Christmas Years A,B, and C

Sean Goan Let the reader understand, The Sunday Readings for Year B

Donal Neary Gospel Reflections for Sundays of Year B

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Michel DeVerteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels- Year A www.columba.ie

General Comments

Although the passage is short, you may divide it up, as each section is different and you may meditate on it separately. The key to to understanding verse 33 is to take “the time” as the time of grace, the time when a longed for event finally comes to pass: Jesus is reminding us that if we are not awake we let those moments pass us by.

Verses 34 and 35 are a parable, although the emphasis changes is verse 35 so that even these two verses should be meditated on separately. In verse 34 the vocation of the doorkeeper is the focus, so enter into it. In verse 35 the delay in coming is the main point. In verse 37 identify with Jesus, consciously making a distinction between “you” and “all”.

Prayer Reflection

Lord, we remember the hard times: – a relationship meant everything to us, yet we were just not communicating; – a beloved child had turned to drugs or alcohol; – the project to which we had given ourselves wholeheartedly collapsed. Then, quite unexpectedly, something happened and all was well again. How true, Lord, that when we are dealing with people we must never lose hope but remain on our guard and stay awake, because we never know when the time will come.

Lord, the world today presents a dismal picture: – violence in families, in neighbourhoods, between nations; – famine in the midst of abundance; – money that is sorely needed for food and drink spent on arms. It is enough to make anyone despair. You tell us today that this is not your will for the world at all. It is like when the master of the house goes abroad and delays returning, so that everyone becomes slack and undisciplined. We pray that we Christians may be like faithful servants, each of us with our own task, and especially that we may be like doorkeepers, a sign to all that this world is your home and you will be returning soon to live with us.

Lord, we thank you for the people who have waited for us – parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts; the church community; friends. When everyone else had given up on us and gone to sleep, they were the doorkeepers. As we hesitantly made our way home, wondering if we would be let in, they were awake and welcomed us back.

Lord, forgive us that we give up too quickly just because evening and midnight have passed. But when we stop hoping we miss the opportunities you send us: – a moment of reconciliation comes but we don’t even notice it; – the word of encouragement that could have brought a community or nation to life remains unspoken; – we give things to people but we do not give them the space where they could grow in self-confidence, all because we are not on our guard and have gone to sleep.

Lord, we watch today with all those who wait: – oppressed peoples throughout the world; – those who are trying to be agents of reconciliation in Ireland, in Colombia, in the Holy Land; – those who are working for solidarity between rich and poor nations. Evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn have all come and gone. We watch with them, trusting that their time will come

Lord, there are many in our country who have lost hope. Say to all what you have said to us Christians – that we must not despair but must stay awake.

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Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for Advent& Christmas Years A,B, and C www.columba.ie

Introduction to the Celebration

Today we begin Advent. This is the period when we prepare to celebrate the coming of the Christ among us two millennia ago, but we also believe that he is coming among us now and so we have to be prepared to receive him, and we know that he will come again at the end of time and we have to prepare the world for his coming. Everything we do as Christians is related to these three comings. So let us reflect on how it is because he first came that we are here at the Eucharist today; gathered now we ask pardon of our sins that we might be prepared for his second coming in this Eucharist; and as a community let us pray that we will be ready to stand before him when he comes again in Glory.

Homily Notes

1. On this first Sunday of Advent the church’s thoughts are concentrated not on the coming of the Lord in Palestine two millennia ago, nor upon the new liturgical year, but on the Second Coming at ‘the end of time’, the Last Days, the Parousia, the Eschaton, ‘The End’. This is not a popular topic for preaching. Indeed when most preachers, excluding those from the fundamentalist fringes, are asked about the topic they say that it is one best left alone. However, while preachers are silent, that does not mean that this topic is not communicated in popular programmes, urban folklore, and ill-informed comment in the media. Most people think they are more than familiar with the Christian view of the end-times: it’s the apocalyptic nightmare when God is going to come as fearful destroyer, give everyone their come-uppance, and it will be a combination of a horror film and a cataclysm. Such thoughts about ‘The End’ are seen to show that in the final analysis God is a mean brute exacting vengeance; and religion is just a scare story of a wicked father punishing misdeeds. This may seem a caricature, but it is widely held and one that many Christians are happy to adhere to as when there are calls for getting back to the real days of preaching when people were told what’s what. Moreover, a glance at Christian religious TV from the USA will show you that there are more than enough communicators of the ‘God as brute vengeance’ message in the world today.

2. Given this fact of so much misinformation in the public imagination about The End, this opportunity to say something that is not sensationalist and does express the church’s faith on the eschaton should not be passed over.

3. The place to begin is to acknowledge that there are two distinct views, schools of thought, about The End within the Christian tradition and that these views go back to the time of the earliest followers of Jesus. On the one hand there is the familiar view that God will come as avenging justice and repay the wicked with suffering: The End as the Great Crunch. A careful reading of the evidence in the gospels makes it almost certain that this was the vision of The End that was preached by John the Baptist: ‘His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’ (Mt 3:12). One of the matters where Jesus’s teaching is very different from that of John the Baptist is on precisely this point: The End that Jesus announces as coming is one where suffering humanity is delivered through the Father’s love. For Jesus, The End is the Great Banquet. He preached a future in terms of banquet, harvest, rest, and fullness. The stark choice between the message of Jesus and that of the prophet John is the choice between the Great Banquet and the Great Crunch. However, in so far as many of John’s followers became followers of Jesus, they seem to have retained the Baptist’s vision of the future; or they seem to have perceived Jesus’s message as a refinement of John’s, rather than its replacement.

4. Down the centuries these two visions of The End have exercised varying amounts of influence in preaching. Some parts of the church have read, indeed devoured, the Great Crunch approach which has its clearest expression in the Book of the Apocalypse. Other parts of the church have been so appalled by it — the Greek churches on the whole — that while they have kept it in the canon, they have refused to read it in the liturgy. Other parts of the church have preached the Great Crunch, but then used the Great Banquet language of Jesus as the key to imagery about the life of the world to come.

5. The basic message of Jesus about the coming of the Lord is that of being brought into the Banquet of life: God is love, healer, restorer, mercy. If this is our faith, then this must form our vision of the Second Coming. Just as the First Coming was not the mighty warrior king that many hoped for, but love made flesh in Jesus Christ who reconciled the world to the Father, so the Second Coming is the mercy of God in Jesus Christ who reconciles us to the Father and bids us to takes our places in the Great Banquet. Hence our presence today at the Eucharist: this is the foretaste of that banquet. Christ’s coming now in our gathering is the anticipation of his final coming.

6. To reflect on how we view the Second Coming is the challenge to purify our mind’s images of the future, of the message of the Christ, and our image of God.

It is to replace the image of the Great Crunch with the Great Banquet; to replace the image of vengeance with that of mercy; to replace the image of God is power with that of God is love.

7. For Christians, the future is good news!

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Sean Goan Let the reader understand www.columba.ie

Gospel Comment

It is widely thought that Mark’s was the first gospel to be written and that it was composed in Rome just after Nero’s extremely violent persecution of the Christians of that city. One of the themes in Mark is that Jesus is a crucified Messiah and that being faithful to him will involve suffering for your beliefs. This means that they must always be vigilant and that is the theme of today’s gospel. It is taken from chapter 13 which is a link between the end of Jesus’ public ministry and the beginning of the passion and it stresses the importance of believers not becoming lethargic or casual. The fact is we live in a changing world and new demands will be made on us as followers of Christ. For Mark’s first readers that meant being persecuted by the most powerful government in the world. For us, at this time of year, the threat to our faith may be from a more subtle yet no less destructive enemy of the gospel — rampant consumerism.

Reflection

When the prophet prayed that God might ‘tear open the heavens and come down’ he was probably thinking in terms of what had happened on Mt Sinai many years before when the Israelites experienced God in the awesome splendour of nature (Ex. 19). It would have been unimaginable for the prophet that God should indeed immerse himself totally in our world and yet in the fullness of time that is precisely what did happen. While Isaiah prayed that the mountains would melt like wax at the presence of God, it seems God was more interested in melting our hearts. It is as though the Potter became the clay. During Advent we are invited to think about our human weakness, not so as to become sad or depressed but so that we can be filled with wonder at the way in which God chooses to save us.

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Donal Neary SJ Gospel Reflections for Sundays of Year B www.messenger.ie/bookshop/

The Invitation

I like these words of the late Cardinal Hume: “There are times when I can visualize Our Lord at the break of day standing by my bed and saying: “Get up, follow me.” Whether I am conscious of it or not, in effect that invitation, that loving but insistent command, is given to me every day. Each new morning is the opportunity to start again. Yesterday there may have been inadequacies and failures but today Christ renews his call: “Follow me. I have chosen you. I need you.” Who can fail to respond to the thought that God needs our willing collaboration.”

We are carers of creation and of his people. Take this seriously, it is our world. God has made himself so vulnerable and this gospel reading is just before the passion. An area or parish improves if enough people do something. We look at areas in a locality which are now clean of drugs, more prosperous and just. This has been the work of people co-creating the world with God. Making it a better place. Doing the world a world of good.

Gospel today says – Don’t give up. God is always near! Live in hope and preparation. Stay awake to the season – the ways we can deepen and grow in our faith — maybe do a a retreat, do something good for others with your time or finance, notice God in the events of the next few weeks, pray a bit every day, make time to be awakened to the centre of our world who is God, and to his central action in creating the world each day, sending Jesus Christ his Son.

A question for the first week of Advent:How can I help someone today?Lord, send me, use me, create me for your work in the world.

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