Lord, we thank you for the Easter feast. We thank you that after your death and your descent into hell, after tasting to the full every kind of abandonment, you have returned to us; that you have remembered our insignificant abandonment and overwhelmed it with the radiant fullness of your presence. Although you suffered the death that we caused by the burden of our sins, you come back to us as our brother with the gift of your redemption. You do not make us pay for having brought you to the Cross but let us take part in your joy. You celebrate a reunion with us as if we had never been unfaithful, as if we had always awaited you with faithful trust, as if we were capable of adding something ourselves to your joy. Lord, make us grateful. Let the thanks we owe you and your Mother always accompany us from now on, let them bear fruit, let them be the pervasive spirit of our service. Let us be redeemed men who truly fill their whole life with your redemption, follow you wherever you go, and attempt to do your will, just as you do the Father’s will. Do not let us merely enjoy the fruit of your Passion and of your redemption; let us try, starting today, to know you as our brother, as our true redeemer ever in our midst, and always to bear in mind that you are present and that you have repaid our unfaithfulness with fidelity and our unbelief with even greater grace. Let every day, whether hard or easy, dawn as a day that holds the express, or even hidden, joy of knowing that you have redeemed us and, returning to the Father, have taken us back with you. We ask you now for your Easter blessing; may it include the blessing of the Father and of the Spirit. Amen.
Amen.
With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:
(The Suscipe Prayer)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.
Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The entire world was created by the Father with a view to the Son; the Father who creates thus shows his love for the Son. As it comes forth fresh and new from the hand of God, the world is pure and free. However, Adam misused his freedom and alienated himself from God, and creation was dragged into this estrangement. Mankind struggles for its place between subjective alienation from God and its enduring objective meaning as created for the Son. Even after the appearance of Christ on earth, this conflict remains within man. In fact, now that the demand of God has been revealed, it becomes greater. The Word of God has issued forth; but man does not want to encounter God, because he is afraid that he would have to do what he does not want to do; namely, he would have to decide to conform himself to his original purpose. So he prefers to forego knowledge.
Of course, many evade this only from ignorance or partial knowledge. They have heard that there is a God who has spoken, who presented himself as a God of Love, but who places great demands on men. In both respects, this God opens the meaning of existence beyond finitude. Men shrink back before such a God. They long for a religion that does not call into question earthly values and proportions. Thus there arises a sort of contest between the voice of man, which grows louder and louder in order to drown out God, and the voice of God, which maintains its divine volume. The more man wants to decide for himself about his destiny, and thus also about his past and future, the more he falls prey to the limitations of life on earth, the more everything becomes smaller for him. He pushes greatness to the side as absurd. Man would prefer anything rather than to appear absurd. And if he himself has so little knowledge of God, those who come after will know even less.
And yet there are moments, whether he wants them or not, when he is placed before things beyond his ken and his competence because they seem to come from another world. He denies them, but they still suddenly make their presence known. And because things are created as ordered to the Son of God, this voice from beyond can also resound from a thing, an event, an illumination—from something that is almost nothing but is nonetheless something. It has meaning as something created for God,and precisely now it seeks to unveil this meaning. It is not about ‘‘God in all things’’ but rather ‘‘all things pointing toward God, pointing toward Christ’’, about all things as signposts. Man truly needs countless signposts in order to recognize the path, indeed, even to suspect that the path leads in this direction. And yet it is a path that determines the world. It is, however, directed against the state of the world as the active is against the passive, as life is against death, as obedience and love are against abuse and guilt. The ordering of all things to the Son is a powerful and permanent reality that cannot be denied. It can appear hard, sharp-edged, and merciless. Man must reconcile himself to its unalterability; he cannot break this boulder. It is the primary rock of earthly existence, indeed, of the creative power of God. The path of obedience was traced even before man appeared in the world. There are countless points of entry to this path.
Man, however, has become accustomed to look at the things of the world with the eyes of memory and to judge them according to their past instead of creatively looking at their future and considering them in view of their purpose. So his spirit loses contact with the creative act of God. He works with the stuff of the past, which is, as such, rigid and unalterable, perhaps already putrefied. He must learn to meet God and to work where the creative act takes place: toward the purpose of things, into the future, into hope. The hopelessness of the world’s condition lies in the fact that memory has taken the place of creativity and that freedom is placed behind man because he does not want to see it in front of him. In this way man, while remaining in sin, has reversed the sign of time. In place of the future, he has substituted the past. In God, however, these signs remain unchangeable, and the believer need only adhere to time as it is in God in order to find a way to God in things. It is a path away from the ‘‘I’’ into the future, from hopelessness into expectation, from decay to new life.
If man begins to think about his goal, then he changes the position of the world as he changes his own position. It is as if he were to go back thousands of years in order to get from a gloomy prison into fresh air, to get to the place where God the Father strolls in paradise, the place where the Cross stands and where resurrection and redemption take place. The Father created everything for the Son; in redeeming the world, the Son directed everything anew toward the Father; the circulation of love is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit and made knowable and accessible to us in faith. This occurs without any regard for the condition of the world. Each of us, before we seriously encounter God and recognize the direction of things, lives in the condition of the world. But conversion does not mean turning to God in such a way that one turns one’s back on the world. For we are in the world, and we are created as part of the world. When we change directions, something in the world changes. At the moment when we encounter God, we cannot forget the destiny of all others. The Lord emphasized our belonging together in the command to love our neighbor. Our neighbor, however, is the entire world. We have to take the world with us on our personal way to God. Certainly, no one (even were he Francis Xavier) will be able to convert all his brethren in the world. But he will bring the world with him in the spirit of the Carmelite mission so that the world, too, will be able to encounter God. He will take it with him into all of the activities of everyday life. Above all, however, he will take the world with him into prayer, where the final encounter with God occurs. Here the direction of all things is perfectly clarified; here also purity still exists, and from the purity of the divine exchange of love the world can be healed. The world as a whole, as the sum of all the individuals who come from the hands of the Father in the unity of their end, and who, through the hands of the Son, will be given back to the Father in the Spirit. This world is simultaneously created and recreated—recreated because the work of redemption is based on the Resurrection. The old hope of things, the old promise of creation, is fulfilled miraculously in that the world passes through the hands of the triune God.
Taking the World to God
When man begins to think, he envisions his adult life in a certain way. He would like to do this kind of work, to have this kind of home, to use his freedom in such and such a way. His plans occupy a great part of his thinking. He tries to gather, to enjoy, and above all to select from his education, his experiences, and comparisons all that the years of youth have to offer. He does this in such a way that everything is ordered to the image of the future that he has designed for himself.
If he is a believer from childhood, his faith will also influence his plans. However, it is seldom that he is aware already in his youth that he has been created by God for a definite purpose and that he has to accomplish something that may indeed lie outside of his human plans but that lies soundly within the divine plan. Once it occurs to him that he is answerable to God, who created him, a confrontation between his own plans and the plans of God becomes unavoidable. This gives rise to areas of friction. If faith is alive in him, the moment will come when he lets his own project fall away in favor of God’s plan in order one day to be able to answer God face to face. But even when he does this, he must still reckon with the world that surrounds him, with its immense fullness and variety, its fallen condition and longing for redemption, its moving away from God together with its wish, nevertheless, to find God. He stands in the midst of this world; both realities must be measured, and it is not easy for them to get along. The reality of the world cannot deny the reality of the man standing here; and this man in his singularity cannot dispute the plurality of the world. His self-gift to God must acknowledge the world created by God, if not as a presupposition, then as background. He must take the sinful world along with him, taking note of the world with its progress and its movement backward, its provisions and efforts. Man will not reach his goal without affirming what exists in such a way that he knows therein also the No of distance, fear, and disgust. His Yes is such that it passes through the world to God. The desert or monastic solitude can be the world for him, and his collaboration with the world can be limited to vicarious prayer and atonement: the world is nonetheless present. This presence also bears the stamp of the present moment of history in which each of us is situated. That the world exists would remain true even if the condition of the world were to consist of sheer lies and resisted every Christian intervention. In the truth of its existence, the world still points immediately to God’s hand. It may be that this truth urgently points to the untruths of the world’s condition, to false problems and situations, to the dangers provoked by human thinking, to the problems raised by technology and its future, which are becoming ever more important for the world, which cannot afford not to work toward a solution. The Christian, who in prayer has the greater world of God’s love before his eyes, still must learn to recognize God in this condition of the world. He must look through all the veils and all the lies to see the single truth. Indeed, he must know that the one who prays in solitude with closed eyes and given over to God will experience God no more and no less than he would in the tasks that the world places before him. God may have wanted him in the monastery cell, but he can also place him in the busyness of the technical world of work. He may want to encounter him here and not there, or perhaps there as well as here. The life in a monk’s cell is not anachronistic; in the same way, the God-given vocation to live in the world is not a new invention. God can lead someone into the solitude of the mountains in order to be worshipped there by him. He can also place him in a factory or in the chaos of a big-city firm together with countless nameless individuals. If God dares to bring man into such contrary positions, it is because he, as omnipresent, can meet him anywhere. In order not to narrow his image of God or constantly to paint God in his own image, man has to see and recognize the triune God’s unforeseeable possibilities and ways of appearing. This knowledge has value, however, only if it allows itself to be integrated in relation to the goal of the world and human life, only if it makes man more capable of meeting God in the way he has become visible to us in Christ. God speaks to us; we need only find the place where we are able to hear his voice. God addresses his word to us personally; indeed, he addresses himself person- ally as word to us. But when we hear him personally, we must take care that our contemporaries also hear the word. This is best guaranteed when our attitude testifies that we have heard and that we find ourselves on the way that leads directly to God.
The Church in the World
The words of Christ appear to the world as a paradox; his commandments contradict what people consider to be clever and useful. What these words promise is always heavenly; it comes from heaven and leads to heaven. What people do in sin and unbelief, on the contrary, leads to eternal damnation. Heaven and hell are always the ultimate alternatives, and every conversation between God and the still unconverted sinner is thus concerned with setting these two extremes into relief.
The Lord, however, did not throw his word against the unbelieving world unprotected. He founded his Church in the midst of the world. The Church has one side open toward the world. Indeed, she herself is the open door for the world, so that the world can enter into God’s Holy of Holies, where the mystery of bread and wine is celebrated. Around this mystery the Church is a way of believing and hoping and loving and working whose origin is heavenly. By entering and experiencing this mystery, man finds heaven. And God did not build his Church in such a way that she would be accessible to only a few select souls who live in the purity of faith. He built her as a communal, public place, right next to the street where everyone passes by and can enter when he wishes. Outside is the denial of everything eternal; inside is the receiving into the infinite God of everything transitory in the world. The Eucharist is the innermost event whereby the Church renews herself and makes herself known. But also every divine service, all the remaining sacraments, are encounters with the Lord who gives himself, who points toward his redemptive suffering, and who sends forth those who belong to him endowed with the Holy Spirit. They are called to proclaim the gospel outside and convert sinners. Thus the Church is always a place of encounter between the Lord and the sinner, between heavenly grace and the world. And because it is God who reveals himself in this place, this event is overwhelming and beyond all expectations.
The Church is nonetheless also a worldly reality, a gathering place for Christians that is visible also to others and that serves as a reminder to them. At Mass, in hearing the word and in praying together, Christians themselves are reminded that they are called to be a reminder in the world. They have to show what they have received; they have to bring out into the open the hidden mystery that lives within them. Continually, day after day, they must actualize in visible discipleship the once-only call that they have received from the Lord. The once-only and the multiple are reciprocally related and flow into one another. Indeed, in the man he meets, the Lord sees not only a sinner who will receive absolution, but also a brother whom he receives into his communion of life. In this way he also enabled the word that he spoke only one time on earth to be expanded into a perpetual and living validity. His word lives because Christ lives and because he does not cease to speak the once-uttered word anew and with the same precision it had then. His words appear time-bound to us because we understand them in time. Our understanding, however, is made possible through their connection to eternity.
We are struck and wounded by the word. We could not live apart from the word anymore even if we wanted to. We entered into the Church as nuts with a hard shell; the word broke open the shell. Now, without the shell, we are simultaneously more sensitive and less sensitive: more sensitive because we recognize the traces of the word everywhere and we can no longer live in naive worldliness; less sensitive because the allure of sin does not grab us as much anymore. It is not that it has become weaker, but that it holds less interest for us and God’s defense against sin penetrates all the way through us. At every encounter, God also gives us something to remember him, a gift, never something dead, but his living word.
We hear this word in the Church; we find it in undiminished vitality also at home whenever we open the Scriptures or when we return to the word in prayer. Prayer becomes an encounter with the Lord whose word we are permitted to hear without ceasing. We are personally addressed, and we are allowed to respond personally, and in this twofold personal contact, the word works on man until the true ecclesial man takes shape. With every new encounter, God continues to do his redemptive work on that which the Creator declared good at the beginning and for which the Son offered himself on the Cross, not only until we are brought to completion in ourselves, but until we become useful instruments in God’s hands for his work throughout the entire world. God’s workshop is his Church.
In the Church, as experienced by priests or laymen, there is much that is unchangeable, and this occasionally goes against our spirit of modernization. If we attempt to see and understand with the eyes of love, then we discover that what is unchangeable in the Church comes from the word and its being beyond time. We come to see that, if the distance between the word and us has grown so great, then it is our fault. The word’s ultimate meaning remains veiled for us because of our sins and our lethargy. Only seldom are we able to see what is eternally valid in the word. Of course, a perfect hearing and understanding of the word could almost be compared to the beatific vision. Total understanding, as the fulfillment (to the extent possible) of our reason by the meaning of the word, is reserved for eternity. Nevertheless, when we encounter God and fix our eyes on the eternal, we understand from the triune God and the mystery of the Church all that is necessary for us to remain in a living faith and to embody in our lives what we have received from the encounter. We are given what is necessary in order to concentrate in our Yes to the vitality of today’s Church not only what we need, but also what is needed by our contemporaries for an encounter with God.
Through you, Mother, we have come to your Son. You conceived him, you carried him, you gave birth to him, you accompanied him throughout his life, in order to bring him to us and to give him to us. And also in order to show us how a man can bear and understand him, how a man can place his life within the life of your Son, so as to receive it from him. In order to convey to us the gift of his infancy, of his years at home with you, the gift of his public life and of the hour of his Passion. At every phase of his life you were so involved that everything his presence conveyed found room in your receptive heart. Yet not for you, but for us. By your Yes, you placed yourself so totally at the disposal of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, that the triune God gave us to the Son right through you. You led us to him, but you were always so much in God, so much within your mission and your own Yes, that your only desire was to act as the conveyor of the gift and not as the original giver. Yet for that very reason your act of conveying also became a gift that came from your humility and that your humility gave us. A gift to us, but also a gift to God. And we would like to ask you today to accept into your Yes all that makes up our lives, not just its joys, but also its sacrifices, the roads we take that we had not reckoned on before. Do this so that we may once again come to your Son through you. So that through you, who knew so well how to carry out the Son’s will, we, too, may now accept anew everything he intends for us in the will of the Father, may now will it anew because it is his will. But also that through you we may will anew, with you, grateful that everything you did occurred entirely within his mission. And when the sacrifice costs more than we thought, when it is harder to bear than we imagined, we want to remember that you did not shrink in fear from any sacrifice, and that you did everything in the joy of your Yes. And we want to ask you to intercede for us with the Father, with your Son, and with the Spirit, so that we may be permitted to live by your strength, to come in reality to the Son through you, and to do in him what you have done for him all along. And when you see your angel, Mother, remember that his appearance assured you of the way. Ask him to surround us with care out of love for you, just as he did for you, to intercede for us just as he interceded for you and, by his appearing, gave you the power to say Yes in faith to everything.
Amen.
With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:
(The Suscipe Prayer)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.
Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (Jn 8:44a). After this word of the Lord, it becomes clear that there never exists a midpoint and an equilibrium for the person between God and the devil. The person thought previously that he possessed a zone of freedom between God and the devil and that he could turn freely in this sphere to one side or to the other and make his decision. But now it becomes clear that this neutral zone does not exist but, rather, that the influence of God extends to all that is good in the world and in man, while the devil’s sphere of influence extends to the least presence of evil in the world and in man. The Lord sees only two Kingdoms: the Kingdom of light, which belongs to his Father, and the Kingdom of darkness, where the devil rules. He does not spare the person by covering up this either / or. Still less, however, does he wish to deny the freedom and responsibility that men have; rather, he merely shows them that they have only the choice between God and the devil, and they are always from the very outset in the power of the one or of the other. The Jews who speak with him have handed themselves over to evil from the start, and to this extent their freedom, of which they speak, is an illusion. Nor can they themselves free themselves from this servitude; they could do this only by taking hold of the love of the Son that is offered to them. But they do not want to listen to him.
The Lord does not in the least mean that our Christian life is lived in a continuous confrontation with an either / or or that we should see the devil and make him appear everywhere, in the slightest imperfections and in our daily sins or in those of our neighbor and of the community. This apparently radically supernatural standpoint would very soon lead us to set ourselves, instead of God, in the center once more: we would picture ourselves as heroes, in our spiritual struggle against Satan, instead of simply turning to God away from evil, entrusting ourselves to his light and opening ourselves to him. This is why we may and should often practice forbearance in relation to others and even in relation to ourselves, excusing and overlooking failings and drawing attention to the fundamental orientation of the Christian life, wishing to see only the good.
John, vol. II (Jn 8:44)
Sense for the Devil’s Atmosphere
The community Paul addresses [at Ephesus] already formed before its conversion a group of men, a sort of communion. But they carried out their sins not only by free decision, they also let themselves be propelled by the drift of the age; they did what others did too. The accepted thing, the thing nearest at hand was to walk in sin, because, thanks to the work of the prince of the power of the air (Eph 2:2b), sin was, so to say, in the air. It was like an infection. They followed this prince without noticing who he was. Of course, they did not think they were doing good when they sinned; but a concept of sin had not yet formed in them. It is as if they had had no grounds for resistance because their capacity of discernment was not yet developed. The prince of the power of the air is a human representation and description of the invisible working of the devil; just as in past times, when pathogenic agents had not yet been discovered, people spoke of miasmas, of “exhalations” of the earth or air, which supposedly spread epidemics. And the image is suitable. There is something like a pollution of the atmosphere by the devil, a process the sinner does not perceive but to which saints, on the other hand, can be very sensitive. Many of them managed to withstand the corrupt air of humanity only with effort; many fainted on account of the stench of sin. Of the sin of a determinate man, but also of the sinfulness of a place, of a dwelling, of a city. […]
When the natural man is particularly fine-tuned, he may possess a sort of preliminary level of this discernment: a feeling for what is in the air; when it is explicitly developed it can be termed medial. Yet Christian discernment of the spirits is not a sort of mere intensification of such a capacity but a gift that comes from above, from God […] even though it is not out of the question for the two things, natural feeling and the gift of discernment, to meet in a certain middle zone in one man […] The sinner is simply pulled along by the atmospheric devil. He does not possess the faculty of differentiation, the sensorium for evil is blunted in him; he is like the man who lives in closed rooms and no longer notices the bad air. And thus one will say that an express ethical feeling for good and evil does not occur even in the non-Christian without a certain participation in the Christian gift of discernment. In both forms of perception, however, in the natural and in the supernatural, it is obvious that God wanted to implant much more delicacy of feeling in human nature than for the most part it possesses after the fall.
Ephesians, pp. 64ff
Satan as Consummate Evil vis-à-vis Man
“And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end” (Mk 3:26). Let us try to imagine what it would be like if Satan were divided against himself. For us, Satan embodies pure, concentrated evil, in unsurpassable measure. If he were divided against himself, the evil in the devil would no longer be one with evil as such… But it is unimaginable that the greater evil in the devil has risen up against the lesser evil in him, because here, there is no lesser evil, since the devil embodies pure evil. He would cancel himself out…
But how is it with men? A man is not a devil; he has divine and diabolical within him. He knows what it is to be in a constant state of tug-of-war between good and evil, between the Holy Spirit and the unclean spirit, righteous action and sin. For ever since original sin, man is no longer a unity. Properly speaking, he is a battleground in which unity has not yet been established. This unity was lost the moment he contradicted God and let evil in, when the pure good that God had intended for him was broken up by the intrusion of evil. Let us contemplate our lives for a while from this perspective. We will find that our deeds, which often appear good to ourselves, are, when contemplated on a deeper level, based on ambiguous motives: a mixture of love and selfishness, good and evil.
Through the Lord, we have the great trust that the good in us, the Lord in us, is able to prevail. If we freely grant him room in our souls, he will take the rest upon himself. He works in us, even where we would like to contradict; he stands firm and takes up the struggle on our side—the side we agreed upon with him—against that which is of the devil. This is our great Christian hope: that the Lord will direct this struggle in each of us according to his will, with his mighty power and our weak support.
Mark, meditation #76
Christian Life as Battle
The life of the Christian is destined to be a battle, in which there can be victories and defeats. But the victories do not count, because they are attributed to the Lord’s grace, and the defeats do not count either, because he reverses and makes them good. The only thing that counts is the will to fight in the spirit of the Lord. This battle begins in each individual life, and, if earnestly fought, it leads imperceptibly into greater things: into the battle for the Lord in the world.
Father, let our whole life become a prayer that rises up to you like fire and sweeps along in its flame everything evil and impure, all that belongs to us and to others, so that you may fill it up with your Spirit and may make it good enough to become yours and to be used by you. Do not leave the evil in us either, Lord, but turn it back; open us to your action, even when it is painful; allow our conversion, allow it in your own name.
Amen.
With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:
(The Suscipe Prayer)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.
Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Long ago, when the Lord decided to come, he chose us, all of us, in order to redeem us. He took up a work of Redemption that was not designed for individuals only, that knew no separation and limitation, that was meant for all. Then he appeared in the world and met individual people. These people followed him in a particular way by leaving everything in order to go with him. Because they did this, they were somehow convinced that they had chosen him. But they were mistaken in two ways: in the first place, even before they knew him, he had included them in his work of redemption; but secondly, he called each of them individually and they followed at his call, even if they did not happen to hear it with bodily ears. Both elements apply to every vocation. The Lord always calls first, and when we condescend to hear him, our following is always merely a response. But often we are so taken up with ourselves and our importance that we do not even think that the Lord has anything to say to us. And yet it is he who chooses us for Christian life. He can call us specially to the priestly or religious life, but if we do not perceive this call within a certain time, we know that he has made the choice of the lay state for us, and we are to enter into this choice by means of an explicit act.
The Lord’s call and choice are always grace. Even when it seems to us that our contribution is important and indispensable, only what the Lord does in us and for us is truly indispensable. Even our activity, perhaps in days of recollection and retreat, is only the preparation for interior silence, in order to hear his call in it. Should we decide, without the Lord’s grace, to choose his way, we would not even know what this way is. It would be a path chosen, thought up, laid out and decorated by ourselves; we could pretend that it was the way of the Lord. It might perhaps be a very extraordinary way, an extremely imaginative way, and thus we might think it was a way of the Lord. But the Lord’s way is essentially not one we have chosen. For the Lord’s way is the Father’s mission and commission. His way is the glorification of the Father, and our way is his glorification. Someone might have the idea of remaining virginal, to live a life of penance and to found some work in the Church. But all this would only serve his own glorification if it were not based on a call from the Lord.
The Lord has not only chosen, but instituted them. The choice is followed by institution in one of the Christian states of life. The Lord goes with us as we step from the choice to the beginning of the mission. He not only calls; he also institutes. What is not instituted through him is not instituted at all. If a Catholic has never listened to the Lord and then happens to marry a Catholic woman, and, because it seems appropriate, receives the sacrament of marriage, he has not consciously let himself be instituted by the Lord into his state of life, but has taken it on himself. He will not receive assurance that he is on the way of the Lord. If this marriage turns out unhappily and there is no way out, he must know that a part of his misfortune lies in the fact that he did not listen to the Lord in the beginning. In former times people considered much more carefully whether a child was destined for the world or for the cloister, but because this first, fundamental consideration is so often lacking today, many modern marriages are built on shaky ground and present a picture of devastation. And institution by the Lord is a once-for-all act. We can pass by the time for the decisive questions to the Lord, or rather, the time for listening to his call. Much, of course, can later be retrieved and set right, but other things cannot. There are things for which it is simply too late. Of course the person concerned will still have access to the Lord’s grace, which is greater than his hardness of heart. But his situation in life may be outwardly beyond help; then the only possibility left is to bear what is unavoidable with the Lord’s grace, for the Lord gives the person who has willfully chosen his life the grace to live according to his will even here. But it is a grace of penance for a life of penance. This grace can be so powerful that one can even have the Lord’s joy in bearing the painful expiation of one’s former deafness.
John, vol. III (Jn 15:16)
The Call is Addressed to Everyone
He leads out those who are his own. He leads out only his own sheep: he leaves the others inside. But he calls his own by name. The Church is no longer the undifferentiated bloc of believers: it dissolves, so to speak, into individual paths and missions and offices, each member is set on his own path, each mission of the Lord is a wholly personal mission that cannot be exchanged for any other, the means and powers required for this are distributed to individuals, and a special providence accompanies the individual little sheep on its special path. No one can say that he has not been called. The call is always different; it can have precise contours or be only hinted at. But it is always a call. The one who is not called does not belong to the Lord’s sheep; and this is only because he does not wish to belong to them. The one who is in the Lord’s sheepfold is called by him with full certainty and with full definiteness. If someone does not hear the call, it is always only his sin that is the cause of this: his sin does not allow the call to be transmitted. No call is addressed to any of those who have not yet received the sacraments in grace; those who have not yet been baptized or, if they are baptized, absent themselves from Communion, or are present only in an external manner, or who have turned away from God anew; those who take part only with their body but do not place their souls at the Lord’s disposition. The shepherd alone determines freely the name that the Lord gives to his little sheep: it cannot be deduced from the being of the sheep itself. Everything can lie in the Lord’s call: every commission that is possible within the commission of Christ; every state of life that is an image of the life of the Lord: the religious state, the priestly state or the lay state.
John, vol. II (Jn 10:3)
The Decision
If God decides to speak and to call someone, he does not, for the most part, take into account the place where the one called finds himself. At the same time, this place no longer appears fixed; the one called sits as though in a train that travels through the countryside with new images constantly appearing. Wherever he looks there is something fascinating; immediately thereafter everything is again different. And yet all of this contributes something essential to the situation of the traveler. Before there was a view of the sea; now there are high mountains, and he should find an answer in himself that corresponds equally to both. He should know something that can be used everywhere. And this something lies simultaneously in God and in man; he simply cannot realize it. He knows for certain that God calls, just as he knows that he must give an answer, but his inner situation changes so quickly that his answer never seems to be the right one. There could be—and this is indeed expected—a Yes that is like falling into an abyss. A Yes that appears completely impossible. The air has become so thin that the speaker no longer hears his own voice. And if he said Yes in a life-threatening situation, the landscape has already fully changed again. It is as if God should want the Yes to be the only thing that remains the same, the only thing still standing, while all the rest changes. Man cannot arrange things so that the train stops in order to give him time to orient himself better. If the train were to stop, allowing man to give a reasonable, well-grounded, qualified, and conditional Yes, a Yes that included everything that seemed possible to him (presumably by degrees), then such a Yes would immediately resound in all its emptiness as a mere echo of his own reason. But, someone will object, did not God himself endow man with reason? Indeed he did, but for a moment man’s understanding no longer has the decisive word; God himself does. Therefore it does not help to close one’s eyes in the desire to forget the passing landscape. It is still there, and it must be thought about together with the answer. Man has to see it and say Yes; however, this view should be characterized as a seeing in God.
Until now the circumstances of life were given and accepted by man almost without question; they were aspects of his existence. Now it is a matter of distancing oneself from these circumstances in order to attain complete freedom in God. As a result, the main areas of life appear to shift. What was insignificant becomes essential, and what appeared decisive for everyday life loses its meaning. In order to be free, man must affirm simultaneously the old and the new situation. Only then does his Yes gain the necessary breadth. He can approach a thousand things from a new angle, and at each approach he can express his Yes more clearly. Of course, he can give a global Yes and fundamentally renounce everything that has gone before. But this total Yes should not be made too precipitously; he should give sufficient thought to each individual item. The same, original Yes should resound at every place and should point toward God without looking back. At the same time, however, this unreserved pointing toward God will contain countless backward glances at what exists in order to prove itself in individual details.
For the believer, this broadening of his Yes is a preliminary stage that allows him to anticipate the future broadening of his faith and the demands of God. He affirms all, and he affirms nothing. And finally, his Yes, naked and, as it were, totally deprived of its strength, goes toward God: without strength, because it cannot be supported by any arguments; and yet in full strength, because it lays claim to man’s entire strength—and because it already fully needs and uses this Yes for the coming service. Whoever would like to insert some pauses here, in order purportedly to examine the situation, in order to construct his life stone by stone in light of God’s demands, has missed his hour. No one is asking about the construction, about the walls that can support him, but about readiness—even for a collapse. There is an urgency: one cannot return to say goodbye or to bury one’s dead father. The in-breaking of eternity into my passing life has an absolute and timeless character. There are no points of comparison; there are no possibilities to assess where one stands or to withdraw in order to deliberate with oneself. Only a person who himself is called by God and sent forth will be able to say a word here. This person, without himself knowing it, can be God’s mouthpiece and thus help to form a complete Yes.
For the one called, such a point of intersection between eternity and time is unique. So much so that it strikes him like an immense catastrophe. In this intersection the believer is depersonalized. He observes that the place on earth that he has occupied until now has been left free. Much of what has gone into his day-to-day life has been hollowed out. Only thus is he able to move in this space. He realizes that his life was not determined by his personality, strength of mind, or intelligence; rather it was something for which his personality was intended and designed. He occupied that place himself, for good or for ill, until the moment God calls. And in this call God fills the believer with his spirit and strength. The negative image of the believer that has existed until now is replaced by a positive one. And man grasps that only his Yes truly gives him a personality. Henceforth, he knows himself both as an individual intended by God and as one who is penetrated by the anonymity of the children of God. In a new sense, he is one among many in the Church, a member of the communion of saints. He becomes one who is sent, someone for whom the mission is more important than he is himself. Like a newly hatched bird, he now can move in the freedom of a new world that is God’s world. He need not be anxious; his place is filled and no longer left free; his Yes has its own strength. He has left his hesitations behind. Certainly he will never fully attain the ideal of holiness that God determined for him. However, he may claim the fullness of grace for the path upon which he is now walking. God has prepared this grace for his chosen children: it is here for him.
Lord, set me free and take me to yourself. You have shown me the chains that hold me back from my way, and if they still exist to hinder me, it is for no other reason than that in my heart of hearts I am not yet willing to detach myself from them. How often I moan and groan and regret having so little freedom, whereas all I really mean are the obligations that daily life and my profession entail; but these obligations do not really block my path, they do not affect its essential course, at most its outer form; if anything, they are perhaps just little tests. What weighs so heavily does not come from outside; it lives and takes shape in my own self—I mean everything to which I am attached, which I am not disposed to renounce, which serve me as a crutch and a convenience, everything to which I believe I have a right. Take, Lord—I am trying to ask you for this sincerely—everything that in my eyes is part of my rightful spiritual property, but that paralyzes my love for you, that makes your love for my neighbor stop flowing and freeze solid. Let me disappear in the flow of your love to all men, so that it can pour itself out unhindered.
Amen.
With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:
(The Suscipe Prayer)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.
Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
When man knows about God and experiences his own limitedness, the vanity of his efforts, and the insurmountableness of the obstacles that are placed before him, then these experiences of his limits become an indication for him of a beyond. His passing time becomes for him the sign of God’s eternity; his barriers, the sign of infinity. Thanks to his limits, he is kept constantly reminded and warned. And yet, his human capabilities and experiences, for all their limitedness, do not stand in opposition to what God is and is capable of. After all, God created man in his image, and an image cannot be in contradiction to what it represents. What is contradictory, what is next to incomprehensible about man, what cuts short every comparison, is sin. Sin has turned man’s eyes away from the original model, detached his life from God, and plunged him into solitude.
2. Christ’s Assumption of our Limitations
The Son of God assumes human nature just as he happens to find it, with the consequences of sin, but without sin. He overcomes the weariness that he feels after long travels and night watches by the strength of a human obedience to God. This obedience cannot simply be regarded as a power that he takes over from his divinity. He does not allow himself the freedom of constantly elevating his assumed human nature beyond its limits. He puts up with more than others because he loves more; he endures more because he is more obedient. He gives us this love and this obedience so that we can learn not to stumble continually over our limits but rather to stretch them a little in order to serve God better and fulfill more adequately the task he has set for us. But here below, this overcoming of one’s limits occurs little by little. It is not, for instance, the beginning of a gradual conquest of the laws of the body by the spirit or a systematic displacement of our limits in the direction of infinity. For humility, patience, and the love that bears all things are virtues that God has bound together with our limits and our experience of limits. How could someone who managed constantly to overleap his own limits still be humble? How could someone be patient if impatience always spurred him to further successful achievements? There is a measure that is laid on us. We can use this measure only (as a gift) in love for God, rather than inordinately grasping it for ourselves. This measure, which is entrusted into God’s hands (as is our nullity), not only makes us newly aware of our finitude, but it also makes us forget ourselves and feel secure within God’s embrace, in the very way that the Son revealed to us through his human existence. Perhaps no one was ever so lonely as he was during his forty-day fast in seclusion and temptation. And yet this solitude flows back into solidarity with us. It was not a severance of every connection; rather, it was a task of love, and love never separates; it unites even when desert and solitude are the means of achieving unity. Whoever saw him there would have seen only that he was alone. However, he took us with him into his prayer; we are there with him. His Holy Spirit has overcome all the limits of our own spirit—our being here and not there. We are carried and taken along by the Son and thus are no longer ‘‘here and not there’’; rather, we are ‘‘both here and there at once’’. The perception that we are ‘‘here and not there’’ is a function of our reason, which is bound to human laws. Through our know it-all attitude we often impose a finitude on our understanding and love by speaking the word ‘‘impossible’’ whenever we experience our limits. What we set down as physically impossible—‘‘I can only keep going or stay awake for so many hours’’—is already overcome in the Spirit of the Lord. Consequently, we do not need to waste any time on it, and we should not think and talk incessantly about our limits. Ever since God became man, we have been able to find the unlimited within our limitations.
3. The Removal of Limits in Christ
We can imagine, for example, that we have reached the limit of our power to stay awake and thus are no longer able to say a certain prayer that we had made up our mind to recite. We can then recommend this prayer in faith to God and his saints. Angels can pray it for us, and God can also hear our good intention and grant it; he can make us understand that we have been heard, regardless of the fact that we ‘‘know for certain’’ that we did not say the prayer ourselves. As a matter of fact, it may be that God prefers to have the power of our prayer and of all that we undertake in his name begin precisely at the point at which we have run up against our limits, that point at which we have become too weary in his service—wherever that may be—to bring to completion what we would have liked. Christ suffered this ‘‘not being able to carry on’’ to the point of death. Death was the limit of this incapacity, and he went to this limit. He did not set the limit of his death himself; he would have gone as far beyond the limit of death as the Father willed. And precisely at the limit of death the salvation of the world begins, and the perfect fulfillment of the Father’s will emerges into view. God’s victory came at the limit of death. His absolute infinity breaks through at the point of our absolute finitude.
Consequently, all the limits that we know from our existence, or, in another way, from the existence of Christ, are landmarks. Humanly speaking we would say: Here we run into a stone wall. Here is where our property stops and our neighbor’s field begins. The landmarks placed in fields mark property lines. However, when it is a question of spiritual property, such demarcations are no longer valid; rather, they have been abolished. What is mine is also yours and his. There is the communion of saints, the Church, in which the Lord shows something of the limitlessness of his divinity and the eternity of his love. In this realm one can pray and sacrifice in place of another, or both can do the same work together. One can be ‘‘done’’ in the other, just as we are redeemed in the temptation of Jesus or in his Cross and just as the twelve-year-old Messiah truly burst through the boundaries for us on the way to the Father and made it possible for us to follow after him. The Church is the place where all limited beings are gathered together in freedom from limitation. Insofar as their limits are removed, they are in principle saints. Insofar as they live in accord with this freedom from limitation, they also bring to fulfillment the holiness that has been granted them.
We can understand death and sickness and even poverty, Lord; but how can anyone turn away from you after having known your grace? That is an unfathomable mystery to us. After all, it would be quite easy for you to make the signs of your grace so obvious that no one could have any more doubts about them or to bring back those who are leaving with a gentle call: and you do not do it, in your wisdom, you do not do it. Lord, allow us just the same to beg you with our whole soul that our cry might pierce through the lukewarmness of those who are drawing back; let our members suffer for them, accept every sacrifice for them, only, we implore you, enable them to return, make it easy for them, and in exchange let us pay the price that you deem just. We will try to give you what you take, but grant them anew your faith, your grace. And at the same time we know that we ourselves take our faith too lightly and are given over and over again to promises that seem hard when it comes time to keep them. Lord, grant us all your mercy and strengthen our weakness. Amen.
With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:
(The Suscipe Prayer)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.
Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Why do you still have no faith?” (Mk 4:40)
“Still no faith.” Let us contemplate this “still” on its own. The Lord is greater than we think; at every moment, he can give new proofs of his ever-greater power. No one can say, “Now I know exactly how great is the Lord’s power.” The person who said this would at the same time be proclaiming that he knew just as exactly the extent of his own powerlessness. It is also not enough to say, “I know that God is almighty.” For what is all-encompassing might? But if we know that God’s might in his service is greater than anything we can imagine as “almighty”, then we know that God is the ever-greater, and we know, too, that our faith must adapt itself to this ever-greater. Of course, no one can say, “Today I believe this much, tomorrow it will be a little more, in a year quite a bit more, and five years from now even more”, for in saying this he would be claiming to have precisely that view of the whole of his faith that no one can have. We must leave this view to the Lord. But the Lord accepts faith, Christian faith, in such a way that he allows it to grow together with an insight he gives (which has its source in his view of the whole). Insight into God and faith in him grow together, because the Lord gives himself to the believer more and more.
Let us take an example from daily life. Someone says to a child, “God is big.” Then the child will ask, “Is God bigger than my big brother or my father or my uncle?” In order to grasp God’s greatness, the child will draw on comparisons from his surroundings. The child grows and learns about other powers and authorities than those in his own family, and when his question about God’s greatness leads him again to measure God against earthly greatness, he will choose for the latter measure something significantly greater than before. It is like this with our faith and its insight. Earthly values soon no longer suffice as a point of comparison. We must contemplate God himself, in faith, and seek proofs here for the greatness of the Lord. And only when the proofs are no longer enough for us, when we can no longer draw any comparisons, do we suddenly recognize, truly and objectively, that the Lord is always greater.
Mark: Meditations on the Gospel of Mark, meditation 110
B. Nothingness and limit
There comes a moment in every man’s life when he begins to reflect on his place in the whole of the cosmos, on his future, and on the limits of what he can do. But he cannot think about his future without making his past part of the present moment. He sees what he has planned and achieved so far; he also sees everything that has not been achieved, the failed remainder, which perhaps stands before him as his own failure. He remembers days of work, days of rest, his nights, his daydreams, the great deal that he has received, and the little that he has given. He sees that it will not be easy to balance the books because so many seeds have not borne fruit. Many entries are left with question marks next to them; occasionally there is a successful item that could be marked with a round figure. And yet, it is not at all clear that this figure is really round; it is part of a series along with so many other figures that do not come out right.
And now man plans. He draws conclusions from his experiences. He wants to reach farther and different goals. But suddenly he hesitates: whatever plan he makes, he must always reckon with himself. He cannot envision any future that fully satisfies him, because he cannot count on any full performance from himself. He knows himself well enough to realize that he will always be an obstacle to himself because he does not remain faithful to his best resolutions. Wherever he turns, he encounters his limits. And yet he must go on, and he cannot do this unless he has before him a road, a destination, an image of his future—unless he undertakes something that satisfies him and that he brings about by his own power.
Once again he looks back on his past. He attempts to take a sober look at the obstacles that he himself placed on the path, to draw up an account of all that he has neglected. He tries to do this in a spirit in which he calls things by name and perceives the truth about the forces at work. None of this is easy, because as soon as he gives these failures their real name, he becomes painfully aware of his own responsibility. This failure humiliates him, and now things might seem darker to him than they really are. His confidence in the future wavers. He realizes how much remains undone; how often something was tried, abandoned, and forgotten again. The very first difficulty threw him off track; he simply gave up.
The past weighs on him and paralyzes his new resolutions. He knows beforehand that it will not work. He looks around in search of heroes who made up their minds to do some great work and did not let anything keep them from it. He would gladly be such a person, with the corresponding strength, ability, and perseverance. There is no end to his wishes and yearnings, but resignation debilitates them. He knows that, when all is said and done, he is no hero. Everything about him is futile.
The New Meaning of Nothingness
It may occur to him that there are also Christian heroes. In their lives things really have been performed and accomplished, things whole and holy. If we examine more closely what they have done, if we try to penetrate into the mechanism of their achievement, we find aspects that can be understood together with a great deal that remains opaque. And yet the deed stands there in its rounded integrity, and it is impossible to detect any seams in it. This is curious, disturbing, and unsettling. From where does this unity come? Suddenly it becomes clear: In the Christian hero, the saint, man’s nothingness is overcome. It has been absorbed into holiness. This indivisibility is grace, and it comes from God. God takes care of his own to the point of completely enveloping and covering them with his grace. But they are not buried underneath it, and they do not lose their distinctive face; they are not paralyzed by the weight of an excessive giving. Rather grace permeates, saturates, and sets aglow their entire being and places them in a new physical condition. Grace unites itself to man’s innermost being; it produces in the saint, as it were, an incarnation that reenacts the Incarnation of the divine Son. Christ is God who became man in order to perform as God-man his integral, seamless deeds. The saint is a graced man and is permitted to perform equally integral deeds. By God’s arrangement and action, grace and man have become a single reality. The resulting work retains the properties of both—those of man and those of grace—but forever united.
Whoever considers this successful outcome understands that man’s nothingness represents a state of deficiency. Man lacks something. His sin has moved him away from the place where he should and could stand. He can, of course, fool himself into thinking that through sin he merely has strayed onto a bypath from which he still sees the right way. But deep down he knows better. He no longer sees the right way. He has become entangled in a thicket that his eye can no longer pierce in any way. Reflection alone cannot help him find the way out. He does not know how best to use his remaining strength. He needs grace for this, and therefore he must first of all submit. He must make himself so light that grace outweighs everything else in him. He must forget himself—this is the only true conclusion that follows from the recognition of his nothingness—in order to allow grace to stream into the empty space that he is.
As far as he is concerned, then, he is incapable of imitating the Christian hero. He cannot set off on his own to follow him. And nevertheless the image remains, the example with its radiant, inviting appeal. On the one side, he stands with his failure, his doubts, and with the need to make plans for his life that he knows he cannot sustain. On the other side stands the round deed of the apostolic man that shines upon him, challenges him, and fascinates him. Yet he realizes that he cannot leap over the intervening gulf by imitating from this side the deeds of a person who is on the other side. Rather he must get out of himself. The first comprehensive deed concerns the ‘‘I’’ itself. He must go out of himself; he must step outside of his own self. And this is a sort of annihilation, a forgetting and a losing of himself, and a call for a new solitude. It is a bursting of his own center in order to free up space for God, who enters into this center and from there makes something new out of him. Who above all takes him into his service. This possession must become the unifying point in him, but he will not be able to occupy, fix, or experience this point himself. He is catapulted out of the limits of this nothingness, but he cannot trace this described trajectory, because he has surrendered and lost himself.
All at once the word ‘‘nothingness’’ acquires a new meaning for him; it is now nothing more than a signal, a warning sign.
