May 16, 2005   

"Do You Really Love Me?"

God is giving us deeper faith.  We see, we know, we hope, and we love.  We know that He will constantly give us grace for whatever He asks.  This is what the saints mean when they speak of abandonment to God's will.  This is what Our Lady is talking about.  "Do whatever. . . ."  He'll work out everything else.  This is what Jesus did on the cross.  "Father, into your hands I commend My spirit."  "I give my entire life."  When we are on the cross, we don't know what will happen either.  This is constant conformity to God's will - to come into this deeper, deeper maturity.

If we're starting to see that our faith isn't where we really feel it should be ("I can believe, but still, Lord, I'm not there all the time."), then we have the beautiful prayer of the man in the Gospel, "Lord I do believe, but help my unbelief."  We need to believe in season and out of season because faith puts us in a whole other world; it puts us totally in God's world.  So we have to keep climbing, and God will make sure our faith is going to be tried.  There will be trials and temptations, but that is part of  "Come Higher, Friends."  He will give us events and people and all the ways necessary to increase our faith.  "I believe."  "This is the way.  Walk in it."  No matter what stage of the interior journey, we always have freedom, however, to say "no".  We always have an option.  We always have a choice.  So we always beg, particularly of Our Lady, for that fiat grace to say "yes", no matter where we are. 

When we finally realize that without God we can do nothing, we have made a tremendous breakthrough into the "Illuminative Way."  We are painfully aware of our weakness.  We are very aware that God continues to leave weaknesses in us so that we constantly remain dependent.  Paul begged God to remove the thorn from his side.  There might be certain idiosyncrasies that we have.  "Oh God, if You just took this away, then I could really pray better.  I could love more.  I could do this.  I could do that."  Blessed Claude de la Colombiere used to give St. Margaret Mary the penance to pray, "Lord, make me a saint in spite of myself."  Make me a saint in spite of the thorns, in spite of the weakness.  God loves to make us strong out of weakness.  He loves weakness.  He gets all the glory then.  When we are weak, we are strong because then it is all God and He gets all the credit, all the glory.  St. Thomas said, "The servant of God should always consider himself a beginner and always tend toward a more perfect and holy life without ever stopping" (Comm. in Ep. Ad Hebr. VI, lect. 1). 

It will get simpler, maybe not easier, but simpler because we get these lights from God.  Your journal will start to get simpler and simpler, too.  If you find that your journaling is very complicated, that's all right.  That is where you are.  But as you get more into the "Illuminative Way," it will start to become simpler because you will get these lights without words, but you will understand them and that is what your journal will start to show you.  Our thought life becomes much more simple.  Matthew says, "Blessed are the pure of heart" (Mt 5:8).   This is what's happening because of the lights the heart is receiving in the Dark Night of the Soul, and the heart begins to see, to understand, to know.  The gift of contemplation starts to grow quite quickly from this time on.

Detachment becomes ever so much easier.  It is extremely important to let our own will go for the constant freedom of God's will.  Detachment is not just from things that we have, but it can be from things that we wish we had.  I have a friend who told me that when she was a young girl she desperately wanted to be a Poor Clare.  This is what she thought she was going to do because she had such a love for poverty.  God had just placed that gift, that spirit of poverty, deep in her heart, but when she graduated from the University she met a beautiful young man.  He was also quite poor.  She was living a beautiful life of poverty, the spirit of poverty, and he was, too.  She felt that to be with him was God's will so they married.  What happened is that he became very, very rich.  He started a business and was so successful that he became a multimillionaire.  Here she is with this beautiful spirit of poverty.  It was beautiful to watch a woman who had everything imaginable, obviously, that money could buy, but was totally detached from it.  She was free, totally free. 

On the other hand, there was a beautiful sister in the convent who was detached from everything physically.  Obviously there is nothing in the convent to attach to, particularly in the cloister, but she wasn't free.  She had always had this deep, deep desire to have a fur coat.  I said, "Lord, it is too bad that You didn't let her have the fur coat and get it over with.  She probably wouldn't have liked it anyway."  So poverty can be practiced by the wealthy and the poor alike.  It is a spirit of detachment that God is after.  Have you ever gone to church and maybe sat in somebody's pew?  "This is my pew!"  Sometimes we think we're detached till someone borrows something and doesn't return it.  We can get pretty upset.  God lets these events happen so we get some self-knowledge. 

For prayer warriors, total detachment is letting go of our own will.  That is the detachment, the poverty of spirit, that God is after.  Our detachment from our will is our canopy, our safeguard, in the fight against satan. 

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's "New Heart," Omaha, NE, 2004.