August 15, 2005  

"Mystical Ladder, Part 2"

At the sixth step the soul runs swiftly towards God.  There are many experiences and touches of God here.  There is an invigoration of love because the soul's charity is so increased and almost purified, not totally, but hope has been rekindled over and over, day by day, and so the soul is running, very sure of the encounter.

At the seventh step, God gives an ardent boldness.  I'm thinking right now of the love in the heart of Mary Magdalene when she spoke to the gardener.  "Tell me where He is.  I'll go.  I'll take care of Him."  Love can do all things in Him who strengthens.  So on this seventh step there is an ardent boldness, but it must always be practiced in humility. 

The eighth step, St. Bernard said, "Impels the soul to lay hold of the Beloved without letting him go" (Dark Night II, 20:3).  The soul has searched and searched and searched for God and finally says, "I found Him whom my heart and soul loves.  I held Him and I did not let Him go" (Sg 3:4).  That is what Mary Magdalene was trying to do.  Yet even on the eighth step it is not continual yet.  It is not time for perpetual union yet.  So the soul will remain on this step just a very short time in order to rest. 

The ninth step "causes the soul to burn gently" (Dark Night of the Soul, II, 20:4).  This is where we are starting to go more into the Unitive Way because those terrible purification fires of the Spirit have accomplished their work.  Now that same fire is burning in the soul, not in that deep pain of the purification process, but in a deep, sweet pain of the gentle love that is produced by the Holy Spirit.

The tenth step is that total Unitive Way that the saints talk about.  It is total union with the Lord, where nothing is hidden from the soul.  On that day Jesus says, "You will need to ask Me nothing"(Jn 16:23) because He'll share fully His mind and His heart.  He says, "Everything I have is yours."  That is what we begin to experience.  The saints call this spiritual marriage. 

So for now, He's calling us into these wonderful experiences of His love - these beautiful mystical touches, these wonderful visitations of the Holy Spirit, who is the New Wine.  I was just pondering why didn't Jesus stay with them longer than these visitations?  He had risen; nobody could touch Him now.  He could walk through closed doors.  He was the risen Lord.  He was in the Spirit, but He still was visible.  What the Lord has been showing me is that He wanted to take us into the fullness of faith of believing without seeing.  So when the Spirit comes, when we have this New Wine, we don't have that sensible "flesh and blood" of Jesus to touch.  Now we touch Him by faith and allow Him to touch us the same way. 

Paul said, "All of us, gazing on the Lord's glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed into His very image by the Lord who is the Spirit" (2Cor 3:18).  We are undergoing this beautiful transformation process of being transformed into the very image of God Himself.  Jesus said, "Philip, don't you know, he who sees me sees the Father?"  This is what these beautiful touches of contemplation in this Mystical Ladder of Love are all about. 

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

August 8, 2005

"Mystical Ladder, Part 1"

I just want to share a little bit about the climb.  Some of it happens at this stage and some of it will happen as we get a little more into union.  It is believed that the author of the "Mystical Ladder of Love" is St. Bernard.  It's all about love.  It is all about relationship.  It is all about God in you.  It is ascending a secret ladder to God.  It is like a fire, Bernard says, always rising upward, as fire does.  It is always coming upward.  Until we reach the top step something will always be hidden from the soul.  It is quite different up there at the top, isn't it?  You really don't know what is going on at the top until you're at the top.  So this is a secret ladder, and we can just take one rung at a time.  Here are the ten steps that St. Bernard evidently experienced and is sharing with us. 

St. Bernard said the first step of this love ladder makes the soul sick in an advantageous way as the soul wants to get rid of everything that is not pertaining to God.  It is hungry.  It is thirsty for God.  So on this first rung, the soul loses its appetite for all things other than God.  Because it can't find any satisfaction on that first rung, it will immediately ascend to the next step.  It is desiring to move forward because, "I'm not being fed here.  I'm being touched by Your love but it is not satisfying me.  I'm hungry.  I'm thirsty.  I want more."

On the second step, the soul is searching for God unceasingly.  Searching, searching, searching, and it will keep searching until it finds Him.  One's thoughts constantly turn to God.  One's prayer will be focused on who He is.  "Who are You?  I need to know who You really are."  On the second step of the ladder, we want to speak only of God because we are experiencing Him and have tremendous anxious longings of His love, but we are also gaining strength in this love - even on the second step.  Love is strength for us.

The third step "prompts the soul to the performance of works and gives it fervor that it might not fail" (Dark Night of the Soul, II, 19:3).  So the soul believes that whatever it does for the Lord is way too little.  It is too small.  It believes that it can't do enough for God.  You hear of the saints talking about, "I want to love You more than anybody has ever loved You in the whole world."  Maybe you have said that, too.  You just want to do everything for God because love is consuming you here.  Love believes that anything you do is way too little.  A soul here feels a deep sorrow and pain about the little they do for the Lord because they are so aware now of God's love and what God has done for them.  They consider themselves useless in all their works.  They also believe they are worse than others because love's direct anointing is teaching them what God truly deserves because they are coming into a deeper knowledge and understanding of who God is.  They believe they are worse than anybody because they have the model before them and now,  "What can I return to the Lord for all He has done for me?" is their prayer.  We begin to realize, "I haven't even begun."  So the soul is removed from this deep-rooted pride, this vainglory, this presumption that I'm better than others because I'm receiving these lights.  The soul knows "I am really nothing without God.  He is everything."  So the soul becomes strengthened here to take the next step, the fourth step, on this beautiful ladder of love.

The soul has become aware of many blessings and favors, and believe it or not, doesn't ask God for any more favors.  It knows it is going to be so well taken care of by God because it is becoming more and more satisfied.  It is more focused now on what it can do for God, the pleasure it can bring to God.  It is like Jesus said, "I do only what pleases the Father."  This is one of the rungs of the ladder.  Why?  Because we know God deserves it, even if the cost is high.  And the cost is high because it is always ascending the Cross.  It is always the ascension of Calvary.  Paul said, "For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body" (1Cor 6:20).  So you, too, will be asked to bear these particular graces at a great price for others as well, but you won't stay there - at how much it costs  - because of the love.  This interior detachment from creatures will be coming now because the attachment to God is getting so strong.  In other words, Bernard says that at this level the soul doesn't rest in anything anymore.  It is trying to find its rest only in God.  The word rest is always a contemplative word.  When we are resting, we are at peace.  We are one with God.  So when Jesus says, "Come apart and rest a while," this is what He wants.  We can come apart every day.  He will put us back together the way He wants.  He'll heal us constantly.  He made us in the first place.  God can constantly recreate.  But He said, "Come apart and rest."  Rest. Be fed.  Be nurtured.  Be loved.  Simply be loved.

The fifth step imparts to the soul an impatient desire and longing for God.  It is a desire for union that becomes so strong that the more it is delayed, the more difficult and tiresome it is for the soul because the soul feels (St. Teresa of Avila speaks and writes about this at great length) that to suffer or to die, I have to be in this deep love or I can't live.  I have to see Him.  I have to be with Him or I'm going to die.  At this stage, the soul has learned to feed only on love. 

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

August 1, 2005

"But Now I See!"

In the Illuminative Way there are a couple of other things that happen that I want to cover.  One is that we really see and experience Jesus healing.  In the visitations between the Resurrection and Pentecost, we will see that in almost every one of His visits, He is healing.  He begins by healing people's lack of faith, that uncertainty and doubt, that naturalism, that spirit of the world, particularly with Thomas.  You know, Thomas had a difficult time, and Jesus said, "Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed."  He is trying to deepen our faith right there.  So in the early stages of mysticism, we'll start to experience a deeper faith.  It will become easier to believe because God is simply granting that gift to us, just like He did in the breaking of the bread.  They saw.  They experienced.  They knew with no teachings whatsoever.  It is infused knowledge.

"Peace be with you."  We'll experience peace at a different level.  "The peace," Jesus said, "that the world cannot give."  Once we have experienced this peace, we will know that any other peace is false.  So in this level of prayer, a phenomenal peace starts to come.

Jesus was giving his Apostles this deeper gift of His love as He breathed His Spirit into them.  In this Illuminative Stage, we begin to receive more and more of His love because there has been a purification of our hearts.  Our hearts are more open to receive now.  We're becoming more like Our Lady; we're becoming receivers.  Contemplation is gift.  It is all God's word, and it is His goodness to us.  He is giving us these graces, which means that He is giving us more of Himself.  He is giving us more love.  As we receive more of this wonderful love of God, we're going to be able to forgive, because we are being empowered with love.  To forgive is divine; it is not human.  It wasn't required of them in the Old Testament, but now, in this level of prayer where we're receiving this love, it is required.  We have this power.  We have God's very power within us, that love-power that can let anything go because love can forgive.  One time Jesus said to our community, "There is absolutely no justification anymore in unforgiveness.  I have the power.  I have the love.  Just receive My love."  Receive it and in that love you can always forgive without any conditions.  In fact, you can learn even to forgive first.

So these tremendous gifts that come from Baptism are coming forth at a deeper level.  It is like a new Baptism is starting to happen - the new Baptism that Pope Paul VI wrote about in his encyclical on evangelization.  God said, "I want My house to be a house of prayer," each of us individually and then collectively.  When that happens, individually and collectively, we're going to have this new Baptism because these deeper gifts of Faith, Hope, and Love are given in contemplation.  They are infused at this level and so this new Baptism will happen.  Contemplation bears that kind of fruit.  It will feed us.  Jesus is still as interested in our being fed today as He was with His Apostles.  It will definitely feed us because it is His presence. 

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

July 25, 2005  

"Calvary Love"

When I first received my vocational call, I was just really coming to love the Lord and was still coming into this whole mystery of the Cross.  I would ponder it, and I would look at it.  It is a tremendous mystery of love.  It had not totally been broken open for me yet and I was at a church here in Omaha for noon Mass.  There was a beautiful Jesuit priest preaching there that day.  He really had the gift of preaching, and he was preaching on the Cross.  You know, nothing in our lives ever happens by chance.  Somebody can say something that is just a casual remark, but you know that is a word for you.  There was a word for me that day and I never forgot it.  You never forget some of those words.  I was sitting there.  All of a sudden, he turned and looked at the whole congregation and said, "It is time to stop looking at the Cross.  Get on it!"  I thought, "Oh!  My God, You are calling me.  You are calling me to live a lifestyle of Jesus Christ crucified." 

This is what He is asking of us today.  This is love at its best, but we are in the process of being purified and so we have to draw those graces from what He did first.  It is a prayer of identification.  It is a prayer where we can begin to identify not only with Jesus' sufferings but also with His tremendous love of the Father that kept Him there.  It is one thing to go to Calvary.  It is one thing to go on the Cross, but it is another thing to stay there.  We begin to learn the tremendous love Jesus has for the Father.  He is preparing us for this deep, deep union. 

We are very vulnerable during this Dark Night because our spirit is being purified.  We do not have the fullness, yet, of the Holy Spirit operating.  We do not have the fullness of that love that we are experiencing and Satan knows it.  So there will be temptations, believe me.  It happened with Jesus.  We see this also in the writings of the saints and theologians.  But it happened to Jesus.  "If You be the Son of God, come down now off the Cross."  If any of you saw "The Passion of Christ," you saw this temptation, you would be tempted to come down.  You can be very tempted and say, "I have had enough of this, Lord.  I have had enough" and walk away.  So watch for the way that Satan can bring things to you, like, "You don't have to live this way."  One of his big temptations is, "It is never going to end.  You are always going to have to suffer, suffer, suffer.  You are going to have to suffer alone.  You are always going to be discouraged.  You are always going to be like this.  Nobody is ever going to love you.  You are never going to come out of this tomb.  It is always going to be dark.  Do you think God is ever going to speak to you again?  No.  But I can give you a mission because look at what you have already been through.  Look at how far you have come."  He will start to tempt us with where we have been because by this time, we have already been on quite a journey. 

There are all sorts of ways that we will still be filled with presumption and pride and start to get ahead of God and try to get out of this tomb or off the Cross ahead of God's timing.  Also, the enemy will let the soul believe that, "You will never, never return to the path of virtue.  You will never, never really love."  This, believe it or not, is all part of contemplation of the Dark Night.  It leaves the intellect in darkness.  It leaves the will in aridity.  It leaves the memory in emptiness.  It is particularly hard not to know.  But the surrender will definitely hasten this purgation time because God is flowing into us and, if we do not resist, if we do not kick against the goad, if we can rest and trust that He knows what He is doing, we can come through the Night ever so much more quickly and find that it is not really as dark as we thought.  What makes it dark is because we are so close to God.  He is pure light.  We are blinded by the light.  And when you are blinded by the light, it is like it is dark.  In the darkness, we will begin to realize - and this is because God is giving us these little infused gifts of knowledge - "I am closer to You now than I ever have been."  So the darker it is, really the closer God is to us.

However, we can complain like Job.  "Why have you set Yourself against me?  Lord, why are You against me?  Why am I burdensome to myself?"  We can go through all that but God will keep reassuring us, "I am loving you.  I am loving you and My light is much brighter than the darkness you are experiencing.  There's going to be a new dawn, there really is, and with it will come tremendous rejoicing."  So love starts to be enkindled in the Night.  We will start to feel it.  We will start to know it is getting closer and closer to the dawn.  Now there will be little touches of light, and we will begin to realize, "I can rest here, really rest in peace, because I know that at the appointed time He will roll away that stone and it will be over." 

There is a joy that can come from this level of suffering.  The Little Flower experienced it and calls it "unfelt joy."  It is "unfelt" because we do not feel that lifting of our heart.  We do not feel like we have a winged heart, so to speak, but the joy comes because we know we are in His perfect will and there isn't any joy like it.  We know He is still busy about His Father's business.  We know that our sanctification is coming about that will bring the Father more joy than ever.  It will add to His greater honor and glory.  It is very similar to what souls in Purgatory experience, but this suffering does have tremendous merit.  The fruit of your tears will gain many graces for others. 

You will feel, like Teresa of Avila says, wounded, actually wounded.  You will feel the pain of Divine Love.  The intellect, of course, is still in the darkness.  It does not understand things, in particular, other than that God is doing what God needs to do. You will understand that it is all God's action.  That helps us to really rest.  That "I do not have to know.  I do not have to understand."  We can let that go, too, so that God can purify our understanding.  When God purifies our intellect and our memory and our will, then you can see these infused gifts, these Confirmation gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Then they operate as full gifts.  God does not have to worry about my little understanding any more.  I have finally let it go and now He will give me the understanding He wants.  He will give me the knowledge He wants.  In other words, He will give me everything.  So He is stripping us of the old self to live, of course, the new and the blessed life in union with Him, total union with Him.  We can only say, "Hang in there.  Do not give up."  There will be times when you will want to give up.  There will probably be many times.  Again, take it to the Lord.  Do not try to hide it.  "Lord, I am afraid that I am going to give up.  Give me a special grace, now, in this darkness." 

I received a special grace like that one time at a church here in Omaha.  It was a Sunday Mass on Father's Day.  The priest, Monsignor Dunne, who is on our board now, was the pastor then.  He, also, was quite a preacher and very sensitive to the movement of the Spirit.  He started preaching a beautiful homily.  Because it was Father's Day he started preaching about the Trinity and fatherhood and it was just a beautiful homily.  I was sitting there, taking it all in, but I had come feeling quite discouraged.  "Lord, this is really hard.  It is really hard.  It is really hard."  There are lots of things in the spiritual life that are hard.  I was going through a really hard time because I was out of the convent now.  There wasn't a community.  I was living from pillar to post.  God had to teach me to live in the spirit of poverty, in total dependence on Him.  He said all these things to me in prayer, but it is one thing to receive it in prayer and another thing to begin experiencing it.   So now I was experiencing it and it is trust, trust, trust.  But I will never forget that Sunday when, all of a sudden, Father simply stopped his homily - just stopped it.  This is how obedient this priest is to the movement of the Spirit, and said to the congregation, "There is someone out there right now that is starting to give into discouragement and is tempted to give up.  God wants you to know, ‘Do not give up!' Do you hear Him?  ‘Do not give up!'"  He did not know who he was talking to, but I did.  I thought, "Can you imagine that God loves us so much He changes a whole Sunday sermon?"  Of course, there could have been other people out there who there ready to give up, too, but He was certainly speaking to me. 

So when we are in the Nights, remember, God can speak any way to us.  We do not know.  But we know when that grace comes because we feel that energy of His.  We feel that grace and can go on until the next time.  We do not know how long it will be before we are going to come out into that beautiful Resurrection grace and really run.

Intercession has become a lifestyle for us by this stage, and it is very powerful here.  God can use us.  This is why we would rather have the sufferings here than in Purgatory because our intercession is very, very powerful.  It never stops.  "God hears the cry of the poor."  For those who are going through this, the poor, we have that beautiful beatitude to constantly fall back on.  Jesus said, "Blessed are you, blessed are you, now, in your extreme nakedness, in your extreme poverty, because now the kingdom of Heaven is yours, the kingdom of Heaven is yours."  We want to remain always in His love.  He is here in the darkness.  He is here, waiting with us, as we wait.  Only God can roll away that stone.  There is an appointed time for everything, and God is the One who appoints the time.  When that stone is rolled away, we will find that we have access to the interior garden, the enclosed garden, because there is a new birthing now, a new state of innocence.  A new level of intimacy with God is coming.  We, too, will find ourselves in that beautiful garden within.  We, too, will be the recipients of Jesus' beautiful words to the thief.  "This day," that day will come, "This day you will be with Me in Paradise."  "At nightfall, weeping enters in," and it is night, "but with the dawn comes rejoicing."

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