December 27, 2004

"The Housecleaning Begins at Home"

Whenever we gain territory in any area in our own lives, then we especially have the power to obtain that same grace for someone else.  Unless we have gone through the struggle or have had that experience of some kind ourselves, it seems like we don't have that particular level of grace.  So the housecleaning begins at home so God can restore our household as well.  We need to allow God to heal us.  Once He begins the healing process, we need to choose to reject sin and keep the door closed.  This way sin will not be able to keep opening the door to the enemy over and over again.  Sometimes we actually give the enemy the legal right to enter into our house.  He will come in if the door is left open through sin. 

Any time you are in intercession that might lead into deliverance ministry, you will find that intercession and deliverance ministry go together.  Deliverance ministry will never hold on its own.  Never.  It has to have the healing touch of the Lord so that whatever allowed the enemy to enter the house in the first place will be healed so the door will be shut and remain shut so that the enemy can not return.

Scripture tells us that God has chosen us to be holy and blameless in His sight (Eph 1:4).  Blameless is another word  for sinless.  This is what He wants-for all of us to become sinless.  This is His perfect will.  This is His plan.   More of Jesus, less of me.  John the Baptist said, "He must increase; while I must decrease" (Jn 3:30).  He must because our sanctification is God's perfect will.  In the solitude allow the Holy Spirit to flash His beautiful light to really show you what He wants.  Give Him permission to do whatever needs to be done to bring you into that place where you can enjoy the solitude of love and intimacy with God.

When we are led into the solitude by the Spirit, there are two issues that come up.  One is kind of painful.  Joy and sorrow go together.  As we go into the solitude, especially in the beginning, there can be pain because we're going to get glimpses of ourselves that we never saw before.  We will see bondage, attachments, and sin areas.  That's hard to look at.  We may want to turn tail, as the little Flower said, and run.  At these times, John of the Cross tells us, "Beg for the grace to persevere."  He said that this time of purification is when many souls turn back and no longer walk with God.  So enter into God's light.  Enter into the purification process.  Enter into the fire of God's love and let Him burn away all that needs to go.

As we do that, He is changing us.  We will find that in our own intercession and interaction with people, we will become more compassionate because we've been there.  We're in touch with our own sin and we're very slow, if at all, to judge anyone else.  We say with St. Philip Neri, "But for the grace of God, there go I."  We learn to love the sinner.  We hate the sin, but we learn to love those in sin and we do not judge them.  We learn to pray for them with such compassion and love so that they, too, will come into freedom and  reconciliation with God within.

God sees us as sinners-that's true-but we are loved sinners.  We will fall.  Scripture says, "The just man seven times a day" (see Prv 24:16), so there will be little mud puddles along the way.  But someone once said that the definition of a saint is that they always get up by the count of nine.   So there's hope.

Excerpt from "Wings of Peace," Manila, Philippines, 2001.

December 20, 2004

"Looking at Ourselves"

We need to take time in prayer to come into the inner silence, the inner solitude, and try to become aware of the inner Presence within.  We need to let Him reveal who we really are.  We need to ask Him to show who we are in His eyes.  Repentance means change; it means to become a child.  It's a process.  It doesn't happen overnight. 

There are many voices that we have listened to in the past.  There are voices of the world and voices of our parents.  Have you ever had a parent say to you or heard an adult say to a child, "You're never going to amount to anything.  You're going to be just like your dad or just like your mother"?  We listen to these voices.  Or we listen to our peers at school.  Some of the cruel things that children say to one another!  Some of the cruel things that teachers say to children!  We also live out of the voices of our own flesh.  The flesh is always clamoring away.  Sometimes we listen to the voice of the enemy.  It takes discipline to hear God's voice with all these other voices going on inside of us.  There is so much hurt and rejection.  These things have to be worked through.  The old, false self has to be stripped away.

There is selfishness in all of us.  All of us have something in us that wants to be the sun and have everything else revolve around us.  When we're in His Presence, we can admit these things.  The great temptation that Satan offered to Eve, and she passed on to Adam, was that "God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad" (Gn 3:5).  That's exactly what Eve wanted-to be like God.  That's what we want, and our actions show it and say it: "We want to be in control.  We want to be strong.  We want to be independent.  We want to be God."  It's okay to be Godlike, but the false gods in our lives have to go. 

When we come into prayer and stand in the Presence of Truth, pure Truth, these false gods will go very quickly.  Things will begin to happen when we take His word personally and seriously.  This is listening to Jesus, and listening in a deep sense is obeying.  We are going to start doing something about whatever we understand Him saying to us.  Our lives can change remarkably fast now.  We will come to know that anyone who truly listens to God is learning that God truly is love.  He is pure love.  We will come into our true presence, our real self. 

One of the blocks to this is not being aware of who we really are.  The examen of conscience will help us in this active purification.  St. Ignatius said that he would rather have his disciples miss their meditation than miss their examen.  Isn't that something?  He certainly didn't want them to miss their meditation time.  But he said that if we have to choose, skip the meditation because the examen of conscience is too important.  If we wish to overcome our faults, we have to be aware of them.  The experts advise us to work on one fault at a time.  Just take one at a time.  If we take everything at once, we could get so discouraged that we may not even begin! 

So we take one specific area that the Spirit has revealed to us that is blocking us from a genuine encounter with God-some area that is blocking our growth in holiness, our in-depth spirituality, good witnessing, personality flaws, being a good parent, our vocational call.  We take that one thing that is blocking us and we stay with it for a week.  It could easily be gone by then.  Then we take something else.  This helps us to face ourselves very honestly.  For those who have not done this before, it is good to have a specific time of the day, whether right before bed or in the shower or whatever, where we can take three minutes to examine ourselves.  It doesn't take long, but for those who are accustomed to it, it has become a habit.  The Little Flower didn't have a certain time of the day when she did this because she was habitually conscious of this and would fall to her knees right then and there and tell God that she was sorry.  She would ask for His healing right then. 

A prayer life without a healthy and humbling self-knowledge, which this examen brings, would very likely become shallow and could lead to false mysticism, self-centeredness, and practicing the presence of self rather than the Presence of God.   

Excerpt from Contemplative Prayer series, "Bearing Fruit in the Word," Omaha, NE, 1984.

December 13, 2004

"Preparing Hearts for Christmas"

Those of us who spend our lives doing a great deal of intercession have found that Lent is not the most difficult time for intercessors as we might think.  It's Advent.  Our intercessors and those we know as intercessors have the Cross before them constantly during Advent.  Once I asked the Lord, "Why is Advent such a difficult time for intercessors?  It's anything but enjoying the preparation for Christmas."   He responded, "Because intercessors are needed more than ever during Advent to prepare hearts for My coming.  The spirit of the world has opened hearts in a very natural way to give, to rejoice, to expect presents, and to be generous in giving gifts."  So He takes advantage of His children who are naturally in that posture of giving and receiving, and He brings His graces and gifts of love and His gift of Jesus.  So if Advent is a little difficult for you, know that you are busy in union with the Spirit and Our Lady, preparing a heart for Jesus to come.  We need to prepare a Body for Him again, not just our own personal bodies, but the entire Body of Christ so that He can come.  This is what intercession does.

God gave a beautiful prophetic word to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist.  He speaks to us as well, "And you, O child, shall be called prophet of the Most High (some translations say, "servant of the Most High") for you shall go before the Lord to prepare straight paths for Him, giving His people a knowledge of salvation in freedom from their sins" (Lk 1:76).  So we go on the Cross every day and take on sin so that others may receive Jesus into their hearts and have an experience of His love and His life. 

This is a beautiful mystery that God is calling us to, but it takes great generosity.  It takes great love.  It takes great fidelity.   God is faithful to us, and now He's asking us to be faithful to Him.  Mary is always our model.  She's the contemplative par excellence.  She received this gift of contemplation in its fullness.  We are always being formed more and more into Jesus through the intercession of Our Lady and through the molding and the working and the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit.  Mary said, "Let it done to me as you say" (Lk 1:38).  May that be our prayer, too.

Excerpt from "Wings of Vision," Manila, Philippines, 2001.

December 6, 2004

"Prayer is the Way of Childhood"

The way of childhood is the way of littleness.  Jesus said that we need to change; we need to repent.   We need to become little or He said that we can not enter into His kingdom (Mt 18:2-4).  Prayer is a striving to enter more and more into His kingdom by becoming little.  This is totally against our culture, but the Bible cuts right across the culture. 

Once we learn that all we have to do is become little, we can cooperate with the dark night to hasten it's end.  Isn't that nice to know that it has an end?  The dark night will have accomplished its purpose when the stripping is done, when we are little, when we stand naked once again in our full identity in the Presence of God as that little baby, as His child.  Then we will learn how to celebrate our smallness and inadequacies.  It is so freeing!

We will see a great humility come upon us as we are exposed to the Person who is Truth.  Then we will live in the Truth.  We will walk in the Truth.  We will breathe in Truth.  We will speak in Truth.  That is what humility is all about-Truth.  Part of that truth is acknowledging our own littleness and limitations.  It's okay to fall down.  All children fall, but they are so close to the ground that they never really get hurt.  We will come into a deeper poverty.  This poverty of spirit will bear tremendous fruit.  Who is more poor than a baby?  A baby doesn't have anything unless it is given to him or her.  Who is more dependent than a child?  We will find our total dependency on God, and we will love it.  We can lean on Someone who makes good decisions, Someone who has all the answers, Someone who has a tremendous sense of responsibility and can carry the load that we were burdened with.  We can depend on God.  He is so faithful. 

We will come into greater purity as we come into a deeper relationship with the Lord.  The Holy Spirit will sanctify us.  He will purify us because God is pure.  In order to have union of spirit to Spirit, we need to be healed of everything that has ever happened to us.  Then we will become more sensitive to the needs of others.  Love will start to reach out and we become aware.  In the natural order, children and teenagers are pretty much still turned in on themselves.  They are not too aware of anyone else's feelings or what is going on in the household, but as they grow into maturity, they become very sensitive and aware of the needs of others.  This is what happens in prayer.  It is one of the fruits of union with the Lord.  We become more gentle in dealing with human frailty because we are so conscious of our own weaknesses.  We've been there.  We're there every moment, so we stop being judgmental.  St. Philip Neri said, "But for the grace of God go I!"  How true.  We become more obedient in the sense of responding more quickly to His promptings.  The minute we pick up what the Lord wants, we do it.  We don't argue with Him, we don't procrastinate, we do it, and we do it with great joy.  That will come more quickly because that's the very essence of prayer. 

So if you want to check yourself to see how you are doing in prayer, check your surrender, check your joyful and prompt obedience to the Holy Spirit as you understand what God is saying to you, whether it be through Scripture or private prayer.  Obedience is the essence of prayer.  It's the heart of prayer.  The letting go becomes easier and easier as we go through these states because as we are so involved with the real Presence within that we have learned to trust.  He has our total trust and the letting go becomes easier.  Not that there isn't any pain, because there is usually a sacrifice in letting go, but it will not be as difficult to let go because we have become so accustomed to the One we hang onto.

Excerpt from Contemplative Prayer series, "Bearing Fruit in the Word," Omaha, NE, 1984.