Including Jesus in Everything

So it’s that time of year again when everyone starts making resolutions and it seems to me there’s something missing from most of them: God.  Not to say that some resolutions aren’t about Him, but rather that almost none include Him.  Everything is I will do this or I will do that.

The most common New Year’s resolution is of course to lose weight, which is a fine goal (I too could stand to be in a little better shape).  But how many of us will include Jesus in that? Or seek His help to accomplish it?  It’s as though we put up a partition between Jesus and certain parts of our lives.  I myself am certainly guilty of this as well, and can’t quite explain why.  Surely if the God of everything cares enough about me to die for me, He wants to be included in every aspect of my life.  Not just at Mass or when I’m volunteering or saying the Rosary, but even when I’m going to the gym, or playing ice hockey or trying to keep my patience with family members.

And yet while it feels natural for me to include Him on the back end of things (i.e. to say thank you for another workout without injury), I tend to give Him the shaft on the front end.  It takes discipline to get to the gym every day, and it’s something I tend to think that I do myself.  But is that true?  Do I really do anything by myself?  Is He not the cause of every good thing done?  Are not all virtues gifts from God? Am I so foolish as to think that even small victories over laziness are my own working? (Apparently, yes, lol).

Even when I want to acknowledge God, why does it sometimes feel strange to include Him in everything?  Am I not supposed to do everything for His glory, whatever I happen to be doing?  “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).    Still, even knowing this, it seems awkward to me to ask God to help me get to the gym, or for the Holy Spirit to help my will conquer my desire as I’m staring down the dessert table.  But I suppose that shows just how long a journey of faith I still have ahead of me.

So here’s my prayer that whatever your New Year’s resolution is, be it trying to quit smoking or drinking, or to get out of debt or to spend more time with family  (other popular resolutions) that you’ll open the door a crack and let Jesus in!  He wants to help.  I say we let Him!  Happy New Year!

Living After the Coming of Jesus

It’s always around Christmas time, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, that I’m reminded of how blessed we all are to be living in this time period, A.D.   As Jesus told his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see!  For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Luke 10:23-24).  We all have the good fortune of being able to know Jesus directly, to learn about Him and His life, His teachings, His love.

I think it must have difficult for many Jews B.C.  They knew of God mostly through His law.  They learned of Him through the Torah and all of their traditions, but there was always a separation between them and God.  Even in the Temple, God was only present in the Most Holy Place, and the average worshiper was not allowed to enter.  In fact, only the high priest could enter, and he could only do so once a year on the Day of Atonement.

To separate God in the Most Holy Place from the rest of the Temple there was a great veil, or curtain.  And while this was obviously necessary to physically cut off everyone from the Most Holy Place, it also seems perfectly metaphorical as well.  God was in some sense hidden from all worshipers.

Which brings me back to how grateful I am to be living now.  Not only is God no longer hidden from us, but the Messiah has revealed Himself and come to redeem us all!  We can now  know God’s one and only Son, with no separation, no curtain.  He has also sent the Holy Spirit to be with us and guide us.

What a difference this makes, especially in daily life!  To be able to:

• turn to Jesus, who we know experienced our human struggles, and lay our problems at His feet.
• find meaning in our suffering, if we offer it up to Jesus and carry our cross with His help.
• receive Him in the Eucharist, which strengthens us and slowly but surely transforms us.
• turn to the Holy Spirit and find guidance.
• ask Him to help us pray better, since we do not know how to pray as we ought (Rom 8:26).

We have so much to be thankful for!  God has given us more than we could ever need to turn to Him, to know Him and to love Him.  May we do this our whole lives long!

Love & the Birth of Jesus

Belated Merry Christmas!  I hope your celebration of the Lord’s birth was filled with peace, love and joy!

And if we remember the reason for the season, how could it not be?  It’s such an incredible moment in history that we commemorate on the 25th.  The birth of our Savior, the Word becoming flesh!  This is a shocking thing (though admittedly we can forget just how shocking as we become more and more familiar with it).  That God, Creator of heaven and earth, through Whom all things came to be, from Whom we have received grace after grace, became human to redeem us.  He deigned to come down from heaven, to lower Himself to share in our humanity, all out of pure love!

It’s certainly one thing to talk about this incredible love of Jesus, but quite another to experience it.  Even if it can’t be felt at all times, to know something of this unbounded love He has for us is what being a Christian is all about.  Instead of getting to know the love of God through the law, we are now able to know His love from Him directly.  And what a gift it is to know this love!  Because this love sets us on fire.  It makes us forget ourselves and serve Him (which in turn leads us to serve others as well).  It makes us want to sing His praises and spend time with Him all day long.  And it is this amazing love Jesus became human to share with us!  This is the work Jesus began with his birth.  What great reason we have for celebration!

May we all experience His love in new and greater ways this season!  And may we praise Him for His glory!

Why Does God Want Our Time?

Sometimes it strikes me as extraordinarily incredible that God, all-powerful and all-knowing, creator of every single thing, cares about me…and you too, of course.  I’m a microscopic speck in terms of the big picture (if you’d like a beautiful visual reminder of this, check out this tour from Earth to the edges of the Universe).

And yet though He doesn’t need me, He still wants me.  He desires that I give Him my time, my thoughts, and ultimately my life.  But why?  Why does He care?  What’s in it for Him? (asked in true cynical, human fashion).  Well where else would we go for answers but the Bible?

We’re told “He will rejoice over you with gladness, / and renew you in his love, / He will sing joyfully because of you” (Zephaniah 13:17).  How amazing!  This tells us that when we spend time with God, in prayer for instance, we give Him joy – we cause God, who is pure joy, to rejoice and sing!

If you’re anything like me, this demands a radical adjustment in terms of the way I view spending time with God.  I know it pleases God when I give Him my time, but in light of that Bible passage, “pleases” is an incredibly poor adjective.  It doesn’t do God justice nor does it help me.  Am I more likely to set aside 15 minutes for quiet prayer time every day if I carry the mental image that it “pleases” God or if I think such prayer will cause Him to “rejoice”?  It is so much more powerful to think of God as reveling in us and singing!  Nothing short of immense love would lead God, creator of heaven and earth, to celebrate in such ways just because little ‘ol me spends time with Him.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of God as this mammoth entity who is distant and metaphorically pats us on the head when we follow His will.  But that is not the God of the Bible.  He is personal.  He is our Father.  He wants to scoop us up in His arms and rejoice and sing over us!  Makes spending time with God sound even better, doesn’t it?

Faith and the Dark Night of the Soul

In “Abandonment to Divine Providence” (a book I highly, highly recommend!) Jean-Pierre de Caussade writes, “The life of faith is the untiring pursuit of God through all that disguises and disfigures him and, as it were, destroys and annihilates him.”  An amazingly powerful quote and yet at the same time not something we want to hear.  If were honest we’d probably admit that we’d like faith to be easy, to sail through pain and hardship with ease, solid in our faith like  a rock.

Of course life’s not like that.  As much as we may grow in our faith during good times, it never quite fully prepares us for the hard times.  No matter how strongly we believed before, doubt creeps in during those dark nights of the soul, as St. John of the Cross referred to them.  But of course that’s why faith is so hard sometimes.  It takes work to find God in the darkness; to force yourself to turn to Him in prayer when you don’t want to; to have faith when life’s experiences are screaming at us that God is either a fairytale or imaginably cruel.

Though we may not like it, tough times test our mettle (there’s a reason faith is a virtue!). They provide the most opportunity for us to grow in our relationship with God and they also provide opportunity for us to demonstrate our faith to others.  Your friends may not think much of you going to Church every week (or more often, for our Catholic friends out there), but they’ll notice the amazing calm you have before your wife’s surgery, or the hope and strength you display through the pain of your mother’s funeral.

And while knowing all this certainly doesn’t make me ask for these dark nights of the soul to come upon me, it does give me great solace when they do.

Is Christianity a Crutch?

In our increasingly self-sufficient and independent-minded society, religion is sometimes portrayed as a crutch.  As though its a weakness on the part of one who practices it because they acknowledge a dependence on someone else (even if it’s God!).  Some ask, “who would live according to all the Church’s rules and commands and submit to such an authority unless they were weak willed, confused, or worse?”

It is a great tragedy that people will generally acknowledge the benefit of self-improvement and mentors in business and yet bash the Church for her guidance (though admittedly not the word they would use).  How can it ever be a weakness to humbly admit you don’t have all the answers and to decide to rectify the situation as far as you are able?  No one belittles a student who looks to a teacher to demonstrate and teach methods and solutions to problems.  Is this need for a teacher a weakness?  I don’t know anyone who would say so.
So why do some take issue with the Church being a teacher?  God speaks through the Church, and He is the greatest of all Teachers.  And whereas a student can eventually outgrow a particular teacher, God can never be outgrown.  He is infinite our finite minds will never be able to learn all there is to know from Him.

But of course Jesus is more than just a Teacher.  He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.  The One who has redeemed us all.  Those who can’t understand the need and desire to center their lives around God must have a either a lack of information, or just plain wrong information.  Who wouldn’t want to center their lives around infinite Love, Joy, Peace, Justice, Beauty, Wisdom, etc?  Religion isn’t a set of arcane rules demanding total submission just because some cosmic creator says so.  It’s a series of truths meant to prepare us for infinite love, joy, peace, etc. by molding us into beings who will be able to accept these gifts when offered to us and respond with rightful love and praise for the gift-Giver.  Only a prideful fool would reject an eternity of these virtues because he was given them, and didn’t acquire them on his own.  How sad it is for those who are sure they have all the answers and prefer to do it “their” way!

In any case, if submission to Jesus is a weakness, then may I be the weakest of all.

Does Suffering and Pain have Meaning, Purpose?

Suffering.  I know it’s kind of a depressing way to begin my foray into the blogosphere, but it’s been weighing heavily on me lately.  How can we make sense of pain?  How can we find meaning in tragedies and disasters that seem completely pointless and devastating?  How can we move past all the platitudes of well-intentioned loved ones who just don’t know what to say and instead find relief, healing, purpose?

God knows I don’t have the answer, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that He does.  Though in a particular moment it may not make me “feel” better, knowing that in His omniscience and omnipotence He can imbue everything with significance and purpose is an immense lightening of my burden.  How do I know that He can (and perhaps more importantly, will) do that?  Because He already has.  In fact, He took the worst of all possible suffering and turned it into the greatest of victories.  He turned the greatest of all injustices, the cruelest of all tortures, the worst crime in all humanity…deicide, the murder of God, the Crucifixion of Jesus…and turned in into humanity’s chance at Salvation.  While this boggles my mind a bit, it also gives me immense hope.  If He can turn the greatest suffering into the greatest purpose, how much more easily He can do it with my hurts and struggles!

When I’m in pain I sometimes wonder what Mary or John thought as Jesus’ body was taken down from the Cross.  Surely in their pain they wondered why God would let such a thing happen.  Surely they wondered if God was going to be true to His promises, if there could possibly be any reason whatsoever for Jesus meeting such a cruel and unfair end.  And for three days I imagine all they wondered was, “why?!”  In this struggle God wanted them to have faith.  Even though they couldn’t see that He had orchestrated the most beautiful avenue for our redemption, God wanted them to trust Him.

And that’s what He asks of all us during times of trial and strife.  Easier said than done of course.  Like so much of life, it is simple but not easy.  But the first step is to turn to Him.  During this past week I’ve often thought to myself, “Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief.”  I know better than anyone that I don’t have the faith to see myself through, but I do believe that if I ask Him for it, He will provide it.  That if I give Him my grief, sorrow, anger and everything else I’m feeling, it will help me to trust Him more.  To believe that even if I can’t see how, He will make sense of everything.  That it won’t be in vain.  That eventually I’ll start to understand (even if complete understanding has to wait until Heaven).  And even if it still hurts right now, that knowledge is enough to get me through the day, and that’s enough.  Glory to God in the highest!