Following the Trinity

Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son's is another, the Holy Spirit's another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one.   - The Athanasius Creed

The Trinity has been the focus of my studies recently in class and in life. But I realized today that my journey with the Trinity began several years ago when I was walking down a country road in Costa Rica. It was on that road that I suddenly realized that a personal God existed and that my life needed to change.

Before my conversion, I believed in something akin to God. I was quasi-spiritual, investigating all sorts of different religions, but meanwhile making a wide ring around Christianity. I had absorbed a common secular view that most Christians are ignorant, uneducated sheep and I refused to associate myself with the religion.

I wanted to be “spiritual” but I did not want anything to do with Jesus, I had heard His name too much. I was full of arrogance and sought spiritual novelty, (a common disease among the prideful).

When I believed that God was an It, spirituality merely took a periphery place in my life. After all, why is it important to pursue God if He is not pursuing you? But the moment I realized that God had a personality, He loved me, wanted me to know Him and had a plan for my life, that was the moment my life changed.

The moment God revealed Himself to me as a personal God; I began to know the person of the Trinity who is called the Father. I knew that God cared for me, protected me and looked after me. I knew that God is not male in the same sense that my earthly father is male but I did know instinctively that “He” was the proper pronoun to call God, when a pronoun is needed for this awe-inspiring being that transcends all categories.

I slowly began to get to know this Father. I stayed with the Father for a long time. Even after moving into the Catholic Church, I stayed with Him and did not think much about the other persons of the Trinity, including Jesus. I was in good company after all; this is where good Muslims and Jews and other non-Christian monotheists stay, with God the Father, who is the “source and origin of all divinity.”  

But God was not satisfied with this. He began to reveal Himself to me through the person of the Holy Spirit. I met the Holy Spirit most powerfully when I was confirmed a few years ago. By God’s grace, I actually felt the action of the Holy Spirit in my body at the moment of confirmation and described it later in a poem, part of which is below:

The oil drips down my forehead

I can feel the Spirit sinking into my soul,

I breath deeply

My pores widen

The Spirit, like the oil, sinks into my being

Making Himself a home

He finds the fire of my Baptism,

It is ablaze.

It was only later that I read this line in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The Holy Spirit, whose anointing permeates our whole being, is the interior Master of Christian prayer.” I love the word "permeates" to describe the presence of the Holy Spirit, this is exactly what I felt when I was confirmed.

God saved the best for last when He finally saw that I was open enough to learn more about His son Jesus. He did this through several things, the most important being Eucharistic Adoration. It is impossible to spend time in a quiet room with Jesus and not get to know Him.

He also reintroduced His Son through a movie that I knew from childhood but had not watching in years: Jesus of Nazareth, (best movie ever). One Lent I watched this entire movie and I finally was reunited with the man I was in love with as a child, this God-man who still magnetizes people 2,000 years after his death and resurrection.  I entered into the magnetism that is the person of Jesus Christ and I have never stepped out. 

Only God could charm the world like Jesus has. Only God could save us from death. I knew instinctively that all of these persons I had met within God, were all the same God. The God who called me out of darkness, the God who knit me in my mother's womb, the God who died to save me.

This Lent, let us enter into the mystery of the Trinity. 

The Father who gave His son Jesus to die for us. Jesus, whose very name is a prayer, the God-man who came to save us from our sins and reunite us with His Father. The Holy Spirit who permeates our being, if we allow Him, teaching us how to pray.

We deserved eternal death for our sins but God took our place. God allowed nails to be driven through His hands and feet, a crown of thorns to be placed on His head, because He knows and loves each and every one of you. Enter into this mystery that is God, Creator of the universe, dying on a cross. Let us allow this mystery, the forgiveness of our sins, wash over us and fill us with gratitude this Lenten season.

Lent is coming, are you ready?

Our Lenten readings begin with the temptation of Jesus in the desert. In the video below, Fr. Barron discusses how we are tempted in much the same ways that Jesus was:

 

"The devil tries to order our lives toward something other than our Creator...."

We are all meant to enter the desert with Jesus during Lent and confront the ways that the devil is tempting us to center our lives on something other than God.

C.S. Lewis' book, The Screwtape Letters illustrates this idea. In it, a "senior" devil gives advice to another devil telling him that mediocrity is really their goal for every person they tempt, the most sure-fire way to get someone to hell. The senior devil advises that it does not make sense to lead a person to really serious sin because there is always the danger they may have a dramatic conversion and become a saint.

Are we mediocre in our response to God's love? 

What is diverting our attention from our Creator? Are we in danger of living a life where our focus is on other things and other people, even during the few hours a week that we may be in a place of worship? 

Fr. Barron points out that we often seek things outside of God in sensual pleasure (sex, but also food, entertainment, etc), honor, and glory (self-centered living) - all of the things that Jesus was tempted with in the desert. 

Even the smallest things can be seriously diverting our attention from God - coffee, Facebook, our iPhone. How many times a day do we think about getting our coffee fix or checking Facebook in comparison to how many times we think about and converse with God? (It was not long after I kept thinking of potential Facebook statuses in mass that I realized I really needed to take a break from social media for a while).

Dear friends, let us enter this Lenten time with enthusiasm and passion. Let us strip ourselves these forty days of at least one thing in our life that lead us away from God. After the initial pain of letting go, we will start to feel a peace that is not found in anything other than living for and with God.

What is God asking you to let go of? 

It is usually the one thing you are holding on to the tightest.

Being Catholic

Many people seeing the strange outward trappings of the Catholic Church, learn superficially of some of her teachings or upon seeing its members’ sins automatically assume that the Church is a purely human institution that is misguided and backward thinking. Unfortunately, some Catholics believe this as well but many continue going to Church because they rightly recognize that the Eucharist is the most important bond that they can possibly have to Jesus.

After learning more of the theology of the Church, I found some of the reasonable explanations for why I followed the inner wisdom of my heart and made my way back to this Church that is so ridiculed in our modern times.

The Church is not simply a human institution, or a “religious Enron” as a man visiting our bookcenter recently angrily insisted. It is hard to understand this when we focus on the failings and serious sins of the human members of the Church but we must continually remind ourselves of the reason for the existence of the Church.

God loves us each in a deep and unfathomable way but our relationship with Him is never purely individual. He has always willed to save us not as one person but as a people, united in the Holy Spirit.

It is the Church that can bring about this unity that binds us together through a common profession of faith, celebration of sacraments and apostolic succession. These three things are what keep us from falling apart, from spinning off into breakaway groups and losing part or most of the deposit of faith that Jesus gave us in Scripture.

You may rightly be saying - but wait Catholics have a lot in their tradition that is not directly from Scripture. That is true. The concept of the Trinity, accepted by virtually all Christian denominations, was not fully developed until 325AD. Does this mean that it was not found in Scripture? No. It simply means that the Holy Spirit is still speaking to us, helping us to understand Scripture and to learn more about God through the Church, through the Holy Spirit speaking through the Church.

That being said, the Church cannot subtract or change the teachings of Scripture. This is very important in our modern day and age when there is a huge amount of pressure for the Church to change with the times, even if it is opposed to Scripture and Jesus' teachings.

While the Church cannot subtract or change Scripture, it can add to the teachings of Scripture. This does not come from the authority of the Church but rather the authority of Christ. The Church is not here to add dogmas willy nilly but rather their primary purpose is to preserve what Scripture and Jesus has given us and if you look at the bulk of Catholic teaching, that is what it does. Given that, when the pope does declare teachings that are Scriptural but not directly found in Scripture,  the addition is not mechanical like a room being added to a house. Peter Kreeft likens the Church’s Sacred Tradition to fruit blossoming on the tree of Scriptural truths; it is not a human addition but rather a divinely inspired discovery (i.e. the Immaculate Conception) revealed to the Church from the love of God.

The Church is also holy, not because all of its members are holy but because the head of the Church, Jesus, is holy and He pours His holiness on us so that we can be shining examples of holiness in the world and lead others to Christ who we are imitating. Mother Teresa is an example of this holiness that the whole world recognizes.

But the Catholic Church does not have a monopoly on holiness (obviously). There are many holy people of other faiths and religions but because the Church provides the strongest means to holiness through the graces of the sacraments, people are given a greater opportunity to become holy within the confines of the Church. I know this sounds arrogant but truthfully it is the opposite. It is because of this teaching that I realize that whatever sanctity I gain in this life, it comes from Jesus and the graces He gives me through the Church, it is not due to my ability to discipline myself in the spiritual life or any of my talents or gifts. I can attribute it all to Jesus, who pours His graces out on me, through the Church.

The Church is catholic or universal because God is universal. He is Truth and Truth does not apply to one person or one nation, it applies to the entire world. God is THE universal truth, which is why His Church must be universal. It cannot be confined to one part of the world or only applicable to one kind of person. It is easy to become narrow in our thinking, to focus only on the United States or one group of people or on particular aspects of our faith that are relevant to our world view. Catholics are not exempt from this problem. But we are a universal Church, heading towards heaven together, not country by country or issue by issue.

You may be saying what about other Christians who are not Catholic, are you saying they are not part of the Church? Not necessarily, the Catholic Church recognizes that the Body of Christ extends beyond the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church. But there is only one Body of Christ. Division is not from the Holy Spirit, and there is only one Truth - God. Therefore, what divides us must have answers and we must strive together to find these answers, to find unity in Christ who is the Truth.

Many people, including many Catholics, refer to the Church hierarchy with disdain and anger but if it were not for the continuity of apostolic succession from the apostles to our current pope, where would our Church be today? Gone. Jesus knew what He was doing when He established apostolic succession. It is not because He is a fascist or because He thinks men are better than women, it is simply because He knew what would work. He is God after all.

So, Jesus chose twelve male apostles, He told Peter that He was particularly important and upon Him, Jesus would build His Church (Mt 16: 13-19). These apostles of Christ chose successors to pass on the message of Jesus and that is how apostolic succession was established. Contrary to a lot of current thinking about the hierarchy of the Church, it is not by nature backward or dictatorial, it is simple there to continually adhere to the teachings of Jesus Christ as put forward in Scripture. That is why the Catholic Church does not change with the winds of popular opinions. The Church has to stick with what has been given to us.

The Church is not just an outwardly visible institution on earth. We are all united in Christ together and not just on earth. The Church is composed of those people here on earth, in purgatory and in heaven. That is why Catholics ask for saints’ prayers, it is the same for us to ask St. Therese to pray for us as it is to ask our Christian brothers and sisters on earth to keep an intention in their prayer. We are all one family and we are in this together.

Some of you may be asking – this is all nice but what about non-Christians – how do they fit in this picture? The Catholic Church clearly teaches that there is no salvation outside of the Church, meaning you cannot enter heaven without being a member of the Church. This has been a teaching from early Christianity and Jesus Himself said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). But it is really important to understand that this does not mean that non-Catholics or Christians cannot be saved. The Church teaches that people who, through no fault of their own, do not know Jesus and understand what He has done for them, can still enter heaven. This is pretty obvious to me but I am astounded by how many people think that the Catholic Church believes all non-Catholics will go to hell. This is simply not true.

But, this does not mean that those people who DO know Jesus are off the hook though. The Church does not dare say that everyone automatically gets into heaven because God is merciful, (although some Catholics will tell you differently). But Jesus Himself does not say that everyone is saved - "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it” (Mt 7:13). If Jesus Himself says that many are not entering heaven, He does not tell us this to scare us but out of love, the love of a Father for His children. And it is this same love Jesus gives to us that impels us to share Christ with others. We do this because we want others to share in the joys of Christ, not because we are positive that their religion or faith will not lead them to heaven.

If you have read to the bottom of this post and are not Catholic, I congratulate you on your tolerance! I hope that everyone who reads this will come to understand the Catholic perspective better and I hope that what I write only leads to unity because God wants us to be together on earth to prepare us for a life of being together in heaven.

May God bless you dear friends.

This blog post inspired by readings from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic Christianity by Peter Kreeft (highly recommended!)

Journey of Faith

God designed us so we are naturally inclined to search for Him. God constantly draws us to Himself and we search for Him, whether we are aware of it or not. 

Sometimes we reject God, and there are many reasons why this may happen. We may be ignorant or indifferent. We may be unhappy with the way the world is and want God to change it or blame God. Or we may have been scandalized by those who profess a belief in God and then proceed to do immoral or even evil things. We may be attached to our sin and not want to mess with anything that might lead us away from a life of sin we are enjoying. There are many things that lead us away from God. 

But there are also many things that lead us to God. One thing is the world itself. God created the world – the butterflies, the grass, the mountains, even the cockroaches - all of it can point us to Him. The order, the beauty, the movement, the possibility, it all leads us to Him. The human person also points us to God with his natural inclination toward truth and his desire for true happiness that can only be found in God. The human person also has a natural moral sense that is the voice of God within his soul. It is the soul also that points a person to God because it is a sliver of eternity inside of us that is always straining towards God. Our reason leads us to God and to faith. God gave us our natural reason in order that we may learn more about him; that is the purpose of our reason. So, if we are using reason properly, it will always lead us to Truth.

So, how are we asked to respond to God? 

With faith. 

Faith is a verb and a noun. It is a verb because when we have faith, we let God into our souls – we allow Him to run the show. It is a noun because in order to have faith we must have faith in formulas or creeds that describe what we believe. These formulas or creeds never fully express the truths they communicate: 

The believer’s act [of faith] does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities [which they express]. – Thomas Aquinas

Faith is different from reason but it never contradicts it. Faith is different because it requires obedience, even if we do not understand in order to have faith we must accept. Obedience is not a popular concept in our culture. But how can we refuse obedience to our Creator? We must obey what God reveals to us through Scripture, and for Catholics through Sacred Tradition (which is also God's Word, it is Tradition with a capital "T," whose source is God).

Faith requires we believe in things unseen, not immediately provable. But our faith is not contrary to our freedom or to reason. God never coerces us to have faith. And if we believe something that natural reason proves wrong, then our faith (the verb) is misplaced and our faith (the noun) is misinformed.

God, in His great kindness determined that our faith would not be entirely blind but would be backed by natural reason and backed by signs of revelation – miracles, saints, holiness, stability throughout time, prophecies, etc – look for these things and you will not be far from the object of your faith. 

 May God bless you on your journey of faith!

 

(Ideas are inspired by and a loose summary of parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it's so beautiful!)

Happy Valentine's Day

Love is the effective willing of the good of the other:

May you love effectively this Valentine's Day and all days!

Follow Your Heart

God is a spring of living water which flows unceasingly into the hearts of those who pray.

                              

                                               ~ St. Louis de Montfort

I recently cleaned out an old email account and as I read through several old emails from my college days my jaw dropped. I was shocked at the person I was. I seesawed between an awe of the saucy, cutting way I articulated myself and a horror of my arrogance that was through the roof.

I also wondered if recent years have led to a serious drop in my IQ as I read articulate emails discussing the intricacies of Kant’s categorical imperative and shot questions back and forth with my professors in a cavalier way that indicated to me that I was really just kind of showing off. 

“Who was this girl?” I wondered.

Even as this thought crossed my mind I smiled, I knew the answer. I have not become any less intelligent. I am just simpler; like a more purified glass of water rather than a complicated cocktail. I am no longer a creation of my own making.

Recently, I got into a discussion with someone who does not believe in the divinity of Jesus. He gave me several arguments for his beliefs and I set off to try and prove him wrong. As I dived into a part of theology I had never really explored before, I felt a certain fear behind my frenetic pod-cast listening and internet browsing.

What was I afraid of?

I sat down in the chapel to discern what was going on in my heart. As I drank in the peace I began to realize that in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Theresa, how could you have joined a religious order, let alone a religion without being able to defend the divinity of Jesus?” I really was flabbergasted at myself for lacking such fundamental knowledge concerning the Christian faith.

When I stepped away from organized religion I was fourteen and at the time I told my mom, “I know plenty of bad Christians. I am going to be a good person. I don’t think I need a religion to do that.”

Spending more than ten years away from the Christian faith I depended entirely on my reason to lead me down the road of life, to help me to act ethically. I thought I was smart so I could make it on my own. I felt I did not need traditions or doctrines to hold me down. I did not need anything to figure things out; I could do it all by myself. Reason was my god. It was the answer to everything.

College life taught me to depend even more on my mind. I learned to disdain anything not well-reasoned. Most liberal arts schools emphasize growth in “critical thinking” but from my experience this often translates to learning not just methods of logical reasoning but the art of harsh criticism, of tearing something apart until nothing remains except self satisfied smiles.

I hope you do not mistake what I am saying for some kind of fundamentalist emphasis on faith, with no respect for the faculties of our mind. On the contrary, I give partial credit to my intellect for leading me back to God. One thing I realized as my conversion grew closer was that since I believed in miracles, unexplained phenomenon in life that science cannot explain, I could not really remain an atheist or even an agnostic. I reasoned that since I believed the laws of nature were able to be bent it meant that Someone had to be doing the bending and I reasoned that it had to be a Someone rather than a something because an inanimate force ruling the universe is too impersonal to work miracles of healing, etc.

But there came a point in my conversion when God asked me to follow Him, not with my mind but with my heart. I made steps toward things that I did not understand. I made changes in my life because of an inner prompting. But when others asked me why, I stuttered and sounded like a fool trying to explain.

I was able to make this step toward my heart and away from my mind because God gave me the grace to have an iota of understanding of the distance between me and God. As humans, we like to build our own personal towers of Babel, shortening the distance between us and God, pretending we have everything figured out. But often, we are only willing to believe that God knows what we can understand and nothing more.

As I began this journey of the heart I felt terrified. I was used to a life where I could articulate why I was doing everything I was doing in a way that would make the person I was talking to wonder if they should be doing the same thing. I could convince others of ideas that were drenched in the perfume of falsehood simply with impressive acrobatic skills of reasoning. I was a con artist of truth because I had conned myself into thinking that truth was whatever I could figure out with the limits of my own intellect.

When I finally gave into following the inner instincts of the heart, it was like being led blindfolded across huge chasms between mountains of understanding. It was at the same moment terrifying as it was liberating. I could see myself making leaps and bounds in the spiritual life, not due to anything I was doing myself but what I was letting God do within my heart. I gave up the power of being able to articulate everything I understood so that God could lead me to levels of wisdom that only the heart could understand.

Recently, when I began my research on the divinity of Christ, I let my mind take control, the mind that has been purified to some extent of secular values and its ultra critical mode of being, but not completely. My mind can still behave like an enemy spy, always ready to pounce, to sew seeds of doubt.  My mind was still not trustworthy, yet I had gone back to depending entirely on it. As I let this anxious mind take over, I shut the curtain on my heart. I did not want wisdom that I could not articulate; I wanted to win an argument.

As I wandered through this heartless desert, I felt tiny and alone, as if I had woken up from a dream and found myself at the edge of a cliff looking down. Somehow I knew that I had been down there in the valley, deep in the mysteries of God but my mind could not connect to them. I was like a millionaire who had traded her bursting bank account for a child’s piggy bank.

When I sat in prayer in front of the tabernacle, I felt as if there was an ocean between me and Jesus. I sat as disjointed thoughts about Trinitarian theology rolled around in my head. I felt smart again, giving myself a pat on the back for delving into complicated ideas, but I was really completely lost and God was again just a distant something.

Now I realize that through this experience God is calling me to build more lines of communication between my mind and heart. He is not asking me to depend solely on my heart forever. On the contrary, I am a Catholic and if you know anything about this faith, it is the religion of faith meeting reason. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, the Church Fathers, St. Augustine, the list goes on and on of the truly great minds in the Church. The Church does not disdain philosophy or any other system of thought that pursues truth. Rather, it recognizes that God uses many things to lead a person closer to Him. Our minds are made for just that reason, to pursue the Truth, which is God, whether we know it or not.

These experiences may resonate with you, or may not, we are all different, but I want to leave you with the prayer I am saying to God as a result of this experience:

God, lead my mind to drink at the waters of my heart where you dwell. And help my heart to take the lead as I engage my God-given ability of reason to pursue you ever further, to the ends of the earth.

May God bless all of the beautiful hearts of those I love and those I do not know.

A Letter from John

Dear Theresa,

At the end of my Gospel I say, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world could contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:24).  

You have asked me to describe Jesus so that you may feel closer to Him. Maybe you wish you could have seen the way that He interacted with the people He healed. Or maybe you wish that you could have asked Him questions, or received explanations that would soothe your mind. Or perhaps you wish that you could lie against His heart and feel it beating as I did at the Last Supper.

All of these are beautiful and natural desires but the thing that I want to communicate to you more than what Jesus was like is that you already know the Jesus I knew, in some ways better than I did when I followed Him. I know this is hard to comprehend and perhaps you will never really believe me, but it is true. There is a large expanse of years between the time Jesus walked the Earth and your life now, but that leaves you with many examples of what Christ was like, lived through the lives of holy people who followed in His footsteps.

If you combine all of the things that you love about all of the Saints, that tells you about Jesus. If you imagine all of the amazing saints to come, that tells you about Jesus. He has the strength and the unflinching honesty of Padre Pio. He is the tender sweetness of St. Therese. He is the knowledge and intellect of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is the humility of St. Jeanne Jugan. He has the deep and wide love for all humanity that Bl. James Alberione had.  He has the love of justice of Dorothy Day and the love of the poor of Mother Teresa. Jesus is a brilliant diamond with many facets, and you learn more about Him through other people He puts in your path every day. 

You love beautiful things. If everything that you saw was perfect and pleasing to the eye - that would be a little what like watching Jesus was like. He was like a moving piece of art. All that He did spoke of Beauty. All that He was is Beauty. All that He loved, it made it all look beautiful in our eyes too. And you already know what this is like, how the world has opened up like a budding flower after your conversion - that is how the world was when we were with Jesus.

You want to know what He was like, in His mannerisms and way of being. I can tell you that the thirst you have for holiness and perfection, it was found in the most ideal way in Jesus. He never responded to anyone or any situation in any way except love. He loved when He healed, He loved when He chastised. He even loved when He overturned tables. We always could trust that every single action and blink of His eye was pure love.

You have Jesus now in the Eucharist, my dear daughter. I know it is hard to remember this. It is easy to forget, to take for granted, to become lukewarm but Jesus is with you now in His body, blood, soul and divinity and He humbles Himself to become your spiritual food. God becomes your spiritual food. What an amazing miracle. Maximilian Kolbe said, “If the angels could be jealous of men they would be jealous of the gift that we have in Holy Communion,” and he was right. 

So do not envy me, my daughter. Do not envy the time that I spent listening to Jesus’ heart. You listen to His heart every time you sit in prayer in front of the tabernacle. Do not envy me because I was the “beloved apostle” – YOU are His beloved apostle. Rejoice my child because Jesus is with you now, and we will all one day be together without tears or suffering in Heaven.

With eternal love,

The beloved apostle, John