"About This Life" (Acts 5:20) # 9
The holy Spirit calls me to a
conversion that is always the beginning of new life. His call is always to a
greater love, life and faith. There is a whole new self waiting
to gradually spring forth through "the grain of wheat" (see John 12:24) of my
humanity. This new life, new creation, is always in Jesus--the risen Jesus, the
resurrected Lamb, and it is always teeming with rich interior life. Yet, only
when I have a profound encounter with God's love will I hear this call to
radical change. Without my hearing the Spirit's call it will be impossible for
me to grow into a mature faith and mature spiritual life. Only God can give me
the grace to be more and more aware of the mystery of sinfulness in my heart. I
need to pray actively for this grace.
In his book, The Hidden Self Grown
Strong, Fr. George Aschenbrenner, S.J. Says:
"Repentance with its purifying
pain and suffering, is the only way to this urgently longed-for newness...Only
a heart seared clean in the humiliation of repentance can respond to that
invitation to the new" (Aschenbrenner, p. 109, 112).
Repentance
will always call me to a surrender of self, for it involves a dying experience,
a crucifying of my old, false illusory self. Because God desires to both enlighten
and deepen the "heart vision" of my faith, the holy Spirit must purify my heart
of its spiritual blindness and deafness.
A new heart will always depend upon
how deeply I allow myself to surrender to the Spirit in the process of
transformation--thus, how profoundly transformed I allow myself to be by God's
holy and gloriously transforming love. This much is certain: It is
precisely in the dying that the new is born. God desires that I become so
intimately identified with Jesus as to become Jesus in the world today--to
"become God's Heart for the world, [an] agent of love, inviting others into
God's Heart in Jesus" (Aschenbrenner, p. 117).
Scriptures: 2 Cr. 5: 17; Gal. 6:15; Eph. 4:24
Questions:
1)
Am
I afraid to pray actively for the grace to see my sins more clearly?
2)
Am
I willing to surrender completely to the process of transformation?
I have been created by the God of
Love, and re-created by the redemptive Love of Jesus. My heart has a deep
desire to experience love and to become whom I behold in contemplative prayer.
Yet, both my heart and mind need to be reformed if I am to be aware of and
respond to the call of love more generously. The gift of a sensitized,
interior awareness is a most essential gift of the holy Spirit desperately
needed today. St. Paul speaks to the Corinthian community about this gift
of awareness: "Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test
yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?" (2
Cr. 13:5).
Today, many people in our culture
unfortunately find themselves living daily life often in an 'atmosphere' of
incessant busyness, noisiness and distraction. How imperative it is, then, to ask the holy Spirit for a gift of interior
awareness and recognition--to be sensitive to the loving presence of God in my
daily life; to be able to recognize God's love and to respond to it; and, to be
able to say with the beloved disciple in my daily living, "it is the Lord"
(John 21:7).
In his book, The Hidden Self Grown
Strong, Fr. George Aschenbrenner, S.J. speaks of
the essential, daily need to make time for a "consciousness examen"
(a formal examen or awareness examen).
This is a time each day of holy Spirit-led prayer that focuses on how God has
loved me in the ordinary details of this particular day. I hold up my day to
the light of the Father's love that is always available to me through each day.
As I make the formal examen a daily practice my heart
becomes more aware of God's ever-present love, and also more aware of "how
often and how easily [I] can be oblivious to that, or refuse to respond to
love. This realization awakens [my] heart with healthy guilt with sorrow and
repentance (which are experiences of God's love as well)" (Aschenbrenner,
p. 107). As I encounter "God's forgiveness in Jesus as a repentant sinner
sorrow is transformed into hopeful, vigorous gratitude and a zeal burning to
serve God's loving justice in the world" (Aschenbrenner,
p. 107).
This justice is God's merciful fidelity
to His saving will revealed above all in Jesus. Jesus brought about this loving
justice through the sacrificial offering of his life on the cross. Jesus
desires to continue to live this victory of justice through the humanity of
each contemplative intercessor:
"I, the LORD, have called you for
the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand; I formed you,
and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations..." (Is.
42:6-7)
Scriptures: Luke 24:15-16; 1Cr. 3:16;
Questions:
3)
Do
I make the time each day for an awareness examen in
order to "get in touch" with the moments of God's love?
4)
Am
I aware as well of at least a few of the times each day when I have been too
self-preoccupied or when I have refused to respond to God's love?
