Teachings

   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?