The Path To Holiness, To Sainthood
Many times is seems impossible to find the path to God, no matter how hard we search. Today I saw a bumper sticker that said something like, “Lost? Look for God!”
I used to tell my children that if they are lost, stay where they were, and I would come and find them. They could easily evade me if they wandered about without direction, looking for me.
God is always looking for us. Sometimes we have to sit and have faith that He will find us. We must trust Him.
written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael
IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:
There is a very famous little, I don't know if it is a poster or whatever, that says, "'God is dead.' - Nietzsche" and underneath it it says, "'Nietzsche is dead.' - God."
And when you go back and think. Julius Caesar was a very powerful man. Augustus Caesar. They created the Roman Empire. They were powerful beyond compare. Julius Caesar was assassinated. Augustus Caesar, what, lived to be 70 years old.
Where are they? I don't see them.
We have the great presidents. We have great men. We've great men leading history.
Where are they? They're gone.
And I look at myself and I look at these people who are so powerful. The President of the United States. Man, that guy is the most powerful person in the world!
In 1923, who was the President of the United States? Other than John, who was alive then (teasing), you don't know. He was so powerful. We don't even know who he was.
When we look at the reality of our existence, of who we are, God looks at us kind of the way we might look at a little bug. "Hey, look at that! There’s a little bug down there." We're nothing. We can't come to God and say, "Hey God, [whistle] this is Michael. I want you to listen to me!"
[God replies:] "Who'd you say you were? Where are you?"
But...!! But...!! When we come to God and say, "God, we are nothing." I love that, holding both hands at the same time. "We are nothing without you. There is nothing that we are. We are nothing… the youngest child, the most helpless child that we are able to hold and love, because I love children, is more powerful, and stronger, and important than we are in Your context. You look at us. You created us! We can't even say, ‘See that boy over there. I created him. Well, with his mother, she helped.’ I can't even do that!”
And so when we look at the world, one of the things, and Therese of Lisieux, Terese of the Child Jesus, recognizes very well, is at the core of a spirituality: we WANT to talk to God. We WANT to be able to bring ourselves into the presence of God. How do we do it?
The first question is: what does it mean? I've talked about this before. You know, my grandson yesterday, three years old, was being an obnoxious twit. So what do you do with a three-year old who is being an obnoxious twit? You say, "Sweetheart, you're tired." And you get him to go to sleep.
You can read his mind. How many times have you read the minds of your children? They'll come up and they'll have a look on their face and you'll go, "Don't do that! Don't even think about it!" "How'd you know that, mom?"
And that's our relationship with God. We want to allow ourselves to be, as transparent to God as a small child is to us. As Nathan is to his grandparents. We want to have our relationship with God at that simplistic level, because that reflects the reality. And Jesus says to us [that] it’s in that reality of the relationship of that closeness to God where we are nothing. We are not a cipher, there is nothing He has to look at and go, "I want to get past all that crap so I can figure out what they are, sorry, all that stuff, I want to get past it all so we know who the person really is. I want to get past all of those things that prevent him or her from communicating at the very core of their being. How best to do it?”
To be a child. To go to God as a child. And this is what Therese of the Child Jesus, really, in her autobiography, talked about. The simplicity of our faith. It really isn't a complicated thing. We are not that important. It's all these little things that we build up around ourselves that make us so important, in our view. But the reality is, we're children. And when we come to God, not saying, "Well, God, You know I am important!" which is a barrier. God just says, "Okay, when you get over yourself, come and let's talk."
When we are able to go to Him as a child. A child comes up to mommy, and says, "Mommy, I hurt my foot!" or "Mommy, my older brother wasn't nice to me." There's no subterfuge there! Well, I was the older brother, so there is some degree of subterfuge because most of the time I really wasn't that mean to my sister, but that's another issue.
We need to go to God as a child because ultimately our spirituality, our prayer life, comes down to communicating with God. To open ourselves up in the entirety of our existence and communicate with God. At the very core of where we are, to communicate with God.
And how can we do that? We do that better is if we come before God as a child? None of the trappings, none of the importance, none of the significance. "I'm old and I'm significant. I'm venerable. I am all of these things." No, you're not. Not from God's perspective. And when we allow ourselves to strip away all of those things, that is when we are best able to communicate with God.
And think about it in this context. Think about it in your lives. Something horrible happens. The death of a parent. The death of a wife, a husband. It is that point in time that we many times can communicate best with God because we have had everything stripped away from us. The thing that we love has been stripped away from us. And it is at that point that we are most like a vulnerable child. And that we can open our hearts, and our minds and our souls to God and He is there to listen to us. We feel His presence. We know His presence. And this is what Therese of Lisieux was talking about. The talk about the spirituality of allowing ourselves to be a child with God. To allow ourselves to turn and become like children so we can enter the kingdom of heaven.
October 10, 2018