When we start out on our religious quest, it is usually because we believe that God will solve our problems and satisfy our needs. He keeps us safe and healthy, helps us over hurdles, and allows us to live our lives with the minimum of pain and inconvenience. In return we obey his rules, but live our own lives and fulfill our own ambitions. We live within the parameters he has set except when it is too inconvenient. We follow our own ambitions and are only motivated to pray when these ambitions are threatened or when we are stimulated by some outside factor like a sermon, a pilgrimage, or a religious film. Our hunger and thirst for God in himself and for what he wants to do in the world is merely theoretical without substance in reality.” (p 47, “The Road to Royal Joy: The Beatitudes and the Eucharist”)
The reflection above is often a hard reality we all must face in our “religious quest.” It is overcoming our egos and base desires and moving beyond into the selfless desire of unitive love with the Most Holy Trinity, the Sacred Heart in the middle. The Father has placed a passion in us to hunger and thirst for justice, peace: for a life within community. When Jesus invites us into His Body, The Body of Christ, this is the moment of choosing which road we will follow in the moment. The righteousness of life is the coming together in choosing to look into the gift of the other and open our eyes to see the face of Jesus looking back at us.
Two of the greatest moments, in my prayer, where this hunger is manifested is Joseph at the manger and Mary at the cross. In each of these two moments, the “religious quest” comes in contact with the movement of the Holy Spirit in touching both the Father and the Son. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us this example, “The Holy Spirit is the master of the interior life. By giving birth to the “inner man,” justification entails the sanctification of his whole being: ‘Just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification. . . . But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.’” (#1995 Rom 6:19, 22)
At the stable in Bethlehem, Saint Joseph, kneeling at the manger, chooses to yield to the greater gift. From the moment he knew of the Incarnation, to his explicit yes to accept the role of husband and foster-father, to his care and journey with our Blessed Mother, his life lived and ultimately his happy death with the Son of God and Mary praying with him at his bedside, Joseph was asked to act in justice, choosing to be with and being sanctified by the presence of God in his proper vocation. He lived the words of St. John the Baptist before they were spoken , “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3:30) Am I willing to decrease…let go and forgive…choose to serve…to sacrifice…to show mercy…to love the other?
At the cross we hear Jesus speak these words to His Mother. “Woman, behold, your son!” (Jn 19:26) In a few moments she will take the body of her son into her arms as he is taken from the cross but in this she takes us into her arms not in death but in the life that is promised in and through Jesus her son. This exchange of love opens the world to the greater gift of life, going beyond the momentary and entering into an eternity where we become true daughters and sons of the living God. Jesus invites Mary, as he invites each of us, to behold the other in seeing our Lord alive and present in each of us. Mary with love takes the Beloved Disciple, and in turn takes each of us into her embrace, just as she held her son in both life and death, knowing there was more. Am I, like Mary, willing to see Jesus in the other…to take the hurt and sorrowing into my arms…to embrace the difficult with trust…to share life with an open heart…to hear and follow the voice of Jesus no matter where it leads?
Our hunger and thirst for God begins with and invitation to love…to become small and to open our hearts to the greater…this is our true quest.
God bless
Fr. Mark