Francis’s long journey into God was, at each step along the way, punctuated by learning again and again another truth that St. Augustine articulates at the beginning of his Confessions: “You have made us for You and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in You.” It was a journey that involved learning to love anew the things of creation, his love constantly being purified by the overarching love of God. It was like a return to the Garden of Eden seeking again and again to restore the Paradise humans had so cavalierly destroyed. The journey forward into God is a journey backward to an original innocence we never fully recover but where a sort of semi-paradise happens when love turns into charity. This is the highest of all loves, which Christ defined as the love of God and the love of neighbor, the total love of God leading to true love of neighbor and the true love of neighbor leading to the love of God.
I want to tell you about my evil twin brother, Paul. While I was on vacation, I went to the local diner where it’s like Cheers with food, and everyone knows your name. If you are a regular, you pour your own coffee and bus your own table. The owner told me that my brother was the happiest when he could do something for someone else. That was very nice to hear.
I have good news and bad news for you today. The good news is about the latest that I have read about Covid. It’s 99.5% survivable. Now, that’s really good news! The bad news is that life is 0.0% survivable. None of us are getting out of here alive. One day the doctor is going to tell us that our birth certificate has been canceled. When I was in Gitmo, I was outside the hooch one night with Father Seamus, a Norbertine father, while he was having a cigar. This Air Force doctor walked by and said, “You know, Padre, that’s going to kill you.” Father Seamus took a drag on his cigar and said, “And what are you planning on dying of doctor?” We are called in the 5th Commandment to take all moral and prudent means to protect our health.
We are also called to prepare ourselves to meet Christ and to grow daily in holiness. This dispels the fear that the devil creates about our passing whenever that will be. Sometimes it will be like Dorothy Strube at age 96, and sometimes it will be much sooner. There was an announcement in the obituaries about a gentleman who was 46 when he passed away. We don’t know when it will happen, but constant communion with Him in this life will make us happier and make those around us happier. It will dispel the fear of transitioning from this life to the next…hopefully to heaven, if you do it right.
I read about this one man who committed murder in France and who was sentenced to death. His conversion in prison was so great and so amazing, that he was nominated for sainthood for being a servant of God. He did go to the block…the French took their heads off in those days. So, he was executed, but he was nominated for sainthood for such was his transition even in that small window. My point is this: Why wait for that small window?
We are called to grow closer to God. Drawing close to Him will provide peace for our souls. That moment of death will not be tragic. Instead, it will be a fulfillment of our love. Two hearts who love each other so tenderly will be together for all of eternity and never separated by sin. I say that to the dying. I say, “Make your peace with God and go meet your savior. You will never lose Him again.” That’s where we are all headed…to have peace so that we can become holy.
Do not let your crosses, whatever they may be or how many you may have, cause you to think you aren’t doing something right. “If I were doing it right, my crosses would be much lighter, and I wouldn’t fall so often.” All of that is “bravo sierra” from the devil. Saint Teresa of Avila said, “If this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.” Conversely, the more crosses you seem to have, the greater the love Christ has for you. So, carry your cross, if not for yourself, for others and drawing them to salvation and away from the suffering of the world. The devil uses many things – he is the father of lies – and he may make you think you are not drawing closer to God when, in fact, you are. Be prudent about your health in all things. Also, realize that no matter how many things there are to triumph over, there will be a moment when God will call you from this life to another. And, He will ask you, “Did you love Me?”
How will you apply this message to your life? Are you taking all moral and prudent means to protect your health as we are asked to do in the 5th Commandment? Are you preparing to meet Christ by growing in holiness?
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Since every thing, every person, every situation comes from the God who speaks, the whole world is Word by which we can live. We need only “taste and see how good God is.” We do this with all our senses. Through whatever we taste or touch, smell, hear, or see, God’s love can nourish us. For the one creating and redeeming Word is spelled out to us in ever new ways. God who is love, has nothing else to say in all eternity but “I love you!” And God says this in ever new ways through everything that comes into being. And we “eat it all up”; as we might say of a book, “I devoured it, cover to cover.” We assimilate this food and it becomes our life. We live in its strength. We become Word.
We may read volumes and volumes on the art of swimming, yet we’ll never understand what swimming is like unless we get wet. So we may read all the books ever written on the love of God and never understand loving unless we love. Where love is genuine, belonging is always mutual. It is like submerging ourselves into an ocean of sublime grace.
The Franciscan tradition maintains that Christ is the primary lover of the infinite love of God—the whole reason for creation is Christ. Jesus, we might say, is the “big bang” of the human potential for God because in his unique person, he realized the created capacity for God. As the Christ, the Anointed One of God, Jesus is God-with-us, the human One who mediates our relationship with God for all eternity. What happened in Jesus, however, must take place in all humanity (and creation) in order for the fullness of Christ to be realized, that is, in order for transformation of all created reality in God to be fulfilled. We might say that Jesus is the Christ but Christ is more than Jesus because Christ is all of humanity and creation as we are intended to be in the risen One, Jesus the Word incarnate, who is our permanent openness to the mystery of God’s infinite love.
