Catechumen Thoughts

More and more people work at occupations that make few physical demands. While there will always be jobs that involve manual labor, not everyone can enjoy the satisfaction that comes with seeing a concrete result from physical work. Often our hobbies reveal that we need to do things with our hands, we need to be active, and we need to use our bodies as well as our minds.

Just as spiritual blindness can be far more devastating than the loss of physical sight, so having our vision of God’s grace restored can bring healing far beyond the physical. We see hope where once we knew only despair, and more than that we see new ways to communicate that hope to others. We look with new eyes on the people around us and see how they, too, are children of God.

Complaining can become a habit and it can soon burden our spirits—and our friends. When we’re going through tough times, some amount of struggle and grief is to be expected. But as people of faith, we know that at some point we need to let go of the grieving and move forward with grace.

There’s something attractive about being able to reinvent ourselves. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to do this if we stay in the same place with the same people all our lives. Perhaps the lesson we can learn from Francis is not to let ourselves be limited by what people might think they know about us.

Worry is itself an illness, since worry is an accusation against divine wisdom, a criticism of divine mercy.

Our Father never grows tired of hearing our little voices speak to him in prayer, no matter what time it is. And he will never tune us out, no matter how stupid we think we sound. No need or request is too great for him to fulfill. He’s got the whole world and every aspect of our lives in the palm of his loving hands.

Real love shows up not only in times of great joy, delight, and fulfillment but especially when life seems overwhelming and incomprehensible, filled with unbearable suffering and sorrow. It is in these times that love has shown me the way, not around the pain but through it.

Despite our many sins and failures, God remains committed to us, looking at us patiently and mercifully in the face of our faults. He loves us even when we do things that hurt our relationship with him.

God works through sacraments, most assuredly. But sacraments are given as sure encounters with grace, not as reducing valves designed to make sure the unbaptized are excluded from God.

Christ comes to us through innumerable creatures, since all creation is sacramental. One of the sacramentals bringing us Christ is our neighbor—especially the least of our neighbors. The stunning truth is that Christ is present in all those you meet. How you treat them is how you treat him. Your neighbor is God’s gift to you, a sacramental through whom Christ works in your soul.

One day in the holy city (as the book of Revelation says), there will indeed be no temple “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” Until that happy day we have to listen to Jesus who speaks in tune with all religious leaders worth listening to; don’t enter a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue unless you are prepared to love your enemies.

We can find Christ among the despised, voiceless, and forgotten of the world. We have to move beyond that which we wish to ignore and forget about: embrace the seemingly un-embraceable, love the unlovable, and dare to know what we most fear and wish to leave unknowable.

Merely doing the just thing is not really the goal. Merely not robbing the poor of what is rightfully theirs is not heroic sanctity. What is called for is not mere fairness but love that goes above and beyond.

Jesus didn’t want people to see him as a magician or even as a messiah. He wanted more, for people to connect with him, to know him, from within themselves. There are also signs and wonders associated with that. But they are not magical. They are the real signs of a wondrous transformation of self, produced by the relationship we call faith.

The most important thing in life is to love God, your neighbor and yourself—equally. You will have to have become very simple before you can do this, but in the trying you will be radicalized—in the good sense—radically simplified and your capacity for love fully amplified.

I think the answer, ‘God is love’ is pretty good for a child. Because children understand love ... My son asked me one day, ‘Dad, what’s hell?’ ... So, I said, ‘Well, if God is love, then hell is the absence of God’s love. And, can you imagine how great it is to be loved? Can you imagine how great it is to be loved fully? To be loved totally? To be loved, you know, beyond your ability to imagine? And imagine if you knew that was a possibility, and then that was taken from you, and you knew that you would never be loved. Well that’s hell—to be alone, and know what you’ve lost.’

Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and be that perfectly.