Humility is Holiness

In the slums of the world, I saw more clearly my own weaknesses, and subsequently I slowly began to see the importance of humility. Only through humble eyes can God be seen. I am nothing; God is everything. But, in my nothingness, God gives me everything. Humility helps shatter illusions. Humility is the truest form of honesty. It sees our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Humility allows God to transform our weaknesses into strengths. As the opposite of pride, humility reflects honesty, a holistic sense of reality and a keen awareness of the awesomeness of the universe and the profound mystery of God. Growth in humility is a sign of maturing holiness. One of my dearest friends is an Orthodox monk and priest. He said, “Humility is honesty, is holiness. And it is only in humility that we can authentically meet God, on God’s terms. Humility is not a giving up, but rather, a giving in.” Humility is a pathway to prayer. Prayer is the doorway to the heart, the center of our being, the place where we can let go, let go of pretense, pride, ego and a host of things blocking us from the true source of life, the true source of love, God. In the innermost chamber of the heart we see the dissonance between the Spirit of God and our spirit; it is here we struggle to dissolve that disharmony. In the safety of the heart we can let go of fear and we can risk change. In the heart, conflict gives way to harmony. In the heart, what’s mine becomes God’s. In the heart, humility becomes holiness.

St. Francis clearly understood that God became vulnerable for us. And God’s vulnerability is a supreme expression of Divine Love. A psalmist once said God’s love is better than life itself. More to the point: God’s love is life. Without God, I am nothing, have no life. With God, I lack nothing, have the fullness of life. Love is life. Jesus is a lover. Love cannot be conditional. Love cannot be purchased. Love cannot be used for our gain, cannot be self-centered. Love is liberating. Love is self-emptying, is to be given away. Love is only known from within, as an experience that changes everything, even changes bread and wine into the very substance of God. Love is all powerful, all merciful, all compassionate, all forgiving, always giving. The source of love is God the creator and sustainer of everything. Love animates all life. And through love all life is connected.

Where Love is

When we are enslaved
by obsessive desires
We are not free to pray.

When our interest in
power, money and material things
is greater than
our longing for God,
we are still far from
authentic prayer.

The deeper we journey
into prayer
the less interested we are
in thoughts rooted in
worldly desires and sensory perceptions.

Our prayer should be dressed
in reverence and humility,
unsoiled by a mind
still cluttered, impassioned and impure.

Calm the restlessness of your mind
by mindfulness of your breathing
and by acts of compassion and mercy.

The altar of our spirit
should be unadorned
and free of
false and unhealthy desires.

We must imitate God
who stoops down in mercy
to touch us.
So we too must
stoop down in mercy
to touch others…
even those who live far away.

The spiritual life
is a twofold journey…
an inward movement
to the depths of our being
and the source of Love
and an outward movement
to the broken world,
the margins of society,
where love is manifested
in acts of kindness.

Love and Goodness

The only way poverty will be reduced
is with love and goodness.

We need to see God in each other.
We need to turn away from hatred
and more fully embrace love.
We need to make compassion
the foundation of our lives and actions.
Tolstoy said that our great duty as humans
was to sow the seed of compassion
in each other’s heart.
And it is only compassion
that will change and save the world.

Christ’s work of reconciliation and healing
beckons us to build bridges to unity,
bridges to a distant shore
where common ground is found
and peace prevails.

Our very woundedness
is waiting to be transformed
into compassion.
Our emotional and physical pain
helps us understand and respond to
the suffering of another.
Compassion is as elegant
as any cathedral.

We believe that Christ rose from the dead.
We are resurrection people.
But yet, when we look at the reality
of the world around us,
we see death and destruction,
revenge and retaliation.
We must not let our culture of death
Dominate our spirit of life.
We have lost
our prophetic voice
and we no longer defend
the undocumented, the lonely and the alienated,
those who are hurting
and have no voice.

Poverty exists
because we as the human family
have forgotten God
and turned our backs
on God’s children.

We need to share our time,
our treasure, our love
with the chronically poor.
Jesus wants us
to give our lives away.
This is Gospel giving.

In giving of ourselves,
Christ is truly risen.

Thoughts Scribbled Before Sunrise

The chasm between Christ and Christianity is great.

We are called to serve. And the most truly authentic way to serve is to serve from our own weakness and not from our strength. For in our weakness we are more able to recognize the weakness in another. Sadly, we often look down on those we serve, because we are serving from a position of power. The gospel is not calling us to this kind of service. We need to look directly into the eyes of those we serve…or better yet, in a spirit of humility, look up to them.

We are a result-orientated society. No matter what we are doing, it is the “doing” that is more important than the outcome. A wise person is not concerned with results, and therefore is unaffected by the outcome.

We have become non-stop achievement machines, denying our inner need for leisure, intimacy and communion.

I confess to having a hard time understanding the quantum theory in physics. But the quantum principle of a complementarity that tolerates ambiguity, approximation, probability and paradox greatly appeals to me. Inflexible certitudes turn me off and worries me.

I once overheard a man in a bookstore ask the clerk where the self-help books were located. Clearly the guy needed help. But the proliferation of self-help books mostly prove to be of little help in dealing with the problems we face. It seems that every year our knowledge expands while at the same time our understanding shrinks. We chase after pseudo formulas for happiness and cling to lifeless dogmas instead of entering into meaningful silence. As my friend Fr. James suggests: “Disconnect the phone, the computer, things that beep and wheeze and whine… and just sit.” The help you need is within you…if you take the time to listen.

We are being engulfed by noise…the noise of too much talk, too many words. Opinions and ideologies are hurled at us from all directions. Voices shouting, “Buy me” or “Believe this” are incessant. We need a world-wide week of total silence, a week where everyone on the planet shuts up, completely refrains from all speaking, unless compelled by a true emergency or to cry out for help.

In one of his songs, Bob Dylan said that a person “not busy being born is busy dying.” Likewise, along the spiritual road we can never stand still; if we are not progressing, we are regressing.

Thoughts Scribbled Before Sunrise

The richer we are the harder it is for us to see the poor, and as a result we lessen our opportunity to experience an encounter with the crucified Christ.

We need to become friends of silence and friends of the poor.

The hungry can’t feed the hungry. In stillness of prayer, I am sufficiently nourished so I am able to go out and feed others.

God’s boundless love is the energy that animates all life. It is a dynamic force that generates authentic goodness and true beauty.

The righteous have no need for God or God’s mercy.

Pride is a roadblock to wisdom.

God begins where clinging to things ends.

Let go of the external to find the internal.

The spiritual path knows nothing of tomorrow. Each step is taken in the now, the present moment.

Work is most fulfilling when it materializes our love for others through tangible acts of service.

Thoughts Scribbled Before Sunrise

To pray is to be still.

Without solitude and silence, I easily lose my self. And God.

Solitude is a presence, not an absence.

Solitude allows the soul to look upon the pieces and see the unity.

Love is the most uplifting force in the universe.

Real love is never tempered with prudence nor controlled by common sense – no matter how admirable those qualities are.

Charity is love’s visible form.

Only an open and serene heart can absorb God’s love.

Laughter is an essential ingredient of the spiritual life. The cosmic and the comic love to dance together, though they are rarely seen doing so.

One Organic Whole

“Solitude has its own special work: a deepening awareness that the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world’s needs. It does not hold the world at arms length.”
-Thomas Merton
Conjectures of Guilty Bystander

Society is becoming increasingly fragmented and polarized, which poses a great danger. We are in desperate need of a spirit of communion and compassion to wash afresh over all of us. We need to resurrect the lost art of conversation in which we truly listen to and share with each other. Through communion, compassion and conversation we can find our common ground and work together for the common good of all, while at the same time realizing that we are all fumbling around in the dark of an infinite mystery that is beyond words and understanding. While God is beyond words and shrouded in silence, God nonetheless is in a perpetual conversation with each of us, even if most of us are rarely listening; our failure to recognize and appreciate this divine conversation has caused us to turn a deaf ear to the other, to anyone who does not believe as we do, which in turn stifles communion and compassion.

Each of us is a different expression of the same divine energy and we were created to be in communication with each other and the Other. Each of us is a part of one organic whole. Each of us is only a temporary and infinitesimal fraction of a gigantic universe, and our failure to humbly grasp our individual smallness allows us to assume a far greater importance than we deserve and causes us to be human-centered rather than God-centered. We are so centered on ourselves, we have failed to grasp the organic wholeness of life and the divine beauty of the entire universe.

In looking over the last two paragraphs, I was struck afresh with the oft-ignored reality that “God is beyond words and shrouded in silence.” Yet we are drowning in words and shrouded in noise. Silence was once a natural part of life. Max Picard, the famous Swiss philosopher, accurately observed: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.” And he wrote that long before such noise-making devices as television were invented. Today, it is normal for earphones to be almost permanently jammed into ears, earphones connected to iPods, i-Pads, i-Phones that are channels for endless, pointless chatter. And we watch life through little screens which distract us from the real life in front of us. We now film our lives with our cell phones and then e-mail selected scenes from our self-centered lives to everybody we know. No one looks up anymore…we are all looking down at our i-Whatevers and typing something that someone else needs to know. Writing has become “texting.” We tweeter away the day and keep God at bay.