Friday: from the archives

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

The Pharisee becomes the publican

One thing that can cause me discouragement is dealing with besetting sin–you know that thing you keep taking back to confession over and over.  One of mine is critical thinking.  A few years ago I read Sr. Ruth Burrow’s autobiography, and in it she spoke about this being one of her ongoing faults as well.  However, she found what I think is a very clever way to deal with it:

Perceptive, quick to see the flaws in another, I was prone to criticism, finding a certain satisfaction in seeing another at fault as though this, in some way, raised me up.  I knew that no fault would so displease our Lord or stop his grace as this harsh judgment on his children.  I realized I had the mentality of a pharisee but, I thought to myself, if a pharisee had turned to our Lord and admitted his hardness of heart, his crabbed, mean spirit and asked for help, our Lord would have helped him.  So I did the same.  The pharisee became the publican.  I came to realize that temptations to pride, the sin of the pharisee, could make one a publican.  The stone which the builders rejected could become head of the corner.  I tried to use these bad tendencies to grow in humility.

And the Angels danced, don’t you think?

He seeks until He is weary

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From the beginning of  a newly published book, Amazing Nearness, by the author of The Gift of Faith, Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer:

In my daily life, I am constantly getting lost. Yet that means He can constantly find me.  The more I need Him, the closer He is.  I can ceaselessly discover that in weariness He sought me.  This means loving until weary.  Because of Original Sin He constantly searches for us to the point of weariness and exhaustion, humanly speaking.

In the Eucharistic encounter, Jesus regularly finds me quite lost.   Yet, I am normally lost, needing to be found.  So no need for regrets.  If I am lost I can only be found in Eucharistic love.  He can only find me when I am lost and beginning to search for Him.  Love needs two.  It is a grace always given to me to seek Him through faith, hope, and love.

Fr. Dajczer is here making a reference to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4.  “Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well.”  Augustine points out that Jesus is weary because He is on a journey to seek us each out.  He is thirsty for our faith.  He knows that we are lost and constantly sets out to find us.  If you feel lost today, take heart that He is seeking you and looking for you.  Let yourself be found by Him.

You must not tremble

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

From a letter by Father John, a Russian monk, written to a lay person (1947):

I received your cordial note.  I was happy with your last words: ‘I am not troubled at all, but peaceful’.  According to the Holy Fathers, that is how it should be: if you falter in some virtue, you must not tremble; if you fall–get up; if you fall again, get up again; and so on till the final hour of death.  O Lord, glory to thy mercy.  Great is thy goodness, that Thou has given repentance to us sinners, for Thou didst come to earth not for the righteous, but for us sinner.

You did draw up pure water, but a toad had unexpectedly got into the well.  Throw it away and the life-giving water will still be pure.

Friday: from the archives

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

When you feel that you have nothing left to give . . . 

In my position as superior of our community, there are many days when I feel like I don’t have anything to give my sisters–not that I don’t want to–I just feel very poor.  I also feel that way pretty much all the time in prayer these days.  I have always experienced great encouragement from the story of the widow’s mite.  Some words on this topic from Andre Louf, abbot emeritus of the Cistercian monastery of Mont-des-Cats, France:

Jesus was elated over the poor widow who offered two copper coins.  She gave from her poverty and in so doing offered up everything she had to live on (Mk 12:42-44).  The others had also given money, a lot of it even, but “from their surplus wealth” . . . Jesus, however, preferred the two miserable coins of the widow to these substantial gifts even though the coins were of no significance in the sum total of the collection.    Why did he rate this gift more highly?  Jesus’ answer was very simple: “She, from her poverty, put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”  Does this mean the others should have been more generous?  Should they have given larger sums?  Of course not.  They were naturally free to do this and a higher contribution would certainly have been appreciated.  But that was not what was important to Jesus; the issue was not so much one of quantity.  Even if the rich were to give more, they would still only be giving from their abundance.  For them it would always remain immensely difficult to give from their poverty.  It is the same for us: whatever we may give of all the things that belong to us–our money, our time, our magnanimity, our health, our thousand good qualities–even if we put all this at Jesus’ disposal, still we are only giving from our abundance.  And it will always remain hard and even painful for us to give from our poverty.  To give everything to Jesus always means to give from our poverty and that is not an easy thing to do.  But it is precisely this gift that Jesus expects from us all . . . To give from our poverty means, first of all, to know that we are poor, that we have discovered in ourselves the wound for which (for that matter) no one is responsible but which for ever makes us utterly poor indeed, poor to a degree we would not dare to admit to ourselves. . . [The widow] accepts the fact that she just wants to give what she has because Jesus looked at her and accepted her as she was.  Happy are they who dare to give from their poverty: in the eyes of Jesus they have given everything they had.   (from Mercy in Weakness)