Category: Discerning the will and action of God in our lives

Wise Guys and Gals

The prophet Baruch (6th century BC) admonished his fellow Israelites, who were exiled, living in the land of their foes, growing old in a foreign land:
“You have forsaken the fountain of wisdom! Had you walked in the way of God, you would have dwelt in enduring peace.”
He didn’t rebuke them for their politics, for following the wrong leader or belong to the wrong partisan group.
He didn’t criticize them for greed or egoism, for feathering their own nests, while indifferent to the destitute and powerless.
He didn’t denounce them for their faithlessness, worshiping false gods that seemed to promise power and prestige, wealth and influence, lands and lordships, sensual satisfactions and fulfillment.
He didn’t waste time and words on symptoms and side effects. His diagnosis was of the root cause of all their failings and corruption:
“You have forsaken the fountain of wisdom!” You have forsaken the wellspring, the precious source, the essence of life.

“Learn where prudence is,
where strength, where understanding;
That you may know also
where are length of days, and life,
where light of the eyes, and peace.
Who has found the place of wisdom,
who has entered into her treasures?

“Yet he who knows all things knows her,
he has probed her by his knowledge…
Traced out all the way of understanding,
and has given her to Jacob his servant,
to Israel, his beloved son.
Since then she has appeared on earth,
and moved among men.

“She is the book of the precepts of God,
the law that endures forever;
All who cling to her will live…”

Solomon, David’s son, the third king of Israel was famed for his wisdom. When the Lord promised to give him whatever he asked for, Solomon asked for “a listening heart to judge your people and to distinguish between good and evil.”
The Lord responded, “I now do as you request. I give you a heart so wise and discerning that there has never been anyone like you until now, nor after you will there be anyone to equal you.” (1 Kings 3:5-14)
Alas, although King Solomon still remains the very prototype of the wise man, he had many failings in spite of his many achievements. History has been kind to him!
Wisdom is not merely knowledge; in fact one can have great wisdom without great knowledge.
Wisdom is to know what is true or right coupled with just judgement as to action; it involves sagacity, discernment, and insight.
The root and fountain of all wisdom is God and God’s revelation to humankind. To be wise is ever to seek to discern the will of God, the design and purpose of the Creator—and to conform our lives to it.
When Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert, the evil one showed him all the kingdoms of the world and offered to give him all their power and glory if Jesus would worship him.
Jesus, embodiment of wisdom, told him, “You shall worship the Lord, your God,, and him alone shall you serve. (Luke 4:1-13)
We all have been given something of Solomon’s gift of a heart wise and discerning, and we all are tempted by worldly power and glory.
No more wise guys and gals, please, but more wise and discerning men and women.


13 December 2020

Listen to the Voice of the Lord

“I’m not Moses. I’m not Jesus. I’m not Mohammad. I’m not some special person who can hear the voice of God.”
Wrong! You know why? Did you notice you didn’t say “listen”, you said “hear”? Hear involves ear. Listen means more than that.
– You can listen with your whole body or some part of it. That’s probably the first thing you did when you were born. You felt things—being handled, pain, cold, warmth, contact, security—much later on you learned a word for the experience: “love”.
Love is still something that best communicates through one’s whole body even though we tend to use words to signal that we’re communicating it. (And, sometimes we only “say” it.)
– You can listen with your eyes. Often a component of a vacation is to spend time “seeing” things of great beauty. Whether a work of human artistry or divine, it needs no words to communicate, even to overwhelm us.
The challenge of our too busy lives is to make time to truly “see”, to contemplate, celebrate, wonder, delight, and give thanks for the beauty of the works of creation that ever surround us. (That includes people, of course.)
– You can listen with your nose. It’s part of the richness of our response to fragrance and bouquet, whether food or drink, flowers or fields, or the perfume of another.
– You can listen with your palate, so to speak: the contentment and delight of a taste of something directly a work of the creator or a further embellishment of it through human ingenuity.
It’s curious that when we really want to celebrate something good or great, when we have something that prompts our gratitude and gladness, we usually listen with all our faculties—and usually it involves a celebration with food and drink!
Thanksgiving day is a great example!

Does the Lord give voice in the usual sense of the term? Does he talk to us directly? Do we hear words? Does he speak?
Possibly, but not frequently or usually.
As we were just reflecting, there are myriad ways to “listen” to the voice of the Lord besides using our ears. But he can and does sometimes use words as well.
In the Bible, there are many incidents of encounters with a mysterious someone which turn out to be direct communications from the Lord. The one encountered is often described as an “angel” (from the Greek word for a “messenger”.)
They’re often considered to be, in effect, apparitions of God.
Usually we associate listening to the voice of the Lord with listening to the voice of others—prophets, apostles, evangelists, preachers, and others whom we consider reliable, god-fearing, and honest.
What is their experience like? How do they listen to the voice of the Lord? We can only presume that it’s something like ours. How do we
listen to the voice of the Lord?
The Lord does communicate with us, and at times in a more direct way then through the created world and other human beings. That’s what we mean by the action of the holy Spirit.
Often in ways hard to explain, there is a growing insight or conviction about something in our minds and hearts that we suspect is of God. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where our responses to others even surprise us. We may even speak words that we listen to ourselves.
We don’t always get it right, but at times we do hear the voice of the Lord. Ah, but, when we do, do we listen?


15 November 2020

“Courageous Priest Speaks The TRUTH…”

A few days ago I received an email asking my opinion of its attached video entitled “Courageous Priest Speaks The TRUTH About Joe Biden and Kamala Harris”.
I played the priest’s homily. My reaction to it was mixed. It was calm, measured, carefully developed. It was divided into two segments. The first about belief, teachings, and Christian responsibility I thought was very sound and solid. The second was a denouncement of the Catholic Joe Biden.
My opinion is, whether you sympathize with the priest’s point of view or not, that a direct and detailed criticism of one or another particular candidate is not an appropriate topic for a priest’s homily.
At college, which was a challenging time for me in my late teens, one thing I learned and learned to agree with was the “policy”, so to speak, of the educational program: “We’re here to teach you how to think, not what to think.”
That’s what I try to do. I don’t always succeed, but I try to call attention to the words of scripture, the teachings of Jesus, and the ever developing teachings of the Church and challenge my listeners or readers to consider them and make judgements that are consonant with them—but I try to avoid offering them any specific conclusions or advice.
I think this is the appropriate role of clergy—up to and including the pope! We should be teachers and preachers who try to persuade and lead people to what we believe is good and right—but we shouldn’t be making rules and imposing penalties (although this has often been attempted).
Every person is unique. No one is completely and totally identical with anyone else, even “identical twins”. This means that each of us may face a situation and the need for a decision or course of action that in some respect or other is totally different than any other before.

Of course, since we are not absolutely perfect by nature, we may get it right or we may get it wrong—and our motives may be right or our motives may be wrong.
“Politics is the art of the possible.” Idealists don’t make good politicians. The ideal is always the carrot on the stick—it draws us but we never 100% attain it. There are flaws and failings in every one of us, even when we’re striving to do the right thing.
Personally, I don’t think it’s my role to make a final judgement of anyone—it’s beyond my capabilities. However I can criticize and offer my assessment, for better or for worse of course, of the words they use or write, the effects I perceive them producing, etc.—but not a judgement of their essential worth or value, or goodness or lack thereof.
I don’t think any particular candidate for any particular office is a “saint” or a “devil”. Every candidate, every person, is a blend. We’re tempted to judge that the balance is tilted more one way than another, and that judgement may be right or wrong. Only God knows for sure.
Catholicism is a big tent and there’s room for all kinds, styles, and personalities. Catholics aren’t an army marching in step on parade, eyes left, right, or ahead as the command may be.
We’re more like a herd, wandering this way and that. We sometimes fall behind because we’re blindly grazing, sometimes race so far ahead, left, or right that we’re in danger of being separated or lost, and sometimes safely stick to the center where we’re surrounded by our own kind. There the dangers are being squeezed too much or the majority’s pulling you from the way!


25 October 2020

Backstage

It’s only human to be curious.
After seeing a great performance—play, concert, dance—sometimes we really want to see the performer—the actor, musician, dancer, to see who he/she really is. We’re so impressed we want to learn more about the person who did such a great job.
The performance, of course, reveals a little about the performer, but only a little . . .
– every tweet reveals something about the tweeter.
– every speech reveals something about the speaker.
– every painting reveals something about the painter.
– every building reveals something about the architect.
– every lie reveals something about the liar.
– every loving act reveals something about the lover.
– every torture reveals something about the torturer.
No matter what, we never learn everything; in a way, everyone is ultimately a mystery.
As we see the cosmos, the whole universe, the earth, and all it contains, it reveals a little about their source, their origin, their maker, but only a little.
Overwhelmed by the vastness, the power, the energy, the complexity, and the beauty of it all, we want to learn more about their creation and their creator [or Supreme Being, Source, Maker, Begetter, Father, Mother, Parent—the names vary].
We don’t even know what we want to know! It’s like an insatiable hunger, and, no matter what we discover, we yearn for more.
St. Augustine of Hippo got it right when he said, “Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.” (“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”)

Notice Augustine said that it is our heart that is yearning, not our head.
Of course our head is yearning, too. We can’t help the restless questing to know, to understand, to comprehend, that is built into our very essence and being.
But the yearning of our hearts has a different dynamic. We can be constantly overwhelmed by beauty and wonderment, and the gratefulness and joy that they inspire. This, too, is built into our very essence and being.
It’s not that we are made for endless unfulfillment, never to know or to possess all, but the very opposite—never-ending fulfillment, never-ending finding, discovering, wonderment, gladness, and gratitude.
You know, the old Baltimore Catechism was right on target with its third question and answer. They really captured the essence of Augustine’s beautiful reflection:
Q. Why did God make you? A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.
However, the answer adds an important third purpose. The way we’re made, we can’t help but restlessly to seek to know more and more; we can’t help but to love and desire more and more . . .
But, it doesn’t work quite the same in the case of “to serve Him”. We do have some built-in desire for doing what is right, to do the will of God—but it’s weaker than “to know Him, to love Him”.
Beware the temptation! Remember what Jesus quoted, “The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.”


4 October 2020

Thinking outside the Box

I remember reading an article some time ago about oil and the future of the petroleum industry that reminded me of a conversation with a friend many years previous:
“You know the Fischer company, the ‘bodies by Fischer’ of the Cadillacs?.” he said, “Well, they used to be a carriage company. When ‘horseless carriages’ started to become popular, the Fischer company decided that their business wasn’t just carriages but transportation.
“They responded to change and development by ‘thinking outside the box’, and they not only survived but grew.”
Many small and big oil companies have been doing the same. They’ve been accurately reading the signs of the times and rethinking their business model, their “mission”, if you will.
The article explained that they were not only embracing new technologies like fracking but also totally different businesses like wind turbines. To use my friend’s example, they also were thinking outside the box, realizing that their business is not just “oil” but “energy”.
What about religious people and religious organizations? How many of them have been successfully reading the signs of the times and thinking outside the box?
It’s not easy to do, of course, since it involves letting go of secure, familiar, and once effective and fruitful things and risking embracing a relatively unknown, uncertain, and somewhat risky future.
There has been a lot of progress—and a lot of defeatism, too. For example, take “ecumenism”. During the last half century, most Catholics have moved away from “outside the Church there’s no salvation”.
In fact, one of the seismic shifts in the understanding of the church has been that the one church of Christ embraces all who are trying to live as disciples of Jesus.

Some of the aftershocks of this ecclesiologic earthquake have involved placing less emphasis on rites, rules, and regulations:
– For example, defining church membership less by the ritual of baptism and more by the life-time commitment to follow Jesus that the ritual presumes and celebrates.
– For example, esteeming faithfulness to that commitment less by regular Sunday Mass attendance, Friday abstinence, or observance of other church regulations and customs and more by fidelity to the teachings, all the teachings, of Jesus.
– For example, judging the validity of marriage less by the marriage ceremony having been conducted according to church law and more by the existence of the decision and commitment that the ceremony symbolizes and represents.
– For example, respecting persons with ministry in the church less for their having been ordained or authorized and more for their personal integrity, competence, and loving commitment to service.
Change isn’t always comfortable, probably frequently isn’t comfortable—don’t we often speak of “growing pains”? It’s painful because change—growth, maturation, development, evolution, whatever you want to call it—is challenging.
It doesn’t involve just thinking outside the box, it means getting out, climbing out, breaking out of the box. It means rethinking your identity, purpose, and mission.
It It means letting go of some things, even really good things, so that you can have others, even better.
A chick can’t live unless it cracks the egg!


6 September 2020

Dando Vueltas

Por lo general, cuando decimos que alguien está “dando vueltas”, queremos decir que sigue volviendo al mismo lugar o problema donde comenzó, que no está progresando ni logrando nada.
En términos de movimiento, estamos dando vueltas todo el tiempo:
– Cada persona en la superficie de esta tierra rotativa está dando vueltas a 1,000 millas por hora, ya que la circunferencia de la tierra es algo más de 24,000 millas.
– Toda la tierra y todos los que viven en ella giran alrededor del sol a una velocidad de aproximadamente 67,000 millas por hora.
– Todo el sistema solar se mueve alrededor del centro de la galaxia a una velocidad de más de 500.000 millas por hora.
En términos del curso de nuestras vidas, tendemos a dar vueltas la mayor parte del tiempo, a menudo viviendo sin rumbo fijo con poco o ningún sentido de destino.
Cuanto mayores somos, más conscientes somos de la velocidad de nuestras vidas—y   de la inminencia de su final, de la muerte.
Hay una pregunta hermosa y sorprendente en La Liturgia de las Horas (Semana II, Lunes, Oración de la mañana, Antífona 1): “¿Cuándo llegaré al final de mi peregrinaje y entraré en la presencia de Dios?”
Es una forma interesante y desafiante de describir el curso de la vida de uno, ¡como una peregrinación!
Una peregrinación generalmente significa un viaje exigente, de costumbre largo, a un lugar especial, a menudo un lugar extraño o sagrado—y, por supuesto, el viaje necesariamente tiene un propósito.
Emprendemos una peregrinación a pesar de sus privaciones, dificultades y peligros debido a nuestro vivo deseo de alcanzar su objetivo, llegar a nuestro destino.
Como caminantes, viajeros, peregrinos, no tenemos miedo del final de nuestro viaje, no lamentamos que el viaje terminará—anhelamos alcanzar el final, nuestra meta.

Dar vueltas no es necesariamente un desperdicio. Si subimos una escalera de caracol, aunque damos vueltas, también estamos progresando, subiendo cada vez más.
Dar vueltas es un aspecto fundamental de nuestras vidas. Pero, sin un propósito, meta o destino, sin progreso o logro, nuestras vidas pueden ser vacías y terriblemente sin sentido.
Para algunas personas, una pregunta como “¿Cuándo llegaré al final de mi peregrinaje y entraré en la presencia de Dios?” no es más que “charla religiosa” sin sentido.
Es una descripción profunda de nuestras vidas. Tal vez no nos demos cuenta de todo sus implicaciones, pero da algún propósito, poder y satisfacción a nosotros, criaturas humanas en constante movimiento.
La vida no es un tiovivo. No solo disfrutamos del viaje hasta que termina. Y, el viaje no es necesariamente agradable.
La vida no tiene efecto búmeran. No estamos tirados, viajando mucho y lejos, terminando agotados no muy lejos de donde comenzamos.
La vida no es un viaje en tren que nunca termina; no somos vagabundos sin una estación en la que bajamos; tenemos un lugar adonde ir y esperanza para el mañana.
Si la vida es una peregrinación con su misterioso destino, “la presencia de Dios”, ¿por qué no nos preparamos para el viaje?
¿Por qué estamos abrumados por cosas inútiles, no viajamos livianos, no estamos en guardia contra los desvíos y bloqueos?
Está bien dar vueltas si estemos haciendo espirales y si, sin importar que intrincada sea la ruta, estemos progresando hacia nuestro destino final.

(Una traducción del inglés)

9 de agosto de 2020

Going Round in Circles

Usually when we say that somebody is “going round in circles” we mean that they keep coming back to the same place or problem where they started, that they’re not making progress or achieving anything.
Actually, in terms of motion, we’re all going round in circles all the time:
– Everyone on the surface of the rotating earth is constantly going around about 1,000 miles per hour, since the circumference of the earth is somewhat over 24,000 miles.
– The whole earth and everyone on it is spinning around the sun at a rate of about 67,000 miles per hour.
– The entire solar system is moving around the galaxy center at a speed well over 500,000 miles per hour.
We’re part of a very fast crowd!
In terms of the course of our lives, we tend also to be going round in circles much of the time, often living aimlessly with little or no sense of destination or destiny.
The older we are, the more conscious we become of the speed of each of our lives—and the imminence of their end, of death.
There’s a lovely—and striking—question in The Liturgy of the Hours (Week II, Monday, Morning Prayer, Antiphon 1): “When will I come to the end of my pilgrimage and enter the presence of God?”
It’s an interesting and challenging way of describing the course of one’s life—as a pilgrimage!
A pilgrimage usually means a demanding journey, usually a long trip, to a special place, often a foreign and/or sacred place—and, of course, the journey has a purpose.
We undertake a pilgrimage in spite of its hardships, difficulties, and dangers because of our keen desire to attain its goal, to reach our destination.
As wayfarers, travelers, pilgrims, we don’t fear the end of our journey, we don’t lament that the trip will be over—we yearn to reach it, to attain our goal.

Going round in circles isn’t necessarily wasteful. If we’re going up a spiral staircase, though we’re going round in circles we’re also making progress, getting higher every time around.
Going round in circles is a fundamental aspect of our lives. But, without a purpose, goal, or destination, without progress, achievement, or attainment, our lives can be empty and terrifyingly meaningless.
For some people, a question like, “When will I come to the end of my pilgrimage and enter the presence of God?,” is nothing more than senseless “religious talk.”
In reality, it’s a profound way of describing our lives. We may not fully realize its implications, but it does give some purpose, power, and fulfillment to us, we ever-circling, fast-moving human creatures.
Life isn’t a merry-go-round. We don’t just enjoy the ride until it’s over. In fact, the ride isn’t necessarily always enjoyable.
Life isn’t a boomerang journey. We’re not just thrown around, traveling long and far, and end up spent and exhausted pretty much not far from where we started.
Life isn’t a train ride that never ends; we’re not wanderers without a station where we get off; we have a place to go to and a hope for tomorrow.
If life’s a pilgrimage with its mysterious destination, “the presence of God,” then why we aren’t we preparing for the journey?
Why are we encumbered by useless things, why aren’t we traveling light, why aren’t we on our guard against detours and blockages?
It’s okay to be going round in circles so long as we’re spiraling, so long as, no matter how convoluted the route of our lives, we’re progressing towards our final destination.

(Available in Spanish translation)

9 August 2020

Thy Will Be Done

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)
Ay, there’s the rub—how to know the will of the Father
St. Cyprian wrote a beautiful treatise about this, about all of the Lord’s prayer. Cyprian was born in 210 in Carthage. In those days, Carthage had a proud heritage as one of the great cities of the ancient world. In Cyprian’s day it was part of the Roman Empire (in contemporary terms it was located in Tunisia).
He practiced law. He converted to Christianity and was made bishop of Carthage in 249. During the persecution of the emperor Valerian, Cyprian was tried and executed in 258.
Here’s what he wrote about the will of the Father:

. . . Your will be done on earth as is in heaven; we pray not that God should do his will, but that we may carry out his will.
How could anyone prevent the Lord from doing what he wills? But in our prayer we ask that God’s will be done in us, because the devil throws up obstacles to prevent our mind and our conduct from obeying God in all things.
So if his will is to be done in us we have need of his will, that is, his help and protection. No one can be strong by his own strength or secure save by God’s mercy and forgiveness.
Even the Lord, to show the weakness of the human nature which he bore, said: Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, and then, by way of giving  example to his disciples that they should do God’s will and not their own, he added: Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will

All Christ did, all he taught, was the will of God:
– humility in our daily lives
– an unwavering faith
– a moral sense of modesty in conversation
– justice in acts
– mercy in deed
– discipline
– refusal to harm others
– a readiness to suffer harm
– peaceableness with our brothers
– a whole-hearted love of the Lord
– loving in him what is of the Father
– fearing him because he is God
– preferring nothing to him who preferred nothing to us
– clinging tenaciously to his love
– standing by his cross with loyalty and courage whenever there is any conflict involving his honor and his name
– manifesting in our speech the constancy of our profession and
– under torture confidence for the fight, and
– in dying the endurance for which we will be crowned.
This is what it means to wish to be a coheir with Christ, to keep God’s command; this is what it means to do the will of the Father.
(Second Reading, Office of Readings, Wednesday, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, The Liturgy of the Hours)

Even though Cyprian wrote this reflection over 1,700 years ago, it’s still a great advice and challenge for you and me today.


2 August 2020

How God Sees

Through the words, witness, and personality of St. Paul—and, of course, the power and providence of God—a community of new Christians was founded in the commercial port city of Corinth.
Paul was proud of them—a paternal pride in them as his spiritual children—and was distressed when he learned about their infighting and divisions. In part that provoked his writing a strong letter to them. In a loving rebuke, he reminded them:

Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the worlds to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God. (1 Cor 26-29)

This was one of the great lessons Paul and every devote Jew learned in studying the history of their people.
In that history, the greatest of their kings was David—and yet David was an unlikely candidate for such a role.
1 Sam 16 tells a story of how God, having rejected Saul as king of Israel, sent Samuel to Jesse of Bethlehem to anoint his choice for Saul’s replacement from among his sons.
Jesse introduced them to Samuel in age order, the oldest first.  Each time, Samuel was impressed by what he saw and thought he had the likely candidate, and each time the Lord disagreed: “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature . . . God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The Lord looks into the heart.” (1 Sam 16:7)

Finally Samuel met the youngest, who had been called home from the field where he was tending the sheep. This wasn’t the greatest job, but then the boy was too young to have much experience at anything else.
Samuel may have wrinkled his nose when the grubby teenager appeared, but the Lord said: “There—anoint him, for this is the one!” (1 Sam 16:12)
The shepherd boy became the great shepherd-king of his people. One of his remote descendants was the Good Shepherd—also an unlikely candidate for the great role of Messiah that was his.
We’re no Samuels, you and I. We’re not great prophets with huge destinies in our hands. But, then, in some sense we are, in that God uses each of us as instruments to achieve his purposes—in spite of our often misconstruing his choices and plans!
As Samuel, we are often mislead by appearances when we deal with other people, by externals which are superficial and give little clue as to the nature and possibilities of what’s before our eyes.
We may or may not suspect the depth and quality of another, but in any case we cannot see their heart—meaning, of course, the essence of the person, the power of their love and generosity.
Also, although we ourselves may not be “wise by human standards . . . powerful . . . of noble birth”, God may chose us to “shame the wise . . . shame the strong . . . reduce to nothing those who are something.”
“We” means you, me, and everybody else, no matter how unlikely they may appear.
Only God sees into the heart!


5 July 2020

Cor ad Cor Loquitur

St. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, describes the coming of the Spirit primarily as a miracle of communication:
“And they were all filled with the holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.” (Acts 2:4).
That would be astounding, since the apostles, the blessed Mother, and the others there were not linguists, Their native language was Aramaic, their ancient religious language was Hebrew, and perhaps they had a smattering of Greek since that was the “lingua franca” of their world.
But, as St. Luke adds, even more astounding was the fact that everybody who heard them speak heard them speak in their own particular language—and all this simultaneously!
It’s physically impossible to speak several languages simultaneously. But, the miracle was that each listener understood them as though they were speaking each one’s native language. They communicated effectively with everyone.
Communication is not merely a matter of the words themselves. It involves gestures, expressions, tone of voice, emotions. a kind of total projection of one person to another.
We can communicate without words at all! How often a hand movement, a smile, a tear, a touch, or an embrace speaks more than any word.
In case your Latin is not too good (or non-existent), the title above, an oft quoted expression, means, “Heart Speaks to Heart.”
The heart, of course, is the symbol of love, of the place where the fullness of love abides. And, love is the most powerful force in the world, the very essence of God.
With words or without words, but with love, we can powerfully communicate. Words may help, of course, but we can manage without them.

Often we tend to rely more on the head than on the heart, with verbal more than non-verbal communication.
We’re inundated with torrents of words most of the time. We’re constantly wrestling with their rightness or their wrongness, their truthfulness or falsity, and weighing their nuances.
But, the most powerful and effective communication is love—not speaking about love, not saying “love”, but loving!
It’s astounding—miraculous!—how powerfully you communicate when you really and truly love.
Love can involve wonder, thanksgiving, pleasure, satisfaction, and joy—it also can involve acceptance, endurance, patience, forgiveness, and even pain and sacrifice.
It takes courage and strength to love well. It can require sometime almost more than we’re capable of, almost superhuman strength! And Jesus is commanding us, his followers, to do it, to “Love one another as I have loved you!”
We can’t do it, it demands too much. True, sometimes it does, usually it does. To totally and completely love means to give of yourself and yours until there’s nothing left to give, including your life itself.
But, with the coming of the Spirit, with the infusion of divine presence, life, and love into our lives, with the help and grace of God empowering us, all things are possible.
The Pentecost experience wasn’t just for that small band of believers. It is repeated daily in your life and mine. The Spirit, the force, the strength of God’s love empowers you, too.
May your life always communicate love!


31 May 2020