The Human Heart and its Seven Divine Longings
October 24, 2023
Hi!
How is each and every one? Today, October 24, used to be the feast day
of St. Raphael, the Archangel. When the
General Roman Calendar was revised in 1969, the feast was transferred to
September 29 together with archangels Michael and Gabriel. Nevertheless may I request
you to ask St. Raphael to heed my personal petitions for today and always? I
depend on your prayers. You can depend
on my prayers as well.
In the last post we talked about a constant
longing you and I have, an inner ache.
It cannot be denied that you and I long for happiness that the world
cannot give. It is a beating of the
heart that makes each of us restless and ill at ease not knowing what it is and
where to find it, and finally be peacefully content. I think what is happening in these times is a
sign of this longing. Different groups
of people are trying to satisfy and fulfill what they have been longing for but
perhaps looking in the wrong places and satisfying their longings the wrong way,
applying the wrong means to the extent of hurting themselves and many others more
and more in the process.
Saint Augustine, himself was in the
same situation. He was longing for happiness
and searching in all the wrong places before he discovered true peace, meaning
and happiness in knowing Jesus Christ. He heard the voice of a child telling
him “Picked
it up, and read it. Pick it up and read it.” He got a copy of the Bible and opened it; the first passage
he saw was from the Letter of Paul to the Romans: “Not
in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and lust, not in quarreling
and jealousy. Rather, put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh”
(Romans 13:13-14). After reflecting on the experience, he wrote his famous
prayer: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until
they rest in you”.
St.
Josemaria: “Heaven and earth seem to merge, my sons and daughters, on the
horizon. But were they really meet is in
your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives” (Passionately Loving
the World). How to sanctify daily life? “Do your work as perfectly as possible,
love God and mankind by putting love in the little things of everyday life, and
discover the divine something which is hidden in small details. The lines of a
Castillian poet are especially appropriate here: “Write
slowly and with a careful hand, for doing things well is more important than
doing them”. Words heard from my mother:
“Gagawain mo na rin lang, gawain mo
na nang mabuti”. “You are doing it anyway, do it well.”
Following is
the continuation (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human
Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2) on longings.
The
Seven Divine Longings of the Human Heart
Do not be afraid!–Matthew 14:27
Embrace the divine filiation which
constitutes the essence of the Good News.—St. John Paul the Great, Crossing the
Threshold of Hope
We spend a great deal of our lives
consumed by fears of one kind or another.
Perhaps the greatest fears are those fears that alienate us from
ourselves.
What if there were a way to stop being
afraid of your desires? In this chapter,
you will discover how even your most neurotic and destructive desires can be
transformed into engines of divine actualization that can propel you down the
path toward both a more joyful life in the present and the fulfillment of your
ultimate destiny, becoming the god that God himself created you to be.
Love
and the Reorientation of Desire
Falling in love with my wife was a
transformational experience for me.
Suddenly, everything was about her.
Love has a way of radically reorienting us away from ourselves and
toward one another. We find ourselves by
losing ourselves.
(From Opusdei.org) Some of us don’t know how long we will be deprived
of participation in the Eucharist, but we need to realize the value that our
sincere desire to receive Him has in God’s eyes. Saint Josemaria has taught
thousands of people throughout the world a prayer that he learned from a good
Piarist priest: “I wish, my Lord, to receive you with the purity, humility, and
devotion with which your most holy Mother received you, with the spirit and
fervour of the saints.”
It is a very bold prayer because he expresses the wish to attain the
highest summit any creature has reached. He wants his soul to be at the height
of Mary’s, the blessed among all women. And he is eager to make his own the
fervour of all the other saints. Everything seems little to him when it is a
question of celebrating the presence of a Guest who merits everything. And God
makes his desires effective. God cleans a soul that prays like this. To speak
in a human way, God “enjoys” seeing how his Only-begotten Son and his adoptive
son love one another. During these days we can make God happy by fulfilling our
ordinary duties and praying this brief prayer frequently. It will help us find
Him not only in the nearby but perhaps inaccessible Tabernacle, but also in the
thousand small daily occurrences in our homes.
In a similar way, when we make an
authentic response to God’s invitation to become gods, something amazing
happens. Suddenly everything is about
him. Our hopes, our dreams, our
relationships, our desires become reoriented.
They don’t go away, but they take on a new significance. They point not to our desires as an end in
themselves, but to new ways we might come to know God better and draw closer to
him. Directly or indirectly, our desires
become entirely about him.
The Three Attitudes Toward Desire
We desire a lot of things: wealth, status, power, sex, security,
affirmation, and health are just a few of the longings almost every person
aches to fulfill. Sadly, we often have a
complicated relationship with our desires.
In his book Fill These Hearts
(2012), Christopher West notes that, in the face of their desires, people tend
to become addicts, stoics, or mystics.
I now
recall in the slam book in which I asked my young friends to fill out, not a
few of them had for their ambition ‘To be a saint’. I was not expecting that at such a young age
the few of them want to be a saint. I
wondered then ‘do they know what they are wishing for?’ Doubtless the Holy
Spirit is in them at that young age as He is with each and every one of
us. He it is who makes us saints but not
without our participation. You and I can
be saints, the gods that the Holy Spirit wants us to be. Let you and I then do our part well. Let’s
pray for each other.
See you in
the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may
you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care;
‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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