Hidden Within Sin: A Hint of Hope?
Hi! How is each and every one? Wow! I just
realized November is the month of suffrages for our deceased relatives and
friends and for all the Holy Souls in purgatory. At the same the last Thursday
of the month has been designated as Thanksgiving Day. And yet every moment should truly be a moment
of thanksgiving. St. Josemaria suggests “Make
it a habit to raise your heart to God, in acts of thanksgiving, many times a
day.” “Thank Him for everything, because
everything is good.” St. Paul
says, in
everything God works for good with those who love him (Rom 8:28), which St. Josemaria condensed into the
aspiration omnia in bonum! Everything
is good; everything is for the good.
Both gratitude for what is good, and the hope that God will draw good
out of what seems bad. Wherever
we happen to look, Saint Josemaria seems to be telling us, we will only find reasons
to be grateful. We see reflected here an
overflowing admiration for God’s goodness; an astonishment that recalls Saint Francis,
“Canticle of the Creatures,” where everything also becomes a reason for
thanking God. “Praise to you, my Lord, for Sister Moon and for the stars…
Praise to you, my Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air, and fair and stormy, all
weather’s moods… Praise to you, my Lord, for those who grant pardon for love of
you.”
The following excerpt (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the
Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2) also
calls us to give thanks to God for His goodness, love and mercy.
Hidden Within
Sin: A Hint of Hope?
People often despair over their endless struggles
against their fallen nature. But what if
I told you that, rather than a cause for despair, the very existence of the
seven deadly sins is a sign of hope? The
seven deadly sins actually point toward the seven divine longings of every
human heart. Longings that God not only
approves of but intends to satisfy abundantly!
Classically, sin is understood as “a privation of
the good.” To put it another way, sin is
settling for less than what God wants to give you. For instance, God wants us to experience
earthly pleasures in a way that leads us to greater health and stronger
relationship and points us toward fulfilling our destiny in him. Instead, we tend to settle for particular
types of experiences of earthly pleasure that are destructive to our health and
well-being, that undermine our relationships, and that point us toward nothing
except emptiness. Sin does not make us
“bad people.” It makes us broken
people—really, broken gods, because divinization is our destiny. Sin steals this destiny from us and turns us
into people who feel powerless and isolated, people who are filled with
self-pity and consumed by the pursuit of self-indulgence because they want to
make all the gain go away.
By contrast, because he loves us, God wants us to
desire what is good for us, and through our deepest longings he wants us to be
healed. So he gives us the grace to
fulfill all our desires—even the earthly ones—in a dynamic way that satisfies
body, mind, and spirit!
Give
Me a Drink
Consider the story of the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus at the well. Jesus asks her for a drink, and after a brief exchange he reveals that he has much more in mind for her.
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks
this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give
will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water
welling up to eternal life.” The woman
said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to
keep coming here to draw water” (Jn 4:13-15).
As the story unfolds, we discover that the woman at
the well has had five husbands and is now living with a paramour. Clearly, this is a woman who is looking for
something more and struggling to find it.
It would be easy to condemn her, but that would mean ignoring something
important: the strength of her desires
is actually a great resource. Unlike
many who give up, believing that their longings can never be satisfied, she
continues to look for something that can fill her.
Like that Samaritan woman of long ago, each of us
stands before Christ thirsting, but we’re uncertain about what we are thirsty
for. We seek fulfillment in the pursuit
of pleasure as an end in itself, but no pleasure will ever satisfy us. We can discover the living water that
quenches our thirst only when we turn to Christ, who shows us that when our
desires for earthly things are united with his grace, they can serve as
vehicles that propel us toward true fulfillment and our ultimate destiny.
“As we strive to
maintain a constant spirit of gratitude in our lives we will realize that
thanksgiving enlarges our hearts to receive even greater gifts from God” (Fr.
Javier, Thanksgiving Day and Acts of
Gratitude).
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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