Our Divine Longing for Communion

January 23, 2024


Hi! How is each and every one? We are still within the Octave of Christian Unity (January 17-25).  The Church is praying for the unity of Christians all over the world. Together with Pope Francis we are also praying for peace in the world, in the Holy Land, Ukraine and Russia. Each of us has his/her personal petitions and intentions and we pray together for all these. 

“Prayer, this is our strength:  we have never had any other weapon” (St. Josemaría, Letter 17-VI-73, 35).  All the dimensions in our life can become a constant dialogue with God. Therefore at any moment we can raise our requests to heaven.  This is a reality that fills us with hope, because we know that, despite the difficulties in the world and our personal limitations, our Lord always listens to us.  Only He can offer us deep joy, both in the adversities and the joyful moments that accompany us day after day. (cf. opusdei.org Letter, 22 January 2024).

Following is an excerpt from opusdei.org on The "Why" of Revelation (10/01/2022).

 All men and women possess a natural desire to gain full knowledge of God, although we cannot attain this knowledge without God’s help. Through the history of salvation recounted in the Bible, God has revealed himself as a personal being and a Trinity of persons. By this revelation, God seeks to offer us the possibility of living in communion with Him, so that we can share in his gifts and in his own life, and thus attain complete happiness.

 The “why” of Revelation

 Each person has a natural desire to reach a full knowledge of God. Such knowledge, however, cannot be attained by human effort alone. This is because God is not a material creature or a sensible reality that we can experience. We can arrive at some certainties about God from created beings and from knowledge of our own being. But these ways of knowing give a rather limited knowledge of God and his inner life. Moreover, we confront considerable difficulties in attaining this certainty. Therefore, if God did not emerge from the mystery of his own life and reveal Himself to us, our situation would be similar to what Saint Augustine once experienced, according to a story told by some medieval authors.

 One day Saint Augustine was walking along the seashore, trying to comprehend what the Church teaches about God and the mystery of the Trinity. At a certain moment, he looked up and saw a little boy playing in the sand. The child would run to the sea, fill a small container with water, and return and empty the water into a hole. After observing this for some time, the saint became curious and asked, “Hi there, what are you doing?” The young boy replied, “I’m taking all the water out of the sea and putting it into this hole.” “But that’s impossible,” he told the boy, who quickly replied: “It is more impossible to do what you are trying to do: to understand the mystery of God in the smallness of your mind.”

But God hasn’t left us in this situation. He chose to reveal Himself, that is, to manifest Himself, to emerge from his own mystery and remove the veil that prevents us from knowing who He is and what He is like. God did not do this for the sake of satisfying our curiosity, or by simply communicating a message about Himself. Rather, He revealed himself by coming to meet mankind – especially by sending his Son into the world and by the gift of the Holy Spirit – and by inviting us to enter into a loving relationship with Him. God has wanted to unveil his own inner life, and to enable us to approach Him as his friends and as beloved children, so as to make us fully happy with his infinite love.

The “longings for fulfillment” and the “longings for salvation” inscribed in our human condition cannot be satisfied by something earthly. However, the revelation of God, the gift of Himself in giving us his infinite Love, has the capacity to satisfy—in a superabundant manner—the human heart, filling it with a happiness far greater than what we can desire or even imagine. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9). Revelation “is the fulfillment of our deepest aspirations, of that longing for the infinite and for fullness, which dwells in the depths of the human being and opens him or her to a happiness that is not fleeting or limited but eternal (Pope Benedict XVI, Audience, 5 December 2012).

 

Lust the seventh of the capital sins (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2).      

Lust is a distortion of the divine longing for communion, the desire for intimate connection, to know and be known by another.  God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gn 2:18).  We were created for intimate communion, and we cannot be satisfied if we are cut off from the authentic love of both God and others.  In this life, the divine longing for communion helps us create deep, intimate, and rewarding relationships.  It facilitates our divinization by making us long for ultimate communion with the God who made us and calls us to him.  The spirit of lust lies to us, telling us that true communion is unnecessary; rather, lust whispers that it is enough to create a connection with another person that is often just skin-deep.  Lust ignores the call to soulful intimacy we were created to enjoy.  It causes us to settle for the illusion of connection.

Our divine longing for communion can be satisfied only by practicing the heavenly virtue of chastity.  Most people think chastity is limited to what some parents tell their children:  “Don’t have sex until you’re married, or else!” but that’s not true.  Practicing chastity in the larger sense is trying to love every person in your life rightly.  Chastity enables us to be as fully loving as might be appropriate with everyone with whom we have a relationship—not just our romantic partner.  In general, chastity is the virtue that stops us from seeing people as a means to an end instead of as persons who have a right to be treated with love and dignity.


The following table presents an at-a-glace overview of how the seven deadly sins, the seven divine longings, and the seven heavenly virtues go together.

THIS DEADLY SIN…

DISTORTS THE DIVINE LONGING FOR…

WHICH CAN BE FULFILLED ONLY BY THIS HEAVENLY VIRTUE

Pride               

Abundance

Humility

Envy               

Dignity

Kindness

Wrath

Justice

Patience

Sloth

Peace

Diligence/Fortitude

Greed

Trust

Generosity/Charity

Gluttony

Well-being

Temperance

Lust

Communion

Chastity

 

 

                                 

 




                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





 


 I thought it best to post all the volumes of In Conversation With God by Francis Fernandez for your information.  You might just be interested as I have heard of a lot of persons like it and say the collection continues to help them in their conversation with God every day.   

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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