The Workings of Grace

January 30, 2024

The Divine Mercy        

Hi!  How is each and every one?  Still enjoying the cool mornings?  Do appreciate and savor them; bless the Lord for them; for everything, for that matter - the air, the light, the sun, the moon, the breeze, the snow, the rain, the drizzles, the morning dew, everything.  You and I don’t own anything.  Our Father in Heaven owns them all.  In His goodness and love He shares everything with us, His children. May you and I count everything as blessings and make good use of each and every one of them - our very life, person, body, mind, heart and soul, our talents, capabilities, potentials  and effort to become better each day, to do good always and in every place we find ourselves.  All this need continuous awareness of God’s love and presence in us and in every time and place. Following is the continuation of he previous post and this time we are invited to shift our focus (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2).

The Divine Longings:  A Shift in focus

Viewing our desires (pride, envy, sloth, wrath, greed, gluttony, lust) as expressions of the seven divine longings (abundance, dignity, peace, justice, trust, well-being, communion) enables us to see that giving in to sin is really not glamorous or fulfilling.  In fact, it is a distraction from the authentic fulfillment of our deepest desires—desires that point to eternal realities.  Likewise, understanding the seven divine longings invigorates our understanding of goodness.  We don’t practice the seven heavenly virtues just so we might avoid some existential spanking from our transcendent parent figure.  We practice them so that we might finally, after all our seeking, find true satisfaction of the seven divine longings in a manner that enables us to fulfill our destiny to become gods through God’s grace.  Any goodness that results is the fruit, not the object, of this effort and better reflects the working of God’s grace in us than it does a badge of honor that we pin on ourselves as a sign of our personal quest for spiritual superiority.

Opus Dei

I Do Not Condemn You

When Jesus said to the adulterous woman, “Neither do I condemn you” (Jn 8:11), he was speaking to each of us.  Too many people see the Christian walk as a lifelong attempt to avoid God’s big, wagging, heavenly finger—as a series of “thou shalt not’s” that must be scrupulously avoided if we are ever even to hope to pass muster.  The Christian walk is none of these things.  As Pope Benedict XVI observed, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular has to be more than “a collection of prohibitions” (Spiegel Online International, 2006).  The Christian walk is a call to fulfillment.  It is a path to discovering that God is speaking to us through our desires, and that those same longings that have so often led us down false paths can, with the help of God’s grace, be engines that drive our deification.  In the words of Pope Benedict XVI,

“We must not forget that the dynamism of desire is always open to redemption…We all, moreover, need to set out on the path of purification and healing of desire.  We are pilgrims, heading for the heavenly homeland…[The pilgrimage of desire] is not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height” (2012).

It is my hope that, by discovering the seven divine longings of your heart, you will be set free to confront your brokenness in a new light.  I hope that you can begin to leave behind the condemnation and suffocation of your past spiritual efforts and take up a new and easier yoke by which you learn to befriend your desires.  The path God has set before you, even though it has its challenges, is not meant to be a path of punishment, rejection, failure, and scolding, but rather a path of fulfillment, acceptance, victory, and encouragement toward your heavenly destiny in Christ.

Opus Dei today

What needs to be done by each one of us is to make more quiet time to reflect on ourselves, our life, our identity, our purpose in life, the meaning of our life, our mission, God’s plan for each one of us, why did He create us and the world. We ask ourselves these questions in God’s presence in our souls in grace and then we listen to movements, inspirations, in our hearts and we act on them. We need also to ask for God’s grace to be able to carry out what He wants at every given moment.  And be assured he will help each one of us work on our natural desires towards the fulfillment of our divine longings. You and I are each a divine work in progress.  It is a partnership between God and each one of us, the divine and the human. It is an exciting journey and adventure.

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