Consent to God

Monday of the First Week in Lent

Matthew 25:34-6

Come; you that are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom for you from the foundation of the world; , for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

The spiritual journey is a training in consent to God's presence and to all reality. Basically this is what true humility is. The divine action invites us to make the consents that we were unable to make in childhood and growing up because of the circumstances that surrounded our early lives.

This brings us to a paradigm for the spiritual journey that sheds a great deal of light on the positive aspects of grace, which not only heals the emotional damage of a lifetime, but also empowers us to enter on the path of unconditional love, even from the beginning of our conversion. Jesus emphasized this approach to divine union when he said, "Love one another as I have loved you."

The theologian John S. Dunne has suggested that the stages of the spiritual journey correspond to the passage of human life from birth to death. At each major stage of that development, God asks us to make an appropriate consent.

In childhood, God asks us to consent to the basic goodness of our nature with all its parts. As children we experience our own faculties, develop imagination, memory, and language, and learn to relate to family and peers. In these years we are asked to accept the basic goodness of our being as a gift from God and to be grateful for it.

In early adolescence, God asks us to accept the full development of our being by activating our talents and creative energies. Puberty actualizes the physical side of a much broader energy: our capacity to relate to other people, to emerge out of the isolated world of a child, and to begin to assume responsibility for ourselves and for our relationships.

In early adulthood, God invites us to make a third consent: to accept the fact of our nonbeing and the diminutions of self that occur through illness, old age, and death.

The fourth consent is the consent to be transformed. We might think that everybody would be eager to make this one, but even the holiest people are inclined to say, "Let's not rush into this." The transforming union requires consent to the death of the false self, and the false self is the only self we know. Whatever its inconveniences, it is at least familiar. Some of us are more afraid of the death of the false self than of physical death.

This gradual training in consent is the school of divine love in which God invites us to accept the divine plan to share the divine life with us in a way that transcends all that the human imagination can foresee. We do not make these consents as ends in themselves, but rather to the will of God present in these things. We consent to God and to his will both in the enjoyment and in the surrender of his gifts.

~Invitation to Love

Prayer

O Holy Spirit, through Your unfailing inspiration,
may we consent ever more fully to
Your Presence and action within us.

Prayer

Tuesday of the First Week in Lent

Matthew 6:7-13

When you are praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Pray, then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
    hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven: 
Give us this day our daily bread. 
And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, 
    but rescue us from the evil one.

Prayer is a large umbrella. There are many kinds of prayer and many ways of expressing it. Fundamentally, it is a response to God's invitation to turn our minds and hearts to him. The classical formulas are that of Evagrius, which is the laying aside of thoughts; and that of St. John Damascene, which is conversation of the mind with God. By "mind" St. John means the spiritual faculties of intellect and will. Sometimes this interior movement needs to be expressed in words or concepts, but to be true prayer, it does not have to be expressed by words or concepts.

The Fathers of the Church and the great spiritual masters of the Christian tradition have elaborated on various levels and degrees of prayer We may also think of prayer as a conversation with God, which deepens as one becomes more and more devoted to him. That deepening does not prevent us from expressing prayer spontaneously on every level of our being, from the spoken word of prayer to the simple movement of the will, which the Cloud of Unknowing calls a "gentle stirring of love." This simple movement of the will is scarcely perceptible to our attention, but at the deepest level of our being, it unites us more intimately to the Holy Spirit than any other form of prayer For, as St. John of the Cross teaches, the Spirit is the sole mover at that deep level of interior silence and works powerfully without our being aware of what is happening.

~The Heart of the World

Prayer

O Holy Spirit,
may Your Light open our minds to the truth
and strengthen our wills
to accept the truth without wavering.

Conversion

Wednesday of the First Week in Lent

Jonah 3:6

When the news reached the king a, of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

The process of conversion begins with genuine openness to change--to be open to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so our spiritual life is evolving. Our psychological world is the result of natural growth, events over which we had no control in early childhood and grade school. Grace, which is the presence and action of Christ in our lives, invites us to be ready to let go of where we are now and to be open to the new values that are born when we penetrate to a new understanding of the Gospel and how it applies concretely to our daily lives. Moreover, Jesus calls us to repent not just once; it is a message that keeps recurring.

It is a gilt-edged invitation. Each time you consent to an enhancement of faith, your world changes and all your relationships have to be adjusted to the new perspective and the new light that has been given you. Our relationship to ourselves, to Jesus Christ, to our neighbor, to the Church--to God--all change. It is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in. Sometimes the Spirit of God deliberately shatters one of these worlds. If we have depended upon them to go to God, it may feel as if we have lost God. We may have doubts about God's very existence. Such doubts may be the best thing that ever happened to us. It is not the true God of faith we have doubts about, but only the God of our limited concepts or dependencies; this god never existed anyway.

And so the second part of 'Jesus' message is very important. If you repent and are willing to change, or are willing to let God change you, the kingdom of God is close; in fact, you have it; it is within you and you can begin to enjoy it. The kingdom of God belongs to those who are poor in spirit, who have let go of their possessive attitude toward everything, including God.

~Contemplative Outreach News, Winter, 1988

Prayer

Holy Spirit of God,
give us the grace of true sorrow for our sins
and the sure hope of pardon for all of our sins.

~~~~~