Tag: AnxietyAnxiety and Contemplation
I need peace, I need your prayers…Dear Mother Luisita, I am deeply troubled by things that seem so trivial and I can’t seem to shake a sense of impending doom. My anxiety is constant. I need peace, I need your prayers.
Accept my loving greeting and my prayer for you to be what God wants you to be. What about your soul? Is it taking little steps toward heaven or is it flying there? Be very united with Our Lord so that your prayer may be continual, and at the same time, full of confidence in God. Fix your gaze on heaven, not on earthly things that all pass away like a breath leaving behind nothing but remorse and sadness like smoke that disappears with nothing but reality remaining. Be entirely at peace. What we have to do, myself included, is to become saints, to perfect the ordinary deeds of daily life and to live only for God. Let us bless God always and for everything, that we may remain happy and at peace even in the midst of thorns. Let us bless God our Lord in all and for all! Whenever sorrow enters your life, lift up your soul to God, offering it up to Him. Never separate yourself from Our Lord. He is always giving you proofs of His love for you. He loves you very much and, in return, you should love Him with all of your soul. We have to become very detached from everything else, so that He may be the One to fill our hearts. I remind you that He is very jealous, and that inordinate love for any creature will take His place in our souls. The troubles you are now experiencing are found everywhere. They are the flowers in this valley of tears that perhaps are part of the plan of God and a means of practicing virtues. Try to see the difficulties and contradictions in this life with serenity. God our Lord will help you if you place everything in His hands and pray much. When you place everything in His hands, He will do everything, and very well! Look to God, your soul, and eternity. All the rest is merely a puff of smoke! Peace, it seems to me, is an indispensable factor if we are to have life in our souls. Lack of peace is harmful to you. Try to allow peace to come back to your soul, praying to Our Lord for that grace. Every day you should be spending half an hour if you can, or even less, with the Blessed Sacrament asking Him for His help and presenting Him all your difficulties. As God, He knows everything; talk to Him as you would talk to a Father. Try not to lose God’s peace or His presence. May you receive the consolation that comes from Him alone. Try to become a little better each day. Make all of your devotions with increasing fervor and have a great purity of intention at the root of all of your actions. May God help you to be happy in your work, doing everything for the love of Him. When Our Lord sends you occasions to practice virtue in any manner whatsoever don’t oppose Him or resist Him. Accept with good will all of the difficulties and contradictions of life. I would like very much for you to become a great soul, strong and vigorous, never looking toward your own gain and self-love, but toward God’s glory. Keep well, my child, and be what you are supposed to be – a saint! Take care of yourself. Write me when you can. Pray for me and may God bless you. - Mother Luisita Click here to find out more about Mother Luisita
Advent anxiety – What do I do? – Part I of III
A: Progress on the path of holiness requires sincerity with God and sincerity with ourselves. How can we move forward if we aren’t honest with ourselves about the obstacles in our path? Your question shows you are being sincere. That’s good. That’s a reason for you to breathe a sigh of relief –the Holy Spirit is already guiding you from within. He will continue to do so. But since the subtext of your question touches issues that, I am certain, many of our readers are also dealing with, I would like to take two or three posts to address the issue of living Advent well. Living Advent well requires, in the first place, refreshing our understanding about liturgical seasons in general, and the liturgical meaning of Advent and Christmas in particular. Why God Invented the Liturgical Seasons We are not angels. Angels are pure spirit; they live outside the limits of physics and biology. We human beings, though we are indeed spiritual creatures, develop our spiritual capacities in and through material realities. Among those material realities, time and space hold pride of place. And so, when God decided to redeem us, to lead us back into communion with himself after the disaster of original sin, he did so by sending his grace through the media of time and space. And this is still his method. The Church, enlivened and guided by the Holy Spirit, is earth’s spiritual rehab center. It administers the grace we need to recover from sin (original and personal) in doses that reach us through human, not angelic, means. The rhythm of the liturgical seasons arises from this remarkably humble, gentle, and realistic approach to salvation, an approach customized to our spiritual-material nature. The liturgical seasons, then, are chances for us to receive new graces from God, graces that he puts in the air (so to speak) precisely for us. Each season is like a fresh start, a new opportunity to mature spiritually just a little bit more, as healthy trees mature through the steady and gentle transition of natural seasons. All we have to do to foster this spiritual growth is live each liturgical season with the attention of our heart on the primary aspects of God’s revelation that the season highlights. For Advent, this includes the three comings of Christ: his historical coming two thousand years ago, his present coming in the here-and-now of our lives, and his future coming at the end of history. These events are all interwoven through the liturgical readings, feasts, and traditions of the season. They reveal God’s goodness, wisdom, mercy, and power. They urge us to reform our lives so as to be ready to welcome the Lord. They inspire us to remember the bigger picture of salvation history, even as we stumble through the part of that picture comprised by our daily lives. Turning our attention to those mysteries involves an attitudinal and a practical adjustment. Adjusting Our Attitude Attitudinally, we need to remind ourselves that his Advent is different from every other Advent that we have ever lived, ever. It is different because we are different. In the past year, we have changed. We have another year of life under our belts. Maybe it was a year full of successes, joys, and advances. Maybe it was a year full of failures and sins. Maybe it was a year of suffering and hardship. Whatever happened during the past year, it has affected us. We have more experience, more knowledge, and, we hope, a little more wisdom and a deeper love for God and neighbor. As a result, when we turn our attention once again to Advent, to the three comings of Christ, we will see something new, something different. Jesus Christ is God. He is infinite beauty, power, goodness, and truth. We can never know him completely. He is an inexhaustible treasury of greatness. Because of our life experience during the past year, we are now ready to discover new facets of this treasure, new levels of meaning, wisdom, strength, and joy. God’s providence has been preparing us over this past year, so that we may now learn things about God and his plan of salvation that he couldn’t show us before, because we weren’t ready. All three of those comings of Christ have the same purpose: to reestablish and deepen our friendship with God. He is looking forward making that happen, to deepening our friendship with him, in these coming weeks of Advent. Making a Practical Adjustment Practically, the coming four weeks need to be different. During our daily God-time, the themes of our meditation and spiritual reading should speak to us of Advent. We should make sure to go to confession during these weeks. We should participate actively in some of the parish Advent activities – both the spiritual ones and the apostolic or service-oriented ones. And we should make sure that our family life and our home are brought into synch with the rhythm of the liturgical season. Instead of listing the myriad ways that can happen (decorating the house and yard with Christmas decorations gradually, throughout Advent; having a family Advent Calendar or Jesse Tree; listening to Christmas music starting right away in the first week of Advent; watching favorite Christmas movies as a family every Saturday night of Advent…), I would like to ask our readers to comment on Advent traditions that have been fruitful and helpful for them, so we can have an exchange of ideas. The important point is that we have to express our shift of spiritual attention in some material manifestation, if we want to live the season well. (This is why, for instance, the Church changes the colors of vestments and the hymns during Advent.) If you need some new ideas, you can browse through the Advent-themed comments and articles at www.FaithandFamilylive.com, and the Advent-themed products at this online store. As you can see, the attitudinal and practical adjustments of Advent don’t have to take a lot of time. They are simply a refocusing of the attention of our hearts. We turn our souls towards the spiritual winds of Advent, to be refreshed by the graces they carry. Having reminded ourselves of the meaning of liturgical seasons in general and the season of Advent in particular, we are ready to address the core of your question: the challenges of Advent, which are the cause of your feelings of anxiety. There are two major difficulties. Will tackle them in our next posts, one at a time. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC, ThD Ignatian Examination of Conscience on Faith, Hope, and Love
As we read the Spiritual Exercises, we may be overwhelmed by the minute detail of St. Ignatius’ treatment of what he calls the particular examination of conscience. At the same time, he is careful to provide, “Some Notes on Scruples.” It is very important, therefore, that we form a clear and correct conscience. This means that we cultivate a sensitive judgment which is alert to the least offense against the Divine will and, at the same time, protect ourselves against the wiles of the evil spirit. “The enemy,” says St. Ignatius,” considers carefully whether one has a lax or a delicate conscience. If one has a delicate conscience, the evil one seeks to make it excessively sensitive in order to disturb and upset it more easily. Thus, if he sees that one will not consent to mortal sin or venial sin, or even to the appearance of deliberate sin, since he cannot cause him to fall in a matter that appears sinful, he strives to make the soul judge that there is a sin, for example in a word or passing thought, where there is no sin” (Spiritual Exercises, 349). It is valuable to reflect on this tactic of the evil spirit before we offer some practical norms for making our daily examination of conscience. Why? Because otherwise, we are liable to overlook the importance of a daily inventory of our moral conduct for fear of becoming scrupulous. There is such a thing as growing in prudent sensitivity of conscience, without becoming a victim of the “enemy” as St. Ignatius calls him. We may set this down as a general principle, for those who are sincerely striving to do the will of God: It is characteristic of God and His angels, when they act upon the soul, to give true happiness and spiritual joy and to banish all the sadness and disturbances which are caused by the enemy. It is characteristic of the evil one to fight against such happiness and consolation by proposing fallacious reasonings, subtleties, and continual deceptions (Rules for Discernment of Spirits, II, 1). What are we to conclude from this? That the more zealous we are in trying to please God, the more He will give us a deep interior peace of soul. We should suspect as a temptation from the evil one, when we find ourselves worried or anxious or disturbed, no matter how pious the source of the worry or anxiety may be. The key to applying this principle is that, before God, I honestly want to do His will even though through weakness, I may fail to live up to my resolutions. One basic virtue on which we should daily examine ourselves is peace of soul. We should ask ourselves, “Have I given in to worry or anxiety?” “Have I allowed myself to get discouraged?” A good practice is to pronounce the name, “Jesus,” when we find ourselves getting despondent, or say some short aspiration like, “My Jesus, I trust in you,” whenever we become dejected over something. PARTICULAR EXAMEN ON THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES Before applying the particular examen to my own spiritual life, it is well to first ask myself, “What are the virtues that I know from experience I most need to develop?” The reason why this question should first be answered is that no two of us are equally prone to commit the same kind of sins. Nor are we personally always tempted in the same direction. There is wisdom in first knowing enough about myself, to be able to get to the root of my own moral weakness. Otherwise, I may be ignoring what really needs attention in my spiritual life and concentrating on what is not so necessary for me at this time in my service of God. Moreover, it would be a mistake to suppose that by attending to my moral failings, I am being “negative” in my pursuit of holiness. On the contrary. In God’s providence, He allows us to fail in those areas in which He especially wants us to grow in virtue. We can fail in the practice of these virtues either by commission, omission, or by tepidity, in not acting as generously as we might in responding to the grace we have received from God. FAITH
HOPE
CHARITY
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