~From The Desert Fathers

And how can we live in the bosom of the One who flung the flaming stars into space, and not burn white hot and sun-bright?

From Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning

As I suspected, the statement “The glory of God is man fully alive,” taken out of context can be deceiving.  It seems to imply that the way to glorify God is to just be yourself and follow your heart.  Now, being yourself is very important — just look at what happens when you try to be someone else — but it’s important to remember that the only way to truly be yourself, a created being, is through and for the One who created you.  The glory of God is man fully alive, but man fully alive is man glorifying God.

But I have better words waiting in my clipboard.

NEW CATHOLIC CATECHISM

|ARTICLE NO. 293

Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.” St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase His glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it,” for God has no other reason for creating than His love and goodness: St. Thomas expresses it thusly. “Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened His hand.” The First Vatican Council explains:

This one, true God, of his own goodness and “almighty power,” not for increasing his own beatitude, nor for attaining his perfection, but in order to manifest this perfection through the benefits which he bestows on creatures, with absolute freedom of counsel “and from the beginning of time, made out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal…”

ARTICLE NO. 294

The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of His goodness, for which the world was created. God made us “to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace,”(Eph. 1:5-6) for as St Irenaeus states; “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of god: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.” The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last be all in all, thus simultaneously assuring His own glory and our beatitude.”(1 Cor.15: 28)

S. D. found the irony in this; I think it’s incredibly profound.  Why do we expect God to give us an easy life?  What do we think this is all about, anyway?  (And by “we” I mean “me”).

Another friend emailed me this recently, a wonderful reminder of our purpose here:

“The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God. One reason that the problem of evil seems so puzzling is that we tend to think that if God exists, then His goal for human life is happiness in this world.  God’s role is to provide comfortable environment for His human pets.  But on the Christian view this is false.  We are not God’s pets, and man’s end is not happiness in this world, but the knowledge of God, which will ultimately bring true and everlasting human fulfillment.  Many evils occur in life which maybe utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness in this world, but they may not be unjustified with respect to producing the knowledge of God.”

“As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.”

In the rest of this article, Fr. Neuhaus talks about his near death experience nine years ago.  Read it here.

But I was broken out of my intellect, my intention, my talent by the brokenness of my body, and though I wanted to relate to Christ in his witty reparte, his compassion, his healing, I now relate most to his twisted form on the cross, eyes shut in pain, not yet dead, not yet ressurrected, not yet ascended.  My Lord, the suffering, naked, four inch plastic form on the eight inch wooden cross.

I am not making a theology out of this.  Far be it from me.  I am telling you what I do not know, not what I know.   I am in pain all the time.  I am dizzy, nauseaus, exhausted, and this is before the side effects from the medications kick in.

Jesus’ features are not twisted in agony.  If you didn’t know better you might almost think he looked peaceful.  But I think that I recognize the movement inward that a long-suffering spirit makes.  It is close to meditation.  You have less to do with the world, with what is going on around you.  Physical and emotional sensation takes over and then, somehow, you sink below that, to a place deeper than that.

The contemplatives teach that at our very center the Spirit is constantly praying; that our act of prayer consists of joining in awareness with that ongoing prayer.   This is the only kind of prayer I can hope for, now.

I place a finger on each nail and press the wooden cross to my heart, the broken body of Christ against my own.

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel.

This is an exerpt from Eliot’s The Four Quartets, and it is a vivid description of the experience I have been having this past year, which I can also find described in books like The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross.

The Latin for “dark” is obsura — obscure. We don’t understand why the removal of our joy, our peace, our dearly loved connection with our Lord is necessary, but we trust that it is. We have prayed to give Him everything, and it turns out that the taking away of everything includes the things we depended on for our faith. These things are not He. As a character in a Charles Williams novel says, “Neither is this Thou.”

We wanted to live for Him. We find we can barely live at all. We wanted to conquer the world for His Kingdom. We find we can not even conquer ourselves.

Even this is too much explanation. It is obscure. I am not here to instruct myself, nor to carry report. I am here to kneel.

*Thanks to Sleight of Hand for sending me to this passage.

“Augustine says, ‘My heart is restless until it rests in you, O Lord.’ You can say that much of what we are doing is to find some solution for our loneliness. On a very deep level, we know that if we want human beings or human structures to solve our loneliness, we can quickly become extremely demanding and obsessive. If you use your relationship to solve your loneliness, you can quickly find yourself being very clinging and oppressive. This is why loneliness often leads to so much violence. You want somebody else to take that loneliness away and it doesn’t work. You can see how quickly people’s behaviour starts becoming violent — kissing is a loving behaviour, but it becomes biting before you know it. Listening becomes overhearing, and looking tenderly becomes looking suspiciously. Precisely when they come out of loneliness, all these gentle things become violent things very quickly…

“Solitude is a discipline in which you deal with your loneliness in a way that it doesn’t destroy you or others, but instead becomes a place to discover the truth of who you are. You are created by a God who wants all your attention and who wants to give you all the love you need.”