Thank God Constantly For The Love God Shows Us Through Our Faith

Abundance flows in all our steps.  Thank God in all circumstances,* since God's blessings endlessly proliferate.  

On Thanksgiving Day, in his homily Father Cyprian noted that we can be thankful in various ways.  We can be grateful that worse circumstances have not befallen us.  Right now, thanks be to God that the coronavirus is before us and not anything more devastating, nor an additional, much more threatening challenge; this spiritual dynamic is easy to perceive here at the hermitage, given how, thanks be to God, no one here was injured during the recent wildfire, nor how any structures were damaged in that fire which erupted in the midst of the coronavirus.  

In his homily, Father Cyprian also noted that in a much more profound sense we can thank God for the spiritual blessings He bestows on us.  Thanks be to God that He gives us faith in Him.  Through this faith, God strengthens us in the hope we have in His promise of what is to come.  God motivates us through this faith to love Him** and to love one another.***  Having faith, we are empowered by God to open our hearts to receive His love He pours into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.****

As we open our hearts to God, we are grateful to God that our hearts are open.  Although current circumstances may feel challenging, thank God for what is happening right now.  Often we are not able to see the good that God is working through all that is happening right now, the good that He works for all who love Him.*****  Trust is an indispensable bulwark to going forward in faith in God.  

What do we think is happening right now?  There is what is happening that we cannot see.  There is what we do, in which we can make seen the unseen.  In our choices, we can be the pathways through which God makes manifest that which could not be seen, yet which can be seen if we consent to cooperate.  If we embrace the faith God has given us, God makes His love manifest through us, and thus we give constant thanks to God.  

* 1 Thessalonians 5:18 

** Deuteronomy 6:5; Deuteronomy 10:12; Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27 

*** Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Leviticus 19:18; Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14 

**** Romans 5:5 

***** Romans 8:28 

Let Us Let God Remake Us

Today in his homily Fr. Cyprian really got to the core of my basic orientation toward the coronavirus. Indeed, when the idea came into my head to blog expounding a little on what he'd said in his sermon, I stopped to consider that perhaps he'd already fully expressed it.  

Fr. Cyprian referred back to the first reading we heard at Mass tonight.  In that reading, we heard 

This word came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Rise up, be off to the potter’s house;
there I will give you my message.
I went down to the potter’s house and there he was,
working at the wheel.
Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand,
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.
Then the word of the LORD came to me:
Can I not do to you, house of Israel,
as this potter has done? says the LORD.
Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter,
so are you in my hand, house of Israel.*  

Fr. Cyprian explained that perhaps God is trying to remake us now.  Maybe we are being called right now to unlearn maladaptive habits which have become very comfortable.  Just because we're used to a certain way of thinking or acting, it doesn't mean it serves us well.  

Fr. Cyprian described that when we're addicted, we are overflowing with our addictions.  He continued that recovering addicts are told to visualize their addictions as being in a cup.  They're told to overturn the cup and let its contents spill out.  

Yet when we are emptied, then what do we do?  How can we fill ourselves?  How can we know what we need to fill us in a healthy way?  How can we nourish ourselves?  How can we provide the source of our own life?  

Instead of trying to fill ourselves, we can sit and wait.  We can practice patience.  We can develop the skill of sitting still.  We can learn to be silent.  We could listen instead of talking. We can try to be attentive to God.  

We embrace all of these difficult endeavors, they suddenly begin to happen, through the working of God's grace, when we're removed from the world.  If we give our consent, we give God free rein to work miracles in and through us.  Having stepped out of ourselves, God steps into us.  

Indeed, we have been extricated from our usual routines.  We have been given the blessing of being helped to step out of our maladaptive patterns.  

It wasn't until I quit my job as an attorney, accepted an invitation into the Peace Corps, moved to northern Morocco, and then went even deeper, moving into the Sahara Desert, that I had sufficiently departed from distractions to be able to consider a new way of being.  It was time.  
Sometimes we willingly choose to go into the desert.  The dry, arid expanse of the physical desert can be a good analogy for the metaphorical desert in which we feel deprived of all we had found so comforting.  

Yet if we stay where we are not challenged, how will we ever grow?  If we never step out of what is familiar to us, we will never step into the territory in which we find that we have been capable of more than we have ever been.  

Right now we have been picked up and dropped into a landscape where we have never been. How we will emerge from it is up to us.  Are we going to accept the invitation to become what we have never been, or stay right where we have always been?  

* Jeremiah 18:1-6