We Try, We Begin Anew

Did you read Magnificat yesterday? It truly is a great gift when it becomes a part of your life. What a difference just a few pages a day can make!

This comes from the late Father Maurice Zundel:

We know very well — we ourselves have noticed it thousands of times — we know very well that we really exist only when we cease being slaves of our own temperament, of our rights. We cease being slaves inasmuch as we lose ourselves in God.

When we have become nothing but a gaze turned toward God, then all is well: we can communicate, for a moment, the smile of divine kindness to others. We are truly persons only inasmuch as we are hanging on God, and Rimbaud’s words, “I is an other,” really mean that. Our true “self” is in God. Our true freedom is God and we really become a human being, a creature, inasmuch as we are really in a relationship with God.

Except that this happens only momentarily. We rarely are in this state of transparency to God which makes of us the sacrament of his presence. We try, we begin anew. But we are not continually in this state of perfect detachment which allows him to shine through us all the time.

Saints allow God to shine through them with a much greater constancy: and yet, saints never come to the end of this work of liberation and they are the first to admit that they have never finished purifying themselves of their limitations and barriers and, they, too, the saints, much more than we, are hanging on God and keeping their self in God.

Our Lord’s humanity, this creature, conceived through the work of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, no longer adheres to itself, and that is the difference between his humanity and ours. It is a constant living relationship with God.

How practically put. Hanging on God. Keeping ourselves in God. If we can do it for a moment today, we’ve got a shot at doing it more often. Letting him shine through at home and at work and in transit and wherever we meet a brother or sister.

We try, we begin anew. To make of our lives a “transparency to God which makes of us the sacrament of his presence.” To give our lives to God, so he can do what he has had in mind all along.

What a difference it would make. What a life it could be.