I’ve tried for so long to win in the game of life and to succeed in the spiritual life.
If you know me, you know I spent more than two decades searching for God in every traditional and non-traditional path. It was all interesting and enlightening in many ways. But nothing stuck.
Returning to the Catholic faith after a lifetime of being away, I’ve realized the follwing simple truths, which have been reiterated since Jesus told his disciple Peter that he would build his church upon him.
-This world and all the people in it are broken.
-Forgiveness is the humble acceptance of everyone’s brokenness, including my own.
-Only God has the power to heal or change anything. I am helpless and hopeless to do anything on my own about my life or the world.
-Whether I knew it or not, anything positive in my life came from God’s grace, not my effort.
-God is always here. I am the one who constantly abandons him when I look elsewhere for direction.
-Jesus isn’t just a kindly, wise soul. He is the unfathomable, divine presence of God squeezed into the human. I must “Do what he says,” as Mother Mary instructed the servant to fill the wine jugs with water at the wedding feast of Cana.
-Jesus’s resurrection makes his words and actions the way, the truth and the life unlike any other.
-The heart-stopping belief in the resurrection is a gift of God’s grace. It convinced me that Jesus’ words are God’s. I could not have come to this knowing on my own.
– It doesn’t matter that Jesus entered human history 2,000 years ago. God and his truth are eternal, working backward and forward through time.
-Turning to God repeatedly in the eternal present is how I heal the past and safeguard the future. I am not to be distracted by the external. Instead, I look to the peace or unrest in my heart as the measure of my relationship with the Lord.
Amen.
The Radical Catholic 
Leave a comment