Behold I Make All Things New
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
If we are to see clearly and understand without error the meaning of our earthly experiences, if we are to succeed in unifying our whole life and giving more than transient significance and worth to our actions, we must put ourselves at the point of view of Almighty God and see our human life through his eyes. The significance of life and every act that makes up life is determined by the career which God traces for the human soul that issues from his creative hands.
To know ourselves is great wisdom. We know ourselves when we see ourselves as we appear to the thought of God, when in the exercise of his omnipotence he forms us.
As he deliberately molds soul and body, he is fully aware of the possibilities with which he endows his creatures. The creature’s existence as planned by him is the progressive realization of these possibilities.
The only life that is true and real is the one that conforms to that progressive course as clearly traced in the mind of God. Its reality and its truth is in the exact measure of that conformity.
It is unreal, no matter how praiseworthy and eminent it may appear in the eyes of men, to the extent that it deviates from that line of development. It is easy to see from this undeniable truth how false are the lives of those whom the world calls great.
The human soul created and recreated in grace is a masterpiece of God’s handiwork. Its production engages God’s omnipotence and gives play to God’s love. It is because of God’s intense love for us that our souls are made from nothing and then endowed with God’s life.
No creature, however holy and powerful, can be God’s minister in the act of creation, though strange to say, intermediaries can be employed in the still more marvelous act of recreation.
Recreation means causing the soul to come to a new birth by grace, to become, as Saint Paul styles it, “a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17). The soul endowed by nature with reason and will is called to live a life that reflects the life of God in its freedom of action and in its pursuit of the good.
As endowed with grace, it is empowered to imitate in an infinitely higher way a transcendently different aspect of the life divine. A life that is peculiarly and exclusively divine is the life of the intuitive contemplation of the Godhead and the beatific love of the divine beauty clearly seen.
The soul, as sanctified, as divinized by grace, is given the capacity to reflect in its own life this inner life of the Godhead. God as the fount of the supernatural system must be for his human creatures an object of praise, of reverence, of worship, of service and of love.
Love sums up in itself praise, reverence, worship, and service. The need of worship and service due from the creature to the creator glorifies the creator but can add nothing to him. It can supply no need. It can contribute no advantage. It can confer no benefit. God is not in need, nor can be in need of anything.
God cannot depend on the work of his own hands for anything. Rather is it the work of his hands that benefits by the service that is rendered to God. Man grows to greatness and distinction, he reflects more fully the perfections of God, the more thoroughly he lives for the service of God. The talents due to that service increase for him. They do not take from or add to God.
Creatures as wholly belonging to God for all they are and all they have, and furthermore, as continuing in essential dependence on him if they are to continue to be, owe their creator a continual worship of prayer, praise, sacrifice, gratitude, and love.
This is God’s right. The discharge of that debt does not impoverish man. It but perfects man and brings him into closer union with the origin of his being. And the closer a thing draws to the principle from which it issues, the more perfect it becomes, because it participates in greater measure in the perfections and qualities of the principle.
God made the human soul a temple in which he deigns to reside and in which he desires to receive that tribute of worship which belongs to him as God.
The soul is his temple of predilection, infinitely preferable to those made of the rarest and costliest stone. We’re told in the prophet Isaiah, “What is this house that you will build to me?” says the Lord. “And what is this place of my rest? My hand made all these things. But to whom shall I have respect? But to him that is poor and little and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my words” (Isa. 66:1–2).
God is the architect and the builder of the temple of his choice. With his own hands he raises it, and with loving industry he attends to its ornamentation. The edifice reared on Mount Zion, in spite of all its glory, was but a faint type of this handiwork of God.
The walls of the temple of Jerusalem were covered with pure marble whose whiteness flashed back the rays of the sun. Its portals were enriched with plates of gold and clusters of precious stones that glittered in the light of day.
It was splendid in its proportions and in the harmony of its parts, in the fair laying out of its courts and its sanctuaries. Its construction called into play all that was richest in intellectual and material wealth to be found in the world of that time.
Earth yielded up its treasures to adorn and embellish it, and men taxed their powers of thought and skill of hand to make it apt for the great purpose it was to serve. It was one of the wonders of the earth, compelling the admiration of all privileged to behold it.
The apostles, as they sat on the Mount of Olives, gazed on it with awe mingled with pride. The master himself, sitting in their midst and allowing his eyes to follow their gaze, contemplated it through a mist of tears as he beheld in vision the dissolution of all that beauty that he considered with tender appreciation.
There it stood on that hill, a sign for the whole world, the temple in which the only true sacrifice on earth was offered to the Almighty.
God is a spirit, and as such wishes to be worshiped in spirit and in truth. And if he willed to dwell in that beautiful edifice, it was not that he set store by marble and gold. He willed all that lavish expenditure in order that the material evidence might present to our senses an image or a suggestion of that other dwelling place fashioned by the finger of God’s right hand, the Holy Spirit himself.
Every human soul, if that soul is to fulfill the purpose God had in making it, is meant to be a fair temple in which the Blessed Trinity comes to take up its abode permanently. There, the divine persons are meant to abide as in a heaven and receive from the living temple itself, not inarticulate praise and glory, but a warm and loving worship which should knit worshiped and worshiper in bonds of loving intimacy.
Jesus communicated this truth to his apostles in his last interchange of thought with them. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. And my Father will love him. And we will come to him and we will make our abode with him” (John 14:23).
The inimitable and felicitous language of Cardinal Newman can be appropriated as presenting a most accurate description of this spiritual house that owes its structure and design to God himself. He says, “Whereas on earth, temples and palaces are formed of parts costly and rare, but all material, so in the world of the spirits, nought is found to mold withal and form into a whole, but what is immaterial; and thus the smallest portions of this edifice, cornice or frieze or balustrade or stair, the very pavement, is made up of life.”
In these words, there is question only of the nature of the spirit world, considered according to that which is connatural to it. But in the case of the soul sanctified by grace, the life which supplies the spiritual structure with consistency and ornament is the divine life itself.
Such was God’s plan when he determined to elevate humanity to the supernatural plane of existence. The soul of the first man rose fair and beautiful under God’s creating and sanctifying hands. Its beauty mirrored the beauty of God, and its perfections flashed back the divine perfections. All things else in creation were but vestiges and images of the divine power. Man’s soul bore a filial likeness to God.
And such it remained as long as it was content to hold God and to find its happiness in possessing him. Its life unfolded itself after the pattern of God’s own life and expressed itself in knowledge and love of the divine persons. But one day came the temptation. As the Jewish temple became the pride of the Jewish race, so too, the soul began to be enamored of its own power and beauty. It was tempted to self-satisfaction and self-worship. This self-regarding mood disposed it to give ear to the suggestion of Satan. Why should it not be its own master and enthrone self in the place of God?
As soon as it yielded to the suggestion, the glory of this spiritual temple faded away. The veil which shrouded the divine mysteries that had been taking place within was rent in twain. In the depths of the conscience, a voice was heard, “Let us go forth from here.” And the Blessed Trinity quitted the soul, leaving it a desolate void.
Divine charity, which was the cohesive bond that knitted part to part and stone to stone, dissolved. Straightway, the spiritual temple cracked in ruin. Its walls were undermined, its doors broken, and its beauty passed into shapeless decay. Not a stone was left on a stone, for all the inner powers of man fell apart in mutual strife. The senses rebelled violently against the reason, as reason had rebelled against God.
Such is the picture of the soul which is no longer a dwelling place of God, and in which the worship of love is denied him. The soul yielded to the desire to make itself the term of its knowledge and love. It had aspired to be the measure of all things, so it lost the knowledge of God. Its ambition for self-knowledge was denied satisfaction. In ceasing to know God rightly, it ceased to know itself rightly. In yielding to love of self, it tasted the bitterness that every human soul must experience when it chooses to spend its power of loving on its own ego.
Egoism is a herb that embitters the waters of life. The bitterness penetrating the soul causes it to shrivel and shrink. This was what the human soul came to experience after the first fall. The experience came to it with terrifying swiftness. It became a picture of the ruined temple of Jerusalem. Its soil was sown with salt, and the ploughshare of its enemy passed over the site of God’s dwelling, and grass and weeds sprang up in rank luxuriance.
Noxious plants flourished where once there were stately walls and broad courts. And as the centuries passed and sins accumulated after the pattern of the first prevarication, even the very trace of the ruins disappeared under the dust of years. Practically all trace of the fair plan drawn by God vanished in the course of time.
For the vast pagan world that at the moment of speaking, like a desert, surrounds the oasis formed by Christendom, God’s plan for human life has been completely obliterated. Even throughout large tracts of what was once Christendom, the true notion of the supernatural has vanished. And with it, the power to discern God’s purposes in human affairs.
And finally, in individual souls whose Christianity is largely conventional, whose lives are worldly, and whose sense of sin is blunted, the blindness, though considerably less, is still very great. As it has been, so it ever is. Man’s fall is of yesterday, and today, and until the end of time.
It is being always reenacted. Man is ever substituting himself for God, and the consequences are ever the same: the ruin of God’s temple. How few there are who realize there is no light, nor is there any wholesomeness in the world, except Christ and what is of Christ. To the extent that we are one with him, and only to that extent, do we see God’s plan for human life.
And how much of our lives is withdrawn from the influence of Christ? What a large proportion of our day is spent in love of ourselves and in the search after our own satisfactions. Having made some concessions to the Lord, we live as if our lives were our own, to be passed in the way that suits ourselves. It is true, we recognize God’s control of our existence within the limitations traced by the moral law. But for all the rest, we act as if we had sovereign sway and owed allegiance to none but our own desires.
Without misgiving, we strive to grasp from this miserable earth all that we can in the way of selfish satisfaction. We profess that God alone is our happiness and that he alone can fill our souls. And yet, in practice, we act as if the indulgence of our own fancies and caprices could give us what God gives. Pride, vanity, and self-indulgence claim a considerable share in our soul’s activities. It is not surprising that after years spent perhaps with a certain degree of moral rectitude, but in the main characterized by habitual and calculated selfishness, we too find that the spiritual temple raised by God is in a sad state of disrepair, and that accumulated dust and dirt obscure its fair outlines.
For us too, perhaps, it has become difficult to trace for ourselves the original design of God. Now to one or other amongst the multitudes who pass their days in this relative forgetfulness of God, the voice of the Lord comes and makes itself heard in the depths of that one’s being. God calls this privileged soul apart. He stirs it up to set to work to remove the disfiguring parasitic growths that have been allowed to overrun God’s handiwork.
The soul is urged to enter into itself and using God’s measures, retrace for itself the plan of God’s spiritual edifice. It is encouraged to seek for this, and having found it, to cooperate with God once more in constructing a thing of beauty and fair proportions, a temple somewhat worthy of the God to be worshiped therein.
As scientific zeal sends forth scientists from learned associations to distant lands in order by patient delving to lay bare buried sites of ancient temples and cities, so God bids you go forth from your homes and by silence and prayer and studious self-discipline, clear away from your souls the debris of self. By patient work and by endurance of suffering, he would have you clear away all the encumbrance to spirituality that has been accumulated by long years devoted to the service of self.
As a result of your toil and endeavors, there has gradually emerged for you, in sufficiently clear outline, the plan of God’s spiritual temple, which is your soul when wholly docile to his grace. The design of the sanctuary has been disclosed. You have worked your way through the rubbish and dust of your self-love and your egoism, and having discovered the foundations laid by God, you can now proceed to build along with him.
It will be your aim to construct a sanctuary in which God can be worshiped in spirit and in truth. The task to which you dedicate yourselves is no easy one in itself, but love for God alleviates the hardship of it. Love of God makes light of difficulties. In struggling to deal death to the life of self in you and to undo the selfish habits grown rooted over the years that have sped by, you will not be left to yourselves. God will ever be at your side, aiding and directing the work. He will not dispense you from fatigue and travail and many a stern struggle in your own interior and sufferings of various kinds, but he is ever ready to make the yoke sweet and the burden light if he is trusted and loved and appealed to.
What is more, to encourage and direct your enterprise, he will hold constantly before you the beautiful model of a human soul that responds to this his ideal. He gives you Jesus Christ as the exemplar after which your own souls have to be formed. “This is my beloved Son,” he says, “in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him” (Matt. 17:5).
It is true, the positive work of tracing in your spirit the traits of that divine model belongs to the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit cannot carry out his work of divine artistry unless you will to know Jesus Christ and consent to be molded to the likeness of him. “Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). To submit to the divine action demands sustained self-renouncement. We cannot seek ourselves and expect to find God. A man must lose his own life, the life lived for self, in order to have real life, the life of God.
Egoism must die. It must die daily. The crucifixion of self is the exaltation of Christ in our souls. This crucifixion our wills, even as aided by grace, can accept or reject. The cross is the pathway to our goal. There is no other way. The path trodden by Jesus must be trodden by us if we are to reproduce some features of our divine exemplar.
There are various false types of spirituality that promise a friendship with God that does not postulate doing violence to ourselves. These types of spirituality are inimical to the cross of Christ and serve to mislead the soul. They finally plunge it into discouragement at the experience of inevitable failure. But if we are prepared to do our part and to make the sacrifices demanded of us, God on his side will do his.
He never fails in his promises. He has guaranteed to make all things new. This word he will infallibly fulfill, provided that you lend yourself to his work, place yourself under his guiding hand, and give yourself to the appointed task with eyes fixed on the Christ. And as the spiritual temple, stage upon stage, room after room, and court after court is taking shape, God receives in the temple an ever more perfect worship and service.
We must grow up in Christ. Our dispositions and virtues must be modeled on his. Every person is presented with ideal conditions for living like Jesus in his poverty, chastity, and humility. We must therefore seek in him and not in our natural inclinations and feelings, our likings and our dislikings, the motive principle of our actions.
His was a love of God that proceeded to an utter oblivion of self. We must aspire in our turn after a love of Jesus that proceeds to a contempt of self. Our Lord’s program of life is very simple. It has been traced for us in a few brief words by Saint Paul, who understood the divine master so well: “He never pleased himself” (Rom. 15:3).
Complete devotion to God and God’s interests was the characteristic attitude of the soul of Jesus. He had not to eliminate self from his life. Self simply could not coexist with that whole-souled and whole-hearted devotion to God the Father that was his. We need to cultivate that consuming, all-absorbing interest in God and his interests as the shortest, readiest, and easiest spiritual hygiene for the accomplishment of self-obliteration.
Make his interests henceforth predominantly yours. Let his cause be far deeper, be far dearer to you than all that affects you personally. Accept gladly that it should be ill with yourselves only if it be well with him and his kingdom in the world. Consent to be forgotten and despised, if only he is known and appreciated. Rise to the greatness and the magnanimity of the soul of Jesus, since you have chosen him for your own. Shape yourselves to his example.
As he, ardent with the love of God, went forth from his home and created on this earth a movement which will last to the end of time and proves constantly effective in the sanctification and salvation of souls, so do you, in his following and relying on his strength and leadership, go forth and work for the redemption of those who are sitting in the darkness of paganism. Having reared to God in your own souls a spiritual temple of fair proportions, make it your ambition to cooperate with God in raising up in the territories of heathendom, in great numbers, similar temples where God will be praised and blessed for the endless ages of eternity.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
From The Voice of a Priest, Edward Leen (1946).