Deeper Desire

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.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6).

One of the most authentic expressions of a thirst for justice is incessant prayer. We are reminded of this in the parable of the widow who, we’re told, finally obtained justice by persisting in seeking it from a judge, otherwise heedless of God and man.

Our Lord concludes the parable encouraging us to pray without ceasing.

“Will not God vindicate his elect,” we are told, “who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:7-8)

Asking God to do justice for us should not be understood as calling upon Him to punish those who harm us, but rather to speed up our personal conversion.

‘Lord, it's not just for me who love you so little, when you deserve to be loved so much, or to love my neighbor so little when he is such in need of love.’

We can ask our Lord, 'Do me justice. Convert me and transform my heart, filling me with love for You and others.

“Thirst for justice,” as one writer says, “thirst for conversion, for inner transformation.”

It's not so much for personal perfection that we seek it, but rather as a will to respond to God's desire.

An important expression of this thirst for conversion is the desire for truth, refusing all forms of illusion and self-deception, all lies to ourselves, all compromises, and close-enoughs in our relationship with God and others.

We must place our lives in their entirety under the light of God and have the courage of truth.

Shortly before her death, St. Therese of Lisieux said, "I have never sought anything but the truth."

It's clear from experience that people who make the most progress in the spiritual life are not necessarily, at the beginning, the most virtuous or most devout. They're those, rather, who most insist on being honest with themselves and take concrete steps to be truthful with God. Prayer, reflection, serious reading of Scripture, spiritual retreats, and so on, spiritual direction and retreats.

The problem is not so much with our wounds or our faults, but our failure to face up to them in the light of God.

To insist on the truth takes for granted the poorness of heart and humility of which the first beatitude speaks. Humility extends a welcome to truth. It accepts being troubled by it when that's necessary. Pride is the opposite and is one of the principal causes of blindness.

Welcoming the truth requires submitting oneself to something other than ourselves, something that surpasses us. But only truth makes you free, as Our Lord says in the Gospel.

And so the fourth Beatitude points to a question: What is my deepest desire?

Hunger and thirst are images of desire, for what is most vital and essential.

It's good to put this question to one's heart. What do I really hunger and thirst for? What desire is the principle of unity for my life?

It's natural that one has several desires, and that this can be a source of interior division. And the accomplishment of some of our desires can lead us to an impasse or to deceive ourselves.

Saint Paul speaks of the need for a certain filtering or discernment, to distinguish those that come from the flesh from those that come from the Spirit.

Among all our desires, one is dominant in that it gathers together and unifies all the others.

We find in one of the Psalms a beautiful prayer that says, "Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth. Unite my heart to fear your name" (Psalm 86:11).

And in Saint Matthew, Our Lord says, “He who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). In failing to direct their desire towards God, we can risk scattering ourselves.

Fortunate are those whose most profound desire is not confined to some human ambition, but is centered upon a desire for holiness, the desire to please God and do his will, to love God and neighbor with all the strength of their hearts. They will receive what they desire and will be filled.

But how is that desire for holiness kept alive?

One of the main reasons for the loss of desire can be a lack of faithfulness to prayer. For this contact with God sustains and feeds this desire. Contact kept up by reading, by sharing with other believers, and by acts of love and acceptance of suffering.

Another explanation for the extinguishing of this desire is discouragement arising from the repeated experience of our misery and poverty that can sometimes drive a person to abandon the ambition of being holy.

Here the remedy is humility, recognition of one's powerlessness, together with audacious hope and blind faith in the mercy and power of God.

The fundamental process of the spiritual life is a purification of desire in its object and its foundation.

On the one hand, in order that the soul's desires be gathered together and unified with the desire for God, little by little putting aside any aspiration that is outside of the divine will.

On the other hand, hoping against hope, as Saint Paul said, so that this desire be based not on our human capabilities, but solely on the mercy of God.

The more miserable and poor I see myself to be, the more I dare to look for fulfillment with faith in the infinite mercy of God.

This desire is not always felt, and that isn't something to worry about. It would be wonderful to be in a state of permanent ecstasy. Everything then would be so easy. But it's neither possible nor desirable.

One of the familiar trials of the spiritual life is to experience spells of dryness in which one is poor and without desire, able to offer God only a humble goodwill.

We can ask Our Lord in our prayer that His thirst might become our thirst.

It can be good to examine ourselves about this thirst and know how to change course and revive our desire.

We need to also realize that there's a thirst more ardent than all human desire. And that's God's thirst, the thirst of Christ himself. God thirsts to love us and give Himself to us.

Jesus told the Samaritan woman, "Give me a drink” (John 4:7). Before He died, He said, “I thirst” ((John 19:28).

God has no need of our works, but only of our love, St. Teresa of Jesus said. The thirst that Jesus expresses was the inspiration of the life of Mother Teresa.

Our desire for God is nothing compared to His desire for us. He loves us and desires us infinitely more than we can desire and love Him.

Our desire can have highs and lows, but God's desire to love us can never diminish or be extinguished. Despite our infidelity and lukewarmness, God will always want to love us, to give Himself to us, to save us.

And it's this desire of His that can awaken and stimulate ours.

We have to believe in it, offer ourselves to it, without ever becoming discouraged in the face of our destitution.

We must believe that God wants to wed us in spite of our ugliness and believing, allowing Him to do it.

It is He whose gaze will make us worthy and clothe us in beauty.

If we let ourselves be visited by and wed to the Lord, He will make us part of His thirst.

In the lives of the saints, human hearts are consumed by a thirst communicated to them by God. A thirst for love, a thirst for the Kingdom, a desire to save souls more ardent than the maddest of human passions.

Therese of Lisieux lived through this at the age of 14, just after her healing Christmas, and this experience guided her during her life at Carmel.

“He made me,” she says, “a fisher of souls. I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners, a desire I hadn't felt so intensely before. ... The cry of Jesus on the cross sounded continually in my heart: ‘I thirst!’”

"These words,” she said, “ignited within me an unknown and very living fire. I wanted to give my beloved to drink, and I felt myself consumed with the thirst for souls. As yet, it was not the souls of priests that attracted me, but those of great sinners. I burned with the desire to snatch them from the eternal flames.”

And so we could ask our Lord to communicate His desires to us and come to satisfy them.

Then we shall be full beyond all measuring.

The more we go thirsting to drink at the fountain of the heart of God, the more we become fountains for others.

Our Lord promises that in the Gospel of John.

“On the last day of the feast, the great day, Our Lord stood up and proclaimed, 'If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37-38).

In the same way, the more we hunger for Jesus and for the Eucharist in particular, and the more we live for Him, the more we shall be able to become food for others.

We are called to respond to people's hunger and thirst, which is very great today.

When faced with a famished crowd, Our Lord said to His disciples: you give them something to eat.

The greatest injustice in all history is ultimately that God is not loved as much as He should be. That He's so forgotten, so neglected. That human beings take so little note of their Creator and Savior.

And those invited to the wedding feast find a thousand excuses for not responding to the call.

There was a lady once who flew from the United States to Rome in the early sixties. She wanted to go to confession to Padre Pio.

She landed in Rome early on a Sunday morning. She was tired. She decided she'd take a rest in her hotel. She'd catch a late morning Mass. There were no evening Masses in those days. But when she lay down to rest, she slept the sleep of the just, and she woke up at three o'clock in the afternoon.

And she realized she'd missed Mass. She also knew she hadn't committed a mortal sin because she didn't mean to miss Mass.

But the following day she went to Confession to Padre Pio and confessed her sins. And then he said to her, 'Is there anything else?’ And she said, 'No.’ He said, 'Are you sure?’ She said, 'Yes.’

And he said, 'What about yesterday when you flew across the Atlantic and you landed in Rome, you went to your hotel, you were tired, you decided to take a rest, you lay down and you slept, and you slept the sleep of the just and you woke up at three o'clock and you missed Mass?’ He could read souls.

He said, ‘I know you didn't commit a mortal sin, but your negligence hurt Our Lord.’

And so, our lives may be full of negligences. We can ask Our Lord's pardon for all those negligences that we have may have made, where we haven't responded to His call.

There are many passages in the Bible that express God's suffering because of His misunderstood love.

The prophet Jeremiah says, "They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13).

And in the prophet Hosea, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me” (Hosea 11:1).

Recall also Our Lord's tears shed over the Holy City: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you. How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. But you would not” (Matthew 23:37).

At the deepest level, hunger and thirst for justice arise from suffering in face of the failure to love God. Personal misfortune is not what most pains God's friends, but the fact that God is not loved.

The Psalms say, "My eyes shed streams of tears because men do not keep your law” (Psalm 119:136). Saint Francis of Assisi said, "Love is not loved!”

We express our hunger and thirst for God to be finally recognized and embraced for what He is every time we recite the Our Father: hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come.

And so, in the end, to be hungry and thirsty for justice means ardently desiring that God be better known and loved. It means desiring to respond to ingratitude by a surfeit of love.

It means wanting to embrace God, love God, and trust God to make for up for all those who do not embrace, love and trust him.

In Sydney many years ago, a lawyer was approached by a couple, an elderly couple. He was 86 and she was 83. The lawyer asked them, 'What can I do for you?’ They said, 'We want to get a divorce.’ And why do you want to get a divorce? Because we don't love each other anymore. And how long have you been married? Forty years.

And so the lawyer tried to remember all the points from the talk on charity that they had heard at their last retreat and gave them an impromptu talk about charity. Charity is patient. Charity is kind. It doesn't make a mountain out of a molehill. It lets the water flow under the bridge. Charity forgives, endures all things.

And asked them to go and think about it for a while, and come back some other time.

They weren't very convinced, but the husband said, 'We'll give it a go.’

The wife came back three years later to tell the lawyer that, ‘I just came back to thank you because my husband has just passed away, but we just have just had three of the most wonderful years of our whole life.’

The moral of the story is that we're always beginning again in love.

We're always beginning again to foster those deeper desires of what our Christian vocation is all about, which ultimately is holiness and apostolate.

Sometimes it can be good to ask ourselves the question, 'Why did I get married? What is marriage all about?’

Holiness is love.

John Paul the Second liked to talk about how the Blessed Trinity is a communion of persons. And it's a life-giving communion of persons. The love of the Father for the Son gives rise to the Holy Spirit.

And he liked to say that the family is communion of persons. And it can be a life-giving communion of persons. The more the family and marriage resemble the Blessed Trinity, well, the holier it is. “Children are the supreme gift of marriage” (CCC 1652), we're told in the Catechism. We know there's a grace for every situation.

Paul the VI in an encyclical called Ecclesiam Suam, he says, “Indeed, the cultivation of Christian perfection must still be regarded as the richest source of the Church's spiritual strength. It is the means, so peculiarly its own, whereby the Church basks in the sunlight of Christ's Spirit. It is the Church's natural and necessary way of expressing its religious and social activity. It is the Church's surest defense and the cause of its constant renewal of strength amid the difficulties of the secular world.” (Ecclesiam Suam, Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Church, August 6, 1964)

And so we could ask Our Lord for that grace to have deeper desires of personal holiness. Deeper desires to cultivate Christian perfection in this marriage, in this family, in this job, with these health problems, with these financial constraints, with all the permutations and combinations of my present life, in this present moment.

Sometimes the devil can present sanctity to us as something unattainable.

Holiness is continuously doing what God wants, not what we want.

We can ask the Holy Spirit to give us those deeper desires of personal holiness in all the ordinary situations of each day. Because God has called us to be saints, canonizable saints.

Saint Josemaria liked to say that the world crises of today are crises of saints, of sanctity.

We can ask ourselves the question: Where am I now along that pathway to holiness? Do my deeper desires lead me to focus on that goal in all situations? Do I appeal to the Holy Spirit for greater graces?

Just as we polish our shoes every couple of days or even every day, we need to do the same with our vocation to holiness. Because that's what it's all about.

You have to understand what is necessary to make our vocation grow. Maybe I have to avoid certain environments, certain places, certain people, certain comments, certain movies or TV programs.

And to realize that I have been chosen to foster those deeper desires of personal holiness. I have not been chosen because of what I am, but because of what I have to become. Peter was chosen with all of his humanity.

The holier we become, the more transparent the face of Christ becomes in us. And so we have to engrave in our hearts that each one of us is called to holiness.

God wants me in particular to be a saint. He wants me to desire that goal. He has created me and elevated me to the order of grace. He has redeemed me. He has given me many graces because he loves me a lot.

And on whether our life grows with depth in this way depends on us. Depends on our desires. God does not go against our freedom. He's created us out of love and wants that we correspond out of love because we want to, because we have those deeper desires.

We could examine our conscience and see, ‘What do I really desire? Where is my heart?’ Scripture tells us where our heart is, that's where our treasure is also and vice-versa.

Everyone wants to change the world, but few want to do so by changing themselves.

And this is the great revolution that Christianity has come to bring.

Chesterton was asked once what did he think was the greatest problem in the Church today, and he said, 'Me’. He saw very clearly that: I have to be better; I have to improve.

And so the message of personal sanctification is not so much that we convert Russia, China or the United States, but we convert ourselves. We can't change or convert the bigger things if we don't change ourselves. Sometimes we can want big things, but we can forget ourselves.

And so in this moment of our prayer, we could say to Our Lord, 'Well, Lord, give me a passion for sanctity. Help me to renew my eagerness for holiness with a human and supernatural enthusiasm. May I never lose that eagerness. May my whole life, like the whole of creation, give You glory.’

A man told me once after 10 years of attending retreats, he said, 'One thing I've seen clearly on this retreat is that I'm not just here to sanctify my work. I'm here to be holy.’

And this vocation is a gift. It can't be earned. We have to be chosen for this. It's a divine calling.

And that vocation to holiness is a constant in our life. It's not a state of mind. It's not a feeling. It has to do with our very being.

That calling doesn't depend on how our interior life may be, or how our progress is, or our health, or our finances, or our marriage, or our family. It’s a desire that God wants us to have because we see that calling very clearly.

And so in the Forge, Saint Josemaria says, “You saw it quite clearly: while so many people do not know God, he has looked to you. He wants you to form a part of the foundations, a firm stone upon which the life of the Church can rest. Meditate upon this reality and you will draw many practical consequences for your ordinary behavior: the foundations made of blocks of stone — hidden and possibly rather dull — have to be solid, not fragile. They have to serve as a support for the building… If not, they are useless.” (The Forge, 472)

And so we can thank God frequently for our vocation to holiness, realize that this is a great gift, have a sense of treasure, a sense of a great bargain, a sense of calling.

Help us, Lord, to see the star. Help me to see and ask the question, ‘How am I following that star?’

Our Lord wants us to enjoy our Christian vocation and to draw love from the source of love.

And with our calling, God gives us the grace necessary to carry out our mission, which is given to us in spite of our weaknesses, our failures, our defects. We're not called in spite of our weaknesses, but because of our weaknesses. And God is the one who makes us holy.

“Be you perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” (Matthew 5:4) means to be a person of love. And when we do things with love, we acquire more perfection all the time.

In The Forge, St. Josemaria says, " Committed! How I love that word! We children of God freely put ourselves under an obligation to live a life of dedication to God, striving that He may have complete and absolute sovereignty over our lives.” (The Forge, 855)

There will always be difficulties, as we see in the life of Christ and all the saints. But if we have that determination to seek holiness, that inner toughness to live our vocation, in spite of all the circumstances, well, then all the difficulties disappear.

In The Forge, he says, “You know that you will never lack God’s grace, because he has chosen you from all eternity. And if this is what he has done for you, he will grant you all the help you need to be faithful to him as his son, as his child. —Go forward, therefore, with a sure step and try to correspond at every moment to the promptings of God's grace.” (The Forge, 280)

And so we can turn to Our Lady and ask her that she might give us those deeper desires of that great goal that God has set for our vocation, for our life.

Mary, may you always be beside us along the way.

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, St. 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.

JM