That They May Have Life
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.
“I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Our Lord came on earth not to extort but to bestow. Earthly rulers demand tribute of their subjects. Christ seeks but to enrich his.
The measure of his giving admits no limitations other than our capacity for receiving. And since his generosity is without limits, there is nothing that he desires so much where we are concerned as that our power to receive should undergo continual enlargement.
He is not satisfied with giving us life. He yearns to give that life a development and intensity commensurate with his great love for us.
Some are an object of special preoccupation for him. In their interest he is active to devise those means which will most powerfully favor their growth in the divine life of grace, and will prove most effective in removing the obstacles to that growth.
These souls he calls from the distracting cares of secular life and provides them with special opportunities to acquire the most happiness-giving of all arts, the art of the knowledge and love of God.
That this favor is extended to some and denied to others is a mystery that is unfathomable.
Those who are the recipients of it have but to bow their heads in worship of the supreme freedom of God’s choice, and while humbly acknowledging their unworthiness of the divine favors, pour forth their souls in fervent and unquestioning gratitude for them.
Theirs is not to question, but to receive with thanks.
“I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Adapting and appropriating to the occasion words spoken by the savior in the synagogue of his native town at the beginning of his mission, it may not ineptly be said that “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).
It is he who has placed himself deliberately in your path as you hurried on your way, pursuing your own willful courses.
He arrests your steps and bids you to give ear as he invites you to enter more freely and fully into that divine life which he came on earth to restore and which is found in him without measure.
He is all eagerness to communicate of his abundance and proposes to initiate you into the ascetic conditions that you must fulfill if you are to benefit by his offer.
It is true that our divine savior came to enlighten and to vivify all the children of men. All are called to be children of God and to participate in God’s life, receiving it through his divine Son, the Word made flesh.
But the pressing invitations of the Christ often fall on ears that hear without understanding. It is not willfulness so much as incomprehension that makes them unreceptive, dull, and unheeding.
Men are not, as a rule, inattentive when the call is to morality, even to a morality of the exacting kind that Christianity prescribes. All Christians of goodwill prize moral purity.
But Christ’s primary aim is not to raise men’s moral standards merely, but rather to raise men’s spiritual status.
His mission is not merely to trace lines of action, but to open the way to happiness.
He is not merely a teacher of morals; he is a giver of life.
He wishes to share his divine experience with men.
A possibility of that divine experience is open to the children of men, even when they are as yet incapable of either good or evil in action.
Christian infants that die before they attain the use of reason literally share the prerogatives of Christ. They have in their souls the divine vitality of his holy soul and in union with him enjoy the beatific vision.
In adults, it is true, there cannot exist this vital intercommunication with Christ unless there is conformity with the moral law that he has traced for Christians.
But the divine gift which he communicates to souls, though in adults conditioned by the observance of the commandments of Christ, unimaginably transcends in worth all human morality.
The savior, finding the bulk of his followers more preoccupied with the condition than the thing conditioned, more concerned with his law than with himself, draws some aside from the crowd in the hope that they may prove more discerning than the rest.
He confidently expects that you will, under his instruction, manifest a proper sense of values and boldly lift your eyes to the contemplation and love of that participation of the divine life won for souls by Christ’s great sacrifice on Calvary.
That life of God, enkindled in the soul by sanctifying grace, nourished by the sacraments, and favored in its growth by self-denial, must not be little more than a figure of speech.
To many, the phrase can hardly be said to stand for a definite reality, more real than anything with which their reason and their senses deal.
In a hazy way, they take it as implying a certain moral purity of soul, the absence of sin, rectitude of conduct, and obedience to God’s law.
The life of God in the soul presupposes all this, but implies what it is in the literal sense of the term, infinitely more.
If we are to make effective use of the advantages we enjoy by our vocation in the middle of the world, there is needed a more precise and thorough understanding of this gift that the savior presses on us in a special manner.
Superficiality of view can to a large extent frustrate the attainment of the goal of the contemplative in the middle of the world. And it can produce such an insensibility to the higher things of the spirit as will present a formidable obstacle to the intimacy to which the savior invites the soul.
To many a person, the divine master is compelled to repeat with a sigh the words he in the first instance addressed to the Samaritan woman: “If you did know the gift of God...” (John 4:10).
The person dedicated to Our Lord is pressingly invited to ponder and to take as having a special application to themselves the final instruction of Jesus to his apostles. Because it is in this instruction that he unveils fully to their wondering souls what he himself conceived to be the real objective he aimed at in the mission that was entrusted to him by his heavenly Father.
“Father,” he prayed, “glorify your Son, as you have given him power over all flesh, that he may give eternal life to all whom you have given him. Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. And the glory which you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one as we also are one. I in them and you in me, and the world may know that you have loved them as you have also loved me” (John 17:1–3, 22–23).
Here there is the solemn and authentic statement from Our Lord’s own lips of the ultimate purpose of his religion.
The theme is the soul’s initiation into the life of God, not mere morality.
He speaks of a divine experience, not some ethically correct conduct.
It is a strange thing that men who are Christians will fix their attention exclusively on the Sermon on the Mount and show themselves inattentive to and inappreciative of the discourse of the Last Supper.
They appear to be more interested in morality than in God. And yet morals are not an end. They are but the condition of man’s intimate converse with God.
We are given unrivaled opportunities to devote ourselves to the study and practice of this eternal life of which the savior speaks and which he obviously conceives to be inaugurated here on earth.
If we allow ourselves to be distracted by the occupations for which our aptitudes have marked us out from that study and that practice, then the sacrifices we have made will prove in large measure sterile.
What is this divine life of God within the human soul? How does it manifest itself? And what are its characteristic effects? How is it generated? And how is it developed?
The knowledge of all this should be our chief concern, and not the knowledge of such skills as we may be called to exercise in the tasks entrusted to us.
The term life is frequently on our lips, to which we attach a diversity of significations, and of which we make a variety of applications. We think we know its meaning perfectly, yet we should find ourselves at a loss were we asked to define it. In truth, the notion implied by the term is not easy to analyze.
If there be this difficulty when there is question of conveying the significance of the term when it has application to things within human experience, how much greater the difficulty when the word serves to express something that belongs to the realm of divine realities.
Life is invariably associated with the notion of activity, with activity that wells up spontaneously from the creature’s own powers and is not imparted to it from outside. When all sign of this self-generated activity ceases and there is no longer any manifestation of self-movement, death is said to have intervened.
Vitality is considered to be in the exact measure of the intensity and quality of the movement that a creature exercises.
Since all movement implies a striving towards some term, life necessarily connotes a striving and a restlessness.
In this, it confesses itself incomplete. It shows itself to be reaching out after something as yet unattained but attainable.
All movement is towards rest. This paradox is at the root of all change.
By the very fact of reaching out beyond itself, the soul admits that there is something outside itself and distinct from itself that is necessary to complete, to crown, and to satisfy it.
Life, to be fully and truly life, must be reposeful, not a restless activity.
Restlessness and dissatisfaction reveal that what seems to us to verify fully the notion of life verifies it very imperfectly.
This is so both in the order of nature and of grace. At our physical birth, we receive only the potentiality of a human existence.
So too at our supernatural birth in baptism, there is sown no more than the germ of divine or supernatural life.
It is only through the vital movements to which both kinds of life deliver themselves that they can attain to fullness and completion.
All this struggling and striving, which are the most obvious characteristics of human life, find their urge in man’s sense of his own inadequacy, his own incompleteness, his own finiteness.
The striving of life is basically the striving after an ever fuller life.
In the hope of quieting this craving, men hurry from one form of activity to another, and still must remain forever a prey to restlessness and unsatisfied yearnings, unless they come to know and to experience a vitality which is intense yet satisfying, an immense output of energy and yet utter repose.
It is that experience that God, through his Christ, undertook to share with men.
God is life, but how different his life from that of men.
In him, there is no exasperated straining after something conceived as a necessary stepping stone to yearnings unsatisfied.
God’s life is ceaseless activity, yet unending repose.
It is that supreme and infinitely potent output of energy which because of the white heat of its intensity seems utter stillness.
There are images of this in nature. Jesus said, “My Father works until now, and I work” (John 5:17).
God is unceasingly active. He is infinitely vital. Yet his activity has the effortlessness of boundless strength.
He moves all things, himself dynamic yet unmoved, for he is ever in attainment of the term of all movements.
His mind and his will are always in their fullest exercise. The contemplation of the all-reality which is God fully occupies and extends divine intelligence.
God exercises his life as we do, in the activity of the mind and will. His mind is given to the intuition of all being, of all perfection, of the sum total of all that he is. This is no other than himself.
God is subsistent beauty, absolute loveliness, infinite attractiveness. He is drawn powerfully by the magnet of this entrancing beauty, sufficiently powerful to win to itself all the effective energy of the Godhead.
The beauty of God captivates God, and all the immense energy of his being is poured into the enjoyment of it.
God’s life is one of infinite perfection because his mind embraces in its vision all with which the intellect can occupy itself, and his will adheres without shadow of wavering or mutability to the absolute good.
There is a striving which is attended with a measure of peace, and there is a striving which is nothing but the urge of unsatisfied cravings.
Those who truly seek God are rewarded by the successive degrees of discovery. They strive restfully; they seek, but they are continually finding. They still thirst, but all the time have the experience of having their thirst to some extent slaked.
This truth is insinuated in the words of Jesus: “He that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst forever” (John 4:13).
For the majority of us, the striving is but one of restlessness.
We do not direct our movements along a path which ends in rest and which therefore offers a measure of rest and entertainment at each successive stage. We blindly pursue objects of lying promise and continually find ourselves at the end of one blind alley after another.
The things we seek with eagerness in the belief that they will give us expansion of life cheat us of our hope and leave our souls empty. We find ourselves constantly in movement, and as we ourselves express it sometimes, in a spirit of exasperation and frustration, but with literal truth, getting nowhere.
Interior life rescues us from the occasions of this aimless wandering and puts us in the way of getting somewhere.
The life of men is found in the objects which absorb their interest.
We can estimate the value of a man’s existence by the test of the worth of those occupations to which he ardently devotes himself.
A life given to intellectual pursuits is an intellectual life. One devoted to the study of physical health and physical power is spoken of as a healthy animal existence.
When a man’s time and interest are spent on trivialities, he is said to be leading an empty life.
When a person has lofty ideals and worthy ambitions, but lacks the energy and courage to realize them in action, he is described as a vain dreamer.
But the life that is truly life is one that is compact of high ideals and of the steady pursuit of those ideals.
Saint Thomas said that what makes the dominant appeal to a man’s mind and will and emotions, and which he sets out to attain without allowing himself to be deflected from his purpose, and which when gained gives him happiness, is for him the thing that truly gives him life.
The right usage of our time on earth demands then that we should train our minds to give a ready adhesion to all that is real, mold our wills to a love of what is beautiful and good, and discipline ourselves to a resolute pursuit of both in all the acts and decisions that make the warp and woof of human existence.
But even were we to do all this, even were we to be faithful to this program all the days of our pilgrimage, we should still fall short of the perfection that is made possible for us by the grace of God. Our natural powers, exerted to their fullest, could not carry us beyond the limits of nature itself.
Achievement of a far more eminent kind is offered to us by God. And in the call to lead an interior life, he opens out to us the easiest and straightest path to that achievement.
God wills to share with man the perfection of his own inner and divine life, and to offer to him an escape from the perpetual sense of frustration.
But men must on their side meet God’s advances. They must consent to change their values radically. They must not wrest the statement that life consists in movement from its true sense, and so make supreme vitality consist in rapidity of change.
God’s life is intense and yet it is changeless. The life of man, if it is to have a divine quality, must in some degree participate in this element of changelessness. In its variety and in the succession of its experiences, there must be something of repose, the repose that marks God’s life in the eternal contemplation and love of the divinity.
It might be thought that this divine repose is barred to us. So it would be, were God to allow our vision to be limited to what must of its nature change and pass away.
All created things left in their natural state are subject to mutability. If we were left to the resources of our own nature, we could deal with them and so share their condition.
But if our gaze were strengthened to pierce the transient and catch sight of the all-real and therefore the immutable, that is the cause and explanation of all that changes, then we should be able to lay hold of something permanent in the apparently unrelieved flux of our lives.
Thus we should have solved the enigma of a repose in movement.
This God has enabled us to do by imparting to our souls sanctifying grace, through which we share his vision and his choice.
The Spirit of God that searches all things, yes, the deep things of God, is given to us to replace our own, to cancel out the limitations of our vision.
Christ waded through the sea of his own blood, poured forth on Calvary, to give us this Spirit of fire. He did this to enable us to rise superior to the inherent limitations of our nature, to overcome the weakness of our spiritual sight, and so to gaze on eternal things with untroubled eyes.
By the Spirit of God, communicated to our souls with divine charity, we can study the face of God, not merely as it is seen in the mirror of creation, but in all the glory of its own innate beauty.
Grace empowers us to see God as a man sees his friend, face to face.
This is the thing for which we are destined by the call to the supernatural life.
Having made this choice, we should deliberately utilize all the resources offered by life to make progress in seeing with God’s eyes and willing with God’s will.
The striving after an ever clearer vision of divine realities, and the desire to turn to account every experience, every spiritual exercise, every contact with persons and things, and every discharge of duty, in order to make it serve to promote this clarity of vision, should influence all the judgments and decisions that make up the deliberate life of the contemplative in the middle of the world.
We are given by the Spirit of God the power to exercise ourselves in the highest form of life that may be.
We should use this power and not fritter away our existence in occupations which have no link with eternity.
All the activities of life in the world, even though we choose to devote ourselves to works of mercy or to apostolic labors, will have a unity if they have running through them the thread of contemplation.
If we could but see that beauty unveiled, our souls would cleave ecstatically and effortlessly to what we see. But it is the condition of our earthly life that a veil should always intervene between us and God.
The divinity shows darkly through that veil, its glory and attractiveness hidden.
We are told in scripture that we now see “through a glass in a dark manner” (1 Cor. 13:12).
The baffling reflections seen in the mirror are too imperfect to vanquish wholly the unmirrored and unrefracted attractions of creatures.
Seeing but dimly, we adhere but waveringly and fitfully to what we behold.
Our wayward wills are not held firmly by the object of our contemplation.
There is a remedy for the feebleness of our vision. A steady self-discipline in a spirit of fidelity to the will of God is of powerful effect in intensifying in our souls the divine virtue of faith.
If we cultivate a habitual consciousness of responsibility to God in all that we do and experience, if we strive to be continually alive to his presence at, or at least his union with, every moral choice we make, then the wavering, blurred outline of the earthly vision becomes more distinct and steady.
The veils wear thinner as faith by practice grows deeper.
The Holy Spirit, the subsistent love of God, finds the souls in which he dwells more responsive to his action.
As God becomes more real to us, and his presence in our daily life becomes not a vague belief assented to unreflectingly, but a fact recognized as imposing on us the obligation of a habitual collectedness in our way of bearing ourselves, there is rapid progress made in the spirit of faith.
This is not necessarily accompanied by any profound change in our emotional nature in respect of divine things. The growing vision of God does not imply this. It is supra-sensible and supra-reasonable.
It belongs to the supernatural, and as such has no necessary repercussion on our sensibility.
The seeing of God of which there is question is a practical conviction of his closeness to our lives and has as its consequence a promptitude to behave as if we actually were in God’s presence and he were visible to us.
Faith remains the evidence of what cannot now be seen.
There can be no doubt but that the person who schools himself to stand to attention, as it were, to God in his hourly actions will have as his reward that gradual revelation of which Our Lord speaks in his last discourse to his followers.
“He that has my commandments and keeps them, he it is that loves me. And he that loves me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him” (John 14:21).
Fidelity to the obligations of our state in life, when that fidelity is animated by faith, is in a very high degree that practical love which Our Lord asserts to be the condition of his manifestation to the soul.
It is the Holy Spirit that directs this growing revelation, which may be likened to the ever-recurrent but ever-novel slow dawning of color in the morning sky.
The growth of faith is like the deepening flush that heralds the rise of the glorious sun itself.
Love prepares the way for light. Divine charity is illuminative. The Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul is the subsistent spirit of love. He is dynamic as love ever is. He cannot be inactive in the soul. He breathes love.
He enkindles the soul that is attentive to God’s will by fidelity in even the small things and presents no obstacle to his operations.
Christ sends the Holy Spirit to your souls. Beseech him to destroy within you whatever is of a nature to frustrate the purposes of this divine mission, and that your life become real, not in part but wholly.
Henceforth your great ambition must be that there should be no deliberate act of your life lost for the purpose which moved you to give yourself to God. All must serve to procure positively the development of God’s life in your souls.
When your minds and your wills are docile to the Holy Spirit dwelling within you, the element of rest and contentment will be found even in the multiplicity of occupations.
Anchored on him, your souls will move from task to task and not be at the mercy of change of circumstances. Instead of reflecting too faithfully the character of each succeeding occupation, you will be able to impress on all the quality of the inner spirit by which you are governed.
Your moods of soul will not be at the mercy of outward things. On the contrary, you will be able to subordinate all these external doings to yourself and make them minister to the deepening and strengthening of your own inner life.
The fundamental thirst of the soul is for life and an ever fuller life. Every act springing not from caprice, emotion, vanity, self-love or pride, but having its rise in the vision of faith and prompted by charity, helps to satisfy this thirst of the human soul.
Abandon self as the motive force of your doings. Allow the Holy Spirit to be the principle of all you undertake and to exercise control over all the tendencies that are subject to the control of your will.
In this way you will progress, not in human life merely, but in a life that is divine. The growth in age will be marked by a growth in wisdom and in grace.
In this way, in spite of the trials and sufferings and harsh, crushing disappointments which are the inevitable lot of men, you will, even in the experience of the cross, be little by little initiated into that happiness, the perfection of which awaits you in the beatific vision.
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).