John 9:1, 6-7

As [Jesus] walked along he saw a man blind from birth, [Jesus] spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

To look at this blind man begging for food is for Jesus an acute pain. Naturally he wants to do something about it. Notice what he does. He spits on the ground. We read in the scriptures that Yahweh breathed the breath of life into the first man. Jesus also breathed on his disciples after his resurrection, bestowing upon them the fullness of the Spirit.

Breathing is a symbol of the bestowal of the Spirit (The word "spirit" means breath). Saliva also represents the bestowal of the Spirit. Jesus mixes his spittle with dirt, making a mud pie. He then anoints the eyes of the blind man with the mud, symbolizing the Incarnation of the Word made flesh.

The text points to the healing of the human predicament, which is seeking happiness in the wrong places. Happiness is re-bonding with the divine presence and action within. A new dimension has been introduced into the human family. Not only is divine intimacy restored but infinitely more is given.

Easter is the superabundant joy in the new gift of God that transcends the original plan. God himself becomes part of the human family in order that we may participate in the divine life, not as something given from outside, but as something that inherently belongs to us as human beings through solidarity with Jesus Christ. This idea of solidarity with God through Jesus Christ, the divine human being, describes the mystical intuition of the unity of the human family.

~ Reawakenings

Prayer

O Holy Spirit,
help us to embrace every human being
as the child of God, and to manifest Your Love for one another.

Crisis of Faith

Monday of the Fourth Week in Lent

John 4:46-53

[Jesus] came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, "Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe. "The official said to him, "Sir, come down before my little boy dies." Jesus said to him, "Go; your son will live." The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, "Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him." The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, "Your son will live." So he himself believed, along with his whole household.

There are two great crises in the process of spiritual maturity. The centers of gravitation around which these two crises revolve are faith and love. . . . The emphasis in the first crisis is on the growth, purification, and strengthening of our faith. . . .

In John's gospel we have the following scene. Jesus was on his way to Cana. Along came a royal official from Capernaum, pleading, "Come down and heal my son!" Jesus showed great reluctance to go, saying, "Unless you see striking signs of power, you do not believe." But the man cried out in desperation, "Sir, come down now. My son is on the point of death!" Jesus replied, "You go. Your son is healed." The man went down and at the same hour-the Gospel is careful to bring that point out--the very moment Jesus uttered the words, the fever left the boy.

[This man] believed in the power of Jesus' presence. His weak faith required the physical presence of Jesus. He did not apparently believe that Jesus could heal his little son without coming down and physically laying his hands upon him. He is a symbol of those who need to feel the sensible presence of the Lord, at least from time to time, to sustain their faith. And what does Jesus do? He refuses to go down.

Why? Because the absence of his physical presence is to be the occasion of increasing this man's faith. When the royal official went back to Capernaum believing in Jesus' word and found that everything was as Jesus had said, then he came to believe in the power of his word alone. I repeat, the absence of the felt presence of the Lord is his normal means of increasing our faith and of getting us to the point of believing in the power of his word alone, without "signs and wonders," that is to say, without the feeling of his presence or external props.

It is a crisis of faith that he puts the royal official through, and with great success. From that time on, he believed. In fact, his whole household got the benefit of his growth in faith.

~ Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love

Prayer

Holy Spirit of God,
may the Love which You pour forth
in our hearts cast out all fear.

Our Cross

Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Lent

John 5:2-9

In Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids--blind lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool
when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

There is no way of getting well from the wounds of our early childhood except through the cross. The cross that God asks us to accept is primarily our own pain that we bring with us from early childhood. Our own wounds, our own limitations, our own personality defects, all the damage that people have done to us from the beginning of life until now, and our personal experience of the pain of the human condition as we individually have experienced it--that is our true cross! That is what Christ asks us to accept and to allow him to share. Actually in his passion he has already experienced our pain and made it his own. In other words, we simply enter into something that has already happened, namely, our union with Christ and all that it implies, his taking into himself all of our pain, anxiety, fears, self hatred, and discouragement.

It is all included implicitly in his cry on the cross, "My God, why have you abandoned me?" That is the big question. Here is God's son, the beloved, to whom we are to listen--Christ who has based his whole mission and ministry on his relationship with the Father--and it has all disappeared. His disciples have fled. His message is torn to shreds. He stands condemned by the religious and Roman authorities. There is nothing left of his message, humanly speaking. Yet this is the moment of our redemption. Why? Because his cry on the cross is our cry of a desperate alienation from God, taken up into his, and transformed into resurrection. As we sit there and sweat it out and allow the pain to came up, we realize that it is Christ suffering in us and redeeming us.

~ Intimacy with God

Prayer

O Holy Spirit,
infinite outpouring of the Love
of the Father and the Son,
soothe the wounds the refining fire
of Your Love has cauterized.

Deep Rest

Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Lent

Isaiah 49:13

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth;
    break forth, O mountains, into singing!
For the Lord has comforted his people,
    and will have compassion on his his suffering ones.

"Rest" is the term for a wide variety of psychological impressions, such as peace, interior silence, contentment, a sense of coming home, of well-being, and most of all, of God's presence. Suppose this rest is so deep that at some point during prayer there are few or no thoughts passing by. Or one has a strong sense of the presence of God. The experience of deep rest . . . automatically causes the body to rest, and indeed to rest in a greater degree than in sleep.

The feeling of deep rest, especially when it involves a deep sense of the divine presence, leads to a kind of psychological transference with God. That is to say, God becomes the therapist in the psychoanalytic sense in which we look to a therapist for the trust and love that we did not feel we received as a child from an important other, such as a parent.

Deep rest is not only the result of freedom from attachments or aversions to thoughts, but also the feeling of being accepted and loved by the divine Mystery that we sense within us and that Christian doctrine calls the Divine Indwelling. In other words, our awareness of the divine presence begins to reawaken.

Rest grows deeper as our trust in God deepens, and the emotional doubts about our self worth, impressed upon us in early childhood by various rejections or excessive competition with other siblings, begin to relax. Because the rest is so profound, the body rests as never before.

~ Intimacy with God

Prayer

O Holy Spirit,
in the struggle to surrender ourselves completely to You,
be our repose in the depths of our hearts
in the face of every difficulty.

~~~~~