 |
Articles and Reflections: Personal Holiness
| Nearly 1,000 women accepted Archbishop Flynn's invitation to a Mass and morning of recollection Saturday, November 18th in the Cathedral of St. Paul. It was an opportunity for a sacred pilgrimage to the cathedral for fulfilling the requirements of a Jubilee Indulgence, as well as a morning reflecting on the theme, "Personal Holiness: New Challenges and New Beginnings." |
|
|
|
|
Personal Holiness: New Challenges and New Beginnings
After confession (The lines were long-many thanks to the priests who came to hear our confessions!) and the morning Prayer of the Church, Archbishop Flynn addressed those gathered on a particular secret to fulfilling the vocation God has given each of us. "God has created each of us to do something special for him, and to love him,....He has created us to be holy, to be filled with His life, to be filled with His grace,... God has created us to reflect the very image of the Living God. God wills that you, and that I, be similar to God." To be similar to God? This is a very dignified call, which implies something important about us: it must be true that we have a very special dignity. To be fully human means to be able to be like God? What dignity we must have if we are made to share in the very life of God! So, the Archbishop said, the more we believe that about ourselves, the more we will be able to fulfill whatever God wants from us, out of our own particular place and situation in life.
But do we believe it? Do we believe in our dignity and that fulfilling such a call is really possible for us? The truth of the dignity of each person is in many ways denied by the culture in which we live-we see the denial in the many aspects of "the culture of death," as the Holy Father puts it. In the face of this, it is a challenge to remain convinced of the goodness of human life and of our own dignity. "It is a challenge to live chastely, either in marriage or outside of marriage,...to fulfill Christ's mandate to us to be forgiving,...to live with the kind of patience and the kind of peace that reflects the very image of God." Archbishop Flynn said that we live in a world "that scoffs at our vocation and our beliefs," threatening to weaken our belief in our own dignity, and so in order to face the challenge of such opposition we must learn a "beautiful secret" that Jesus knew. How is it that Jesus faced the challenges and temptations he encountered, and the opposition, and those who scoffed, and the simple tiredness from the many demands placed on him? What did he do?
Throughout the four Gospels, on all kinds of occasions, in all kinds of circumstances, when Jesus was facing all different kinds of difficulties and hardships, He went out into the mountains alone to pray, and into the desert alone to pray. He was tired, and having dismissed the multitudes, He went into the mountains alone to pray; and rising very early, He went into a desert place, and He prayed; and when He was baptized, He prayed. Crowds would gather asking for cures, and He would go out into the hills to pray; "and He suffers, and falls on His face, and He prays." Those phrases repeat themselves over and over again, revealing "a picture of Jesus Christ as praying, in every situation,...as if his prayer were a source of strength, a way to discover the Father's will, and to have the strength to embrace it."
So Archbishop Flynn urged us to be convinced of this: if prayer was essential for Jesus to face the challenges of doing his Father's will, then we must realize it is essential for us. The many demands on us, rather than being the reason why we can't find time, are the reason why we must find time. "We tend to forget in everyday life, with challenges from all sides, that Jesus himself, stretched physically and emotionally, would leave the sick unhealed, the ignorant untaught, and go alone to pray. What does that mean? That Jesus was a pilgrim like you and me, on the way to His Father's house, enduring temptations and all the rest, and he found the place and knew the meaning of prayer in his life. If we could only learn that beautiful secret."
"Don't cheat yourselves. Every day, like Jesus, find your own mountain, and find your own desert, and God will show you the way, and God will comfort you and love you and let you how precious you are."
|
|
Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis
- Office for Marriage, Family and Life
Phone: 651-291-4488 / Email: spmmfl@archspm.org
|
|
