This meditation comes from reading Adrienne von Speyr, and Dom Luigi Giussani. In my opinion, these two spiritual giants compliment and bring out the depth of each other's gifts. As you go through Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, I hope you will take off in the direction the Spirit moves you, and feel inspired to add your own personal reflections. The text is long and wordy, but, I hope, worth reading slowly and responding to, not in one prolonged sitting, but in bits and pieces.
I believe all of us experience the tensions of living the human adventure and journeying towards God. The tension of being finite and hungering insatiably for the Infinite; of being limited and yet wanting to be the measure of the Unlimited One; of feeling the urge to surrender to God and yet remain independent of him; to have his Divine Life in us, but have it on our own terms and under our own control; to possess God without giving ourselves to Him; to follow Christ, yet be in charge of the way we go. This tension comes from living in the Spirit, under the influence of Grace, in virtue of faith, hope, and charity instead living by our natural inclinations to see, feel, taste, figure out, understand, enjoy, and digest everything we experience according to our human capacities and limits. How could we not experience this tension, when we inevitably reduce the Christ to what little we are open to receive from Him who wants to take us over completely? How could we not perceive his generous offering of self as an invasion of our freedom and autonomy. But we can't have it both ways: we can't belong to ourselves and belong to him.
(Where Christ says “you” in the singular or plural, personalize his message by speaking out your name. His revelations are to all of us, as the different, unique persons we are, and as a common family, who share all his gifts with one another.)
Jesus said to his disciples:(including all
us who follow him today) Let not your hearts be
troubled.
Do not let all your
worries, fears, anxieties and insecurities overcome you, nor your ideas and
feelings. None of that is the measure of who you are. The measure of who you
are is your relationship with me in faith, hope and love. I am the measure of who you are. Get yourself
out of the bio-dome, or ego-bubble inside which you live, that ego-bubble where
you need to stay in order to feel secure, safe, and in control, that bio-dome
where you imagine yourself autonomous and free. Get yourself outside of that
artificial environment, that comfort zone, and into the supernatural life that
flows from me to you. Live in that ever-deeper, always developing, ongoing relationship
with me.)
Believe in God; believe also
in me.
Put the same faith in
me that you have in my Father. That is going to be difficult for you, because
soon I am not going to look like my Father’s Son to you. When I am hanging on
the cross, helpless, dying, and forsaken, I will look like anything but the divine Son of my Father in your
eyes. Yet that will be when I am most perfectly the Son He eternally calls me
to be, for I will be giving myself to Him for all of you. I will be pouring out
on you all of the Life and Love the Father eternally pours into me. I will be
absorbing the sin and evil of all mankind, and cleansing you of your sins. That
is my mission, my purpose in life, my destiny: to give myself away, give myself
in sacrifice to you, for you, in order to bring you back to the Father.
You can trust that
gift I am making of myself, even though you cannot comprehend it. You can trust me and my Father. We know what we
are doing, even though you are not capable of understanding it.
In my Father’s house there
are many rooms.
So many rooms, many
places. As many places as there are persons, and there are so, so many of you.
Here on earth, you have no place that is really yours. Whatever home you have
is temporary. Your real home, the place where you finally settle down, is with
me and my Father. On earth your whole life is a journey home. As long as you
are here you are a person-the-way; to be a wayfarer is who you are; it is your
identity on earth. You don’t become your
full self until you arrive home and are in my Father’s embrace. Here you cannot
be your full self, your definitive self, because you are not with Him. What
you are on earth, who you are on
earth, is a continual growing towards him, an on-going movement towards Him. That’s
why wayfarer is your identity in this world. This identity gives your life
meaning and purpose. Here as you journey you start discovering who you are, you
develop self-awareness, in your relationship to me and my Father. How could you
know yourself any other way, since you belong to us?
If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
Who you are, your
personal characteristics, would get lost in the immensity of the Kingdom, if
there were not a special place in my Father’s house for the unique person that
each one of you is. If there were only one huge dwelling place, I would have to
reduce you all to one common denominator, and level you all down to single
manageable mass. But no, this is not the case. Here on earth, I have a specific
purpose for each person, including you, a calling, a mission, a vocation that
no one else can fulfill. I guide you
principally by my grace in the sacraments. What you do on earth is not a matter
of indifference or unimportance. I call no one to exist, no one to follow me,
without a purpose. Each one has a different part in my divine plan for the
Kingdom. What makes you all different on
earth will continue to make you all different in heaven. Hereafter, all the
differences will all fit together into
the beautiful, harmonious, glorious Kingdom of my Father, where He is all in all. Then you will be fully
yourself and finally be his child forever. This is why I have told you over and
over I am going back to my Father. I
came from him by myself. But I will return to him with all of you. And my Father
will accept you, because he will recognize me in all of you. You have already
been sealed as mine in Baptism. In the Kingdom, you will be stamped with the
final form my grace gives you. You, in all the richness of your differences,
will mirror me to my Father and give him glory. I do not go back to him
empty-handed.
And when I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you
may also be.
My going to the Father
is part of my mission, as is my coming from the Father. This commission from
him is my path, the Way that I have received from my Father. It starts and ends
with Him. You see my going to him begin with the Cross, and continue in my Resurrection.
From you I go in suffering and to him I
return in glory. And I take with me all who believe in me. I will be beyond
your eyes with the Father, and carry you who love me to him. As the Risen Son,
I am no longer limited to one place. I
am with, and in, whoever believes in me and loves me, in every place, at all
times. So you do not have to be afraid because your eyes do not see me as
before. When I am with the Father I am also with you in the world. I, the
Unlimited One, am with you who are limited. You are everywhere I am, because I am
everywhere you are, whether you see me, or feel me, or not. I am not reducible
to your senses, your emotions, or your ideas.
Always remember: I want you with me and my Father once and for all.
When the Father and I
are One forever, beyond my mission, beyond any more possibility of separation
caused by sin and suffering, then the final stage of your redemption will be
achieved. My coming again in glory at the end of time will not be because the
Father has sent me to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, but to bring you whom I
have redeemed into the fullness of His Kingdom. I will come as the One who
lives with the Father and dwells in him.
You will have eternal life in us. You will live in our reciprocal love.
And that love will fill you with the intense, divine life of the Spirit. Your
very self will be the dwelling place of our glory.
And you know the way where I am going.
I am going to the
Father. Since you know I am going there, now you know how you will get there.
You know the path that leads you there because you know me. And you know there
is no other Way to the Father. So you
know enough, even though you have not seen the Father for yourself. You know
where I am going, you know the Father is love, you know He sent me to show you
what the way of love is by walking it ahead of you. Now you know how to follow
in my footsteps. My Father infinitely surpasses what your eyes can see and what
your minds can imagine. So you cannot get to him without me, without the way I
give you, without the Way that I am.
True, the way of love
is the way of suffering. That is the path I walk, the Way I am. True also, that
you will only know this way when you travel it, when you experience it.
Suffering will persuade you to hesitate on the path, to refuse to go on, to
stop and then go in the wrong direction. All that happens because of the pain
involved in loving others and suffering for them. Even though Baptism has set you on the right
path, even though Penance and Communion will bring you back to the path again
and again, you will never reach the
point where you walk the path steadily
and unhesitatingly without failure. Just because one day you are ninety does
not mean you have made more progress than someone who is forty. My grace will
be working in you, molding you and conforming you to me all the time, but you
will not be able to measure it. Nor will you ever stop being somewhat reluctant
to receive it, no matter how old you are. Your progress, growth, lies in my
hands, not yours. I am impatient for you to grow and progress. But mine is the
impatience of divine love which will seem like endless patience to you, endless
opportunities which you fail to respond to, opportunities you perceive as
challenges too surprising and unexpected to recognize and accept. In my divine
impatience I will patiently keep on teaching you that you must let my love, my
sacrificial self-giving, find a place in your heart now, instead of later, today
instead of tomorrow!
Thomas said to him: Lord, we
do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?
You are like Thomas.
Every person is. You want clarity. With your limited heart and mind you want to
comprehend me completely. You want to know the whole way even before you start out.
You can’t help trying to grasp and measure me with your human senses and abilities.
That is impossible. Even if you had
physical contact with me in the flesh as the Twelve had, even if you had been
in the upper room with them and could both see and touch me as Thomas did! You
would never be the measure of me, just as they could not. Like the Twelve, you have to stop being so
small-minded; stop making the mistake they did.
The only path you
know is one that your feet walk on. My
path is greater than that. You cannot understand my plans, my destiny, even
though I have told you everything. The reason why I came into the world, the
only purpose that I have, is to bring all of you back to my Father. Doing his
will, giving myself away for you in love, pouring
myself out in sacrificial love, that is my path back to the Father. All that is my will; all that is my way of love.
Of course you can’t picture and grasp this path, no matter how you try. You hear what I say
about the Kingdom, and you learn the truths about eternal life, but it is
abstract theory to you, because all you can see is that human life always ends in
the disaster of death. In one sense,
that perception is right. The life of my Father, the place where he is, the way
to him, all remain totally incomprehensible to you, for they are beyond human
reaching. You need, you want, a concrete
goal you can see, perhaps a marker that is a mile away. That’s the way you are.
But there is no way to take the infinite, and make it quantifiable, clear, and certain.
Everything you humanly know and do during your whole lifetime is only a passing
moment of your already unending life in me.
That’s why you have to put your faith in me and realize I am the way to
the Father, the only way, your way, and everyone else’s. Only by believing in
me and following me can you become part of the Always More and Ever Greater Way
that I am.
Jesus said to him: I am the
way, the truth and the life.
I understand how
discouraged you feel at times and how blind you usually are. I know you crave
security. That’s why I am revealing my deepest secrets to you and all the
others. Even though I reveal my secrets to
you, they remain mysteries, however. They can only be grasped in the dark light
of faith. You cannot yet see my mysteries in all their light and clarity. Nor
can you help reaching out and trying to measure to what I say by means of your
limited capacity to receive. Your very lack, your neediness, is why I will
infuse in you the gift of the Holy Spirit. That will enable you to get beyond
yourself and operate out of the gifts of faith, hope, and love, which unite you
to me. The Spirit who come from the Father, he will receive my call in you, the
call to follow me back to the Father. The Spirit will get you beyond your human
limitations and enable you to enter into the mystery of who, and what, I am.
The Spirit will teach you what it means to believe. Then you will hold to the
mystery without trying to measure it.
You will begin to
understand that I am the Way: the-way-to-the-Father. I am the only Way, and
the whole Way. The whole Way is everything I am – my conception, birth, growth,
manhood, work, suffering, and death. All of that is the Way that I am. So it is
the way you have to travel. You do not have to see the whole way; you do not
have to survey the entire journey to know you are on the right path. I give you
the grace to go step by step, then more grace for the next step you are to
take. That’s what it means to walk with me in the light of faith.
I am the Truth. I
cannot be anything but truth, because I am always witnessing to my Father, the
whole truth of who he is. I am that Truth, his Truth, the Truth that comes
from him. I only
speak of what I have seen in Him. I am no empty word, no meaningless verbiage;
I am the fullness of his Truth. I am not some changeable or temporary message.
I am his eternal, living, always new Truth.
All other truths you know are only partial, and therefore
deceptive. Nothing else you know can
exhaust nor grasp the all-embracing Truth I am.
I am the Life. His life, I am the Life that comes from him. All the divine life
he is, he pours into me. I am his Son, his very substance. His is
movement-to-me, and I am movement-back –to-him. That movement-from-and-to
the-Father is who I am on earth. That life is what I pour out unceasingly on
the Cross; that is what I give you in every Eucharist – the self-gift of the
Father to me and of me to him, the
donation we endlessly make of ourselves in the perfect communion of the Trinity.
In every Eucharist I am bringing you back to the Father in the one reciprocal
movement of life and love that the Three of us is.
No one comes to the Father
but by me.
How do you go to the
Father? The way the Father has prepared
for you: The Way that I am. By following me, by living in union with me in this
life through faith, hope and love, you are on the way back to my Father. You
have to walk the way that I did, by receiving from me the grace to make an
offering of yourself to my Father. When
you do that, my whole life will envelop you. That is how you live in me, and at
the same time go beyond me to him. I
will go with you all the Way, and I will hold you out before me to present you
to the Father. You need not be afraid. He will see my life in you. So he will
take you in his arms, just as he takes me.
He will love you as totally, freely, joyously as he loves me.
That is what my
Mother did when she and Joseph joyfully held me up and first presented me in
the temple. She was unaware then of all that
was ahead of her at the presentation. She was innocent of what she would
suffer. At the end, when they took me down from the cross and placed me in her
arms, she offered me to the Father again, this time in the joy of faith and yet
the agony of presenting me to him as the sacrificial victim of your sins.
I
carry you the way my mother first carried me: not at all naively, but knowing fully
the cost of all sin and every evil, having borne it joyously. My Mother went beyond her
pain and agony at my death and offered me to the Father for you. In the same
way I forget my pain, because of the joy of redeeming you and bringing you to
him. You need not to be afraid to be in my arms, or in hers. You need not fear
even death. Let me give you over to the Father as my Mother did with me, so
that I can fill you with his life.
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