Who except God can give you peace?  Has the  world   ever
been able to satisfy the heart?
 --St. Gerard Majella
                                           "Jesus came to pay a debt He didn't owe, because we owed a debt we couldn't pay"..Unknown


Somehow, original sin, that inner anguish and brokeness that is even beyond our own doing, can become the place where we come in touch with our original blessing. Somehow our broken father, our limited mother, our neurotic brother, our confused sister and our own inner struggle push us and create in us a hunger to go beyond the pain. "My soul is restless," as St. Augustine says, "until it rests in you, O Lord."
When we begin to know intimacy with God and to accept others and ourselves as we are, we then begin to speak about "happy guilt" or "happy brokenness." Our inner struggle is no longer such a burden, but a way to the truth, to the light, to the life. How could we ever become children of God, embraced by the love of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and be let into the intimacy of the triune life if God hadn't shown compassion with us, as we are? Through Jesus' incarnation we come to know about the inner life of God. It is in our fragile and mortal flesh that God's original blessing is revealed to us.
      –Fr. Henri J.M. Nouwen

If only my parents had known God

 At  eight years old I once stood with my father and his father in a small dark room with a soft yellow light that shone upon my mother who had just taken her own life. This room remains inside my very soul to this day. My father at twenty-eight had failed her in adultery; the devils last stroke in her life eight years later ( with my father asking to be forgiven) was her failure to forgive my father. My heart goes out to all of those beautiful people in this world that pick themselves back up when they fail others, face the hurt that they cause, ask to be forgiven. To those that have been failed by others who learn to forgive them...to my father, mother, family and friends that I too have let down in this life as well...to those who can't ask for forgiveness nor give it, have a special place also in me, a special room so to speak where the clarity of this world's icebergs become more clear  as one gets closer to Christ. But above all to God, through Jesus who shows us a whole new way to live among each other, for each other, if we so choose to live first and foremost in Him. With peace and victory in Jesus so close to each and every soul no one should ever give up on life or on one another no matter how tough this life may get at times. Getting to know the Gospel, getting to know Jesus opens up a  colossal door for those in the most need, if only they would give Him a chance, and open this door.  Just as the planets rotate around the sun in perfect harmony we to as a people can learn forgiveness and reconciliation while rotating around Jesus, the light, the very ray of God.

One beautiful spring Sunday morning in rural Sacramento California I was on my way to the Mormon Church with my grandmother and brother. I went to find my grandpa to ask him why he wasn't going with us. My grandpa was a pretty important person to me, as we were bonded pretty tight. Not so much because he would talk to me when most adults would not, or because he would share his peanuts while gazing up at the stars, but because we both stood in that room with my mother, with that soft yellow light. I remember his arm around me then very vividly...he looked down at me and told me that it was ok to cry... he was crying. My father did not say much then, what could he say? Pretty tough place for him to be. But he was more than just welcome.

One day not to long after my mothers death I found my grandpa in his garden and I asked him why he did not go to church with grandma and us. He said "I am just not good enough Richy!" I told him that if he was not good enough than either was I so I stopped going. My Church became his garden and my father's love in heaven came down to me through him.

One day at sixteen my grandfather had a stroke...one week later he asked me if I could help him to his garden...he reached over and picked one weed, then we both staggered back to the house. The next day he was gone along with his garden.

32 years later, with so many struggles in between my new Catholic faith brought me back to that room where my mother laid. We won't find a place, home or church here on earth that will protect us from sin. This room through the years has clearly shown me this. Church is not a place to condemn others or ourselves because of our sin, rather a battlefield with the great physician at its very core.

Like the room with the soft yellow light where I stood with my father and his father I have found peace in a place where there seldom is any. But from my mother's room and yours there is a hall that leads to the center of all homes, to the center of our very own souls. In this room there is the cross, there is our Savior...you want to grab everyone you have ever known, ever loved and even hated...you want to pull everyone that you have ever hurt and been hurt by to the very foot of this cross and take a good long hard, honest look at what our savior  Jesus has done, is doing for each one of us.  To be pulled into death on a cross, to move beyond our cross upon are saviors back through its dark passions of a self centered self into our Shepard’s arms... into our Fathers love forever. The cross stands in heaven and earth as the great divide... on the dark side a crucified savior with a beam of soft yellow light piercing the void, forming a narrow path, a beacon of hope for the lost, for us. On the back side is the light of God illuminating heaven while exposing the pit of death in which we are delivered from.

I will never forget the day in the rugged foothills of Northern California while gold panning with my Grandfather,  I asked him "Grandpa… Where is the gold?" My Father said through my grandpa "Richy, the gold is where you find forgiveness and reconciliation, the gold is being with Me forever.

One should never give up on life or on another, as this life here is to precious a gift.  Christ and His Church  is  truly the Treasure found.

 Rich

   
Why Does God Allow Suffering?
 By Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

Condensed  from the Catholic Digest
To Order the Digest you can call  1-800-312-0411
    

"Try looking at pain as something that transforms. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness."

Julian of Norwich asked Jesus why there was so much suffering in the world and why God allowed it. "I allowed the worst thing possible to happen," Jesus told her. "I let humanity kill God--and I made it the best thing….There  isn’t anything that I cannot transform into good."

That explains the old axiom, Crux probat omnia, "the
Cross proves everything." That is, the Cross (pain, suffering) is what transforms us. And yet most people do not know how to handle pain. Fear, anxiety, and negativity bang around inside them until they can't stand it, and so they look for ways to eliminate it. One quick way to diminish pain is to seek blame: "Whose fault is it?"

That's when the process of scapegoating begins--as evidenced, in our secular culture, by the high number of lawsuits. Where you do not have healthy spirituality, pain is always someone else's fault.

The roots of this unhealthy thinking go deep, to the age-old notions of good and bad, worthy and unworthy. In such thinking, God and salvation are always found only in the pure, only in the good, only in the worthy. In such a dualistic world, there are always bad people to blame.

The revelation of Jesus, though, is that God is found in both the so-called good and the so-called bad. Most Christians worldwide haven't gotten this message yet. It is too shocking. It is too disappointing. In the Incarnation, in the entering of human flesh, Jesus reveals that God is found in the actual--not in the idealized, the "pure, good, worthy."

Pretend for a moment that all the good people are in your Church and all the bad people are "out there". Your Church is saved and theirs is lost. How nice for you. How very convenient.

Everybody--all Churches--think this way, because it's easy. It demands no transformation. You are saved because someone else is going to hell; you are smart because someone else is stupid.

Well, here's another shocking truth: Jesus is not upset at sinners. The tax collectors and the prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God before you (Mt 21:31), and Jesus said so to the people in the synagogue. Isn't it obvious, now, why they killed Him? He broke down the distinctions that made their lives so clear and clean and nice.

The fact is, Jesus is only upset at people who do not think they are sinners. If I were to say that in half the churches in this country, I would have things thrown at me. And it is a disappointing statement. It says, No one else is your problem--not abortionists or homosexuals or your wife or the pope. You are your own problem. So many of us put all our energy into changing others, making them into Catholics, for example, but true spirituality is about keeping your feet to the fire. So you grow up. You become changed.

A large percentage of Christians, as I know them, don’t understand the distinction between theism and Christianity. A theist is one who asks, Is there a God? Of course, the answer is yes. Everybody wants a God, and in most of Western culture, the available god figure has been Jesus. In theism, God exists to solve problems, and if you are good and you honor God, God will oblige.

Christianity has a very different message. It says God does not really solve our problems. God reveals them, leads us to the solution, leads us through the solution, and--here is the mystery of the Body of Christ--includes us in the solution. And so we are transformed. In Christianity, sin and salvation are two sides of the same mystery. Salvation is sin overcome and used for better purposes. The question becomes, How do we use evil for good?

Mary offers an example at Calvary. She does not try to pull Jesus off the Cross or try to sue somebody, saying, "This should not happen! This is unjust!" Of course it is unjust. But what does it mean? What is the message of the Crucifixion? Christ offers a similar example. He hangs on the horns of the human dilemma and does not eliminate it. He just hangs there in a reality of pain and contradictions.

That is how transformation happens: by holding the tension instead of expelling it, holding it until it changes us.

Through the Cross, Jesus says you can love it all, even the enemy. There is no scapegoating. Everything, everyone belongs. There is only the broken and suffering Body of Christ eternally crucified, eternally resurrected: the human eternally crucified, eternally resurrected. What faith and surrender and courage it takes to hold the Cross and the Resurrection simultaneously, to let both simultaneously be true in you, in your body, in your marriage, in your children, in your neighborhood, in the Church.

Stop looking for some perfect institution or perfect religion. Stop looking for the perfect friend or partner, because you will be disappointed. He is not Mr. Universe. She is not Miss America. He or she is an ordinary person with faults and wonderful gifts at the same time. It is so hard--but so rewarding--to hold the gifts and the faults together!

There are those who insist that reality be consistent and logical, and those who insist that life is only chaos. Those are the two poles--perfect consistency or chaos. In fact, what Jesus did in the revelation of the Cross was tell us that life is neither of those poles. The pattern of reality is neither perfectly consistent nor perfectly chaos--it is cruciform. There is order and structure, but it is filled with contradictions. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness. You hang in the middle with Christ, on the Cross, which bears the mystery of reality--at once fully human and fully divine.

Meister Eckhart, the wonderful Dominican mystic, said that however great one's suffering, God has suffered from it first. There is only one Cross, one Resurrection, captured in that microcosmic moment and person we call Jesus. We see it there; we understand it there. All the wars, the struggles, all resurrection and rebirth is about God. We are merely fragments in this huge flame of divine action.

Mystics and sinners understand this because, unlike the rest of us, they are not trying to create a universe they can understand and explain. They've let go, surrendered to a new identity.

Basically, there are two patterns of transformation into the mystery of God--the pattern of pain and the pattern of prayer. However, because most people do not surrender to real prayer until they suffer pain, you can say there is only one pattern. The fact is, normally we aren’t willing to give up ego control until we must, until pain forces us to do so. Nobody walks gracefully into the mystery of Crucifixion.

That is why the mystery of suffering is so central to transformation. The mystic lets go of the need to prove anything, protect anything, defend anything, be superior to anything, be anything. I am who I am who I am. I am who God is in me.

At that point in spiritual development, you are so grounded that you do not have to worry about your reputation anymore--you don't have to worry about seeking blame or using other people to make yourself feel good or competing or winning. You are basically invulnerable.

The Franciscan word for this is poverty. The Carmelites call it nothingness; the Buddhists, emptiness. It says, I am naked underneath my clothes.

This experience feels like dying. If you do not have good spiritual wisdom while it's happening, you will do everything you can to get back up. Yet, transformation is all about going down--into the pain, into the ordinary, into the physical, into the bloody, into the concrete. It's about descent not ascent, not heightened states of consciousness. In other words, until we can see God where we did not want to see God, the world remains a secular, dualistic world.

After we are transformed, we can look back and see that we were guided through this process by Another who is choosing us, desiring us, and is infinitely wise and compassionate. That means you do not have to figure out all the patterns ahead of time. You do not have to be that smart, that good. You just have to surrender. Good spirituality is not about being good. It is about God being good. When you keep your eyes on the reality of God's goodness, then God rubs off into you. You start being good almost in spite of yourself, but you do not even care about it anymore. You are not checking whether you are better than the next person. You have got something so much more wonderful to be excited about.

This is a difficult concept, and a long process. Most people do not get to this understanding until their 60s and 70s. I meet a lot of old nuns in motherhouses and infirmaries. All they keep saying--over and over--is that God is so good, God is so good.  ....end