The Way of Surrender

THE WAY OF SURRENDER

What God wants from us is not a million acts of virtue, but a million acts of surrender, culminating in one massive surrender of soul, mind, and body. When we have given up everything and are completely helpless to give ourselves anything, as we will all eventually be when we face death, then salvation can be given us.

Salvation can never be taken, earned, or possessed by right. Hence nothing we have or can accumulate in this life – fame, fortune, health, good looks, a good name, or even moral virtue, religious fidelity, personal sanctity, or the practice of social justice – tips God’s hand towards us. What tips God’s hands is helplessness, surrender in grace.

C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce makes this point in a very simple way. He has a fantasy of some (ten) interviews between someone in heaven trying to coax someone not there to come to heaven. Each of the ten persons seeking entrance into heaven is blocked by some major flaw, pride, anger, idolatry, the incapacity to forgive, shame, lust, and the like. In each case, irrespective of the flaw, the person in heaven keeps telling the other: “All you have to do is to give me your hand and let me lead you there. All you have to do is surrender!”

In the ideal order of things, surrender is for the mature, for the flower that has come to bloom and needs to give off its seed. That is less true of us during the first half of our lives, for we are still building, but it becomes the deepest truth of the second half of life. After forty, understood religiously, life is not about claiming worthiness, or about building things, especially our own egos, but about getting in touch with helplessness.

Age brings us physically to our knees and more and more everything we have so painstakingly built up begins to mean less and less. But that is the order of things: Salvation is not about great achievements, but about a great embrace and, as C.S. Lewis puts it, all we have to do is surrender.

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1st Sunday of Advent (C)

Short Reflection for the 1^st Sunday of Advent (A)

Readings: Isaiah 2: 1-5; Romans 13: 11-14; Matthew 24: 37- 44

Selected Gospel Passage:  “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.  (Matthew 24: 42-43)

Reflection:  Advent Season invites us to be vigilant, to be strong, to be prayerful, to be able to welcome the coming of the Lord. Beware that our hearts do not go astray by the trappings of Christmas. Our feasting, drinking and sometimes even our excesses in the celebration of Christmas draw us away to the true spirit of becoming “vigilant” and “staying awake” for coming of the Lord.

In the coming Sundays, the readings will tells us of how truly we should prepare for Christmas – reject our sins and turn to the Lord; and reform our lives by making our crooked ways straight.  Let us then be VIGILANT at all times and pray that we have the strength to accept the Lord when he comes to our lives in the ordinary act of charity to those in need. Therefore, STAY AWAKE!Be at all times and pray that we stand ready to welcome Lord into our lives. www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD...

Folks,

1. The Dhikr prayer is intimately linked to the Badaliyya movement – a legacy identified with two witnesses of Christian presence in the world of Islam - Fr. Louis Massignon and Fr. Charles de Foucauld.
2. The association with the Badaliyya movement is one of the many legacies of my stay in Egypt.

1^st step: Write the Dhikr in your heart.

2^nd step: Let the Dhikr remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the dihkr silently as often as possible...

3^rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the Dhikr in your life.

The Feast of Christ the King (C)

Short Reflection for the Feast of Christ the King (C)

Readings: 2 Samuel 5: 1-3; Colossians 1: 12-20; Luke 23: 35-43

Selected Passage:  “The people stood by and watched; the rulers, meanwhile, sneered at him and said, "He saved others, let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Messiah of God.”  (Luke 23: 35)

Meditation:  Christ the King is the crucified one for our sins.  He is the RANSON for all our offenses and he has redeemed us that we may have life to the full.  The Cross is the powerful Icon of God’s love for the whole creation.  It is for this reason that our proclamation is no other than: “By your Holy Cross, your have redeemed the world”. We do NOT simply stand and watch… but we believe in this life-giving SACRIFICE and WITNESS of LOVE of self-expenditure that others may be saved! Cf. www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD...

1st step: Write the text or Dhikr (the Arabic word for REMEMBRANCE) in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Short Reflection for the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Readings: Malachi 3: 19 -20; 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12; Luke 21: 5-19

Selected Gospel Passage:  “You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed. By your perseverance you will secure your lives. (Luke 21: 16 – 19)

Meditation: We are nearing the end of the Liturgical Year.  Next Sunday will be the Feast of Christ the King which marks the end of Year C. The Gospel speaks of the end time – when we all shall be united with the Lord in his Kingdom. The Day of Lord is the Day of Reckoning both for our good deeds and bad deeds, as well. We have nothing to fear, even in times of great tribulations, so long as we persevere in the faith.  Yes, it is by our perseverance that we shall have life to the full!

We hope and pray that not a hair of our head will be destroyed when e persevere in our faith. May this assurance give us courage to speak out the truth even in difficult times and hen truth is not popular.  www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD...

1st step: Write the text or Dhikr (the Arabic word for REMEMBRANCE) in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.

A Primal Understanding of the Eucharist

A PRIMAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE EUCHARIST

Their understanding of what they were doing in celebrating the Eucharist only developed as they grew in their faith.  But initially, Jesus didn’t ask for much of an understanding, nor did he give them much of an explanation for what he was celebrating with them. He simply asked them to eat his body and drink his blood.

Jesus didn’t give a theological discourse on the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He simply gave us a ritual and asked us to celebrate it regularly, irrespective of our intellectual understanding of it. One of his more-explicit explanations of the meaning of the Eucharist was his symbolic action of washing his disciples’ feet.

Little has changed. We too aren’t asked to fully or even adequately understand the Eucharist. Our faith only asks that we are faithful in participating in it.  In fact, as is the case for all deep mysteries, there is no satisfactory, rational explanation of the Eucharist. Nobody, not a single theologian in the world, can to anyone’s intellectual satisfaction, adequately lay out the phenomenology, psychology, or even spirituality of eating someone else’s body and drinking his blood.

The British theologian, Ronald Knox, speaking about the Eucharist, submits this: as Christians, we have never been truly faithful to Jesus, no matter our denomination. None of us have truly followed those teachings which most characterize Jesus: We haven’t turned the other cheek. We haven’t forgiven our enemies. We haven’t purified our thoughts. We haven’t seen God in the poor. We haven’t kept our hearts pure and free from the things of this world.

Knox submits, however, that we have been faithful in one very important way; we have kept the Eucharist going. The last thing Jesus asked us to do before he died was to keep celebrating the Eucharist. And that we’ve done, despite the fact that we have never really grasped rationally what in fact we are doing.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/a-primal-understanding-of-the-eucharist/#.XZuQcOdKhN0

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A Symphony of Prayer

HELPING CREATE A SYMPHONY OF PRAYER

The public prayer of the church, what we call priestly prayer, works exactly like that. It’s a symphony intended for the benefit of everyone and open to everyone.

This has a number of ramifications: First of all, it clarifies some age-old questions about who benefits from our prayer and who doesn’t. Imagine two people, both in pain and in need of prayer: The first is a very well-loved individual, part of a big community and he has many people praying for him. The second person is alone, without family and friends with nobody to pray for her. Are we to believe that the first person has drawn a lucky straw and will benefit from all the prayers offered for him, while the second will languish alone, without the benefit of prayer since she has nobody to pray for her?

No. That’s not the way prayer works, at least not the “priestly” prayer of the church. It creates a symphony that’s intended for everyone, includes everyone, and benefits everyone, the loved, the unloved, the lucky, and the unlucky, all equally.

In its explicit expression, our “priestly” prayer might sometimes be directed towards the needs of one particular person, but everyone is given the benefit of the symphony. Our public prayers on a Sunday are not so much intended for some individual who’s ill and in pain, as for the whole world in all its ills and pains.

That’s how “priestly” prayer works, it makes a symphony of prayer for the benefit of everyone. That’s the intent of all Sunday services and all liturgical prayers of the church.

What constitutes “priestly” prayer? It’s the public prayer of our churches, the Eucharist, the Sacraments, Services of the Word, Sunday worship. It’s also the Office of the Church (the Liturgy of the Hours, the Breviary).

All of these, by essence and definition, are public prayers, intended first of all not for the private nourishment of those praying them, but as a symphony of prayer for the benefit of the whole world.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/helping-create-a-symphony-of-prayer/#.XYUKniV7k_8
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Affected Prayer

AFFECTIVE PRAYER

His approach was disarming. Most of us are forever looking for something novel, at the cutting-edge, outside the box, something complex, but what he offered was stunningly simple and down-to-earth. He spent the whole time trying to teach us how to pray in an affective way.

What exactly does that mean, to pray affectively?

In essence, what he told us might be summarized this way: “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you: ‘I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but, after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”

These are simple words, but they capture what we ultimately try to do when we “lift mind and heart to God” in prayer.

In the end, prayer’s essence, its mission-statement, its deep raison d’etre, is simply this: We need to open ourselves to God in such a way that we are capable of hearing God say to us, individually, “I love you!”

This might sound pious and sentimental. It’s anything but that. Don’t be put off by simplicity. The deeper something is the simpler it will be. That’s why we have trouble understanding the deep things, be they of science or the heart. What separates the great minds (Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Whitehead, Einstein, Lonergan) from the rest of us is their capacity to grasp the simple.

Anyone can understand what’s complex, but we have trouble grasping the principle of relativity, the concept of being, the concept of love, and things about the nature of the God, for exactly the opposite reason. They’re too simple. The simpler something is, the harder it is to wrap our minds around it and the more we need to make it complex in order to understand it. That’s true too of prayer. It’s so simple that we rarely lay bare its essence. It has ever been thus, it would seem.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/affective-prayer/#.XW6Wn5NKg_8
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Short Reflection for the 32^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Readings: 2 Maccabees 7: 1-2. 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2: 16 – 3: 5;  Luke 20: 27 – 38)

Selected Text:  “That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called 'Lord' the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive." (Luke 20: 37-38)

Meditation: The Gospel passage challenges us about our real belief in the resurrection. It reminds us of the article of faith that ALL will be risen, one day. Death is NOT the end of our story. After death our life-story continues in God. God is the God of the living and to him all are alive. The continued remembrance of our beloved ones who have gone before us is a concrete proof that Christ himself is risen from the dead and he is alive in our hearts and is actively leading us to eternal life. www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD...

1st step: Write the text or Dhikr (the Arabic word for REMEMBRANCE) in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.