Tag: Divine filiation

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Feast Day Sunday Meditations The Baptism of Our Lord Video Meditations

The Baptism of Our Lord ~ The Reality of Our Divine Filiation

After the Lord was baptized, the heavens were opened, and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove, and the voice of the Father thundered: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.

The Entrance Antiphon of the Mass today immediately focuses our attention on the mystery that we are celebrating: The Baptism of Our Lord in the Jordan, by John the Baptist, which also signaled the start of his Public Life. After spending some 30 years hidden in a very private and ordinary life in Nazareth, the Word made Flesh breaks into the public consciousness—teaching with authority, purifying the Mosaic Law of the casuistry that the Jews had filled it with, and confirming his teaching with miracles—that was at the same time spectacular and urgent.

We are already familiar with the site in the Judean desert—close to Jericho on the way to the Dead Sea—where John the Baptist was preaching a baptism of repentance. We had seen how many Jews, especially from the region of Judea, had been going to be baptized and how he had rebuked the Pharisees and Scribes for thinking that they could “escape the wrath that is to come” by going through yet one more ritual. The Gospel Reading of today’s Mass shows how John the Baptist had to rectify even the messianic expectation of the people:

The people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ. John answered them all saying, “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Luke 3: 15-16

This distinction, between the Baptism with water by John and that with the Holy Spirit by Our Lord, cannot be over-emphasized. This is the big difference between the Old Testament and the New, between the Mosaic Law and the Good News

Guido Reni, The Baptism of Christ. (between circa 1622-1623, Kunsthistorisches Museum).

God made man to his image and breathed into him his own Spirit, such that man became a living being (Gen 2,7)—with a new life, which was a participation in the intra-Trinitarian life and which elevated man to be likeness of God. This is of fundamental importance, such that it is revealed by God in the very first chapters of the very first Book of the Bible. Only if man knows his destiny as a child of God—therefore heir of Heaven, as St. Paul would later declare—can he begin to live his life accordingly. Without that conviction, man is doomed to live the life of an animal, because bereft of the activity of the Blessed Trinity in his soul in grace, his damaged nature (wounded by original sin and his own personal sins) can only lead him to self-destruction. So important is this that after man’s fall, God sent his only begotten Son to take on human nature to save us and restore us to our original dignity of children of God.

After Adam and Eve lost the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in their souls in grace, man lost the principle of supernatural life. Naked of such likeness of God, Adam and Eve found themselves bereft of any claim to be in intimate relation with God in Paradise.

Benjamin West, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. (1791, National Gallery of Art).

However, original sin did not end there: without the principle of supernatural life, man found himself incapable of living a holy life. Even after God called Abraham out of pagan and immoral Ur, to form the Chosen People; even after God gave Moses the Decalogue to act as a moral code that put them above the rest of men; without the principle for such a moral life, for the Jews the superior moral code provided by the Decalogue would have seemed more like a burden. The best they could hope for was a kind of moral unity with God. Fallen nature remained unhealed, waiting for a Savior.

This is what Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, brought into the world. The Gospel Reading of today’s Mass expresses this wonderful reality thus:

After all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

Luke 3: 21-22

The Baptism of Our Lord signaled the establishment of the Sacrament of our own baptism, through which we are regenerated to divine filiation. What we need to do now is to consider the consequences of that rebirth for our daily life. In this regard, I cannot help but think of St. Josemaría Escrivá, the Founder of Opus Dei, whose birthday it is today. Opus Dei is the first institution in the Church to make the sense of Divine filiation the foundation of its spirituality. Whereas Divine filiation is a fact and even a doctrine that was preached by the Apostles from the start, reaffirmed by Vatican Council II and of late by the most recent Popes, St. Josemaría’s unique contribution was to incarnate and to teach a way of life for ordinary people to be fully conscious of this fundamental reality while being engaged in temporal activities in the middle of the world.

After the first generation of Christians—who were so conscious of their Divine filiation that they referred to each other as saints (cf. Eph 1:1, 1Cor 1:2)—this fundamental reality had somehow been put aside. The ideal of holiness had been relegated to a special class of people who were willing to renounce the world and to lead a contemplative life either within monastery or convent walls, or in the ordained ministry. What God inspired St. Josemaría to do was to remind the world that holiness is the fundamental calling of man because he is a child of God, echoing the words of Jesus Christ: Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect!  However, the uniqueness in St. Josemaria’s spirituality was to base this struggle for perfection in the awareness—a sense—of our divine filiation, such that all aspects of our daily life are informed by that awareness: we work, we play, we carry on our social relations, and we pray as God’s children.

The first three points from St. Josemaría’s posthumously published work, The Forge, illustrate this spirituality. The very title of Chapter 1—Dazzled—manifests the sentiment that this sense of divine filiation provoked in his heart and should provoke in ours:

God is my Father! If you meditate on it, you will never let go of this consoling thought. Jesus is my dear Friend (another thrilling discovery) who loves me with the divine madness of his heart. The Holy Spirit is my Consoler, who guides my every step along the road. Consider this often: you are God’s—and God is yours.

The Forge, n.2

We are children of God, bearers of the only flame that can light up the paths of the earth for souls, of the only brightness which can never be darkened, dimmed, or overshadowed. The Lord uses us as torches, to make that light shine out. Much depends on us. If we respond, many people will remain in darkness no longer, but will walk instead along paths that lead to eternal life.

The Forge, n. 1

My Father—talk to him like that, confidently—who art in Heaven, look upon me with compassionate Love and make me respond to thy love. Melt and enkindle my hardened heart, burn and purify my unmortified flesh, fill my mind with supernatural light, make my tongue proclaim the Love and Glory of Christ.

The Forge, n. 3

The sense of being a child of God is a powerful principle for the ascetical struggle and for the apostolate. On the one hand, it enables us to be identified with the 12-year old Jesus who calmly and firmly declares that he must be about my Father’s business. We are not just engaged in any good deed, but in the business of our Heavenly Father, which is the economy of Salvation. On the other hand, it also fills us with so much confidence hearing the voice of our Heavenly Father—as he was heard on the day of Our Lord’s Baptism—You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

Below is this Sunday’s video meditation (guided prayer) for today’s feast, and next week, we shall begin the continuing series,  The Adventure of Ordinary Life, as we enter the liturgical season of Ordinary Time. All my video meditations are available every week, and can be accessed every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at my YouTube channel, Meditations with Fr. Jim Achacoso, and on Sundays both at my YouTube channel and here on my blog.

FEATURED IMAGE CREDITS:

Juan Fernández Navarrete {“El Mudo”}, The Baptism of Christ. (circa 1567, Museo Nacional del Prado).

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Ordinary Time Sunday Meditations Video Meditations

The Love of God: Cause of Our Sanctification

Amaziah, priest of Bethel, said to Amos, “Off with you, visionary, flee to the land of Judah! There earn your bread by prophesying, but never again prophesy in Bethel; for it is the king’s sanctuary and a royal temple.” Amos answered Amaziah, “I was no prophet, nor son of a prophet; I was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores. The Lord took me from following the flock and said to me: Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

Amos 7: 12-15
Unknown, Amaziah and Amos.

The 1st Reading of today’s Mass is taken from the prophet Amos, who was called by God—as he himself declared—from tending sheep and sycamore trees to speak to the Israelites in the first half of the 8th Century B.C. Despite this claim, however, scholars have recognized that the book’s literary qualities suggest that he was a man of education rather than just a simple farmer. In any case, the 1st Reading shows how he was confronted by the hardness of heart of the Israelites, who rejected him as a prophet sent by God. For his part, Amos proclaimed Yahweh’s judgment of the infidelities of the Israelites—equating them to their neighbors—and the impending destruction of Jerusalem, which would take place a couple of centuries later at the time of the prophet Ezekiel. Like all prophets of the Old Testament, Amos was acting as God’s speaker, demanding purity from the Israelites and their neighbors alike.

How easy it is to read this passage as something from a distant past, the relevance of which is lost in the dustbin of history. It is good to remember St. Paul’s advice to Timothy: “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). God’s call to fidelity is a constant teaching of all the prophets in the Old Testament that echoes in the books of the New Testament, which is perfectly summed up by Our Lord Jesus Christ when he declared to the multitudes in the Sermon on the Mount:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect!

Matthew 5:48
Henrik Olrik, Sermon on the Mount. (1800s, Sankt Matthaeus Kirke Copenhagen altarpiece, detail).

One can imagine the voice of the Word made Flesh reverberate on that hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee, speaking to the multitude on that first sermon at the beginning of his public life. He was not just addressing the intimate group of men, who would be the Apostles. He was addressing the multitude, as he is addressing all of us now. St. Paul would recapitulate this message: Haec est enim voluntas Dei, sanctificatio vestra! “This indeed is the will of God: your sanctification!” (1 Thess 4:3).

This message—which is at the core of the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council—is too often given no more than lip service. The idea of sanctity, of identification with Jesus Christ, just seems to be too lofty to be taken literally today. All too often, people of our time—as those of the centuries of Christianity after the times of the Early Christians—think that those words of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount were purely rhetorical: more of an ideal to be admired than a vital principle to be lived. The experience of one’s own woundedness all too often leads to a kind of pessimism, which in turn leads to an attitude of concession to man’s fallen nature. One thinks: maybe it is not really possible to follow the Sermon on the Mount radically. That is why it is so important to fully understand that solemn exhortation of Our Lord, together with that of St. Paul: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect!” (Mt 5:48).

In Latin, the prefix per- implies that whatever root follows is carried out or is considered in its fulness. For example, from the verb forare (to bore or pierce) comes perforare (to punch a hole through or “perforate”); from colare (to sieve) comes percolare (to percolate all the way through). Being a chemist, I cannot resist citing the nomenclature of some anions—e.g., chlorate (ClO3-) and perchlorate (ClO4-) which shows the maximum oxidation states of chlorine from +5 in chlorate to +7 in perchlorate, thus pushing the possibilities of chlorine to the maximum. Perfection comes from the perfect tense of the Latin facere (to make) or perfacere (to complete or finish). Thus, perfection implies the realization of the potentiality of something all the way to its maximum. In the case of our Lord’s exhortation in Mt 5:48, this means that we should strive for the fulness of our potentiality as children of God—i.e., elevated to Divine filiation by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord is not just speaking of the perfection of our human nature, but the actualization of the full potential of our supernature: divine filiation.

Furthermore, an attentive reading of Our Lord’s declaration in Mt 5:48 suggests that the word as is not just a conjunction but is rather an adverb, modifying the action contained in the main clause: Be perfect! However, it cannot possibly be a comparative adverb—i.e., setting the perfection of God as the standard for our own perfection—because we cannot possibly equal God in perfection. Thus, as must be a causal adverb: Be perfect, because your heavenly Father is perfect! This is also the reason for the other adverb, therefore, in the sentence. Thus, our Lord’s statement in Mt. 5:48 can be paraphrased as: Therefore, you should be perfect, because your heavenly Father is perfect. Formulated the other way around it comes out even stronger: Your heavenly Father is perfect, therefore you should be perfect!

Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
Kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven.
The Lord himself will give his benefits; our land shall yield its increase.
Justice shall walk before him and prepare the way of his steps.

The Responsorial Psalm is a hopeful song of the ecclesial community, expecting God’s mercy that shall be the cause of man’s justification: man shall indeed become holy because God’s merciful Love wills it. This is the logic of salvation: God’s love for man is unchangeable, such that even when man sins, God redeems him.

Leonello Spada, The Return of the Prodigal Son. (1608, Musée Louvre).

This is confirmed by the 2nd Reading of the Mass, taken from Chapter 1 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.”

Ephesians 1: 3-4

Here is the ultimate reason for our hope for and claim to holiness: Because God willed it for us even before Creation and his will cannot change. What then can possibly stand in the way of that divine plan for our sanctification? Only one thing really: our own obstinate will to the contrary. The operative word is obstinate, because our will to sin is not fixed in time either: even though we sin, we can also repent and return to God. In fact, we ordinarily have a lifetime of flip-flopping in our elections. However, we need to struggle to win the last battle: at the moment of our death, we should be loving God.

The Gospel Reading of today’s Mass recapitulates our consideration of the effective Love of God for our holiness:

Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in their belts. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave. Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” So, they went off and preached repentance. The Twelve drove out many demons and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

Mark 6: 7-13
James Tissot, Il les envoya deux à deux {He Sent Them Out Two by Two}. (1886-1896, Brooklyn Museum).

Indeed, Jesus wants everyone to be saved, but he also gave us fair warning: Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them. This is a reminder to all those who think that God will do all the work for our salvation: we have to welcome the Gospel of repentance and listen to the authentic Magisterium; otherwise we shall be rejected as well. We cannot help but remember what the Precursor said to the Jews who were going to him for baptism in the Jordan, with the pretension of going through yet another formalistic ritual that would assure their salvation but without undergoing a sincere conversion:

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Matthew 3: 7-10
James Tissot, Saint Jean-Baptiste et les pharisiens {Saint John the Baptist and the Pharisees}. (1886-1894, Brooklyn Museum).

The lesson is clear: Even if the initiative for our salvation is from God—who has redeemed us in Calvary and left us the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the Hierarchy to deliver the means of salvation—the subjective reception of those means of salvation and sanctification belongs to us. God respects our freedom always. Failure to correspond fully to the divine invitation is lukewarmness, and in the words of the Book of Revelation, God vomits out the lukewarm:

“I know your deeds: you are neither cold nor hot. How I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm—neither cold nor hot—I am about to vomit you out of my mouth.”

Revelations 3: 15-16

Lukewarmness is a clear and present danger that we need to struggle against with the grace of God. St. Thomas Aquinas explains it as a certain loss of appetite for the things of God—i.e., a lack of earnestness in our journey to perfection. Unfortunately, entire societies are steeped in this malady. What we need to do is to inoculate ourselves against this malady—as we do against any harmful virus—by building up antibodies against it. This is what the ascetical struggle does.

We can end with some points from St. Josemaría to help us in our examination of conscience:

Below is this Sunday’s video meditation from The Adventure of Ordinary Life, my ongoing series of meditations (guided prayer). Video meditations are available every week, and can be accessed every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at my YouTube channel, Meditations with Fr. Jim Achacoso, and on Sundays both at my YouTube channel and here on my blog.

FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT:
Howard Lyon, Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet.

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4th Sunday of Easter Easter Season

The Acts of the Apostles ~ The Gospel of the Holy Spirit

The 1st Reading of today’s Mass is a continuation of the previous Sunday’s account of the preaching of St. Peter in Jerusalem soon after Pentecost. After preaching to the crowd attracted by the miraculous cure of a cripple, Peter and John were arrested by the guards of the Sanhedrin and imprisoned overnight. The following day, they were hauled to a gathering of the Sanhedrin, the elders and the scribes, and interrogated as to what authority they had to perform the cure and preach to the crowd. St. Luke narrates:

Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said: “Leaders of the people and elders: If we are being examined today about a good deed done to a cripple, namely, by what means he was saved, be it known to you all and all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well. He is the stone rejected by you, the builders, but which has become the cornerstone. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race, by which we are to be saved.”

Acts 4: 8-12
Unknown Artist, Pedro y Juan ante el Sanedrin (Peter and John Before the Sanhedrin)

We are impressed by the optimistic tone of the Prince of the Apostles, proclaiming salvation through Jesus Christ. Later on, at the face of the Sanhedrin prohibiting them from preaching Jesus Christ, he would reply: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20). Commenting on this passage, St. Josemaría Escrivá wrote:

This is the glorious freedom of the children of God. Christians who let themselves be browbeaten or become inhibited or envious in the face of the licentious behavior of those who do not accept the Word of God, show that they have a very poor idea of the faith. If we truly fulfill the law of Christ—that is, if we make the effort to do so, for we will not always fully succeed—we will find ourselves endowed with a wonderful gallantry of spirit.

Friends of God, n.38

This is the fruit of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles on Pentecost. Henceforth they would embark on an evangelization that neither lack of means (they were just poor Palestinians from a remote corner of the Roman Empire) nor persecution (first by their fellow Jews and then sporadically even by the Roman authorities) could stop. In a few centuries Christianity would change the face of the Greco-Roman world. Neither did it stop there: because even with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the late 5th Century, Christianity would continue its spread unabated, all through the so-called Dark Ages (which were not so dark after all, precisely because of the monasteries that bridged the gap between the Greco-Roman civilization and the Christian Civilization of the Middle Ages). Neither was this evangelization limited to Europe: from the 13th Century onwards, Christianity was carried by missionaries and explorers around the world to Asia, across the Atlantic to the Americas and finally to Africa and Oceania. In fact, this year the Philippines is celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines in March 1521, which signaled one of the most successful evangelizing enterprises by Spain, converting the Philippine Archipelago into the bulwark of Christianity in East and Southeast Asia, not to mention the full circle implied by the re-evangelizing work of the Overseas Filipino Workers in Europe today.

Carlos V. Francisco, First Mass in the Philippines (Undated).

The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone. So, the liturgy sings in the Responsorial Psalm of today’s Mass. Of course, that stone primarily refers to Jesus Christ, who was rejected by the Jewish authorities and even by the Jews who were incited to do so by their religious authorities. However, these words can also apply to that other stone—Kephas, Petrus—the rock on which Jesus Christ established his one Church, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail: Peter and his successors in the Papacy, on whom Christ gave the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, such that whatever they bind on earth is bound in Heaven and whatever they loose on earth is loosed in Heaven.

Fabrizio Ruggeri, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Rome.

There are some voices in that Church that are agitating against the voice of Peter and his authority. There are powerful and influential voices that are spreading doubts and even dissent against the Vicar of Christ and his allegedly faulty magisterium. Unfortunately, Church History is not without some notorious examples of that phenomenon. In fact, many times such dissenting voices and doctrines have been the occasion for many dogmatic pronouncements of the Church Councils through the centuries: many Catholic doctrines that had been peacefully taught and accepted by the faithful had been subsequently studied theologically and subsequently defined dogmatically because some theologians or ecclesiastics started to question them. God draws straight lines from crooked segments and the Holy Spirit continuously guides the living Tradition and Magisterium of the Church. Without Arrius and his followers, there may not have been any need for St. Athanasius and the Council of Nicea (325) to define the consubstantiality of the Word with the Father; without Pelagius and his followers, the great doctrines on grace elaborated by St. Augustine may not have become part of Church doctrine;  without Nestorius and his heresy there may not have been any need for the Council of Ephesus (431) to define the Divinity of Jesus Christ and therefore that Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos); without Martin Luther and his so-called Protestant Reformation, there may not have been a Council of Trent with its most encompassing re-statement of Catholic Doctrine; and without the onslaught of modernism, there would not have been the great documents of the Second Vatican Council. God writes straight lines with crooked segments and the Holy Spirit continues to blow and fan the homologous evolution of doctrine. Only the hardcore traditionalists ossify Catholic doctrine and want to straightjacket the faithful from living the freedom and the glory of the children of God.

“Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

1 John 3: 1-2

The 2nd Reading, taken from the 1st Letter of St. John, is short but contains two very important revelations.

The first is again the reality of our Divine Filiation, which is not just a manner of speech— “we may be called the children of God”—but is a fact: “Yet so we are.” This is something we had repeatedly meditated on all these months of the Corona Retreat, but this time the Beloved Disciple draws an important conclusion that can help explain the critical voices  against Pope Francis, but also—in a larger scheme—all the anti-Catholic sentiment that can be observed now and then: from the taking down of Christian symbols in public places to the outright attacks on the Catholic hierarchy by certain governments. Indeed, St. John already said it quite clearly: The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. And the reason why men do not know God is because they have not accepted the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ as the key to our salvation, as St. Paul had said, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles.

The second revelation is about the beatific vision for those who go to Heaven: We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. How will Heaven be like? St. Paul waxes mystical on this point:

“Eye has not seen, nor heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

1 Corinthians 2: 9
Corrado Giaquinto, The Holy Trinity, the Virgin and Saints. (circa 1755, Museo Nacional del Prado).

In this life, what we know are concepts that our intellect forms either as the end of the process of simple apprehension (when we abstract the essence of things we detect through the senses) or an act of judgment (when we put together concepts and make affirmations based on them). This includes our knowledge of God—which we form both from what we apprehend of created things and from revealed truths. Regardless of how we arrive at our concept of God, it is our concept, with all its limitations. In the beatific vision, the concept of God of the soul in Heaven will be God himself, who unites the holy soul with Himself. In other words, in the beatific vision, the saintly soul will not have a created concept of God, but rather the very essence of God himself.

Now consider this: If in this life, the knowledge of God, friendship with Jesus Christ, and the loving dialogue with the Blessed Trinity in prayer produce so much delight, how will it be like in Heaven, when what we shall possess will not be just a created concept of God but the essence of God himself? That direct knowledge of God shall produce such a superlative joy, that it will brook no letting go. That is why it is called beatific. We get a poor glimpse of this when we contemplate poor Peter (with James and John), who at the sight of the Glorified Christ on Mt. Tabor, could only blurt out: Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us build three tents—in other words, let us abide here and prolong this moment as much as we can.

Peter Paul Rubens, Transfiguration (Detail). (1605, Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy).

That is what Heaven will be like. How well we understand Peter’s dazzlement in front of the glorified Christ and Paul’s bewilderment at the prospect of the beatific vision. Yet, life is a continuum: if that direct knowledge of God is waiting for us at the other side of death, then this side of it cannot be far off. Heaven is just the steady and eternal state of what may be temporary and ephemeral in this life; however, both are essentially the same, just differing in intensity. How well St. Josemaría Escrivá expressed it when he said:

I am more convinced each time that they are happy in Heaven those who knew how to be happy on earth.

The definitive and eternal Heaven is just the consequence of a temporary but heavenly life here on earth. To the question of a saintly soul, “How will Heaven be like, Father?” I had to answer: More of the same contemplation, my child; more of the same joy! Only perfect and eternal. This is what Our Lord tells us in the Gospel Reading of today’s Mass:

“I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for my sheep.”

John 10: 14-15
Jean Baptiste de Champaigne, The Good Shepherd (17th Century, Palais de Beaux-Arts de Lille).

This is what interior life is. This is what contemplative life means. It is the fulfillment of God’s plan when he made man to his image and elevated him to his likeness by breathing into him his own Spirit. This life was supposed to consist in a joyful relationship with the Three Divine Persons in the perfect albeit temporary harmony of Paradise, where man was supposed to confirm his love for God and then segue into the eternal knowledge and love of God in Heaven. Paradise was lost with original sin, but it has been regained by the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. The rules of engagement have not changed: God made man free, and freely man has to choose God. In his eternity, God knows the souls who love him and choose Heaven; those who love God and choose him, also do. Are you one of them? Jesus has laid down his life for you; are you committed to spend your life for him?

It is your choice, always your choice.

  • NOTE:
    The No Greater Love series of daily video meditations (guided prayer) continues throughout the Easter season until Pentecost Sunday on the 23rd of May 2021. For easy access to all past, present, and future meditations of Fr. Jim, please feel most welcome to subscribe to his YouTube channel, Meditations with Fr. Jim.
Blogpost Featured Image Credits:

Antonio de Pereda, La Santisima Trinidad (The Holy Trinity).

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Christmas Feast Day Sunday Meditations

3rd Sunday of Christmas: Feast of the Baptism of the Lord ~ The Reality of our Divine Filiation

Annibale Carracci, The Baptism of Christ (detail)

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased.”

Mark 1: 9-11

Today’s Gospel Reading presents for our contemplation a very well-known scene: the Baptism of Our Lord by John at the Jordan. With today’s feast the short liturgical season of Christmas comes to an end. Our Lord’s Baptism likewise marked the end of his Hidden Life and the beginning of his Public Life. Let us contemplate this beautiful scene.

We are already familiar with the site in the Judean desert—close to Jericho on the way to the Dead Sea—where John the Baptist was preaching a baptism of repentance.

We had seen how many Jews, especially from the region of Judea, had been going to be baptized and how he had rebuked the Pharisees and Scribes for thinking that they could “escape the wrath that is to come” by going through yet one more ritual. This time, however, it is Jesus Christ himself who goes all the way from Galilee to his cousin to be baptized by him. St. Matthew narrates the momentous event in the following way:

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented.”

Matthew 3: 13-15

This brief exchange contains a wealth of lessons, but we can focus on one: the need for humility. On the one hand we see the humility of John the Baptist, who acknowledges the supremacy of Jesus Christ and his own indigence. Greater still is the humility of Our Lord, who submits himself to the baptism of John, to fulfill all righteousness. The result is a new revelation and the establishment of a new sacrament.

“And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on (Jesus); and lo, a voice from heaven saying, ‘This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Matthew 3: 16-17
Francesco Trevisani, John the Baptist Baptizing Christ (1723)

Thus, Our Lord established the Sacrament of Baptism, by which what happened at that moment by the Jordan takes place every time the sacramental signs are effected: the washing with water (either by immersion or pouring), together with the pronouncement of the words taught by Our Lord: I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It is the doorway to all the other sacraments because it is what establishes the fundamental condition for any human person to receive them: being a child of God. Through baptism, a human person—who is born in a state of alienation from God, due to the absence of the supernatural life of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity—recovers the original dignity of Adam and Eve before the Fall, when they received “the Breath of Life” and became “living beings.” Indeed, when a human person is baptized, the Holy Spirit comes upon him, informing his whole being, such that he is enabled to perceive and understand the inspirations and heed the motions of the Holy Spirit in his soul, making it possible for him to freely identify himself with Jesus Christ in the spirit of divine filiation, and to deal with the Father as Jesus would. This is what that mysterious “breath of life” is; this is what to become “a living being” means—the birth to a new life: the life of the Blessed Trinity in the human soul in grace, that makes him a child of God.

Let us recall our consideration of that mysterious verse in the second account of the origin of man in Chapter 2 of Genesis:

“Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

Genesis 2: 7

We cannot belabor this point enough: Man was made from dust (not created from nothing)—implying an evolutionary process. Sacred Scriptures are not scientific books. This is especially true for the Pentateuch (the first five Books of the Old Testament), which were composed by Moses for the primitive Israelites during their 40-year wanderings through the Sinai on the way to the Promised Land (ca 1,500 B.C.). Hence, their accounts of the origins of the universe, the earth itself, and man could not be scientific accounts. However, Sacred Scripture is revealed by the maker of that universe. Hence, though not rigorous as physical science, neither are they contradictory to physical science: they just move on a different plain—i.e., the plain of fundamental truths.

In this case, Scripture reveals that man was made in the image of God—a spiritual being, with the faculties of knowing (intellect) and self-determination (free will)—though not exactly like him. Man is endowed with a material body which is informed by his spiritual soul. Unlike an animal, which only has a soul that is purely material—i.e., what makes it alive is reducible to a series of physiological processes—man’s principle of life is spiritual (not material). An ordinary person has the awareness of something that transcends his materiality: he can think, reflect on himself, conjure past events in his memory and imagine real and even unreal things in his mind, carry out abstract operations in his mind (like mathematical operations). Indeed, man is a totally different form of life from the animals and the plants: he is not a rational animal as some taxonomists are wont to explain, just to fit him in a preconceived mental scheme. That would be akin to the opposite extreme of classifying man as an angel (that other spiritual creature) with a body (perhaps as a fruit of some fall). It is more correct to say that man is a spiritual being with a material body.

But why did God create spiritual beings anyway (angels and men)? Recall how we were considering this early on in the Corona Retreat: the only reason for God’s actions is Love, because God is Love (1 Jn 4:8). God caused the coming into being of creatures outside himself to love them…and for them to love him back. The spiritual being is inherently relational: that is why even the Blessed Trinity can be explained best by the relationships of the three Divine Persons among themselves, without which (relationships) there would just be the Unity of God. God the Father is father to the Son, and God the Son is son to the Father, and God the Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father. For man (and the angels) to be made in the image of God implies a nature which is capable of knowing and loving God, the way God knows and loves himself in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Simply put, it would not have been meaningful at all for God to cause the whole universe if that universe were just to be material things with which he could not relate and—even worse—which could not relate back with him.

Michaelangelo, Creation of Man (cropped)

God made man to his image and breathed into him his own Breath of life (the Holy Spirit), such that man became a living being (Gen 2:7)—with a new life, which is a participation in the intra-Trinitarian life and leads to identification with Jesus Christ (the Son of God made man). This is of fundamental importance, such that it is revealed by God in the very first two chapters of the very first Book of the Bible. Only if man knows his destiny as a child of God—therefore heir of Heaven, as St. Paul would later declare—can he begin to live his life accordingly. Without that conviction, man is doomed to live the life of an animal, because bereft of the activity of the Blessed Trinity in his soul in grace, his damaged nature (wounded by original sin and his own personal sins) can only lead him to self-destruction. So important is this that after man’s fall, God sent his only begotten Son to take on human nature to save us and restore us to our original dignity as children of God.

The Baptism of Our Lord signaled the establishment of the Sacrament of our own baptism, through which we are regenerated to divine filiation. What we need to do now is to consider the consequences of that rebirth for our daily life. In this regard, I cannot help but think of St. Josemaría Escrivá, the Founder of Opus Dei, which is the first institution in the Church to make the sense of Divine filiation the foundation of its spirituality. Whereas Divine filiation is a fact and even a doctrine that was preached by the Apostles from the start, reaffirmed by Vatican Council II and of late by the most recent Popes, St. Josemaría’s unique contribution was to incarnate and to teach a way of life for ordinary people to be fully conscious of this fundamental reality while being engaged in temporal activities in the middle of the world.

St. Josemaría Escrivá (Opus Dei Communications Office, License cc-by-na-sa)

After the first generation of Christians—who were so conscious of their Divine filiation that they referred to each other as saints (cf. Eph 1:1, 1Cor 1:2)—this fundamental reality had somehow been put aside. The ideal of holiness had been relegated to a special class of people who were willing to renounce the world and to lead a contemplative life either within monastery or convent walls, or in the ordained ministry. What God inspired St. Josemaría to do was to remind the world that holiness is the fundamental calling of man because he is a child of God, echoing the words of Jesus Christ: Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect!  However, the uniqueness in St. Josemaría’s spirituality was to base this struggle for perfection in the awareness—a sense—of our divine filiation, such that all aspects of our daily life is informed by that awareness: we work, we play, we carry on our social relations, and we pray as God’s children.

The first three points from St. Josemaria’s posthumously published work, The Forge, illustrate this spirituality. The very title of Chapter 1—Dazzled—manifests the sentiment that this sense of divine filiation provoked in his heart and should provoke in ours:

God is my Father! If you meditate on it, you will never let go of this consoling thought. Jesus is my dear Friend (another thrilling discovery) who loves me with the divine madness of his Heart. The Holy Spirit is my Consoler, who guides my every step along the road. Consider this often: you are God’s—and God is yours.

The Forge, n.2

We are children of God, bearers of the only flame that can light up the paths of the earth for souls, of the only brightness which can never be darkened, dimmed or overshadowed. The Lord uses us as torches, to make that light shine out. Much depends on us. If we respond, many people will remain in darkness no longer, but will walk instead along paths that lead to eternal life.

The Forge, n.1

My Father—talk to him like that, confidently—who art in Heaven, look upon me with compassionate Love and make me respond to thy love. Melt and enkindle my hardened heart, burn and purify my unmortified flesh, fill my mind with supernatural light, make my tongue proclaim the Love and Glory of Christ.

The Forge, n.3

We are about to complete an entire Liturgical Cycle since we started this Corona Retreat on March 15, 2020, when the entire Philippines, as many other places in the world, went into a veritable lockdown. Do you remember how you started reading this blog, then published daily? At that time it was getting as many as 45,000 hits from 30 countries worldwide. From the start, these meditations had been crafted in such a way as to foster a familiar conversation with God—of a child to his Father—full of confidence, simplicity and abandonment. As we prepare to enter the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic—a year dedicated to St. Joseph—let us thank God for this initiative of Pope Francis to help us grow deeper in our sense of Divine filiation.

We need a human experience to penetrate the Divine realities of our existence. Jesus Christ—the Son of God made man—gives us the human model for being a son of God. St. Joseph, on the other hand, gives us the human model for us to understand better that Divine Fatherhood, because Joseph’s sentiments for the boy Jesus mirrors very well that of our heavenly Father for us. And if by chance we may still hold off, for shame or fear due to our weaknesses and failures, then let us be conscious of Our Blessed Mother’s presence.

I recently came upon a little piece of sculpture depicting what I think is a very moving scene: the child Jesus reaching up to give St. Joseph a hug—much as a child would his father when he arrives home—and the Holy Patriarch looking down lovingly on the Word-made-Flesh, while the Blessed Mother stands discreetly behind, soaking in the tender scene. One can almost hear the words coming out of the Divine Child’s mouth: Abba!  Daddy, Papá. Let’s learn to address God the Father that way, by looking at how affectionately St. Joseph dealt with Jesus.  

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2nd Saturday Meditations Video Meditations

2nd Saturday Meditation #20200109 ~ 3rd Sunday of Christmas: The Reality of Divine Filiation

With this second Saturday entry, we start 2nd Saturdays with Fr. Jim, a new section of this Corona Retreat containing video recordings of meditations by Fr. Jim. Each video that is published on the 2nd Saturday of the month will be accompanied by inspirational graphics. The aim of this new section is to help you, dear followers of this blog, learn the art of meditation, which is the most elementary form of mental prayer.

Helpful Notes:
  • Easy access to all video meditations can henceforth be had by clicking any of the category labels (“2nd Saturday Meditations” or “Video Meditations”) located directly above the title of this and any future video-posts.
  • To enlarge the screen of the video, click on the Enlarge Screen icon (four white arrows extending outward) on the bottom right side of the video menu.
2nd Saturdays with Fr. Jim, The Reality of Divine Filiation (Video Meditation #20210109)

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Daily Meditation

Day 9: Monday of the 4th Week of Lent ~ The Joy of the Children of God

Today we move into the second half of the Lenten Season, and it is time to really get serious. With my self-quarantine extended until Saturday—since a friend of mine, who flew in from the south like I did two Saturdays ago, seems to have just come down with a slight fever and sore throat—and the Corona pandemic not showing any signs of abating yet, we need to dig deeper into the foundations of our hope and optimism. Hence, we shall deviate a little from the pattern of the past week—following the Readings of the Mass daily—to go to the beginnings. As Fraulein Maria of the Sound of Music would say: “Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Genesis 2: 7

This verse constitutes the second narrative of the origin of man, forming part of the second narrative of creation in Chapter 2 of the book of Genesis. It is like an echo of the narrative in Chapter 1, but with new information added.

First, that God formed man from pre-existing matter—i.e., man was not created ex nihilo (from nothing)—without going into the details, which would have been beyond the understanding of the Israelites of the Exodus anyway (ca 1500 BC). This ties in very well with the very popular hypothesis of evolution: hypothesis, not quite a theory—because in the scientific method, for a hypothesis (“less than a thesis”) to become a theory, it must stand the test of experimentation—i.e., the actual coming about of a new species, brought about experimentally, which has never been done.

For me, the strongest proof that some kind of evolution must have taken place is this revelation from the Creator that man was formed from the dust of the earth. I still remember the excitement generated by the so-called de novo synthesis of an amino acid (the building blocks of protein) by the introduction of an electric spark to a mixture of nitrogen gas, water and carbon dioxide. The simplest amino acid was formed and a good number of scientists gleefully jumped into the conclusion that this was the origin of life: there was no need to posit a Creator; simple elements (of course their existence were just taken as a given) just randomly combined and with enough time assembled themselves into complex structures, until living beings accidentally formed. Then more accidents like that, given enough time, and man was formed. The problem with such mental constructs of matter evolving by itself to more complex forms is that they violate both physical and metaphysical principles. First, it goes against the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics: matter by itself tends to maximum randomness, not the opposite of increasing structuredness that life shows. As Dr. Grant—my favorite character in Jurassic Park, and Michael Crichton’s vehicle for his own philosophizing—said: to presume that the primeval soup of elements just accidentally—given enough time—got assembled into complex life forms would be something like a junkyard accidentally getting assembled into a Boeing 747 (at the time the most advanced airliner). In fact, as any biologist can attest, even the simplest life forms have more parts than a Boeing 747. So, no: the primeval soup cannot evolve by itself to life forms; but yes, God can make use of that primeval soup to form life forms, all the way to man, through a process of evolution. Evolution is the most plausible hypothesis that science can present—but not a self-contained evolution of matter, but something caused by a Guiding Principle with all the power needed for such a task. And that Guiding Principle, that Unmoved Mover, that Uncaused Cause, that Maximum Perfection and Architect is called God.

The greater objection to Darwinian Evolution, however, is in the metaphysical (“beyond physics”) order. Simply put: a being cannot acquire a further perfection by itself, without the introduction of something by a cause that already has that perfection. Some pieces of wood and some nails (material cause) cannot by themselves become even the simplest of bookstands, unless a craftsman (agent cause), with the design of a bookstand in his mind (formal cause), having in mind what the thing is for (final cause), makes that piece. Matter needs all those other causes to become a more complex material being.

I apologize for the short class in physics and metaphysics, but that red herring had to be taken out of the way, before we can meditate on the more sublime reality of our Divine filiation. The existence of man cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution. Only God could really reveal to man what he is—in His image He made him; male and female He made them—and how he came about—formed of dust from the ground. However, if it is fascinating to realize that the what and the how of man’s being, as supernaturally revealed by God in Sacred Scripture, tracks perfectly with what the real physical scientists have discovered with their own methodology (natural revelation), the why of man totally transcends the possibilities of the physical sciences. Only the Creator can supernaturally reveal why He created man—the final cause of man.    

I will never forget attending the traditional Advent Mass with then Pope John Paul II: it was December 1980, my first Roman Christmas Season, as a student of theology in the Roman College of the Holy Cross (now the International Seminary of the Prelature of Opus Dei). John Paul II had recently started a tradition of holding a Mass at the start of Advent for the university students in Rome. St. Peter’s Basilica was packed with about 40,000 of us (at least that was how many tickets were printed). After almost four decades, I can still hear the baritone of the Vicar of Christ reverberating in that cavernous hall:

Cur homo? “Why man”

And the words of St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, came rushing to my mind in reply:

Elegit nos in ipso, ante mundi constitutionem, ut essemus sancti et immaculati in conspectus eius in caritate. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, so that we may be holy and spotless in His presence in love.”

Ephesians 1: 4

God made us in his image–with a spiritual soul like His, capable of knowing and loving—in order to have a loving relationship with Him. The spirit is by nature relational: that is why even God, who is pure spirit, is a relationship of Three Divine Persons; that is why we engage in social media. The purpose of creation is for creatures to be in a relationship of knowledge and love with their Creator; otherwise, creation would be futile. That is why God created the Angels—pure spirits—first. Only because of man—whom God designed as a creature with a material body and a spiritual soul—did God have to create a material universe as well, to be man’s fitting habitat. So even in the natural plane, man as a rational creature, was designed to be in a loving relationship with God his Creator, just like the Angels before him.

But God did not stop there. Those words of Genesis, Chapter 2 resound with imperative force, demanding a deeper understanding.

It does not say that God formed a human corpse out of dust, then breathed into him human life, so that he became a living man. Scripture said that God formed man—alive, with body and spiritual soul—AND (not then, which would imply temporal succession), simultaneously, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

What is this mysterious breath of life?

And this is where something important was lost in translation. Remember the first narrative of Creation in Genesis Chapter 1:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the water.

Genesis 1: 1-2

In an earlier meditation, we saw that the word used for Spirit of God was the Hebrew word ruah—which means exhalation. And there is no doubt what that ruah meant: the Holy Spirit, God’s Love who is the reason for all creation and its providence. The same word, ruah, is used in Genesis 2: 7— God breathed into man His own Spirit (ruah), thus making man—from the very beginning, not subsequently—a partaker of His own Divine Life.

Behold man’s original dignity: he was made in God’s image—with body and spiritual soul, capable of naturally knowing and loving God—and elevated to His likeness, by that infusion of the Holy Spirit, who made man not only a rational creature (like the Angels), but a son of God (also like the Angels, but with a material body unlike them). With that principle of Divine Life in him, man was meant to enjoy a relationship of knowledge and love in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. We were meant to know and love God, the way He knows and loves Himself.

Filiation is the relationship of proceeding from someone of a spiritual nature, and being like that someone. Hence, we do not apply the notion of filiation to animals or plants (because they are not spiritual); we rather limit it to humans, who are spiritual in nature. Even in common language, we never apply the terms son or daughter to the offspring of an animal: the puppy is to the bitch, as the foal is to the mare; but the son or daughter is to his or her mother (or father). Because we come from God, and we have a spiritual soul like Him, with the infusion of His own Spirit in us, we are children of God. That is what Divine filiation means.

And that is God’s design for man: not only what and how man is, but more importantly why he is. This is our destiny.

What a Copernican turn life takes, when we become aware of this fundamental reality! But even more significantly, what marvelous hues life acquires when we live it with this consciousness all the time. It’s enough reason to go through the entire day as if drunk with that thought—and the lines of yet another musical come to mind:

With a song in my heart, I behold your adorable face.

Just a sigh at the start, that is soon a hymn to your grace.

The sense of our divine filiation, not anymore just a conviction but an awareness that we are God’s children, is the foundation of the spirituality of Opus Dei. It explains the optimism (not just braggadocio), the cheerfulness (not just frivolity), the striving for human perfection (not just perfectionism) that characterizes the Christian who is struggling for holiness in the middle of the world. Aware of his lofty calling, he is responding with a generous gift of himself to God and His creation—despite all his failures in the process. We can end with another quote from St. Josemaría:

My Father—talk to him like that, confidently—who art in Heaven. Look upon me with compassionate Love, and make me respond to thy love.

Melt and enkindle my hardened heart, burn and purify my unmortified flesh, fill my mind with supernatural light, make my tongue proclaim the Love and Glory of Christ.

The Forge, n. 3