By Father Rich Tomkosky
Don’t take God’s Mercy for granted. As I mentioned last week, God is all holy, but amazingly He also wants to have a personal relationship with each one of us. We see this play out when Moses encounters the living God in the mystery of the Burning Bush. God then tells Moses to remove his shoes as he is standing on holy ground.
When we encounter the living God, it is different than anything else we experience in this life. Exciting in a holy way! As Catholics when we come into any Catholic Church, it should always remind us that we are standing on holy ground because this is where the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered and where the Lord is truly Present in the Tabernacle in the Consecrated Hosts, the reserved Blessed Sacrament. So, there is always a candle lit next to the Tabernacle to remind us of that sublime reality.
Do we believe this central truth of our Catholic faith and act accordingly by showing proper reverence and prayerful silence while here in the Lord’s Real Presence and remember to genuflect to the Lord when coming into and leaving the Church as people traditionally genuflected to an earthly King – but we have the King of the Universe here?
We must pray for the gift of holy awareness. All of us must honestly face the spiritual reality that our sins blind us to God’s Presence in this life to a greater or lesser degree depending on how serious and how engrained they are in our being. This is why the Sacrament of Confession is so helpful in not just having our sins forgiven by God’s mercy but rooting them out of our life over time. And also, in helping to lift our spiritual blindness, which is an effect of actual sin, the two worse types in that regard according to Saint Thomas Aquinas are sins of pride and lust – so always be aware of that especially if we struggle with one or both of those capital sins.
Saint Paul brings this out when he notes that God was not pleased with all of the Israelites even though they ate/drank the miraculous manna/water for years. That is a warning for us in regard to the Eucharist and receiving Holy Communion; it is not magic. We always need to be properly disposed: having the requisite faith, keeping the one hour fast from food and drink (candy, gum) other than water and medicine, and not being aware of serious/mortal sin on our soul.
Remember God doesn’t interfere normally with our free will, so we can indeed receive the Lord in Holy Communion in a bad state of soul, but we will be held accountable for that someday; and so in humility and faith NEVER do that, and to go to Confession ASAP to get rid of any serious sin, and to take the steps to be in God’s friendship always, i.e. in the state of sanctifying grace to the best of our knowledge.
And if you have been away from the Sacraments, to do whatever you need to do to get back, e.g. get your marriage blessed in the Church, stop skipping Sunday/Holy Day Mass because of work, sports, and other activities and put God and our Catholic faith as the number one priority in our life. We’ll never regret that in light of eternity!
But staying out of mortal sin is the bare minimum. To bear spiritual fruit to the glory of the Blessed Trinity and for the salvation of souls, starting with our own, we must cultivate a personal relationship with God; He is beckoning us, but we must say: Yes. And why wouldn’t we respond to the greatest invitation of life? Well, if we are not praying daily in a significant way, we won’t see the invitation in our spiritual dullness and apathy. This is a clever trick of the demons on us humans to not really think of God much in daily life.
For so many Christians this may be the biggest obstacle to holiness: that in the busyness of daily life, prayer gets pushed to the side, and it is a pattern rather than a random occurrence. Just the other day I made a resolution with the Lord to do better with my own prayer life as I saw how the first two weeks of Lent were off. Only in real prayer do we grow close to God and are amazed at His holy patience with us, desiring only our spiritual flourishing by helping us die to self and to embrace better our daily Cross: a great portion of which, in our time in particular, is being more spiritually disciplined in regard to prayer.
When we hear the parable of Jesus about the seemingly healthy to all appearances tree that is bearing no fruit, and the owner says: Cut it down – but the gardener says to the owner: let me work on it for one more year to see if it bears fruit, and then if it doesn’t, you can cut it down, He is talking about our soul, our spiritual life. If we are not praying daily in a significant way, we won’t bear fruit, and at the end of our life we will likely not be with God in eternity as we had so little interest in Him in this world. Scary!
Lent is the time to re-focus and get disciplined spiritually. Take advantage of the opportunities to do so, as so many of you are, with daily Mass, the Holy Hours, the Stations of the Cross, Confession, and more daily prayer. God bless you.
Father Rich Tomkosky is the Pastor of Saint Thomas the Apostle Parish in Bedford and the Pastor of Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in Beans Cove.
