Second Sunday of Lent
A very fine diocesan priest became my spiritual director twenty years ago, just as I was beginning to discern my vocation. I am convinced that God put him in my life to strengthen my faith and help me move along the Christian path. As we were trying to sift through my life’s options, I said that according to the mystics, we can look deeply into our innermost selves, only to discover that our own desires are in complete harmony with God’s desires, because God is present at the center of every soul. My heretofore patient and understanding spiritual director bluntly rejected this idea. In my frustration, I dismissed him as a simple parish priest who was just unfamiliar with high-level mysticism.
But he was right. The mystics I had been studying were not Christian ones. They did not understand the weight of original sin. My spiritual director knew from experience that God often asks us to do things we really rather wouldn’t do. For example, to struggle with a debilitating illness. When that time comes, we are called to reshape our desires according to the divine will. That is the essence of a religion as opposed to a mere spiritual method.
Consider how God asked Abraham to give up his first-born son, Isaac. Although nothing on Earth could have been more precious to Abraham than this son, he obeyed, and because he obeyed, God rewarded him, making him into the father of a progeny as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore, among them Jesus Christ himself.