Reflection from Friar Nicholas

SOLEMNITY OF ALL SAINTS   Apoc 7:2-4,9-14; Ps 24:1-6; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Mt 5:1-12 The Essence of Happiness and End of Prayer We bring our reflection on prayer to a close as we celebrate the solemn feast of All Saints. We celebrate all those who walked the path of prayer rightly and duly to arrive at the goal of prayer. As we have noted, prayer is the seeking of God’s face, a longing or desire for our ultimate good. God places this desire within us at our creation as an emptiness that can only be filled or satisfied by Himself. Our turning away from God in sin caused us to wander about in the world of creatures for what would fill the spiritual abyss within each of us. Experience teaches that no creature can satisfy the yearning of our hearts that is for God alone. The absence of any meaningful satisfaction for our deepest yearning is the mystical meaning of death; the absence of spiritual or eternal life in the world of material things without God. Man died when he turned away from...

FRIDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 9:1-5; Ps 147:12-15,19-20; Lk 14:1-6 Prayer and perfect Charity If, as we have come to understand, prayer is our desire for God at its foundation, then the basic desire in us gives birth to charity. God gave us this desire at our creation as a means of making us like him. For as we have noted, we shall be like God only when we come to the knowledge of God, suitable to our human nature, and love him with our whole mind, heart, will, and strength. The God-given desire in each of us to seek, know, love, and serve God was corrupted and turned toward self by sin, original and actual. To say that we were spiritually dead means we lost our spiritual path to God by sin, which is disobedience to his divine will. God restores our spiritual path by sending the Eternal Word to us again. Hence, our profession of faith in the Son of Man has reopened the spiritual path for our return to God, giving us a new spirit through which we can immediately conn...

THURSDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 8:31-39; Ps 109:21-22,26-27,30-31; Lk 13:31-35 The Revelation of the Son and the Father in Prayer Like newborn babies, we grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ through feeding regularly on Him, the eternal Word of God. As we commune daily with the Holy Spirit and follow his inspiration, we eat of the word of God, which illuminates every event of our daily life and makes us grow in the knowledge and spiritual stature of the Son of Man. We have explained this spiritual eating as constitutive of our interior life as Christians. If we are not living and drawing life from our new spirit, then we are not nourishing our spiritual life, but only our physical one. When this is the case, we will only grow in the knowledge of the physical reality without growing in spirit. To grow spiritually, we must live interiorly and from the spirit we have received at our profession of faith in Jesus Christ. The new spirit is a principle of life that connec...

WEDNESDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 8:26-30; Ps 13:4-6; Lk 13:22-30 The Faith Foundation of Prayer When we receive the gift of faith from God, our innate desire finds a direction to God. Before we received the divine gift of faith and the spiritual life subsequent to it, the innate desire in us roamed the material world, seeking a proportionate good that would satisfy us. Our craving for creatures only increased our hunger and emptiness without God. It follows that prayer or desire is innate in us because of our original longing for God, which God put in us when he made us in his image. We prayed to our idols, creatures in which we hoped to receive fulfilment in our land of exile from God. The divine light shines in our darkness when we receive the word of God, and through the gift of faith it confers, we receive a new spirit that defines our true prayer to God. The new spirit we receive from the Holy Spirit brings order and harmony to our disordered desires for creatu...

FEAST OF SAINTS SIMON AND JUDE, APOSTLES Eph 2:19-22; Ps 19:2-5; Lk 6:12-10 Prayer Feeds on the Will of God Everything related to God is characterized by order and harmony. God himself is the origin of order and harmony; the root of the harmony is the divine will, from which everything emanates within and outside the Trinity of Godhead. The Son is the carrier of the divine harmony as God’s knowledge of Himself and action. The Holy Spirit completes or returns the divine harmony as God’s love of Himself and all He does through the Son. Everything outside the Trinity, which has its origin in God, exists and follows the divine order and harmony as operating always within the divine will. The order and harmony originating from the eternal and immutable will of the Father form the basis of the goodness of every creature in heaven and on earth. Man and woman were created in the image of God to easily perceive, understand, and follow the divine order and harmony. But using their free wil...

MONDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 8:12-17; Ps 68:2,4,6-7,20-21; Lk 13:10-17 Our Spirits working with the Holy Spirit Through faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit generates a new spiritual life within us by the merit of the sacrificial death of the Son of Man. The new spirit we receive is actually the life of the Son of Man within us. We gain this by believing that he died our death, so that we may live his life. It is a fair exchange with the Eternal Word of God made man for our salvation. Saint Paul enunciates this truth in his second letter to the Corinthians 5:15. The reason he died for us is that we may no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for our salvation. We gain this new spirit at the moment of profession of faith in his death; that is, at our baptism. The exchange is made possible through the will of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit, who makes his home within us at the same instant. The Holy Spirit takes His residence in us, ...

SUNDAY, THIRTIETH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Eccl 35:12-14,16-19; Ps 34:2-3,17-19,23; 2 Tim 4:6-8,16-18; Lk 18:9-14 Prayer forged in the Ashes of Humility From our reflection on the grace of God last week, during which we understood grace to mean the presence of God given to us to accomplish His holy will, we take up prayer as the corresponding response to God’s grace in our lives. The grace of God causes prayer in us, as our adequate response and cooperation to God’s gift of Himself. As we noted earlier in our reflection, every grace comes to us first as a prevenient grace, enabling us to cooperate with God’s will and domesticate it within us as actual grace in realising the divine will for us. Prayer is the desire for actual grace for the accomplishment of the divine will that is revealed to us. The divine will for our salvation, which is Jesus Christ, produces a pure spirit within us, essentially a pure desire for the knowledge of the Father and the doing of His holy will. The new ...

SATURDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 8:1-11; Ps 24:1-6; Lk 13:1-9 The Cost of Ignoring Grace of Jesus Christ Grace is the presence of God with us to accomplish his holy will. We have repeatedly stated this very important truth, that it may sink deeply into us. It is a central truth of our salvation because not understanding the presence of God with us exposes us to the manipulations and snares of demons and evil people. However, knowing the signs that indicate the presence of God with us helps us to attend to His presence and be secure in our willing and doings. To live in the regime of grace is to be aware of the presence of Jesus Christ with us always. His presence is no longer given to the senses, but in mysteries. But every event and circumstance of our lives is an indicator or a sign of his abiding presence. The awareness of his presence is prayer and characterises the interior life for us. Our continuous struggle to be aware of this presence is the struggle for ...

FRIDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 7:18-25; Ps 119:66,68,76-77,93-94; Lk 12:54-59 Differentiating Nature and Grace The purpose of our struggles with keeping the commandments and receiving the answers to our prayers is to bring us to the regime of grace through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. They are part of our spiritual birth pangs, signifying that Christ is being born in us. Human understanding and feeling cannot easily comprehend the difference between what is accomplished by our human nature and what is accomplished by grace. To a casual observer, the two would pass as the same. But the one who experiences the working of grace knows better the difference between the two. Grace accomplishes what is impossible for nature. In other words, grace achieves what is supernatural to nature and also elevates what is natural to our nature to a supernatural level. By this, we mean that those things we ordinarily accomplish by our natural strength or skill are elevated to the...

THURSDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 6:19-23; Ps 1:1-4,6; Lk 12:49-53 The Division caused by Grace A structure is always at work within us at any point in time. It may be the structure of sin, which is innate in us, or the structure of righteousness, which comes with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were born with the structure of sin, which works well with our lives through the senses. The fall of Adam and Eve was their choice to walk the path of knowledge of good and evil, which involves the experience of death. They lost the guidance of divine light or grace, which is incompatible with their choice. Their choice implies guiding themselves by the light of their own reason. Since the human reason can only gain knowledge by walking the path of physical creation, the senses define their route to knowledge of good and evil. The structure of sin arises in us through our habituation to self and ignorance of what is truly good for us. Deceived by the forces of evil, ...

SAINT JOHN PAUL II, POPE Rom 6:12-18; Ps 124; Lk 12:39-48 The Coming of Christ in Grace Our Lord asked his disciples to pray for the grace to stand before the Son of Man when he appears in glory. But we know that standing before the Son of Man when he appears in glory will not be a problem for us if we are now standing before him in grace. What does it mean to stand before the Son of Man in grace? The standing here has the same meaning as the standing of the angels before the One of great age in the vision of the prophet Daniel. It is a spiritual standing that denotes eagerness to receive God’s revelation and to carry it out immediately. The angels are spiritual beings with no physical form to stand on. They are said to stand before God when they wait on him to receive the revelation of his will. The same applies to us when we wait on Jesus Christ to understand God’s will for us. Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the revelation of the Father comes from him to both angels an...

TUESDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 5:12,15,17-21; Ps 40:7-10,17; Lk 12:35-38 Readiness for Grace from Jesus Christ Just as by our natural birth we all participate or inherit the original sin of Adam and Eve, and the proneness to sin, which is disobedience to God’s will, by our spiritual rebirth through the salvific work of Jesus Christ, we participate in the grace won by the perfect obedience of the Son of Man. As we have stated in our previous reflection, God’s abiding presence was connatural to his creatures before the fall of Adam and Eve. God’s grace was not lacking to them for their growth in knowledge and development of God’s likeness before they chose the way of death. Their choice to know death and walk the path of darkness, deprived them of the grace of God, as God forewarned them. They and their progenies enjoyed a minimal presence of grace. They eked out their livelihood through a cursed earth that yielded thorns and brambles in place of good fruits enhanc...

MON DAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 4:20-25; Lk 1:69-75; Lk 132:13-21 Desiring the Right Blessings Prayer is basically the desire for God. Although the desire manifests in different forms at various times and stages of our journey toward God. Because the original sin we inherited from Adam and the actual sins we committed against God gave us an orientation to creatures, in place of the original orientation of man to God, our spiritual journey entails the purification of our desire and refinement of our opinion about God. God attracts us by satisfying our bodily desires, but the indulgence of our sensible desires is only a sign of the deeper spiritual satisfaction He wants us to desire and enjoy. Thus, when our Lord wetted the appetite of the five thousand that he fed with five loaves and two fish, he presented his body and blood as the real food and drink they should longed for. Therefore, our spiritual journey and experience of prayer go through this purification, th...

SUNDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Exod 17:8-13; Ps 121; 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8 Grace of Self-Sacrifice to God The purpose of man’s life on earth is to be like God. We get this truth from the book of Genesis. To be like God requires that we gain knowledge of God one way or another. Since God is above our natural comprehension, he would have to reveal Himself to us to know him and model our lives on him. Secondly, being a supernatural knowledge and end, his presence and activity in us are required. For this reason, we stand in need of God at all times. In our reflection on the grace of God, we have come to know that God does not deny us his grace in any way but continuously offers us grace. Since the grace of God is his self-communication, God’s will or divine countenance is continuously turned to us for our salvation and redemption. The only hitch we experience from receiving his continuous and steadfast communication to us is our intermittent attention to God. Because...