Your Body Matters for Prayer

Lent Day 27 - Why Your Body Matters for Prayer

Christian prayer is embodied prayer. In C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters we discovered an experienced devil giving lessons to a young temptor. At one point, the veteran orders his young charge to encourage his 'client,' a budding Christian, to envision prayer as something very 'interior' and 'mystical,' having little to do with posture or the position of the body. He wants the poor Christian to think that whether he stands, slouches, sits, or kneels is irrelevant to the quality of his communication with God. This, of course, is the Cartesian voice, the belief that our bodies and souls are independent and have little to do with each other. But then consider the view of William James. In his Principles of Psychology, James writes that it is not so much sadness that makes us cry as crying that makes us feel sad. The body in a significant sense precedes the mind. The same dynamic occurs when we pray. It is not so much keen feelings of devotion that force us to our knees as kneeling that gives rise to keen feelings of devotion. If you're having difficulty in prayer today, try kneeling, or bowing, or making some sort of reverent gesture. The body often leads the mind into a deeper spiritual space. Fr. Robert Barron

Towards a life on high with God!

Lent Day 26 - How Should the Resurrection Shape Our Everyday Lives?

The Resurrection is the very heart and soul of Christianity. Without the Resurrection, Christianity collapses. It's the standing and falling point of the faith. Therefore, to deny the Resurrection is to cease to be Christian. You might pick up bits and pieces of Christianity here and there, and you might follow Jesus as a wise spiritual teacher, but without the Resurrection the whole thing falls apart. Speaking more practically, the Resurrection is key to spiritual detachment. If God has a life for us beyond this life, one not so much opposed to this earthly life but inclusive of and beyond it, then I'm able to wear this world much more lightly. I'm not as obsessed with finding my joy here. Those who are not convinced of the Resurrection, who believe they'll just die and that's it, naturally chase after wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. But once you're convinced of the Resurrection, you know this world isn't ultimate. You can let go of those earthly pursuits, stop chasing them, and aspire toward a life on high with God, which is a life of love. Becoming a person of love thus becomes your central goal. That's how the Resurrection affects every aspect of your life.   Fr. Robert Barron

The Saints: What can they teach us about Lent?

Lent Day 25 - What Can the Saints Teach Us About Lent?

When considering saintly masters for Lent, I would direct attention to St. Ignatius of Loyola. He went through an extraordinary religious conversion as a young man and then spent a year living in a cave in Manresa. He lived in extreme deprivation, fasting, in utter simplicity. He even let his hair and nails grow out. We might say he went a little too mad. But that wasn't the case. He was experimenting with a sort of radical asceticism, trying to rid himself of the attachments that were keeping him from doing God's will. Now was his an extreme form? Sure. Many of the saints go through extreme periods of asceticism, in imitation of Jesus who spent forty days and forty nights in the desert. Does Ignatius live that way for the rest of his life? No, and he wouldn't counsel his followers to do so. But it was an important moment in his own spiritual development. None of us are meant to live Lent all year round, but it's good for us to deny ourselves for a period, fasting, almsgiving, ridding ourselves of detachments and diversions. It's important for us to do this for a time, just like Ignatius at Manresa. Another saint to consider during Lent is St. Robert Bellarmine, one of Ignatius's great sons in the Jesuit order. Bellarmine was a gifted theologian and respected cardinal, and very active in the world. Yet despite his activity, every Lent, every year, he completed the thirty-day Ignatian retreat. Some people complete the retreat once in the lifetime, but Bellarmine did it every single year. There's something wise in adopting a rigorous, but healthy period of asceticism during Lent, as these two particular saints demonstrate.   Fr. Robert Barron

Christ at the Center

Lent Day 24 - Christ at the Center

The massive rose windows of the medieval Gothic cathedrals were not only marvels of engineering and artistry; they were also symbols of the well-ordered soul. The pilgrim coming to the cathedral for spiritual enlightenment would be encouraged to meditate upon the rose of light and color in order to be drawn into mystical conformity with it. What would he or she see? At the center of every rose window is a depiction of Christ (even when Mary seems to be the focus, she is carrying the Christ child on her lap), and then wheeling around him in lyrical and harmonious patterns are the hundreds of medallions, each depicting a saint or a scene from scripture. The message of the window is clear: When one's life is centered on Christ, all the energies, aspirations, and powers of the soul fall into a beautiful and satisfying pattern. And by implication, whenever something other than Christ--money, sex, success, adulation--fills the center, the soul falls into disharmony. Jesus expressed this same idea when he said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the rest will be given unto you" (Mt 6:33). When the divine is consciously acknowledged as the ground and organizing center of one's existence, something like wholeness or holiness is the result. Don't live your life on the rim of the circle, but rather at the center. Focus on that reliable, unchanging point where Christ resides. Fr. Robert Barron

The One Who Fully Heals

Lent Day 23 - The One Who Fully Heals

What exactly is sin? To answer that we should first make a simple observation: we are all unhappy. By this I do not mean that we are all psychologically depressed. I mean that we are all, at a fundamental level, unsatisfied. And more to the point, we know it: "People are much sadder than they seem," concluded St. John Vianney. Our minds are hungry for truth and want it in great waves. But they get it, if it all, only in small doses and tiny drops. Likewise, our hearts hunger for goodness, and they get it, if at all, in dribs and drabs. We seem to know what to do, and what to be, but we seem fundamentally incapable of realizing it. There just seems to be something "broken" in all of us, something not as it should be. Even worse, we know in our more honest moments that there is nothing we can do about it. Our minds are flawed, and we can't think them back into health; our wills are weak and we can't will them back into strength. I realize how difficult this is for us to accept. Optimism and a can-do attitude belongs to the mythology of America, a country born of Enlightenment rationalism and confidence. But whenever we as individuals or nations try to lift ourselves up out of this problem, we make matters worse. Whenever we listen to a guru, a demagogue, a dictator, or a self-help psychologist, who tell us that all will be well either through economic, political, cultural, or interior reform, we make matters worse. This is our misery, but it is also, in an odd way, our greatness. We are broken, but since we are made in the image and likeness of God, he can fix us. One of the most important spiritual tasks then, especially in our time, is to awaken to the fact of sin--and to acknowledge our need for a savior. "Those who are healthy do not need a physician," Jesus claimed, "but the sick do." Only when we recognize our deep brokenness and dissatisfaction, neither of which we can heal on our own, can we encounter the One who fully heals. Fr. Robert Barron

What We Carry When We Die!

Lent Day 22 - What We Carry When We Die

In 1932, just as the Great Depression was getting underway, an itinerant philosopher named Peter Maurin found himself in New York City. There he met a young woman, a spiritual seeker and social activist who had just converted to Catholicism. Her name was Dorothy Day. Together Maurin and Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement, at the heart of which lay a newspaper and several houses of hospitality, places where poor and hungry people could receive a meal or a place to sleep. Their goal was to create a society where it was "easier to be good," changing modern America from being "a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers." How did they go about making this change? By following the practical precepts of the church, which flow directly from Matthew 25, namely, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, bury the dead, counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, pray for the living and the dead. When these are practiced, they realized, one's concern for "peace and justice" is no longer an abstraction or a harmless velleity. It becomes real and impactful. Upon our death we can take no earthly treasures with us. We leave behind our wealth, our power, our social status, our degrees, and our titles. Yet paradoxically, in Maurin's own words, "what we give to the poor for Christ's sake is what we carry with us when we die." Fr. Robert Barron

Why Fasting During Lent?

Lent Day 21: Why Fasting During Lent?

Across almost all cultures and religions, fasting has been an ancient spiritual practice. Its main rationale is that by detaching ourselves from certain desires, we awaken deeper hungers. 

It's hard for us to experience that. Most of the time, we're dominated by our sensual desires--our desires for food, drink, sex, and pleasure. Yet it's by fasting from these admittedly good things that we allow deeper hungers to emerge. That includes, perhaps most of all, the desire for God, the desire for intimacy and communion with him. 

Today, choose one shallow desire to detach yourself from--not by suppressing it, but by distancing yourself from it. In doing so you'll awaken your deeper hunger for God.  

Fr. Robert Barron

Up the Mountain

Lent Day 20 - Up to the Mountain

In the account of the Transfiguration, we hear that Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him "up the mountain to pray." Mountains are standard Biblical places of encounter with God. The higher you go, the closer you come to Yahweh, who resided in the sky. We don't have to literalize this but should unpack its symbolic sense. In order to commune with God, you have to step out of your everyday, workaday world. The mountain symbolizes transcendence, otherness, the realm of God. This means that when people say, "I pray on the go" or "my work is my prayer," they're not really speaking as people of prayer. You need to go higher or beyond your normal world. Your mountain might be church, a special room in your house, the car, a corner of the natural world. But it has to be someplace where you have stepped out of your ordinary business. Today, choose to go "up to the mountain to pray" in order to meet God in the higher place. Fr. Robert Barron

Rolling Away the Stone of Death

Lent Day 19 - Rolling Away the Stone of Death

In all of the Gospel accounts, mention is made of the huge stone rolled across the entrance of Jesus' tomb after his burial. This seems to stand for the awful finality of death, the irreversible, dense facticity of it. But in Jesus' victorious resurrection, that stone is effortlessly rolled away. This subtle but important action highlights why each Sunday is our victory day. The power that held us ransom has been overthrown; the dark cloud that has brooded over our lives, turning us in on ourselves and outward in violence and sin, has been removed. Now we can sing, "Death and sorrow, earth's dark story, to the former days belong." And, "Where the Paschal blood is poured, Death's dark angel sheaths his sword." With Paul, we can mock the former lord of the world: "Death where is thy sting?" And with the psalmist we can say-now at full pitch-"If God is for us, who can be against us?" Jesus rolls away the stone of death and brings to that dark place the light of God. Fr. Robert Barron

Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love

Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore or the shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love is a Roman Catholic shrine dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary that consists of two churches: an old church built in 1745 and a new church added to the sanctuary in 1999. The church was included by Pope John Paul II in the pilgrimage of Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome during the Holy Year2000.

The Diversity of Saints

Lent Day 18 - The Diversity of Saints

One thing that strikes you first about the saints is their diversity. It would be very difficult to find one pattern of holiness, one way of following Christ. There is Thomas Aquinas, the towering intellectual, and the Curé d'Ars who barely made it through the seminary. There is Vincent de Paul, a saint in the city, and there is Antony who found sanctity in the harshness and loneliness of the desert. There is Bernard kneeling on the hard stones of Clairvaux in penance for his sins, and there is Hildegard of Bingen singing and throwing flowers, madly in love with God. There is Albertus Magnus, the quirky scientist, half-philosopher and half-wizard, and there is Gerard Manley Hopkins, the gentle poet. There is Peter, the hard-nosed and no-nonsense fisherman, and there is Edith Stein, secretary to Edmund Husserl and colleague to Martin Heidegger, the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century. There is Joan of Arc, leading armies into war, and there is Francis of Assisi, the peacenik who would never hurt an animal. There is the grave and serious Jerome, and there is Philip Neri, whose spirituality was based on laughter. How do we explain this diversity? God is an artist, and artists love to change their style. The saints are God's masterpieces, and he never tires of painting them in different colors, different styles, and different compositions. We might say God is a pure white light that, when refracted in the prism of creation, breaks into countless colors, each unique and each an aspect of the light. These colors are the saints, each one reflecting some aspect of the divine reality. What does this mean for us? It means we should not try to imitate any one saint exactly. Look to them all, study their unique holiness, but then find that specific color God wants to bear through you. St. Catherine of Siena was right: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire."   Fr. Robert Barron

Carry Your Own Cross

Lent Day 17 - Carry Your Own Cross

Jesus summed up his teaching with a word that must have been gut-wrenching to his first century audience: "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." Now, his listeners knew what the cross meant. It mean a death in utter agony, nakedness, and humiliation. They didn't think of the cross automatically in religious terms, as we do, for they knew it in all of its awful power. Yet Jesus places this terrible image at the foundation of the spiritual life. Unless you crucify your ego, you cannot be my follower. But how should we take up our own cross? It requires not just being willing to suffer, but being willing to suffer as Jesus did, absorbing violence and hatred through our forgiveness and non-violent love, thereby transforming it. We turn to Jesus on his cross and carry ours in imitation--loving what he loved, despising what he despised. We "come after him" through own sacrificial love.   Fr. Robert Barron