5th Sunday of Lent - Fr. Leo
“I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts: I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” This is the new covenant the Lord establishes in us through the forgiveness of our sin. Because of God’s mercy, extended to us through the death and resurrection of Christ, our sonship and daughtership is revealed to us in God’s love, his law, placed in our hearts.
This is why we can pray with the psalmist, “Create a clean heart in me, O God. Have mercy on me in your goodness.” We can pray this because God has had mercy on us and his Spirit cries out in us to be made ever more whole and holy.
The way of God’s love, his law, is inscribed in our conscience. To “know” God’s being requires us to, “Be still and know that I am God.” It is in contemplation when we let go of our agendas mentally, physically and spiritually, that we begin to hear the voice of God. Beneath our internal chatter lies our deepest self in God. Our true self where being and peace are one.
Above that “ground” of being, there are many layers that time has placed over our God-self. These are the stirrings of fear or anxiety that become embedded in our nervous systems. Ways of reacting to things taught to us by our culture passed on though previous generations. Because of this, we will experience a constant war within our members. Our shadow side and our Godly side facing off through the events of our lives.
When we pray, “Create a clean heart in me, O God,: we are asking the Lord to help us heal our shadow side with all its fears and anxieties. Only God can do this. We may become aware of our weaknesses, which itself, is a grace, but we must turn to the Lord to help us. This is where we may, like Jesus, be the seed that must die to produce much fruit. When our shadow side is surrendered to God, new life springs up in our beings and the Holy Spirit becomes the one who lives in us. Not I, as St. Paul says, but Christ who lives in me. This timeless experience of oneness is the prize of surrendering ourselves to God.
All of us have agendas that guide us. To join our agendas with God’s, we may need to surrender certain things. For example: when something drives us on an emotional level and we get all worked up, we can ask ourselves, is it worth it? Is it that important? Not having something go our way may be a blessing for us if we look at the issue as ask how it is good, or how it teaches us. Bad experiences may be blessings because they teach us something about ourselves, our values, our hopes and our dreams.”
In studying the violin, for example, what we may think of as the worst lesson we’ve ever had, may in fact be the best. Time will help us see gifts in difficulties as we learn to play more beautifully. The end result is a wisdom that can become our gift to others as we thank God for the path, however challenging, that brought us to so great of a blessing.