The Best Possible Resolution for This Jubilee Year

The Jewish Philosopher Simone Weil said, “We are no more than the quality of our endeavour”. It is the quality of our endeavour in prayer that will determine the measure with which God’s love can prepare and purify us for union with himself.

In his monumental History of the Catholic Church, Monsignor Philip Hughes uses one word to describe the prevailing attitude of heart and mind of the early Christians. It is the word ‘Renunciation’. They chose to follow Christ above and beyond all else and in order to do this they renounced all and everything else that could possibly prevent them from doing this, day in and day out.

However, Renunciation has to be learnt and it is learnt by practising it repeatedly, and the place where it is practised is in the time that they gave for personal prayer. This is the practical way in which the first Christians took up their daily Cross and practised selfless sacrificial giving. This was most especially true when they seemed to receive nothing in return. It was then that they united themselves with the selfless, sacrificial giving that was the hallmark that characterised the life of Christ on earth. Just as this daily dying to self in imitation of his daily dying to self, led to Resurrection and Glorification, they knew that what they called white martyrdom would do the same for them, but in God’s time, not theirs.

Gradually and with perseverance they enabled the Holy Spirit, not just to purify their heart’s desire, but their hearts too, then, through using their hearts as a prism, the rest of their human being. For the union for which they were being prepared was not just for their minds but their bodies too, and the whole of their human being. This is not only known but experienced by the great mystics, beginning even in this life when their purification enabled them to be led into the Mystical Marriage. Here they tangibly experience God’s love as it filters down into their bodies making them ready and able to be united with the physical body of Christ. Christ’s transformed and transfigured body transforms and transfigures their bodies too in the process.

The Mystical Marriage that is the summit of the spiritual life in this world is preceded by what St Teresa of Avila calls the Mystical Betrothals. As the expression suggests, it is the mystical marriage but only for brief periods of time, at least until the requisite purification for ecstatic union has been completed.

Like St John the Baptist, the first Christians realised that if they were to introduce Christ to others they would first have to have undergo a prolonged purification in a real or metaphorical desert. That is why while St Paul was preparing for ten years to become a true and effective apostle, his confreres in Jerusalem were doing the same. They did not write down the details of their spiritual purification as later mystics did, but nevertheless a few words from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is most revealing:

I know a man who fourteen years ago was caught up whether still in or out of the body, I do not know – God knows- right into the third heaven. I do know however that this same person whether in or out of the body; God knows, was caught up into paradise and heard things that cannot, must not be put into human language (2 Corinthians 12 :1-5).

A brief look at the chronology of St Paul’s life enables us to see that fourteen years before this letter to the Corinthians, St Paul was just completing his ten years of preparation and purification for his apostolate. St Paul could not have had such profound mystical experiences without such a purification, nor could he have received the wisdom that we find in his letters, without the fruits of contemplation that shine through everything that he wrote and did. Although we do not find similar details of mystical experiences from the writings of the other apostles, we do know that they experienced them, as we see the fruits of contemplation in all they wrote and did, as we can read in the Acts of the Apostles and the Acts of the Martyrs.

The same is true of the Fathers of the Church whose writings are still the bedrock of our Catholic faith. That the Church is at present full of would-be apostles eager to do what the first apostles did for the Church is clearly evident. Sadly what is not so evident is that they are prepared to do what their predecessors did. Both born Catholics or recent converts seem to think that a religious experience, albeit genuine, is a call to set out without delay to become the spiritual leaders for which they have not been prepared. The first apostles had profound and personal experience of God’s love, but they still believed they had to spend many years of penance and repentance learnt in ‘the desert’ before they had the effrontery to set themselves up to lead and guide others. Lest what I say is taken too literally remember St Catherine of Siena found her spiritual desert in her own home where the success of her incredibly fruitful apostolate was made possible by years of continual prayer.

In this Jubilee Year why not follow her example by making a retreat in your own home on your own with your own family. With the active and ongoing help of the best of and most important Catholic Networks throughout the coming Jubilee Year, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, our patron, myself and others, who are helping, believe that this could at last, be a means of generating the positive ground level Catholic Renaissance that is so desperately needed. It is so desperately needed to reinstate and live the Spirituality that Christ the King has given to us. We believe that it will enable the remnant to rise as one like a latter day peaceful Pilgrimage of Grace, as a slumbering giant to confound those who have been trying to destroy us, with a massive and united spiritual counter offensive, under the banner of Christ the King.

All you have to do is to click on https://metanoia.org.uk  Here you will find all the materials you need to do a retreat in your own home for yourself, and this includes a free 15 part video course on prayer. Do not hesitate to make this retreat. It could completely change your life in a way and on a level that you never conceived possible before.
Happy New Year!