A Time to Give; A Time to Receive

Catholic social teaching, humility, humble

For years I deceived myself into believing that I was totally devoid of the racism that afflicted others until the moment of truth that all but shattered me. That moment was the very moment when my brother told me that he was to marry a black African. The racism that had been all the time harboured in my unconscious flooded into my conscious mind and left me in no doubt that I was, despite my self-deception, a racist.

Like the Pharisees, I believed that I was not ‘like the rest of men’. I thought I was on a higher plain, occupying the moral high ground when I was in fact no more than a hypocrite. Although in time it was my sister-in-law’s love for me that completely changed my attitude to black Africans, it did not change me into the sort of Christ-like person I wished to become.

I experienced many sleepless nights tossing and turning as I realised that if I had been blind to this single prejudice for so long, what about all the other prejudices that were still lurking in my unconscious mind. My prejudice against black Africans had indeed been changed thanks to her love. But what about all the other racial prejudices that ruled me from deep down in the nether regions of my personality? They would prevent me from becoming one of the peacemakers that our world so desperately needs to put a stop to the nonstop wars and endless violence that desecrate the world that God created. And this is to say nothing of the other prejudices, from class and social prejudices to religious and intellectual prejudices. They all help to divide a world originally created by the God of love in whom we are all finally destined to find our fulfillment and completion as one people.

A Self-Seeking Hypocrite

The egotist within me was regularly tempted and lured into loving everyone and everything, including God, for what he could receive from them. Even God-given impulses to give oneself in love to another, to have a home, to bring up one’s own children and order one’s life and family for the good of all, could be reduced to lust, greed, and power-seeking. The egotist could be consumed with anger, envy, and jealousy against anyone who stood in his way, and anyone who had what he felt had been denied him. I saw all this and so much more in the endless sleepless nights that became the norm. I felt totally helpless. How could I possibly free myself from the malevolent maelstrom of evil that seemed to rule me from within?

It was then that I was struck by a divine inspiration that was to change my life for good, or at least the direction of my life, and permanently. If the love of my sister-in-law had destroyed one form of prejudice that was corrupting me, what could God’s love do to destroy, not just all forms of prejudice but all forms of self-love that perverted me and prevented me from experiencing his love to redeem me from the slow death of spiritual asphyxiation?

Divine Serendipity

I am sure it was some form of divine serendipity that, as this inspiration inspired me, I was simultaneously introduced to someone to whom the transformation that I was seeking for myself had already taken place.  He was not a great philosopher or theologian; in fact, he was not an intellectual or academic of any sort. Truth to tell he was a simple semi-literate shop assistant of about twenty-five years of age. However, he did have a colourful past. He had been a revolutionary, a soldier who had fought in the front line, been captured, and spent time in a prison camp. It was here that he contracted a debilitating illness that was to affect the rest of his life. Although he was rather small and could never have been called handsome, he did have an engaging personality that won him many friends. That he was a party animal nobody could deny, nor that he had an eye for the girls and ambitions quite beyond his position in life. Then late one night on the way home from one particularly rowdy shindig something or rather someone touched him. It could not have been one of his friends for he was all alone but he was certainly touched. He was touched by a form of love that he had never experienced before. It was deeper, more profound than the human love that he had experienced before.

Although the experience was new to him, many other young men and women have had a similar experience not once but several times over especially in their youth. After this had happened several times more he finally understood the message. If it was God, and he was pretty sure that it was, then he had to respond to his love, not just because it was God, but because it was this love that he wanted to experience more and more and in ever greater strength.

A Divine Revelation

Yet, when after months seeking out solitude for prayer where he thought this love was to be found he seemed to be going nowhere. Far from becoming closer to God, he seemed further and further away from him. He was about to give up although he had persevered more than most of us would when something rather dramatic happened to him.  It left him in no doubt that it was God reaching out to him from the beginning and then testing the quality of his love in the spiritual darkness that he had been experiencing in his solitary prayer.

It was when he was praying in front of an old byzantine Cross that John, as he had been baptised, or St Francis of Assisi as you have come to know him, heard Christ speaking to him. There was no doubt about it. He actually saw him move on the Cross, saw his lips moving and what he was being asked to do was to change the direction of his life completely, and the Church, which in his day rather like in our day, was in dire need of restoration. ‘Rebuild my Church’ was the command given to him, but that was not all. The love that he previously received in ‘gentle touches’ now totally enveloped his whole being making him realise that with this love everything was possible, even the impossible task that Christ wanted him to perform. When this experience gradually left him, it left him with the truth. God’s love always imparts wisdom to those who receive it. Many of us may have experienced the touch of God’s love at various moments of our lives, most particularly in our youth, but few will have persevered in prayer as St Francis did to receive the love and the wisdom with which that love-filled him.

The Most Loveable and Adorable Man Who Ever Lived

So listen carefully to hear that wisdom, and if you put it into practice as St Francis did then St Francis, or more precisely the one in whose footsteps he chose to walk, will have come amongst us once again through you. The wisdom he received touched his mind and his heart simultaneously.  It taught his mind that the task that was asked of him would be impossible without this love. He knew that the life of the man who spoke to him had been himself filled with God’s love at every moment of his life, filling him with the goodness and truth that infused all the supernatural virtues into every part of him. It was these that made him into the most loveable and the most adorable person who had ever walked on the face of our world. St Francis knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he did what was asked of him, he would be filled with the same love of God, his Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit could destroy in him the egotist that he knew still ruled him from within, with all the prejudices, all the human lusts for power, and ill-deserved popularity that he yearned for before.

In short, he was inspired to realise that what the love of my sister-in-law had done for just one prejudice in me would be done for all pride all prejudices and every conceivable moral malady born of original sin in those who radically opened themselves to receive him. This is what his mind learned from the supernatural love that was infused into it. But his heart was infused and animated by the love too, and he knew immediately that he wanted to experience this love in ever-increasing depth and intensity because he now knew that this is what he had been created to experience and to experience again and again, from ‘here to eternity’.

Quality Space and Time for Love

What he did next must be done next for all who aspire to follow him. Although he knew now that God’s love was ready and poised to enter into him to make him into a Christ-like human being, he was nevertheless living in a world of space and time.

To be absolutely practical, space and time would need to be found and given to bring about the transformation that Francis desired above all else, by receiving the only love that can bring this about. No other saint saw this more clearly for as soon as he finished praying before what we now know as the Franciscan Cross, he spent the rest of his life in deep personal prayer. He spent far more time in prayer then in work of any kind although every kind of work was soon transformed into prayer. He realised through personal experience that God is loving us at all times, but it is only in time, our precious time, the time we make available for that purpose that we can receive his love. If we do nothing to find this time then nothing will happen to change us as Francis was changed into the man his contemporaries called ‘The Second Christ’.

Time, Time, Time

Nor will we remain the same because the spiritual journey is like trying to walk up a downward escalator. The moment we stop is the moment we start to move backward. The moment we stop finding time for the prayer where we open ourselves to God’s love is the time when we begin the descent into the hell which is life without his love. What we do in this time to receive God’s love is to be found in the profound teaching of Christian prayer that I have spent my life gathering together so that I can hand it on to you as it was handed on to me. I have done this in every book that I have written and in almost every article that I have written too. And I will continue to do this in my articles in the Catholic Universe in the months ahead.

 

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