What Holds The World Together

Blessed is the womb that bore you,

and the breasts at which you nursed.      

Luke 11:27

Cut away the umbilical cord, but don’t cut away the heart. Because the heart—the feminine heart—helps hold the world together.

I watched  with tears in my eyes yesterday as the women of the Our Lady of the Lake Altar Society processed up the center aisle of the church, carrying roses and bouquets for the annual May crowning while singing hymns to Our Lady.

 Triumph all ye cherubim! Sing with us ye seraphim! Heaven and earth resound the hymn! Salve, salve, salve Regina!

Hail, Holy Queen, we cry with such resounding joy that it carries a exclamation point! Why? Because we know that our salvation was and is contingent upon the intersection of divinity and humanity in Mary’s hallowed womb. We understand that the world and the Church need the balance of the feminine heart, the heart that mothers children, the heart that gives life, the heart that takes its piercings and releases the offering of blood, sweat and tears into the ground of its saplings, who move too fast from suckling to separating. But even as they pull away, a mother’s heart stays put.

Like the mother I spoke to yesterday, one of the three whom I call, “The Daughters of Jerusalem.” They can often be seen kneeling together praying for and suffering over their children. When I see them conjoined in prayer, I think of Jesus’ words: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me; but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:28). And I think of Our Lady, who was a daughter of Jerusalem.

“My daughter just had her first baby,” one of the women shared with me before Mass. “She asked when she can expect to get a good night of rest, and I told her you’re never going to sleep again!” she smiled. “Because mothers never stop lying awake at night worrying about their children!”

Then there’s the mother I see day in and day out in the chapel on her knees, praying and weeping for the teen who’s taken to cutting herself; her beautiful, beloved daughter who has turned against herself. I watch her wipe her tears; I see the broken heart she bears as she grips her Rosary with tired fingers and as she does not sit down, never sits down, the entire time she spends each day offering the raw-kneed sacrifice of her bleeding heart for the child to whom she gave life. That, the fruit of a mother’s love, consumed for the fruit of her womb.

And let’s never forget the Mother at the foot of the Cross, standing beneath her Son’s broken body so she can receive, let it fall on her face and her veil, His precious blood—the same precious blood that formed in her womb with her consent. Her primordial affirmation also made life possible for us, hence the adage of the Church Fathers: “Death through Eve, life through Mary.” There she stands beneath His battered flesh, her tears and sweat mixed with His, uttering the unceasing: “yes.” Yes until it’s finished. Yes as she receives His body from the Cross. Yes as He disappears from her sight.

It is good that we remember and sing praise.

Don’t tell me the Church wants us to deify Mary, for that would, indeed, be blasphemy.   But what we need, oh so desperately need in order to be human, is to experience and celebrate more deeply the feminine heart of the Church in this all too lopsided, hostile world.

May after May we remember the Woman who continually births Love into the world. Roses, crowns and hymns are hardly enough to recognize the feminine beauty found in Mary's heart, the axis that every Christian church and every woman in the world needs to reclaim.

A Tomb With A View

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I know, it’s Lent. And I’m out of sync with the liturgical calendar. But I’ve been meditating on the Resurrection in my Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and something really struck me recently. It involved Peter, John and the tomb of Jesus, which Mary Magdalene had just reported she’d found empty. The two apostles ran like lightening to see it for themselves, and John, being faster, arrived first.

When he got there, the beloved disciple merely bent down apprehensively and peered into the dark grave. But then he stepped into the tomb, and he truly came to believe. Suddenly, John saw things from a completely new perspective, and he understood what it meant to rise from the dead (John 20:8-9).

How often have we peered into the tomb of our lives, standing on the edge of real or imagined “death,” looking in and fearing the worst? How many times have we gazed into the black hole of our dreads, afraid that we might fall into the darkness? I’ve done it a thousand times, and I’ve learned firsthand, it’s deadly.

Truth is, we cannot know the power of God to raise us from a thousand deaths until we step into the tomb and experience the power of the Resurrection. That shift in perspective is precisely what constitutes hope.

I’m watching hope unfold in living color in the life of my son, Christian, and, oh, how it makes my heart smile. I remember five short months ago when Christian came home from Communita Cenacolo, the place he had called home for four years. Leaving the safe confines of the cloistered community that saved his life and delivered him from addiction was a frightening prospect. He was anxious about how he would take care of himself, and had no idea where he was going or what the future held.

“How am I supposed to do this?” he asked, understandably scared about how he was going to make it on the outside. I had agreed to follow Community’s wise counsel of letting him find his own way, and of not rescuing him from his own life.

“You do it by doing it, Christian,” I assured him. “And with God’s help, you will learn that you can do it.”

God quickly opened a door for him to go to Wyoming—back to the youth ranch where he had lived for a year as a fourteen year-old boy. He was offered a job there earning minimal pay and working long hours running a house full of troubled teens; boys that I knew would provide a mirror image of him at that age. He took the job and packed his bags, leaving my house with a sack full of qualms and “what ifs” on his back. My heart ached as I watched him peer into the tomb of his life, and all I could do was pray and trust that God would take care of him.

Christian’s legs were wobbly when he first stepped in, just like when he learned to walk. But he moved into his fears with faith, and his legs grew stronger. With each step forward, his faith and strength grew, and the hope in his voice increased.

“I’m doing it, Mama,” he shared yesterday, as I told him how proud I am of him. “And it’s not as bad as I thought.”

Peering into the darkness can be terrifying, and we tend to imagine the worst. But stepping into the empty tomb and experiencing the power of the Resurrection convinces us that Jesus has, in fact, overcome death—both His own and every death we face. We may know this theoretically, and even believe it in good faith. But it is only in experiencing this reality personally that we can come to know the force of the Resurrection, a force that moves stones away and blows boulders out of our lives.

Can What Kills Us Make Us Stronger?

Lent is a time for unlocking. Unlocking the doors of hope. And unlocking the doors of our hearts that keep us stuck in fear and trembling, imagining what might befall us.

Jesus stands in our midst, saying: “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19)

But we wonder: How can we possibly have peace in a world that is fraught with dangers and threats on every side? In a world that’s bombarded with news of ISIS, infidels and insurrections? We worry incessantly about our families and our futures—and about how this world’s collective insanity will ultimately play itself out.

“Peace be with you…When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced.” (John 20:20)

The same men who had cowered in fear behind locked doors minutes earlier now rejoiced. And not in spite of Christ’s open wounds, but because of them. Suddenly, they could see clearly that death had not “killed Jesus,” but that it had made Him stronger, freer—and glorious.

The atheistic German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, infamously said, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Nietzsche also said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” We hear that phrase quoted constantly in our culture. Our idols even sing award-winning songs about it. And there is some truth in the saying.

Yet a deeper Christian truth lies in the mystery that, paradoxically, what kills us can indeed make us stronger.   Jesus said it this way: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (Luke 9:22) Jesus had just made His triumphant entry in Jerusalem, after predicting that He would be rejected and killed. Then came His searing invitation: Follow me.

Twenty-one Christians followed Jesus down a beach in Libya, where their blood ran together with water, just like His did on the Cross. The men shrouded in black sent forth videos of the massacre as “a message signed with blood to the nation of the cross.” What they fail to understand is that Jesus already sent a message signed in His blood to the entire world. And the message is this: Take courage, I have conquered the world.

Wherever blood spills in His name, life springs up, renewing and re-creating the Church in the power of the blood of the Cross. Death loses its sting, and the very violence that attempts to kill the Cross fertilizes parched humanity with an offering of love, sewing seeds of faith that can only be sewn through blood and through water. For, indeed, these are the signs of God’s death on the Cross—and they alone can give true life.

We begin Lent under the banner of the Cross—wearing it publicly on our foreheads—proclaiming that we, too, are terminal. But we also declare that with Christ and in Christ, death becomes the door to life, the passageway through which we enter victoriously into eternity. Twenty-one Christian martyrs who died on a beach in Libya know this now.

Let us begin Lent by unlocking the doors of our hearts and allowing Christ to enter them with the full force His love and  His peace. And let us stand together in solidarity with those who have died under the sign and power of the Cross. We remember their sacrifice, and we pray that it makes us stronger.

Lent: You're Invited!

“What are you giving up for Lent?” my son, Christian, asked me today. “Meat,” I said (among other things, but I’ll save that for next week’s blog).  Being a huge carnivore like me, Christian responded, “Wow, that will be a really good sacrifice.”

But more than giving something up for Lent, I believe the Lord calls us to do something more for Lent. And by more I mean that we are called to take an honest look at ourselves during Lent—at our doubts, our poverties, our attachments and at what gets in the way of our relationship with the Lord.

Lent is not a time for superhuman feats, where we strive to be “spiritually” faster, higher and stronger, as they say in the Olympics. It is, instead, a time for supernatural exposure, where we quiet ourselves before God and ask Him to help us become slower, lower and weaker. When we get slower, lower and weaker, God can move in our lives with His strength, perfecting His power in us in and through our weaknesses (2 Cor. 12:9). That description of God’s movement sums up the story I tell in my book, Miracle Man, where God miraculously and repeatedly demonstrated His power at a moment in our lives where my late husband Bernie and I were at our lowest and weakest.

With this in mind, I am offering a free Lenten Reflection Guide that is meant to prompt honest prayer, reflection and spiritual growth during this holy season. The Reflection Guide, which provides thirty-three short Lenten meditations (one to go along with each chapter of Miracle Man) is available as a free download on my website at http://memorareministries.com/chaos-free. By reading one short chapter of Miracle Man each day in Lent and pondering the corresponding reflection question, I hope that you will realize the happy reward of attaining a better understanding of yourself and a deeper relationship with God.

I wrote Miracle Man to remember the miraculous ways God worked in our lives, and to encourage others to trust in what God can do for them, too. It is my hope that in praying through Miracle Man and the Reflection Guide this Lent, God will unveil your eyes to see His power working in your life. And that He will help you make room for more.

Get a copy of Miracle Man here.

Get a FREE download of the Lenten Reflection Guide here.

Lenten Virtual Book Tour

I also want to let you know that I will be launching a virtual book tour this Lent. Many thanks to the wonderful folks who will be interviewing me and reviewing Miracle Man! I really hope to connect with you all during this tour and hear how God is working in your lives.

Please join me at memorareministries.com/virtualbooktour to see where I’ll be visiting and how you can participate.

With prayers for grace and growth for all of us this holy season.

The Woman Of My Dreams

by Kara Klein

What a joy and delight to hear the amazing testimony of my daughter, Kara Klein,  at the Magnificat Breakfast this week.  Truly, the Lord has done great things for her, and holy is His name. Enjoy her guest blog!  

Recently at the national Focus conference I heard gifted speaker Sara Swafford tell a group of single young women: “Become the woman of your dreams and you’ll attract the man of your dreams.” This struck a deep chord in me.

As we enter into a new year, and resolutions fill conversations and various forms of media, I’ve been asking myself:

“What do I want for this new year? Not merely, what do I want to do, but who do I want to become? Who is the woman of my dreams?”

Initially, what comes to my mind is: perfection. I want to be perfect, of course. Virtuous and valiant, strong yet sweet, to always do the right thing, say the right thing, know the right thing, to be successful in all I attempt, to love without faltering.

Yet I once heard the very wise Fr. Jacques Philippe say: “More than God wants our perfection, more than he wants our success, He just wants our trust.”

What kind of woman would I be if I didn’t so much grasp after being perfect as much as I trusted in God with my whole heart? If my whole presence exuded the reality: “All is well. We have a Father. He is real, and He is good. We can trust Him with our entire being, abandon ourselves to Him without reserve. And no matter what happens—though the mountains crumble around us and the earth melt like wax before us—we are in His loving hands, and He is working all things for our good.”

Probably I would be less like Eve, and more like Mary. Less like the one who took matters into her own hands out of fear that her Maker was holding out on her, and more like the one who said, “the Lord has done great things for me and holy is His name!”

I think we Christians complicate our lives more than we realize. We think we have to do so much, be so much, achieve so much, discover so much; when all we really have to do is say “yes.” A simple “Let it be done unto me according to your will. Today.

Yes to loving the person that is right in front of us; yes to accepting with peace life as it unfolds before us; yes to trusting radically like a little child. Simple, but not easy.

To be a woman whose trust and joy are not based upon the ever-changing circumstances around her, but solely in a God who loves her. That is a woman of faith. And that is the woman of my dreams.

The Secret to Scaling the Summit

Today's blog is dedicated to my precious daughter, Alexandra, with love and thanksgiving for your tender beauty, grace and strength.  Happy birthday, DeeDee Bop A Loula!  I love you!!!!

The summer my late husband Bernie died, I figured that the best way to survive what I knew would be a long, hot, lonely summer at home was to get out of town for a while. My daughter, Alex, who was twenty-one at the time, agreed to accompany her nine-year-old brother, Benjamin, and me as we set out on our first “vacation” after Bernie’s death—an event which any widow can tell you is emotionally daunting. Providentially, we visited three beautiful mountain towns that summer: Jackson Hole, WY, Crested Butte, CO and Caesar’s Head, SC. And as God is wont to do, He used both the sweet company of my daughter and the stunning mountain landscapes not only to provide consolation, but to remind my still fragile heart of some of life’s most precious secrets.

When we arrived in Jackson Hole, I told Alex that I wanted to take a hike. I had in mind a nice, leisurely walk beside a clear, running stream. She took me instead for trek straight up a mountain trail, a trudge that is more than a bit challenging for someone like me, given that I’m not athletic, am scared of heights and am unaccustomed to high altitudes.

Alex, who a year later would run a half-marathon on those very same mountains, insisted that we push our way up the peaks anyway. She knew from experience that the reward of climbing the mountain—the breathtaking, invigorating vistas—could only be seen from on high.

“Come on, Mom, you can do it. Drink lots of water,” she said repeatedly as I panted for breath. Because as any experienced climber can tell you, the number one trick for making it up the mountain is drinking plenty of water.

As I stopped repeatedly to quench my thirst and catch my breath, I thought about how important water is to both our natural and spiritual lives—especially in times of drought. Living water, water that will never run dry, comes to us through a relationship Jesus, who is the fountain of life (John 4:14). He slakes our thirst continually as we give ourselves over to Him and drench ourselves in His love. His love sustains us in times of sorrow and suffering, especially if we have let it soak deep into our souls over time.

My mountain trek also reminded me of how indispensable food is for the journey. “Stop and eat a snack,” Alex insisted after an arduous period of climbing when I was feeling weak and disoriented, convinced that I couldn’t go on. I remember the long, painful days in the ICU, when the only thing that kept me going was the Holy Eucharist—the superabundant Bread of Life—mercifully delivered to the hospital by a Eucharistic minister. I do not believe I’d have survived the suffering we endured that year without the Eucharist. Just as I know that I would have been unable to continue climbing upward with Alex without natural sustenance.

With Alex by my side, I also learned that if you’re going to climb a mountain, don’t try to do it alone. If you get injured, lost or can’t go forward, you need someone there to help. In fact, you may even need someone who loves you to carry you to safety.

One day in Crested Butte, we hiked a mile up a mountain to see an exquisite waterfall at the top. Young Benjamin started out with a bang, running ahead of us for the first half-mile. Twenty minutes later, his little legs collapsed and he couldn’t go any further. Though he weighed sixty some-odd pounds at the time, he simply needed to be carried. Strong, loving Alex carried him on her back most of the way to the top, reminding me of how she had demonstrated the same strength for her dad and me as Bernie’s life came to a close. She bravely sat beside us, holding our hands. Her faithful presence was a tremendous gift as we scaled a painful, frightening summit, and she stood steady with us to the very end.

God and the mountains teach their lessons, and so do those whom we love. It’s not necessarily what they say out loud that communicates who and what they are, but their strong, abiding presence that tells us everything.

The Lord Sings Joyfully Because of ME?

I had an epiphany in the Adoration Chapel on Tuesday morning, on the real Feast of the Epiphany.

After the past few weeks of Christmas craziness and sporadic, half-baked prayer time, my husband Mark and I happily settled back on Monday into our morning routine of “wasting” lavish time with the Lord in the chapel before Mass. Yay! But I showed up at the chapel that day agitated and distracted, unable to concentrate or pray. I was preoccupied with my sins and myself, and proceeded to present my list of leftover holiday “junk” to the Lord.

“Ok, Lord,” I started. “I did it again this Christmas. I prayed too little, spent too much, ate too much, drank too much and gossiped too much…So much for my intention of having a holy, prayerful Christmas.”

I was disconcerted throughout the hour, certain that God was as disgusted with me as I was with myself. After heading home, I spent the rest of the day wasting lavish time on Facebook and other Internet excursions, ending the day with a stiff neck, more irritated with myself than when the day began.

Back in the chapel Tuesday morning, on the real Feast of the Epiphany, I opened to the morning readings:

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior. He will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love. He will sing joyfully because of you.   Zephaniah 3:17

Those words rang at me. “You will sing joyfully because of me, Lord?” I asked. “You rejoice over me?”

I sat there with my eyes shut tight in our sunny little chapel, trying to picture God singing joyfully over me. It was pretty hard to imagine. I then tried to recall the times in my own life when I had sung joyfully over others, and two vivid images came to mind.

First, I remembered the many times I had nursed my children at my breast while singing to them, along with the surge of joy I had experienced as I beheld a beautiful baby in my arms. I remembered the happy surprise of falling madly in love with each child, experiencing a depth of love I'd never even dreamed was possible. I had sung over my children and rejoiced.

He will sing joyfully because of you.

As I further pondered those words, a second, more recent memory came to mind, which occurred when I married my husband, Mark. For months, I walked around the house constantly singing a song I’d made up to the tune of “Emmanuel.” My silly song went like this: “Markisimo...Gelisimo...your name is called...Markisimo.” (No, Kara did not get her songwriting skills from me:)

“I’ve never had anyone sing my name before,” Mark responded to my singing, delighted that I sang joyfully out of love for him.

“Judy, that’s just an inkling of the way that I love you,” I heard the Lord gently whisper as I smiled. “There is nothing you or anyone else can do to make me love you more or less. I love you infinitely. I am love.” With that, my heart filled with joy.

Moments later, I opened the book I had brought to the chapel to read, and amazingly, found my apparently all-too-common dilemma on the page before my eyes:

"The sadness of not being perfect is a feeling that is much too human, it can even border on idolatry,” I read St. Francis of Assisi's words to his friend, Brother Leo, who was depressed and defeated by his sins. “Focus your vision outside of yourself, on the beauty, graciousness and compassion of Jesus Christ,” St. Francis advised. “Accept being shipwrecked. See only the compassion, the infinite patience and the tender love of Christ. Jesus is Lord. That suffices.”

I am learning that God does not relish in my getting it right, doing it right, or being right. Instead, He delights when I let go of my futile attempts at performance and let Him love me. Our God is a merciful Father who sings over His children, a Father who tenderly picks us up when we fall and who rejoices over us with gladness simply because He loves us. May this epiphany hold me fast throughout the coming year.

Finding Advent Hope: The Pathway Through the Heart

God cut a highway right through Bernie Klein’s heart, an artery that could give him life. Not surprisingly, that’s where Love seeped in.

“I died and I clearly remember it,” Bernie told me after waking up from a six-week coma brought on by a massive heart attack and subsequent multiple organ failure. “I could see myself floating in the air, looking down at my body, and I could see my damaged heart.”

That vision was the start of a near-death experience six years ago that took my late husband Bernie to heaven and back, where he met God and encountered with great clarity both the profound love of God and the spiritual condition of his own heart. I share the entire true story in detail in my book, Miracle Man.

“It looked like my heart was torn in half, and half of my heart was a vivid color of blue that looked like ugly debris. I knew that represented all of things I had done in my life that were not pleasing to God,” Bernie shared soberly. “The other side was beautiful gold, and I knew it represented all of the things I’d done in my life that were pleasing to God.” Bernie was “sent back” by God to undergo what he called his “purification,” about which he emphatically stated: “And I NEED it.”

Bernie’s experience calls to mind a series of Advent sermons delivered by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in 1964. Ratzinger called our lives “an enduring Advent” and said:

the borderline between "before Christ"and "after Christ"…runs through our own hearts.*

“Insofar as we are living on the basis of selfishness, of egoism, then even today we are ‘before Christ,’” said the man who would become Pope almost fifty years later. He explained that our vocation as Christians is “live with Christ and in Christ,” an ongoing event in our hearts that makes every day of every year Advent for us—for the rest of our lives.

To live with Christ and in Christ is the hope of Advent, and for Christ to live with us and in us is our hope for glory (Colossians 1:27). In Advent, we invite the God-man to be birthed anew in our hearts, asking Him to blur the dividing line in us of all that is “before Christ.” In Advent, we welcome the Lord and ask Him to occupy our hearts, much as He did the manger in Bethlehem. In doing so, all that is “before Christ” within us increasingly decreases.

“Judy, you have no idea how much God loves you,” Bernie said as he finished telling me his near-death account. “I will spend the rest of my life spreading the message of God’s love to others,” he concluded. “Nothing else matters.”

God’s incredible love. Nothing else matters. Bernie saw that clearly after meeting God.

Paralyzed from the neck down and completely dependent on life support, Bernie’s mantra for the last six weeks of his life became: “You have no idea how much God loves you.” He spent those last days enjoying what he called “fellowship with God,” allowing God to run a road from his once-divided heart straight to heaven, this time, to stay forever.

This Advent let us take the occasion to ask: Where is the line drawn in my own heart? How much of my heart does not yet belong to Christ? May His Divine Presence displace everything in us that is not of Him, and may His light dispel any darkness in our hearts.

*All quotes from Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, are from the book of Advent sermons entitled: What It Means To Be A Christian.

Cultivating Advent Hope: Healing Our Decembers

Tears flowed freely during the meeting with my spiritual director, Sandy, as I shared with her the pain I was feeling. “December is here,” I said. “I get such a wave of anxiety and grief at this time of year.” Somehow, I have a hunch I’m not alone in experiencing December this way.

December is the month that “our lives blew apart with more violence than we ever dreamed possible,” I wrote in my book Miracle Man. The month that my late husband, Bernie, suffered a massive heart attack—leaving my children fatherless and me a widow after 87 excruciating days in the ICU. Six years and a wonderful new marriage later, December still brings it all screeching back.

“Beg the Lord to heal the trauma of all your past Decembers,” Sandy wisely advised. “And ask him to fill you with the joy of his birth.”

For December is also the month when we celebrate our Savior’s presence penetrating Earth’s agonies, defying what human eyes behold as mere babe-flesh, disguising the God-man. This is the month that Hope is born, ushering in the time of fulfillment for the long-awaited healing of our crippled souls and lame lives. December is, indeed, the month of Advent hope.

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The hope of Advent lies in experiencing the reality of human frailty—and in believing that Someone, though fragile in appearance, is coming to heal us soon. The hope of Advent consists in a hearty cry for deliverance from the weight of sin and death—and in trusting that God’s glory-weight will pierce right through all of this world’s darkness. For we have all known the sorrow of “Decembers” during life’s winter months, times of shadows and suffering where we cry out for the Light to come.

Every year I’m reminded that December is a fitting backdrop for Advent, as it is the month that throws off the least amount of light in the calendar year. The days grow short and winter begins. The darkness brings with it a certain sense of vulnerability and disorientation, along with the knowledge that we need more Light, so we can see.

Advent hope has everything to do with vision. Advent hope is inexorably connected with eternal perspective. That’s because hope—Christian hope—is so much more than plain old wishful thinking. It is the theological virtue by which we order our lives toward heaven; the virtue that establishes trust in us that there is a heaven, and gives us the conviction that we’ll live there with God some day. Hope reminds us that this earth is not paradise, and it strengthens and sustains us as we travel toward the longed-for Promised Land. Hope gives us a new vision for our lives, enabling us to see that what may look like “disaster” to human senses is but a moment of time that God holds in his hands, shaping it for our good, while simultaneously, mysteriously molding us into good.

“Can you see your Decembers as a time when God reaches into your life to work miracles, instead of as a time of sorrow?” Sandy gently asked. “You saw that once,” she continued. “You wrote a book about it.”

Yes, I saw it clearly then. But somehow I go blind every December.

And maybe that’s as it should be. Since it is December’s darkness that beckons me to encounter my desperate need for a Savior. Along with my need for a divine infusion of Hope.

Thankfully, it is Advent. The season of so much blindness healed. The Church’s daily readings ring out promises of what the Messiah will bring, along with rich Gospel accounts of those promises being fulfilled:

On that day the deaf shall hear…and out of gloom and darkness, the eyes of the blind shall see. The lowly will ever find joy in the Lord, and the poor rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.               (Isaiah 29:18-19)

 And then we hear:

Two blind men followed him crying, “Son of David, have pity on us!” …Then he touched their eyes...And their eyes were opened. (Mt. 9:29-31)

Touch our eyes, Lord, and enable us to glimpse reality from heaven’s angle, through the lens of Advent hope. Heal all of our Decembers, and fill us anew with the joy of your birth.

Is Christ My King?

“Jesus is the Lord of my life.” That was a common statement in the evangelical Christian church I attended 25 years ago, before I returned to the Catholic Church in 1988. Meditating on the Feast of Christ the King this past week, I wondered why Catholics don’t use that kind of language more often when we describe our relationship with Christ. After all, is making Jesus the Lord of one’s life only a Protestant concept?

Not according to Joseph Ratzinger, who says something very similar in his book of Advent sermons entitled, What It Means To Be A Christian:

Becoming a Christian…is just this: achieving a Copernican revolution and no longer seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, around which everything else must turn…instead of that we have begun to accept quite seriously that we are one of many among God’s creatures, all of which turn around God as their center.

My relationship with God is thus meant to cause a Copernican revolution in my life, where I awaken to the reality of a personal God and make Him the center of my universe, letting everything in my life orbit around Him. Such a revolution is called “faith,” which is not just an intellectual assent to articles of the Creed, but the full surrender of my entire self to the living God, including my mind, my will, and everything else in my life.

I underwent such a Copernican revolution in my early twenties, when I gave my life to Christ. But a recurring revolution occurs daily in my walk with God, as I offer my life and myself to Him and honestly examine what gods I am placing at the center of my world on any given day. So often, I fall prey to three “lords” that I must continually renounce: what I possess, what I can do and what people think of me.  Those are the gods this world prizes most, and, sadly, they are often the standard by which I measure both my own self worth and the value of others.

Thankfully, God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Is. 55:8). While the world around us screams: “You’re not enough, you don’t have enough, you don’t do enough,” God whispers, “You are My beloved child, on you My favor rests.” While the world encourages us to compete frantically to fit in, buy in and measure up, God says: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” (Mt. 11:28).

I am increasingly aware of how tired I am of the world’s false measures, and how much I desire to be set free from the burden of carrying them. So I invite Jesus to come more deeply into my being, asking that more of His love inhabit my small temple. This process of ongoing conversion—a conscious, constant Christ uprising—turns me away from false gods toward the living God, who is Love. It places the one, true Lord on the throne of my heart, where He is anxious to lay His crown.

Interestingly, the word conversion, which means the change of a measuring system, also means changing one’s beliefs. Maybe that’s because our beliefs change when we change our measuring system. Conversion is a “radical reorientation of our lives toward God.”*  It recalibrates our entire understanding of reality, changing our measuring system from the world’s stifling scales to the infinite expanse of God's love, which knows no bounds. When that happens, I trust that my significance and meaning lies in God’s love for me and not in any manmade gauge of performance.

So let us ask today: Is Jesus the Lord of my life? Is He is the center of my life, around which everything turns and by which everything else is measured?   To live in such a stance is what it means to be a Christian.  To live in an opposing posture makes us a slave to the world's tyranny.  It's one or the other.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus Christ, I surrender my life to you and I place my mind, my will, my heart and everything in my life under your Kingship and your authority. I give myself to you and ask you to take possession of me. Change me, that I may live in the truth of your love and reflect that love in our broken world. Thank you Lord for your love, mercy and kindness. Amen.

*Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary