Contemplating the Word

The Spirit is the Spirit of light. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life" and all from this comes this marvelous revelation, this marvelous presence of light. Light had come into darkness and had totally overcome darkness. That's what Christmas is all about. These three stages of the interior life begin to merge together as we begin to experience the word differently as the Lord reveals the Word to us. We can go through all three stages at the same time. There will always be something in our lives which needs purification. There will always be something inside of each of us which will need illumination, something which we will be working on with and through the Lord.

Teresa of Avila, a doctor of the Church, tells us that we must go to the Scriptures. Go to the word. There is the mystery there. There is life there. She knew that. She talks about vocal prayer and mental prayer, saying that if that is where you are in your prayer life, do not worry about it. It can lead to contemplative prayer. It can lead to the experience of God. There was a nun in her cloister who she seemed to be so contemplative and when Teresa asked her what her prayer was like she said, "I just say the Our Father over and over and over." She just couldn't get enough of "Our Father".

You will find that if you can really meditate on the words of the "Our Father," you can move beyond that yourself. "Our Father, " the same Father of Jesus Christ is also my Father. Isn't this amazing? Jesus tells us that He is "our" Father - yours and mine. He called Him, "Abba - Daddy." You can see why the Pharisees wanted to put him to death. It was so radical that He actually would call God, this great I Am, "Daddy." A little child will call his father, Daddy. Hopefully we are His little ones.

Vatican II says, "Taste to the full the mysteries celebrated in the liturgy. Within the Eucharist allow yourselves to be led into the compelling love of Christ and to be set afire." Some of those Vatican II documents are incredibly contemplative, but then the Church is incredibly contemplative. The Church today has almost lost, in a sense, her true identity and we have these beautiful Holy Fathers that are trying to bring the Church back into the very heart. Paul says, "May Christ find a dwelling place of faith in our hearts." May our lives be rooted in love."

We can have "fast food" in prayer. We can read articles that are surfacy. We are not having meditative reading. We are not having contemplative reading. We are not having Scripture reading. We haven't anything to digest so we are not going to grow. We are going to stay on the surface.

Once when the Lord gave me the name "Leviathan," in prayer, I asked Him to explain this to me. He directed me to go to the Bible, to His Word. So I did and I looked up Leviathan and found it in the Old Testament. It is another name for satan. The Lord opened my mind to Revelations 12 where it says that Satan then went off to make war on God's children and he took up his position by the seashore. Satan has been in shallow waters trying to block us, God's children, from launching out into deep waters. He has kept us very busy about many things. We are so busy, into all kinds of ministries, that people are going into burnout. Burnout is not from doing too much; it is from receiving too little. The enemy has been in the shallow waters saying, "Come on in. Get baptized in the Spirit. Get your feet wet. Get really busy about many things, even good things!"

Recall that in the garden, the fruit on the tree looked really good and pleasing. But what happened when Adam and Eve chose to eat it? It may be that we have not chosen the one thing necessary. We have to get back into the desert. We have to get into deep waters. We have to get into the heart of God and learn His secrets and be fed again with His Word. We have to come alive. Look at a body without a heart. It is dead. Look at what happens to the heart in the mystical body of Jesus. There is apathy in our Church today. We have to come alive. We have to bring the mystical body to life. We have to be fed. We are literally having a serious heart attack and we need a new heart. We need His heart.

Jesus takes our little stony hearts He turns them into hearts of flesh with His heart promptings until we can walk alone with this wisdom gift ourselves. So with wisdom we can hear what's going on around us and we can hear what's going on within us. We have to be very attentive to those heart promptings because the heart sees, the heart knows, the heart believes, the heart loves, the heart is key. This is where love is. This is where life is.

As we receive life our heart will prompt us to be life givers for others, life bearers for others. God will give us all new hearts, new spirits so that we too might become bread, we now might become food. We might now, with You, Lord, feed Your lambs, feed Your sheep, be Your presence alive in us to others. This is why Jesus said, "I came that you may have life and have it in abundance," so that we can have so much that it is overflowing and we have plenty to give away. You never can give away too much because God will always keep giving more to you, so we never run out. Jesus wants us to have this experience of His life I bring you this good news so that His joy may be in each one of you and your joy, your deepest joy will be complete.

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