The Catholic Prayer Club
… a Worldwide Apostolate
… spreading the message of our Lord one
word at a time..
February 2007
“ Just one small step on our
journey to Salvation”
If you know someone that you
think would enjoy our newsletter just send us his or her Email address to admin@catholicprayerclub.org.
CPC does not sell or share our list with any other organization.
While our
Ministry is free of charge it is not free of cost. Please consider supporting
CPC with a tax - deductible donation by clicking the secure link below
Donate Here Through JustGive®
http://www.justgive.org/nonprofits/donate.jsp?ein=14-1977600
By Father Reginald
Martin, O.P.
Personal and
Scriptural Sorrow
And
Jesus said, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be
comforted."
Of the Beatitudes, this second is, perhaps, the most difficult to comprehend.
Not because we do not understand what it means to be sad, but because the
Scriptural understanding of sorrow evolved over time, and our personal
understanding of sorrow has failed to keep up.
When Jesus promises a reward to those who mourn, we may think of the sorrow we
feel when someone dies. But there is also a unique "Scriptural" sort
of sorrow that has less to do with personal loss, than it does the pain and
harm the community experiences as a result of sin or oppression. This collective
sorrow is different from the personal sorrow experienced by an individual, so
the blessing that rewards one type of sorrow is different from the blessing
that rewards the other.
Personal Sorrow
and the Cross
First, let us consider the value of personal sorrow. Obviously, we mourn when
someone dies. At the time, we may not feel particularly holy, but the preface
for the funeral Mass reminds us that "the sadness of grief gives way to
the bright promise of immortality." These words are not only a promise
of eternal life for those who die; they should also be a reminder of the
blessing that comes to those who mourn.
At some point we have to be consoled by the thought that Jesus also mourned the
death of a friend. The new Catechism of the Church reminds us that grace
...makes us
‘partakers of the divine nature’ and of eternal life. With beatitude, man
enters into the glory of Christ....
Human grief unites us with Christ, who wept at the death of Lazarus, so grief
is one more of those things that refines the image of Christ in us.
That is the here and now reward of our sorrow. We cannot imagine what
other forms the consolation for our grief will take, but there is a maxim in
our faith that the Church believes as it prays. Our prayer over and over
repeats the promise of reunion with those who have died, so we reasonably look
forward to this reunion as one more consolation for our grief.
Collective or
Spiritual Sorrow
Perfection &
Sorrow for Sin
But what shall we say about communal or "Scriptural" sorrow, the
grief we express when we ask forgiveness for sin? This is the sort of
"mourning" the early Christian writers considered almost exclusively.
Here we may find it profitable to remember that St. Thomas Aquinas places the
Beatitude of comfort for those who mourn among the blessings that remove the
obstacle of sensual happiness. In the previous reflection, on the happiness
Jesus promises to those who are poor, we remarked that sensual happiness comes
from money, power, and distinction, as well as the more predictable sex, food -
and any of the other created, material goods that insulate us from the pain of
everyday life.
But if the Christian is striving for perfection, there is a goal higher than
moderation. The Catechism says, the beatitude we are promised confronts us with
decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and
to seek the love of God above all things.
General Electric has a motto, "Good enough isn’t," and that is the
point the Catechism makes. It is not enough for Christians to be good. God
calls us to be perfect. Nor is it enough merely to "avoid evil." We
must also "do good."
The Catechism reminds us that the highest good is seeking the love of God over
everything else - even to the extent, Aquinas says, of "...cast[ing]
them aside altogether; nay more, so that, if need be, [one] makes a deliberate
choice of sorrow"
Created things are attractive, good, and reasonable. But they do not last. We
can lose them, or fear that we will lose them. No matter how many things we
have, or how excellent they are, if we find our happiness in created goods, we
commit ourselves
to an unending cycle of striving to gain something we cannot possess for long.
A 17th-Century Jesuit moralist summed this up very elegantly - and also very
frighteningly, "When nothing more is to be wished for, everything is to
be feared... for where desire ends, apprehension begins." (Baltasar
Gracian, "A Truth telling Manual," 200).
Grace and
Detachment
The saints tell us that the only thing that can make us happy is God, because
God is the only thing we cannot lose. Therefore, the saints admonish us to
cultivate a disdain for the material things that delight and console us, or at
least to be aware that we own nothing in this world, so we must never expect a
created thing to make us happy.
To be fair, St. Thomas Aquinas says that we do not reach this point of
detachment by ourselves. Virtue will lead us as far as moderation, but if we
are going to achieve heroic detachment, God must intervene in our lives by
grace. The good news here is that if we do not achieve absolute detachment from
created things, we are not altogether to blame. Nevertheless, beatitude is the
result of choice, and seeking God’s love above all is the choice we always need
to strive to make.
Here is where the sorrow we feel for personal loss can help us to understand
the sorrow we ought to feel for our sins. St. John Chrysostom wrote,
...if those
who grieve for children, or wife, or any other relation gone from them... if
they aim not at glory, are not provoked by insults nor led captive by envy, nor
beset by any other passion, their grief alone wholly possessing them; much more
will they who mourn for their own sins, as they ought to mourn, show forth a
self-denial greater than this.
Sorrow is the result of loss. The loss can be an event that befalls us
accidentally, or it can be something we seek - as when we give up a legitimate
pleasure for Lent, or try to break the habitual attachment to some sin.
Whatever the cause of it, our sorrow is a point of connection between us and
Christ’s cross. And when we make that connection we are consoled because sorrow
is both a sign of the cross in our midst now, and a pledge of Christ’s love for
the future - the only thing capable of satisfying us completely.
Meekness: the
Corrective to Power
And Jesus said, "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth." If the Scripture confuses us in the second beatitude by employing
a technical meaning for mourning, our language itself betrays us here by
devaluing the virtue of meekness.
Meekness is one of those words we simply do not understand. We look at someone
who stands off to the side and never expresses an opinion, and we say the
person is meek. But that is to confuse meekness with shyness, and Jesus does
not promise a reward for being shy. Meekness is altogether different from
shyness, but it has a great deal in common with the poverty of spirit and the
mourning that Jesus commends in the Beatitudes.
Getting What We
Want
Thus far we have considered the relation between the Beatitudes and what
We can pay for a good, which is where wealth comes in handy. Or we can choose
from whatever comes along that makes us feel good, and here some cultivated
sensibilities and good taste are useful. But there is a third way to get what
we want, and that is force. "...cruel and pitiless men,"
Aquinas says,
Seek by
wrangling and fighting to destroy their enemies so as to gain security for
themselves. Hence Our Lord promises the meek a secure and peaceful possession
of the land of the living, whereby the solid reality of eternal goods is
denoted (I-II, 69.4).
The Remedy of the
Beatitudes
Poverty of spirit enables us to govern our desire for affluence, and mourning
helps us overcome an attachment to the things that delight our senses. There is
one more part to this picture, and meekness fills in the blank space.
Meekness is the virtue that moderates anger, which is a desire for vengeance.
Thus, those who will inherit the earth are the same individuals who might very
easily have taken it by force but who allow themselves to be restrained by the
example of Christ who is meek and humble of heart.
When Jesus promised the earth to the meek he was undoubtedly identifying his
own people, subject to foreign, pagan occupation. His words echo Psalm 37, in
which,
Yet a little
while and the wicked shall be no more… but the meek shall inherit the land, and
delight themselves in abundant prosperity.
Meekness ~
Economics and Us
The apocalyptic rewards for patient endurance still inspire many individuals,
and for the economically disadvantaged and the politically oppressed, the
beatitudes are a strong and hopeful promise of redress. But for most of us
living in the developed economic world circumstances are far different. For us
to understand the blessing of meekness, we need to look at the world for just a
moment from the point of view of the bullies.
The goal is security, and meekness reminds us that we will not find security in
the things we commonly wrangle and fight about. Either a better fighter will
come along or if we get what we want by arguing, we feel so guilty we want to
give it back.
The Beatitudes: a
When we were small we learned that sacraments are outward signs, instituted by
Christ to give grace. This means that Jesus has chosen certain elements of our
lives to go beyond whatever meaning they have in themselves to allow us to
touch Him.
To be poor in spirit, to mourn, and to be meek is to cultivate a sacramental
attitude toward creation - to find signs of the kingdom of heaven in the things
that surround us, and to cultivate the attitudes toward the created world that
will make us the ministers -here and now- of the life we look forward to
enjoying fully in the future.
v
Other Musings This Month
In January the CPC electronic mailing list grew by more than
175% in the number of people that receive this newsletter each month. Among
those on the CPC mailing list are many active duty
The late Dr. Emmet Fox the
renowned spiritual writer, taught that there is no condition that enough love
will not heal. Fox said that divine love never fails, but the divine love must
be in your heart and cannot operate from the outside. When our prayers are not
answered, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is because we are lacking in a
sense of love for all. He reminds us – practice love every day and watch your
thought, and watch your tongue, and watch your deed, that nothing contrary to
love finds expression there. For more from Emmet Fox try his book Around the Year with Emmet
Fox • A Book of Daily
The CPC Prayer Intention for This Month
Heavenly
Father, as the author of life, touch with compassion the Hearts of those women
and men who with your help, have conceived human life and now think of abortion, not
parenthood. Help them to understand that their newly created child and all
children are made in Your image and likeness, made for eternal life. Dispel their
fears and helplessness and give them true and generous hearts to love their
babies and give them birth and all the needed care that a parent alone can give.
Lord hear our prayer
You can help us spread the good word of our Lord…by becoming a
CPC Prayer Ministry Leader in your home area.
As a CPC Prayer
Minister (PM) you will form and lead a small Home Based Prayer Community (HBPC)
in your hometown.
It’s easy to
get started. All you need to do is invite several friends, co-workers or family
members to join your HBPC. Local communities are generally comprised of from 3
to 15 members who gather in community every other week to pray, reflect and
share our faith. The Catholic Prayer Club will provide you with all of the
materials you need to form organize and lead your ministry and Home Based
Prayer Community.
So if you feel
called to a ministry in the service of the Lord, please contact Steve Macy or
Aurora Ragaza Co-Stewards of The Catholic Prayer Club at