I am sure that at an early point in his life, Einstein did
not believe that energy was mass moving at the speed of light squared --- and
then he discovered it was true. In many
children’s lives there comes a point when a young child says to their parent: “You
don’t love me” --- and then they discover the truth. The Holy Spirit is a unity of God, and we
participate in that unity because He made us that way. If we don’t believe that, we need to discover
it, and if we haven’t yet discovered what so many others have does not make it
untrue.
What Einstein and the young child found was truth. At a time when many in our world are saying “What
is truth?”, and denying it exists, we need to have some trust that what we
yearn for, in our deepest part of our common unity IS our common unity. Even as the air and water in us we need to
live, our lives are united in our Creator, Who made us that way, and if we deny
that, we are denying not some church or some individual’s opinion of truth, we
are denying the most basic part of our being.
We may as well say “Well, I don’t believe we need air and water; that’s
just your truth.”
Even as I wrote these words, I turned on EWTN to pray with
them the morning rosary, but instead of the usual live broadcast of the rosary
from the EWTN chapel, there was a live broadcast of a talk at the National
Catholic Prayer Breakfast from Washington, DC. The end of the talk which I
heard echoed what I just wrote. The Holy
Spirit and human existence are beyond human reason, yet are the essence of our
being, each one of us. (This broadcast
will repeat entirely at 2PM on Saturday, September 18 on EWTN; I will listen to
it and believe everyone who is concerned about our country should.) I don’t believe in coincidence; I do believe
in the Holy Spirit.
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Monday night at the chapel I began a two-week novena for God’s
Mercy on the United States (the words of which were written by Bud Macfarlane,
writer and founder of the Mary Foundation).
The novena prayers are Daily Prayers to Save America: The UNITED States. Unity.
The Holy Spirit. Truth.
Mother Angelica, in her Holy Hour book, wrote how the
Beatitudes --- how we should live --- and the Holy Spirit overlap. She wrote: “It really is amazing how the
whole blueprint of the spiritual life is in the Beatitudes and the seven gifts
of the Holy Spirit, given in Isaiah chapter 11, and then matched to those of
the seven petitions in the Our Father prayer.
They all say basically the same thing.
They all lead to the ultimate holiness in this life, which we call
transforming union, as St. Paul writes in Corinthians, until we turn into the
image we reflect. So we reflect Jesus as
we really put these Beatitudes into practice.
… They are very difficult, just like everything God told us to do is
difficult. It’s not all joy, joy, joy.” But we have the Holy Spirit, Our Father, and the
Beatitudes to help us learn to reflect Jesus.
We need to discover that.
And we will discover the true joy of life, knowing we are loved by God. It is not a discovery confirmed by “likes” on
the internet, nor by what “feels good.”
Mother Angelica wrote about spending a Holy Hour in the
chapel, trying to learn about Jesus by praying to Him. That I believe, not the internet, is the
place we can learn the most important things about our life.
