Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Human Formation #2

I concluded last week by proclaiming that God really loves us!  But let me begin this week's reflection by stating that in addition to the fact that He loves us, He actually likes us!  I use the word “like” because that gives an affective, personal dimension to God’s love.  God’s love for us is not general.  It is specific and individual.  It is personal delight.  He delights in us; He delights in you!  How else do we explain the above words?

How else do we explain ourselves?  God’s love for me is the answer to the question “who am I?”  Blessed John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis:  "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself; his life is meaningless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.”

God is love (1 Jn 4:8) and He loves us (1 Jn 4:10; Rom 5:8; Gal 2:20).  And His love is so powerful that it makes us His children, it makes us His sons (1 Jn 3:1-2).  But, do we believe in this reality?  Are we really aware of it?  Do we feel it and live from it?  The answer to these questions will determine our ability to discern, choose and live out our vocations in joy and peace; in a word, the answer to these questions will determine our happiness!

God desires that we would believe in His love and yes, He also desires that we would feel it.  We are created to share in His happiness and in order to do so we need more than a merely general, intellectual knowledge of His love.  We need an emotional, experiential, heart-knowledge of it.  Really the same goes for our relationship with others; it’s not enough to know in our heads that we’re loved, we need to know in our hearts.  God made us so that the heart has primacy over the head.  The heart is supposed to lead the head; the head is supposed to serve the heart, because the heart is the place of loving-encounter--with God and others--the seat of true happiness.

While God’s love is certainly not reducible to an emotional experience, He does want it to touch us on that level.  Our experience of an emotional love for God can actually lead us to a deeper and lasting faith and the higher, sacrificial love that Jesus ultimately calls all of His disciples to.  The Saints and Mystics often speak of their union with God in personal, passionate, emotionally charged and poetic language.  The Bible itself, especially in the Song of Songs, uses powerful, romantic and even sensual imagery to describe God’s passionate love for us and our response to that love. 


Brothers, the beginning and end of all formation—human and spiritual—is the personal love of God for us.  We are loved!  The Christian life has been described as a passage from being loved by God without knowing it to being loved by God and knowing it.  Knowing His love is a must for both discerning and answering God’s call.  And proper development and maturation of our emotional lives is a must for knowing His love.  Therefore,  our series on human formation by exploring God’s plan for our emotional growth.  Stay tuned… 

God bless you all,

Fr. Isaac Spinharney, CFR
St. Joseph Friary
Harlem, NY

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Human Formation #1



Finally, the promised series on human formation is here.  As I mentioned a couple of months ago in our last reflection on the Creed, “in the coming weeks and months, I will be offering reflections on human formation and how the necessary healing and development of our human nature helps us to believe in and live everything we have been reflecting on in our Series on the Creed.  Human formation is an indispensable part of every vocation and it is my hope that these reflections will in some way help all of us to open our nature more and more to God’s grace.”

Human formation is indispensable because God’s grace, which is His very life, builds on our human nature.  Put another way, our human nature was made for the grace of God.  The Church teaches “the desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.  Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for…” (CCC, 27).

We’re created “by God and for God”.  Our study of humanity in general and human formation specifically must start with God because He is our origin and goal!  That’s why I began with some reflections on the Apostles Creed.  The truth about man is relative to the truth about God!  And the truth about God is that He loves us!  Human formation is about preparing our nature to receive this Love, which is the foundation of every vocation.

As we reflected on the first two articles of the Creed we read:

“You have a Father in heaven, God, who created you. Even before the world began to exist, God your eternal Father thought of you, knew you, loved you, wanted you, and brought you into being. Your life is from Him. Although you need not have existed, He wanted you to exist, and therefore you do exist. Your life was given to you so that you might come to know how much He loves you and to love him in return…. Although you do not comprehend how much he loves you and adores you, He has provided a way for you to come to know His incredible love for you….[That way] is Jesus of Nazareth, the eternal Son. He is looking for you. He sees you, he knows you through and through, and he loves you. He reveals his love to you in a special way.

God really does love us!  Ponder that and stay tuned for the second part of our series.

God bless you all,

Fr. Isaac Spinharney, CFR
St. Joseph Friary
Harlem, NY