“Take Care How You Hear”

“Realize…that it is impossible for us either to learn about or to have the good life, or to be hungry for God’s honor and the salvation of souls, unless we go to the school of the Word, the Lamb slain and abandoned on the cross, because it is there that the true teaching is found.  This is what he said: ‘I a the way and truth and life.’  And no one can go to the Father except through him.  Let your mind’s eye be opened to see, and unplug your ears and listen to the teaching he gives you.  Look at yourselves, for in him you will find yourselves, and in yourselves, him.  What I mean is that you will find yourselves in him in that he is creating you in his own image and likeness – gratuitously, and not because he owes it to you – and within yourselves you will discover God’s boundless goodness in having taken on our likeness by the union the divine nature has effected with our human nature.  Let our hearts explode wide open, then, as we contemplate a flame and fire of love so great that God has engrafted himself into us and us into himself!  Oh, unimaginable love!  It would be enough if we had even appreciated it!  To this wonderful school, then…For this energy and love will lead you on and will be your life!

Open your ears, I tell you, to hear his teaching – and it is this:  voluntary poverty; patience in the face of injury;  returning good to those who do us evil;  being little, humble, oppressed and forsaken in the world';  putting up with ridicule, torment, wrongs, insults, detraction, gossip, difficulties, and harassment from the world,  from devils seen and unseen, and from our own stinking flesh which (rebel that it is) is always wanting to defy its creator and fight against the spirit.  It means suffering with patience and resisting the devils with the weapons of hatred and of love.”

--St. Catherine of Siena, quoted in Magnificat, September 2011, pp. 266-267