The Way Ahead

REPORTEDLY, THERE WERE TWO GENERATIONS of Roman Catholic sons and daughters of God in Jesus Christ that either only received a partial formation or did not receive any formation at all in the holy and honorable Faith of our Holy Mother Church. Knowing through the light of Gospel truth the substance of faith as well as the mysterious nature of God's greater will for His creation, I do not claim to speak for all of my generation but I can certainly vouch for this as fact in the context of my own life.

I know now how unfortunately insufficient my Roman Catholic formation was in the usual 20/20 vision given to those things we realize in retrospect of the truth. Consequently, after a brief spell of innocence I no longer remember, as I slowly took over control of my life at around age 8, I know now that my young reason having never gotten the benefit of faith's illuminating light, had no power at all to perceive of truths greater than myself. And what are we, O Lord to Thee but darkness itself! O how You suffered me, O Lord, and how You still suffer me, my Savior!

Till around the great Jubilee year 2000, I had no sense of sin whatsoever. I know this because I had no sense of guilt or remorse whatsoever during those days to those things that I did that I now lament over with much sorrow and spiritual pain. All I had to go on at that time was my conscience which was not properly formed in the faith and therefore, my reason was most of the time misinformed and so I never knew the darkness from the light. I lived in darkness and had no sense of what is light. The darkness was in my heart and I knew it not. All I ever wanted at the time was to be happy and I pursued this desire in all the wrong ways. The repercussions of this deadly exposure to sin still reverberate in my life today and the remnants of those times dictate the pitch and the intensity of the interior battles that I have to fight for love of Jesus Christ, my Savior, my All and the salvation of my own soul. For I did live but I was dead to all that is life, being only alive to what is darkness until our kindly Lord decided to awaken in me a sense of His awesome, dreadful reality.

Today, my greatest fear is to lose this sense of love, a sense of longing for God and the things of God that drive me to do the things I must do and fills me at times with a great joy during unexpected moments of burning realizations that sear into my mind and my heart the truth of the greatness of God's love and generosity for me. And I would most of the time feel like I would want to die and run away from all this love if it were not for the mysterious sureness in my heart that it is God's own will that I respond to Him, love for love, that I should draw near to Him in this way. I know this way of love is foreign to me and it fills me with a terrible fear everytime I fall into grave sin that our Lord might give up on me; that His Holy Spirit might completely withdraw from my life; that I might lose this qualifying sense of love that lights me up to warm my cold, cold heart and shed it's truth so that it might give sense to everything that is real in my life. My greatest fear is not sin, or death or suffering, it is to lose this sense of love and the dreadful prospect of perhaps, losing love forever. Now, there are many good reasons that drive me to climb this mountain path but this is the primary reason in my will that drive me to fight, even in the midst of sin, darkness and defeat when I so often fall, I continue to fight this inward fight because I have become desperate for my Lord's love and His approval of my own miserable, little existence. I have come to the truth in my heart that everything in my life here in this world and in the next one depends on this love. And to lose this love is to lose all meaning and purpose in my life like it is to have once lived and known what it is to be truly alive only to die again but this time forever.

Long gone also are the days when I sought something or someone to blame for whatever pain or hurt I have inherited from the past mistakes of others. By learning how to forgive, self as well as others, my most loving Lord has taught me how to disentangle myself from sorrows past so that I can experience with Him the promise of our present, here in the moment, here in the now. Having come to understand the nature of God's sovereign will, God's own grace has led me to the simplicity of the truth that the only mistakes that are possible to me now are those ones that I deliberately commit in the names of those strange, unholy gods of sin whose evil I know from my own experience work so much sorrow, suffering and death to the souls of men. O how good my Lord is to me, how rich in mercy, how full of loving-kindness is His heart!

Looking back at my life, O Lord, there were indeed many times that You called out to me to save me from needless suffering. But I was so deep into my own sins that You had to stand back and allow me to get hurt until I longed for the safety of Your embrace. All my life, I sensed this love that was incomprehensible but present. And how you suffered me, O Lord, how you suffered my constant offense to Thy eternal dignity! O how You still suffer me, my Jesus. O my Jesus, it was always You, my All, who stood behind the guise of other people to hold me back from straying too far into the darkness so as not to lose sight of hope's morning ward twilight direction. You gave me Thy own mother, Mary, a star of maritime wanderers like me, as a great and holy light and a constant, precious reminder of the way that points back to Thy safe harbors. Indeed, one of my earliest, most faintest memories is one of devotion to Mother Mary, a devotion that at that time I did not understand but I very faintly possessed.

It has been a long inward journey for me, O Lord, growing up. I thought You were ever so far but now I know how wrong I was, dear Savior. You were closer to me enough to know who I am better than I know myself. For you knew me Lord even when I stopped believing in everything, You stood by me and believed in my Christian promise in Thee. You kept Thy peace with me and never wavered, enduring through all my greatest, most insufferable sins, even as You did endure them all during Thy Passion and Cross, all for love of a wretched, cowardly and worthless sinner like me. O Lord, how I weep for sorrow of sin! O how I still weep.

My dear Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, so much lies and deceit have shrouded our world in this darkness. We live in a midnight world where sin and war seem to have free reign over honorable faith and right reason. There are so much lies these evil days that obscure the salient beauty of our Holy Mother Church and who else shall defend her by seeking out the truth but you and I who not only belong to the Church but who are the Church. Therefore, one must indeed, be seekers of the light, one must be seekers of the Lord. So let us not contend ourselves with what darkness contains us, in what sins pain us, in what lies isolate us, in what hurts afflict us, in what bitterness prevent us, from approaching the liberating Light of the Truth in the Incarnation and the Passion of Jesus Christ subsisting in the synergistic synthesis of both Scripture and Sacred Tradition of our Holy Mother, the Roman Catholic Church.

I tell you, my precious friend, through my own meager experience that it is though our blessed Savior, in the prayerful meditation of His life and Person, that we will gain a real understanding of the supernatural reality and most profound inner mystery of our one triune God, the one Creator of all mankind to our everlasting good. But first, we must empty ourselves of all that is troubling us, in what wicked things make our hearts restless, most especially those lies that the world, the devil and the concupiscence of our own wounded flesh, all things that keep us from our great potential for good in this poor world of ours all towards the great Christian promise of joy and everlasting life. Temptation is meant to be withstood just as our afflictions in this life are meant to be endured with, in, through and for Christ our Savior.

One of the first realizations that I know any serious Christian will experience is one that initially filled me with terror, the realization that Christianity demands that we face with supernatural courage the demons that dwell within ourselves, a kind of realization that says to us, "hey, this is it, so this is the real thing, this is where the rubber meets the road." We are shocked into the greatness of the reality that the Christian faith is not all about man's power and man's glory, it is all about God's power and God's glory; that our holy religion it is not a release from personal responsibility but it demands because of it our humble acceptance of our everlasting accountability; that it is not a fantasy that empower magic, it is the reality of a holy faith driven by fiery and ascendant truths; that it will not be an easy ride for the self but a hard and narrow, dark and lonely, painful and exhausting mountian ascent; thst it is not a release from the cross but our embracing of it. We feel overwhelmed. But verily, my Companion, by embracing this we shall find the beginnings of our Christian faith, knowing without knowing that all this great evil can be truly overcome with God's grace merited through the Passion of Christ and that our God rewards the good - all those who never give up trying to be better - and punish those who are relentlessly evil is a validation of our Christian hope, and truly repenting of all these evil things that deny us the way ahead is the first step of a journey that will take us into the very heart of Christian Love; a journey that heaven will recall, I am sure, at the Last Day as the most peculiar, most interesting epic of God's greatest Love, individually told to those of us who abide in His Love and endured steadfastly with our Lord the terrifying ascent into sin's obliteration.

Beloved of God, this story is still being written in the things that we Christians do or don't do today by the grace of our God, in the Name of Christ, on behalf of suffering mankind.

Lord, where is the way ahead
when I close my eyes to Thy Light
and I let the darkness flood into my head?

Lord, how will I follow Thee
when I turn away in my heart
and my courage fail Thee constantly?

Dear Christian, think! Get interested in God. Look death square in the eye and you will see a demon to torment thee or an angel come from eternity. Therefore, let us together repent and come to Jesus, our way, our truth and our life - our everything, our All.

My Companions, does the way ahead consist of waiting for the right moment or working for the right moment? This is a question that I ask quietly to all of you as well as to myself today.

My precious friends, let us pray for each other that the Good God may bring us to a better realization of the steps each of us need to take to fulfill His will for us in this life so that we may be happy with Him forever in the next.

I thank you so much for your prayers so far and rest assured that God knows what is in our hearts and so let us persevere that He may bring us together if not in this life, surely, through bonds of golden charity as well as the special grace of holy perseverance, our Lord will bring us all together in the next life, in our real destination with Christ Jesus, our Savior, our All.

Beloved of God, my heart and my prayers reach out to each of you, I love you all, and may God love us all and keep us in His Love forever.

O Holy Spirit, send your fire deep into my heart that I may serve you with a chaste body and please you with a pure mind. - Fr. Keenan

AMEN.