Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it
directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me,
going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.
Little — be always little! Be simple, poor,
childlike.
Preach the Gospel with your life — without
compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.
Do little things exceedingly well for love of
Me.
Love... love... love, never counting the cost.
Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray,
fast. Pray always, fast.
Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet.
Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.
Pray always. I will be your rest.
The Little Mandate of Madonna House
Listen to the
Spirit – He will lead you. We are going through the
Little Mandate, the words Catherine received in the 1930s as the core of what
she believed God was asking of her, every Tuesday on the blog, bit by bit.
Last week I talked about preaching the Gospel with one’s life,
without compromise. Catherine came up with that line in the context of the
social problems of her time—the Great Depression, racism, poverty, unjust
economic practices (sound familiar, any of it?). When leading people in study
groups through the social encyclicals of the Church, she would come to that phrase
as the essence of the matter—Christians had to preach the Gospel by their
actions and not water it down, either.
The question would come back at her: how are we to do this? She
took that question seriously, and pondered it at length. She describes
sitting by the fireplace in her house one evening, quietly doing this, and these next words coming to her with great simplicity and assurance: listen to
the Spirit – He will lead you.
For Catherine, that was simply the answer. She wrote later that
for a Russian that is a perfect answer, needing no further commentary. So she
wrote it down and went to bed, another piece of the puzzle in place.
Perhaps for us non-Russians some further commentary is required.
When we talk about the Holy Spirit speaking and us listening, we are not to
think of some weird mystical experience—voices and whatnot. We are certainly
not to think that whatever stray impulse or strong conviction enters our little
minds and hearts is ‘the Spirit, speaking to us.’
Catherine always loved to repeat the story of the young woman who
came here in the 1960s and failed to show up at her work assignment one day.
Asked why she hadn’t gone to the laundry as she had been told to do, she said,
“The Holy Spirit told me to go for a walk instead!” Catherine’s response:
“Well, the Holy Spirit just told me you’re supposed to leave on the bus
tomorrow.”
God does not speak to us in that way, normally. And even when He
genuinely does speak in this inward and rather mystical way, there is a process
of confirmation and discernment that is needed before we go haring off down
some trail or other. It is too easy to fool ourselves or to be fooled by the
devil that our own ideas and desires are ‘the voice of God.’
But the Spirit does speak, indeed. Catherine was always careful
and (in my view) very balanced in her presentation of this, that the normal way
of things is that God reveals his will to us through people, situations, and
events. And through a prayerful, thoughtful, carefully considered examination
of all of these, to see what the response of the ‘Gospel without compromise’
should be to them.
In short, the normal pattern of discerning God’s will in the
moment is to pay attention to what is going on around you, and applying the
Gospel of Jesus Christ to it. Is there someone in pain or anguish, loneliness
or sorrow in front of you? Assuage it—listen to them, find out what they need
and if you can, give it to them. If you can’t, pray for them. It's that kind of
thing, multiplied by a thousand possible examples.
At times it may not be clear what to do, and that’s where prayer
comes in, and perhaps consulting with trusted counsellors, and sometimes just waiting in patience for it to become clear, and a lot
of listening and loving and suffering with a hard situation in the meantime
while we’re trying to sort it out. The key thing is that what matters in any
situation is that we do God’s will and not our own, put into practice the ideas
of God (i.e. the Gospel) and not our own puny ideas.
And that we be very humble, very acquiescent, very quick to
question and doubt our own motives and desires, very quick to ask God to guide
and govern us in all things, very aware that quite often the Lord asks us to do the hard thing, the thing that brings us to die to our selfish selves. To mistrust the easy answer, the easy path, that which flatters our ego and panders to our desires.
All of this is what goes into ‘listening to the
Spirit’. All of which we do, as Catholics, within and under the authority of
the teaching office of the Church, knowing that God is not going to tell us to
do anything that contradicts what His Church teaches us to be good and true.
It is very necessary, very necessary indeed in our world of
confusion and profound spiritual and intellectual darkness, that we seek the
Spirit’s guidance into the perfect will of God with eager serious intent. The
world is full of people—the Church is full of people—doing their own thing and
operating from their own ideas and principles. We need to reclaim this radical
openness to God and his moment by moment guidance of our life, if we wish to
have anything to do with the restoration of the world in Christ.
Doing our own
thing does nothing, even if (especially if!) we are convinced we are right.
Doing God’s thing—discerned carefully in the duty and call to love of each
moment—is the only thing that makes a bit of difference in the world.
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