A Sunday Thought About Where God Is, What He Thinks of Us, and What We Can Do About It

It's the 5th Sunday after Pentecost. Maybe some of us have had a super-busy week at work. And maybe we were so pressed for time, our spiritual life was a bit hit or miss. No excuse, of course; but it happens. 

So Sunday becomes especially precious to us now. Before we let the Lord's Day slip through our hands, grab a slice of time and spend it with some salutary spiritual thoughts. 

Fr. Walter Farrell, O.P. makes a good effort here. He tells us, among other things, where God is, and what He thinks of us. And if we read slowly and thoughtfully, we might come to consider what we can - maybe should - do about it:

“Our Heavenly Father is at home in our hearts, no stranger in the halls of our minds. To Him we are known, known as completely as even His infinite love could demand. And we are aghast at the generosity of the love that could endure in spite of such knowledge. But, loving us, He would also be known by us, by us who cannot even penetrate to the soul of a man, let alone to the depth of divinity. So, as lovers always do, He tells us His secrets, truths that we can have in no other way than by our faith in this divine Lover’s words. He can indeed tell us of Himself, for He knows Himself as we can never know ourselves. One of the supreme confidences God has made to His human friends, a divine secret that only God could know, is the story of the impenetrable activity within the Godhead, the story of the family life of God. He has, in His lover’s eagerness to be known, told us of the mystery of the Trinity: the mystery of three divine Persons in one divine nature, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost who are yet, by their unity of nature, one God. The intense life of divinity itself is told to our trusting hearts: the Father, who is God eternally knowing, eternally generating; the Son, who is God eternally known, the Word eternally generated; the Holy Ghost, who is God eternally loved, the breath of love proceeding eternally from the perfect Knower and the perfectly Known. These are three Persons, distinct one from another, but completely identical in their divine nature. This is a lover’s surrender of secrets. It is not a truth told to stagger our minds and so to impress us, though certainly the truth is much too big for more than our most timid caress. The secret has been revealed to further and deepen our happiness, a contribution of love to the happiness of us who are so loved.
    “Even to our dull eyes, there is a tremendous kindness, a gentle protection of our love in this divine confidence. In our stumbling human fashion, we might so easily have seen God as utterly alone, as lonely as a bishop in his study, aloof from everything for lack of equals, cold for lack of a goodness worthy of His great heart; and, seeing Him thus, we might have given Him pity instead of admiration, adoration and love. In our human experience, activity and change are so intertwined that we might easily think of the unchangeable God as condemned to a life of idleness, completely inactive, stagnant, with nothing to do and all eternity to face; and so have our own hearts go dead within us in a sorrow that would be close to revulsion. Because we have direct experience only with human persons, we might easily make the mistake of conceiving God as an impersonal being, some kind of huge blob of goodness, spectral, ghostly, without eyes or heart; and thus have rendered ourselves incapable of so intimately personal a relationship as love.” (Fr. Walter Farrell, O.P.)

I'm continually surprised - baffled really - at just how much God loves us, loves me. If you're a member of the sinner's club - and who of us isn't - you might know exactly what I mean here. 

Even after a busy work week where we may have left God on the outside looking in (at least in our own minds) because we were so preoccupied, He's not put off. In fact, He loves us in a way that all the love we've ever known or experienced simply pales by comparison. 

And that's a Threefold dose of love from Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all at once.

Given enough time considering Father's words, we may wind up our slice of time with the conclusion that Sunday will never be the same.

Happy Sunday!