A Further Sunday Thought About a Particularly Difficult End of 2023

We started this last Sunday - how the end of 2023 was a particularly difficult one for our family. Today, we'll finish off our thoughts. While we told our personal story last week, this week we'll try to complete the lessons that Fr. Dion attempts to teach us. 

If you read our brief description of our personal difficulties, you know the role feelings play in many of our difficulties in life. In our own case, there has never been nor will ever be a way to ignore or minimize the feelings that have and will accompany our memories each Christmas Season. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize the fact that we cannot be subject to them.

That's what makes Father's advice so valuable. He not only makes this point clearly, but shows us how important it is and will be in our efforts to advance in our spiritual life. 

He also shows us how the suffering that frequently comes with our feelings can benefit us. In our personal case, the sadness that rises each Christmas Season has most definitely been a form of suffering. It descends on us and never leaves throughout the Season. Offering this suffering up has been a challenge at times. But with God's grace, we have indeed offered it up. In this sense (and others) it has helped to strengthen our spiritual lives.

Father concludes by warning us against against resisting God's efforts to love us, to help us to become holy. He works at this constantly. His grace is and will always be provided. But we must, must, cooperate. He never forces Himself or His grace on us.

There's much for us to learn and think about on this winter Sunday.

 

Abandonment And The Importance Of Overcoming Feelings (Part 2 of 2)
Fr. Philip E. Dion, C.M.

 

    “Because we resist God’s purifying action of suffering so much, His work in us does not bring about the progress that He intends it to bring. Instead, it seems to increase our guilt or our imperfection. We become embittered and impatient with suffering, and we revolt against it. If we do submit, too often it is with murmuring and complaint. But in showing ill will and resentment toward suffering, we are repulsing God and His loving operations in us. We are obstructing the fatherly operations by which He wants to sanctify us. Therein lies the tragedy of living by our senses; the tragedy of judging everything by our feelings, our comfort, our ease, our pleasure, our freedom from pain. Therein lies the tragedy of living merely natural lives according to the maxims of the world. We misjudge the love of God acting in us, and we repel and insult His love, for it is an insult to murmur against the operations of God’s love in us.
   

 “How often have we frustrated, literally frustrated, the efforts of God to sanctify us? How often have we repelled Him in the past! Just when His love was sending us, in its most austere but most merciful disguise, the thing that we needed most! For all suffering, no matter how it comes, is God coming to us, is God operating in us. Every suffering that comes to us from contact with creatures has a mission to perform in our soul for God. This mission is to purify us of self-will, to uplift us, to free us from ourselves. It is sent by God and it is our duty to accept it…If we have been resisting His sanctifying action, we must begin now to develop the opposite habit!” 

Happy Sunday!