A Sunday Within The Octave Thought About The Primary Importance of Total Surrender of The Heart To God

In the traditional calendar, the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension is referred to as "within the Octave." That's the result of the Ascension being celebrated as it always has on Thursday until the newfangled calendar shook things up. We would ask why it switched Ascension Thursday (as it was always called) to Sunday, but we've done that in the past. No reason to repeat; no reason to dwell on it. It is what it is.

So rather than repeat what we should all know about the divergence of the traditional and the newfangled, let's instead grab on to some pearls of wisdom we can meditate on on this Sunday. It comes from one of our "friends" - a solid, reliable Catholic spiritual writer - Fr. Victorino Osende. 

His focus is on total surrender to the heart of Gd. It's of primary importance to our desire to grow in our spiritual life, i.e., to grow closer to God. He approaches his subject from an interesting angle: beginning with the first Christians. These first Christian forbears of ours lived in the years close to Jesus' own life. Some may have known Him, or known those who knew Him. Their lives were full of the Holy Spirit in a way we can only envy.

But rather than get stuck in the mud, Father jumps a couple of millennia and leads us to Therese of Lisieux, whose "Little Way" recaptures the spirit of those early years. And in this we can rejoice because she is one of our great modern saints who left us with her own words, that we might understand how she approached God in her short life: with total surrender to His Heart.

With that background, here are Father's own words. Let's read them carefully within the folds our Day of Rest, a day that can and should provide us with the time we need for some serious spiritual reading and meditation.  

“St. Paul called the first faithful ‘saints,’ and very likely the generality of them were such. Why? Because the early Christians surrendered wholeheartedly to Christ from their conversion. He was their ideal, the object of all their aspirations, the incentive of all their actions. Complete surrender to Christ was their law, and upon it they based the whole science of perfection. This total surrender, practiced with a lively faith, complete trust, and an ardent love for Christ, sufficed to sanctify them. However, with the passage of time and the cooling of charity in the hearts of men, it became necessary to multiply the means and methods of perfection in order to entice men to seek it and to sustain them in that pursuit. In this way the procedure eventually became inverted: the neophyte was introduced very gradually into the ways of prayer and the gift of self to God, and only after a long period did he arrive at complete surrender, which at one time had been the starting point.

   In the doctrine of the Little Flower (St. Therese of Lisieux), the right order of procedure is again established and the life of perfection begins where it should: in the total surrender of the heart to God. Everything else comes as a necessary consequence of that surrender. Her Little Way facilitates the attainment of sanctity, not by taking away or diminishing any of the essentials of perfection, but by making sanctity the work of love, and thus giving it the ease with which love always operates. Wherefore, let no one deceive himself by thinking that her Little Way is a marvelous secret for attaining sanctity without any labor or struggle…No other way to sanctity has been found, nor ever will be found, save the way of the cross and the following of Christ. Neither will anything or anyone ever be able to except us from its burden and yoke. All that we can desire and hope is that its burden be light and its yoke sweet, as Christ Himself has promised.” (Fr. Victorino Osende, O.P.) 

We may be far removed from those early Christians. We may be far from being saints that we are called to be. But here we have material for study and meditation that can help us to advance in our desire to grow closer to God.

Is there any endeavor more important than this?

 

Happy Easter!