A 6th Sunday after Pentecost Thought About The Divine Presence Within Us

Could there be anything more awesome than the idea that the Divine Presence is within us? It is, as we'll discover. Do we ever think about this? If not hold on. Today's spiritual guide will explain what it means and why it should be held as precious in our hearts and minds and souls.

Being sinners (and aren't we all - or at least most of us?), it can seem unlikely that the Divine Presence would literally live inside us. We might think at first this is some sort of symbolic thing. But God, indeed the Holy Trinity, literally living inside us? Seems a stretch.

But apparently it's not.

And today's author isn't alone in this assessment. But we might wonder how these spiritual writers came to this astonishing teaching. For that, all we need do is refer to St. John's Gospel - John 14:23 - which relays these words of Jesus Himself:

If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him.

It is Our Lord Who first taught this. And we know He would not teach this if it were not literally, albeit astonishingly, true.

Oh, and we know that where the Father and the Son are, so too is their Holy Spirit - which gives us the Holy Trinity living within us. 

So astonishing as it is, it's true. And knowing this, we would do well to do our best to accept this awesome reality.

As for understanding it, well, let's not get too hard on ourselves if this isn't crystal clear. For most of us, our assurance will likely come from Faith, not so much for any understanding generated by our intellect. 

Or course, we have to hold up our end in this arrangement. There won't be any Divine Presence unless we're in the state of grace. Mortal sin serves as the spoiler. But we know what we need to do in the case where we're not in the state of grace. Seek forgiveness: Confess, with a firm purpose of amendment, a determination not to sin again.

With all that in place, let's take a calm and considered chunk of time to carefully read, and do our best to understand, today's spiritual guide. It will lift our Sunday up, as it should be lifted. After all, we're given the Lord's Day to grow closer to the Lord. 

Right? 

    “How many times have we not heard Christian souls express the longing to live in intimacy with God, to have with Him more than simple, formal and semi-official relations limited to occasional acts of devotion observed more to fulfill a command than to respond to a real need of love! Often one asks: ‘What can I do to attain this intimacy? What is the basis of a life of true union with God?’ Blessed are you if you desire this intimacy! No grace could be more precious for you than this yearning to leave off formalism in order to live intensely our magnificent religion.

   “Never to drive God from one’s soul by grave sin is an essential but a negative task. The true Christian will wish to do more. Having sounded the depths of the gift of God, he sees that it consists not only in the presence of a certain something in his soul, and in the super-elevation of his powers of knowing and loving, but in the intimate presence of Someone, the Great Someone, of the Holy Trinity Itself. From this conviction he will advance to the realization that the logic of love requires him to cultivate this Divine Presence, to honor It, to make the most of It, to surround It with a positive devotion.

    “If among the best Christians many lack an interior spirit, it is because they do not sufficiently fathom the mystery of the Divine Indwelling. They lack faith and motivation.” (Fr. Raoul Plus, S.J., 1941)
 

Happy 6th Sunday after Pentecost!