Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, C.S.P.
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HECKER REFLECTION: THE COMPLETION OF GOD'S LOVE

7/26/2014

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Servant of God and Paulist founder Father Isaac Hecker wrote:
 

A mother gives of her life to support the life of her child.  Shall not God support in his children the life he has given to them in Jesus Christ?  It is impossible for a soul which avoids serious sin and often receives the Blessed Sacrament, not to make solid, even rapid progress in virtue and the spiritual life.  It is the most efficacious remedy for our spiritual maladies.   By the frequent reception of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament the way of perfection is shortened, made easier and is safer.  Shortened, because we receive God Himself directly into our hearts.  Easier, because God becomes our strength and the conqueror of our enemies.  Safer, because we depend less on our own strength and more upon God. 
 
There is no living without eating; and the food which we partake of must be of a similar nature as the life it supports.  Therefore the divine life in the soul must languish and die without the divine food of the Blessed Sacrament.  Without the Blessed Sacrament, God’s love and the evidence of His love towards us would have been incomplete.  God instituted the Blessed Sacrament as the completion of His love, the necessary food for the divine life of our souls.
 

Commentary by the Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP:
 
During Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s priestly ministry  (1849-1888) it was the general practice for the ordinary Catholics in America to receive communion only once or twice a year; usually at Christmas or Easter.  The frequent or regular reception of communaion, which Hecker advocates in today’s reflection, was quite rare.  In fact, weekly or daily communion for lay people was often considered presumptuous.  There were several reasons why.  It was expected that you went to confession each time you planned to receive communion so that you would be in a state of grace.  Many 19th century Catholics were not certain whether they were in the state of grace (venial sin) or not (mortal sin). It seemed easier to refrain from communion as it was hard to get to the confessional every time you planned to attend Mass.  The communion fast where you had to abstain from all food and drink after midnight, and the time schedule of early morning Masses, often made it  difficult to get to communion.  You might be able to keep the fast but not get to Mass, or get to Mass but not have kept the fast.  
 
For the average Catholic in the 19th century, receiving communion was an event you had to plan for rather than a habit you regularly practiced.  Sadly many priests did little to encourage people to receive communion with any frequency.  Some priests like Father Hecker encouraged Catholics to receive communion with mixed results.  About twenty years after Hecker’s death, the universal church under Pope Pius X began to encourage ordinary Catholics to receive the Eucharist regularly if not daily, presuming they were free from mortal sin.  The movement slowly picked up steam and between 1926 and 1945 Catholics began to receive communion on a regular basis.
 
In today’s reflection Father Hecker is ahead of his time as an advocate for frequent communion.  Many of the arguments he makes, were adopted forty years after his death by priests and bishops in America.   At the heart of his reflection is a teaching that is quite contemporary.  God feeds us with God’s very life, which is grace.  God continues and completes his love for us through the grace of the Eucharist and it strengthens the gift of eternal life within us.  If you want a spiritual life, begin with the Eucharist and let it renew and strengthen what we have received from the death and rising of Jesus.  It was good advice when Hecker gave it and it is good advice now.
 
(For a discussion on the practice of 19th century communion, see James O’Toole, Habits of Devotion, Cornell University Press, 2004).
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington, DC.
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HECKER REFLECTION: YIELDING TO GOD

7/19/2014

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Servant of God and Paulist founder Isaac Thomas Hecker wrote:
 
We are all willing to give ourselves to God as long as God leaves us alone, our wills untouched.  Yet how can the Spirit of Truth lead us into all truth unless we yield and allow it?  As Francis de Sales wrote, yielding to God is “the virtue of virtues.”  God demands a heroic abandonment of ourselves to His good pleasure.  The measure of that abandonment is the measure of our union with God – our progress.  It is the delight of God’s tender and parental heart to care for His children, the work of His hands and the price of the blood of his only Son.
The more we trust in God, the more God will trust Himself to us.  All that God asks of us is to let him act with full freedom in our regard.  All that God wishes is to make us like Himself (infinitely holy and happy).
 
God would have us forget ourselves; for self- forgetfulness is the beginning of the life of God in the soul.  In God the soul places all its hopes and desires.  It is converted completely to God.  It ignores, the past, present and future.  It throws itself without reserve into the arms of God.  All that has existence is in God and outside of God there is nothing.  Let it cost what it may.  Let us throw all care upon God and put all our confidence in him.  This is what God wishes of us.  What do we have that we have not received by being faithful to God and trusting in His providence?   God has not changed His providence towards us.
 
A Response from the Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP:
 
There is a difference between what we want and what we need.  This is the meeting point, the intersection between our will and God’s will.  In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask the Father for our “daily bread.”   What we ask God for is what we need, God providing us with the grace, the peace, the forgiveness, the hope and the perspective to grow in faith as children of the Father.   But if we are honest with ourselves and God we know there maybe other things that we want.  And some of what we want from God’s perspective, we just don’t need. 
 
This creates the clash of wills that Servant of God Isaac Hecker writes out in today’s reflection.  To develop a spiritual life, to work at a relationship with God means that our will and God’s will are going to differ.  Father Hecker reminds us that we need to yield to God’s providence, God’s will for our lives.  Ultimately happiness happens when our will and God’s will is aligned together.  Hecker suggests that the more we yield to God, the deeper our faith becomes.  To go back to the Lord’s Prayer, we begin it by praying, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Learning to let go and learning to trust that God will lead us through the difficult moments of our lives.  “Let it cost what it may,” he says, “ Let us throw all our care upon God and put our confidence in him.”.  Learning to trust God is the way to deeper faith and a richer prayer life is the advice Father Hecker offers us today.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington, DC.
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HECKER REFLECTION: CHARITY

7/15/2014

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Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker wrote:
 
It is through Charity that one learns to forget oneself for Charity has its existence not “in” but “out” of self.  God is Charity and the more charitable we are the more we are like God, and as thing that are alike readily unite, it follows that Charity is the most immediate and expeditious means of our union with God.  It is through the practice of Charity that we learn to forget self and the more one forgets himself the more God is watchful of us.  He who has totally forgotten himself is wholly directed by God. 
 
It is only through Charity that God dwells in us.  A true act of Charity is worth immortality; for it has God at is beginning, middle and end.  He who sees only creatures, who has no other love than human or natural affection – will never do an act of Charity.  For true Charity consists in the perfect forgetfulness of self for the good of another.  The greater cannot lose or forget itself in the lesser or the equal, hence for a perfect act of Charity God must be its object.  Three things are necessary in every act of Charity.  1) the impulse of the Holy Spirit, 2) the forgetfulness of self, and 3) the view of God alone in the object.
 
A Response from the Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP

 
“God is love and whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them.”  Here in the first letter of John (1 John 4:6) the evangelist tells us that when we experience selfless acts of love, we experience God.   Servant of God Isaac Hecker uses the word “Charity” in todays’ reflection. Hecker is talking about a certain kind of love, one that Saint Paul writes about in First Corinthians.  It is a virtue, a selfless act that develops into a habit like its sister virtues, faith and hope.  In Hecker’s day it was easier to speak of this virtue as “Charity” whereas today “Charity” implies a singular act of kindness or an organization that imparts assistance.  So in modern usage I prefer to us the words “selfless love” knowing that we are speaking about the virtue of love.
 
Hecker speaks about selfless acts of love, as this kind of love carries the presence of God, when we experience it we experience God and when we act selflessly and lose ourselves, God comes into union with us..  As he writes  that it is only in this way that God dwells within us.”  Hecker attempts to explain the dynamic of selfless love where we let go of our self centeredness and our self-interest.  Hecker notes that we cannot lose ourselves completely in another person, we can only lose ourselves in something greater than ourselves and that is God.  Selfless love is at its core an act of loving God through loving our neighbor.
Hecker ends by writing that there are three things that God into an act of selfless love.  First is that the impulse comes from God the Holy Spirit and not from ourselves.  Second that we forget or let go of ourselves.  Finally, that the object of our letting go is God.  For only in God can we truly let go of ourselves.  Here is the dynamic of selfless love, the virtue of love with its companions, faith and hope that Saint Paul writes about to the Corinthians.
 
If you want  to deepen your experience of God, commit some act of love.  So go out this week and be selfless.  Know that when you forget yourself, God not only watches over you but unites with you in a deeper way.  Its always a risk to let go of self but when done with faith and hope, we meet God who seeks to dwell within us.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington, DC.
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THE FOURTH OF JULY

7/4/2014

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Isaac Hecker and the Fourth of July
 
Here are some short pieces from Hecker’s last book, The Church and the Age (1887).  I think they speak for themselves as Hecker the citizen talks about the founding principles of the nation.
 
Father Paul Robichaud CSP
 
“That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
 
That some of these {declarations} are divine and fundamental truths and all are practical verities having a ground in both reason and revelation.  They are divine inasmuch as they declare the rights of the Creator in His creature; they are fundamental, for without the enjoyment of the natural rights which they proclaim, man is not a man but a slave or a chattel; they are practical for man is, or ought to be, under his Creator, the master of his own destiny and free from any dominion not founded in divine right. The Creator invested man with these rights in order that he might fulfill the duties inseparably attached to them.  For these rights put man in the possession of himself and leave him free to reach the end for which his Creator called him into existence.  He therefore who denies or violates these rights offends God, acts the tyrant and is an enemy of mankind.   And if there is any superior merit in the republican policy of the United States, it consists chiefly in this: that while it adds nothing and can add nothing to man’s natural rights; it expresses them more clearly, guards them more securely, and protects them more effectually; so that man under its popular institutions, enjoys greater liberty in working out his true destiny.
 
Universal suffrage is the most efficient school to awaken general intelligence, to teach a people their rights and to arouse in their bosoms a sense of their human dignity.  For what is a vote? It is the recognition of our intelligence and liberty and responsibility; the qualities that constitute our human dignity.  What is a vote?  It is the admission that our human rights are a factor in political society, and that we have the right to shape and the bounden duty to shape so far as our ability extends, the course of the destiny of our country.  A vote is a practical means by which every voter can exercise their rights and fulfill their duty by making their voice heard in the councils of the nation, it is the practical application of the truth, “that all men” have an equal right “to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and armed with a ballot we have the power of maintaining and protecting these rights.
 
Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker
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