Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, C.S.P.
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HECKER AS SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR PT.V: TRANSFORMATION

10/7/2013

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Transformation by grace;

Self-love (selfish acts, self-centeredness) is like a cancer whose roots extend to the most delicate fibers of our mental and moral nature.  Divine grace can remove them but slowly and painfully; the more subtle the selfishness the more painful the cure.

How can the intellect be brought under the direction of divine grace except by reducing it and how can this be done without placing it in utter darkness?  How can the heart be filled with divine love if it is already filled?  How can it be purified except by dryness and bitterness?  God wishes to fill our minds and our hearts with divine light and love to deify our nature, to make us one with God whom we represent.  How can God do this except by removing from our souls all that is contrary to God?

All your difficulties are favors from God but you see them from the wrong side.  You speak of them like a block of marble that is being chiseled would speak, not realizing that you are being transformed into a sculpture.  When God purifies the soul, it cries out like a small child that is having his face washed. The soul’s attention must be turned away from what is happening around us and turned inward towards God in order to come into union with Him.  This transformation is a great, painful and wonderful work.  And it is all the more painful and all the more difficult in proportion to the soul’s attraction to transitory things.


RESPONSE: FR. PAUL ROBICHAUD, CSP

A reflection on the Incarnation found in the preaching of the early fathers of the Church, especially Saints Athanasius and Augustine states that God has become man in Jesus Christ so that we in turn may become like God.  Jesus has come to make us children of the Father filled with divine light and love.  In our reflection today from Servant of God, Isaac Hecker, he tells us that the process of our transformation in Christ is a painful experience.  The more our minds and hearts are filled and are focused in the wrong direction, the more difficult and the more painful is the process of transformation by grace.  Father Hecker says that God seeks union with us through grace.  God seeks to dwell within our very being and in that process we are transformed.  But if our minds and hearts are full, there is no place for God just as there was no place for the holy family when they arrived at Bethlehem. 

Oftentimes in our lives we go through periods of emptiness, frustration and aloneness.  These difficult moments seem to happen to us as a part of our humanity.  We see them as loss.  Father Hecker suggests they just might be cathartic – an emptying experience which God uses to transform us.  He reminds us that oftentimes at our core of our being is self-centeredness and self-importance.  But we have to get over ourselves if we are to make room within for God.  We see the difficult moments of our lives as pain and loss, where Father Hecker sees them as gain.  He says, “all your difficulties are favors from God.”  Like a chisel on a block of marble, what is being cut away is making us new and empowered.  We feel the sharpness of the chisel, God sees the beauty of what He is creating.

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 D.C.


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HECKER AS SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR PT IV: GOD'S GUIDANCE

10/3/2013

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Here is Father Hecker on developing a spiritual life.  This material is drawn from “Father Hecker’s Spiritual Doctrine” as found in Walter Elliott’s The Life of Father Hecker (1891).

God’s Guidance
 

God’s guidance is of two kinds: one is of God’s external providence in the circumstances of life; the other is internal in the direct action of the Holy Spirit on the human soul. There is great danger in separating these two. The key to many spiritual problems is found in this truth: the direct action of the Holy Spirit upon the soul, which is interior, is in harmony with God’s external providence. Sanctity consists in making them identical as motives for every thought, word and deed in our lives. The external and the internal are one in God and consciousness of both is to be one divine whole in man. To do this requires heroic life sanctity.
 
St. Alphonsus says, “all sacraments of the Church, her authority, prayer both mental and vocal, spiritual reading, fasting and devotion, have for their end and purpose to lead the soul to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” St. Alphonsus says in his letters that the first director of the soul is the Holy Spirit. “The guide to the soul is the Holy Spirit and the criterion or test of possessing that guide is the divine authority of the Church.” 
 
The holy Council of Trent teaches that without an interior movement of the indwelling Holy Spirit no act of the soul can be meritorious of heaven. It bases human justification on an impulse of the Third Person of the Trinity. This impulse precedes the soul’s acts of faith, hope and love and of sorrow for sin. The first stage then is the entering of the Holy Spirit into the inner life of the soul. The Holy Spirit is received by the sacramental grace of baptism and renewed by the other sacraments; also in prayer, hearing sermons, reading the Scriptures or devout books and on occasions; extraordinary or ordinary, in the course of daily life. Each movement of virtue, especially love, hope, faith and repentance is made because the Holy Spirit has acted upon the soul in an efficacious manner.


RESPONSE: FR. PAUL ROBICHAUD, CSP

For Servant of God Isaac Hecker, the movement of God’s Spirit in our lives, or what Hecker calls “God’s guidance,” happens in two ways, internal and external. God’s Spirit dwells within us through baptism and moves and prompts us towards acts of faith, hope and love. At the same time, externally God speaks to us in the circumstances of our lives.  God guides us internally and externally. Father Hecker says that these two paths of God’s guidance should never be separated but rather should merge together within our spiritual lives. “the external and internal are one in God.” And for Father Hecker they should be one in us.
 
This begins internally when the Spirit which we have received in baptism moves us to acts of faith, hope and love. To this Father Hecker adds, repentance of sin. As we open ourselves to the experience of God’s internal promptings, so virtue or the disposition to do good, grows in us. Virtue becomes habit forming as we grow in grace. The other sacraments as well as spiritual exercises such as prayer and spiritual reading become means for the Spirit to deepen His presence and His guidance within us. At the same time Father Hecker reminds us that just as the sacraments are external signs of an internal action of God, so the internal and external should not be separated. God is at work in our lives, guiding us in the ordinary and extraordinary events of our daily lives. As we grow in holiness so we seek to merge the internal and external guidance of God. As Father Hecker says, this much more difficult task requires heroic (far more than ordinary) holiness. It represents an ultimate challenge in our lives to grow in God’s grace.
 
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 D.C.
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