Blog Archives

HECKER REFLECTION: HOME IN GOD

11/18/2014

Servant of God, Isaac Thomas Hecker wrote on reflecting on passages of ““Showings of Divine Love,” by Juliana of Norwich (1342-1416)

The soul is at home in God as a man under his own roof, or a babe is in the arms of its mother. It is so true that man is not himself till he has found his home: in God. Mother Juliana wrote: “Highly are we to enjoy that God dwells in our soul; and more highly are we to enjoy that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is made to be God’s dwelling place: and the dwelling of our soul is God, which is unmade. It is a high understanding to inwardly see and know that God, who is our Maker dwells in our soul, and it is a higher understanding to more inwardly see and know that our soul which is created, dwells in God’s substance; and so we are what we are, by God.”

(Again Mother Julianna writes) “The cause for which we battle and suffer is the unknowing of love. For some believe God is almighty and may do all; and that God is all wisdom and can do all; but here is where we fail, not believing that God is all love and will do all. This unknowing is the greatest obstacle to God’s lovers.”

Quotes from
Isaac Thomas Hecker CSP

A Response from Paul Robichaud CSP:

Father Hecker whose spirituality was grounded in his belief in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit cites Julian of Norwich’s “Showings.” Julian writes that through the Holy Spirit present in the soul, God the Trinity finds a dwelling place in each of us. That the very being of God sits within our created being. But she is not content with the fact that God dwells within us. Because God has found a dwelling place in our souls, we have within us extraordinary possibility. Because we dwell in the very substance of God, within each of us is the door, the gateway to God. Father Hecker, filled with hope and believing in extraordinary possibility, must have loved reading Juliana’s words, “we are what we are by God.” God continues the process of creating us and bringing us to fulfillment.

Father Hecker cites a second text from Juliana. For Juliana the problem of sin and evil comes from lack of knowledge, what she calls “unknowing.” Julian writes about the feminine as well as the masculine attributes of God. God as father has power and goodness and God as mother has wisdom and love, drawn from the courtly culture of the high middle ages. The greatest obstacle to faith is not the “knowing” of God’s power but the “knowing” of God’s love. If we are to use the gateway to God within our being, we need to be lovers as well as doers in order to grow closer to God.

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.

HECKER REFLECTION: GOD'S PROVIDENCE

11/14/2014

God’s Providence

Let it cost what it may. We must be willing to give up what is comfortable in our present and future to the infinitely wise action of Divine Providence (God’s will). 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 today that we have not received by being faithful to God and trusting in His Providence? God has not changed His Providence towards us and we in turn should not change our conduct towards God. “

“Know that no one who has hoped in God has been confounded for God is a protection to all who seek Him in truth.” “Be stout-hearted and wait for the Lord. Woe to them who are faint-hearted, who believe not in God for they shall not be protected.” (Eccl 2) If you wish to know the perfect abandonment to Divine Providence? Look to Mount Calvary and the blessed limbs of our Lord nailed upon the cross! That is where it led him whose food it was to do the will of his heavenly Father.”

Commentary by Father 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, that God provide 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 are 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 Father Hecker writes addresses. 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 occurs when our will and God’s will are aligned. Hecker writes 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 to let go and trust that God will lead us through the difficult moments when we say, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” 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 deepen both our faith and our prayer life.

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.

HECKER REFLECTION: LOVE AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

11/4/2014

Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker wrote:

Man is a dependent being and cannot live by himself alone. Without loving something the soul would not exist. To say that we renounce all consolations and pleasures is to pretend the impossible. When the saints, for example St. John of the Cross, speaks of the necessity of refusing all consolations and pleasures, he means that we must replace the love of creatures with the love of the Creator; the sensual pleasures of the passions for the spiritual consolations of Jesus Christ our Divine Spouse.

The laws of spiritual life are like the laws of anything else; no one is expected to give up the greater for the less. For unless the superior part of the soul experiences greater ardor for spiritual things than the movements of its passions, the soul will not overcome the pleasure of which sensual things are the occasion. This is St. John of the Cross, and he says again: “It is necessary that the soul should be embraced with a holy love of her Divine Spouse, so that in placing all her pleasure in her Spouse she may receive the strength and constancy to reject the love of all other objects. (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 50.1 chap 14 p. 105)

A Response by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP:

Servant of God Isaac Hecker writes about love and the spiritual life. The first is fundamental to all humanity which is personal relationships. As social beings we live in a network of relationships. We need and often become dependent on each other. Infants need to he held and nurtured and seniors as they grow older rely on others to assist them. Some adults think they can separate and become completely independent. As Father Hecker says this is impossible. We can attempt to live totally separate lives but only to a point. We are constructed to need other persons in our lives. As Father Hecker writes, we cannot live for ourselves alone. Personhood is a part of our spiritual lives as well; for the most important relationship is with the person of God; a relationship we call faith. Father Hecker writes, “Without loving something the soul would not exist.” Just as the Trinity is a community of persons, so as Catholic Christians, our faith is communal. Our relationship with the persons of God serves to bind us together with each other; making us the people of God.

The second is an understanding of prayer that is developed in the writings of Saint Theresa of Avila and her disciple, Saint John of the Cross. Called a “Mystical Union;” it is the highest degree of mystical life possible in a relationship with God. It is the seventh room in Saint Theresa’s classic work on mystical prayer, The Interior Castle; and it is understood that the saint reached this stage of union with God in the last years of her life. There are three stages of prayer that comprise the journey to a mystical union. The first is the prayer of union where the soul is deeply aware of God’s presence. The second is the prayer of ecstatic union where the mystical union between God and the soul grows so that the body falls into ecstasy. The famous Bernini statue of Saint Theresa in Ecstasy depicts this stage. Finally in the prayer of transforming union, the soul gives itself to God completely and the soul is completely transformed by God’s love and shares in God’s life as fully as is possible in this life. In a general audience in March 1982, Blessed John Paul II referred to the mystical union as an appropriate prayer form for celibate clergy and religious to practice in support of their vows. Just as Father Hecker understands relationships as fundamental to the human person, so as a follower of Saint Theresa of Avila, he understood the highest possible relationship to be with God in a mystical union.

Father Paul Robichaud CSP, is the 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.