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.

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.

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.

Servant of God Isaac Hecker wrote:

Lack of hope is the most ordinary fault of religious people.  We sin more against hope than any other virtue.  We need to be cheerful and perform frequent acts of encouragement, make it our study and our meditation.  Throw all your care on God and put all your confidence in Him.  This is what God wishes of us.  What have we that we have not received by being faithful to the conduct of His providence?  God has not changed His providence towards us, should we then change our conduct towards Him.  “No one who has hoped in the Lord has been confounded.  God is a protection to all who seek him in truth.  Wait on God with patience; join yourself to God and endure.”

A Response from Father Paul Robichaud CSP:

One of the principal virtues that Servant of God Father Isaac Hecker practiced was the virtue of hope.  Living among the Transcendentalists (the spiritual but not religious romantic intellectuals of his day) Hecker refused to give up on organized religion as they had.  In an age of strong anti-Catholicism both in the political and popular culture of his time, Hecker believed this was an opportunity to evangelize Protestant America by boldly preaching the Catholic faith.  Even late in his life when he suffered from debilitating leukemia that often left him without the energy; he often appeared to outsiders and guests as engaged, involved and full of life.  During his most difficult period when he was chronically tired, he still managed to complete the draft of his fourth book God and Man.  Hecker lived the virtue of hope in so many ways, believing that in God’s providence the future God has planned was brighter than the past.
 
“We sin more against hope than any other virtue,” says Hecker the great optimist.   The opposite of hope falls on a spectrum that goes from cynicism to real fear of the future; from giving up and not trying because something looks too difficult to actual fear about the future.  Yet as Christians the Gospel teaches us about the triumph of the Risen Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of God.  We know the story ends with Christ’s triumph therefore we should live in hope with confidence and trust in 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.

Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker wrote:
 
Our hope is not in ourselves but in God the Most High; for God orders all things with power and disposes of them with gentleness.  We must not look to human kind, but to the will of God which as Saint Alphonsus Liguori says, “sets all things to right.”  The more helpless our situation, the more we should trust in God!  Why?  Because God created us out of nothing by His goodness alone.  Every workman loves the work of his own hands.   The nature of goodness is to expand, to express itself.  It surrounds us to make us happy.
 
Our confidence should increase with the rage of the storm and our joy should be greatest when danger is present; because God is the protector of all who trust in Him.  God will clothe us more beautifully than the lilies, feast us more sumptuously than the birds, esteem us to be of more value than the sparrows and not forget all of our wantsl.  Not even a hair on our head falls to the ground without God’s notice.  He will prepare us the right path when we are lost and be our defender in times of trouble.  The Lord is our light, our hope,  our strength, our life and our love.  The Lord gives to those in need with superabundance.  And in due season he will give us the fullness of our desires.  The Lord is our protector of whom should we fear?

RESPONSE: FR. PAUL ROBICHAUD, CSP

“Our hope is not in ourselves but in God” says Servant of God Isaac Hecker.  Before we congratulate ourselves for a job well done or get down on ourselves for problems we face, it is important for us to realize we are not alone.  God is there watching over what God has created.  Father Hecker reminds us that our origins are in God, for we are not only made in God’s imagwe, we were fashioned by God.  Hecker writes, “every workman loves the work of his own hands.”  That was brought home to me recently when a close friend of mine who restores classic cars took me out in his 1931 Packard roadster. He had spent 10 years rebuilding this beautiful automobile and on a magnificent  summer  day we motored through small towns in southern New England.  It was evident to me that my friend and his car had become one entity.  So it is with God and us, God made us, is within us and acts through us.  God seeks to unite with us if only we open ourselves to Him.
 
Father Hecker goes further for he encourages us to trust in God’s presence, especially in when we face critical and difficult moments.  The greater the danger the more we need to trust.  This fundamental trust in God is not just something Father Hecker writes about but it comes out of his life experience.  Hecker has been characterized as a man of incredible hope.  As he often said, the best times lie ahead and not behind.  He speaks poetically paraphrasing  Matthew 6:28.  God will clothe us more beautifully than lilies and answer all of our wants.   So let us be people of hope.  Let us take seriously the promise of Jesus that he has overcome the world – and that includes our personal worlds.  Let God be our hope and sour strength, our light and our love.
 
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.