By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – While giving money to charity is a good thing, God expects Christians to do more by giving of themselves to help others, Pope Leo XIV said.

“It is not simply a matter of sharing the material goods we have, but putting our skills, time, love, presence and compassion at the service of others,” the pope told thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square Aug. 10 for the recitation of the Angelus prayer.

Commenting on the day’s Gospel reading, Luke 12:32-48, the pope focused on how Jesus invites his followers to “invest” the treasure that is their lives.

“Everything in God’s plan that makes each of us a priceless and unrepeatable good, a living and breathing asset, must be cultivated and invested in order to grow,” he said.

“Otherwise, these gifts dry up and diminish in value, or they end up being taken away by those who, like thieves, snatch them up as something simply to be consumed.”

“The works of mercy are the most secure and profitable bank” for investing those treasures and talents, the pope said, “because there, as the Gospel teaches us, with ‘two small copper coins’ even the poor widow becomes the richest person in the world.”

Pope Leo urged people to be attentive so that no matter whether they are at home or work or in their parish they do not “miss any opportunity to act with love.”

“This is the type of vigilance that Jesus asks of us: to grow in the habit of being attentive, ready and sensitive to one another, just as he is with us in every moment,” the pope said.

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

We should know that from the very way God was born into our world. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity, but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove his divinity or prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and how God loves us unconditionally.

In essence, Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our lives makes clear that this presence is mostly quiet and under the surface, a plant growing silently as we sleep, yeast leavening dough in a manner hidden from our eyes, spring slowly turning a barren tree green, an insignificant mustard plant eventually surprising us with its growth, a man or woman forgiving an enemy. God works in ways that are seemingly hidden and can be ignored by our eyes. The God that Jesus incarnates is neither dramatic nor flashy.

And there’s an important lesson in this. Simply put, God lies inside us, deep inside, but in a way that is almost unfelt, often unnoticed, and can easily be ignored. However, while that presence is never overpowering, it has inside of it a gentle, unremitting imperative, a compulsion, which invites us to draw upon it. And if we do, it gushes up in us as an infinite stream that instructs, nurtures, and fills us with life and energy.

This is important for understanding how God is present inside us. God lies inside us as an invitation that always respects our freedom and never overpowers us, but also never goes away. It lies there precisely like a baby lying helpless in the straw, gently beckoning us, but helpless in itself to make us pick it up.

For example, C.S. Lewis shares this in explaining why, despite a strong affective and intellectual reluctance, he eventually became a Christian (“the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom”). He became a believer, he says, because he was unable to ultimately ignore a quiet but persistent voice inside him which, because it was gentle and respectful of his freedom, he could ignore for a long time. But it never went away.

In retrospect, he realized it had always been there as an incessant nudge, beckoning him to draw from it, a gentle unyielding imperative, a “compulsion” which, if obeyed, leads to liberation.

Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite and mystic, describes a similar experience. In her autobiography Before the Living God, she tells the story of her late adolescent years and how at that time in her life she thought little about religion and faith. Yet she eventually ends up not only being serious about religion but becoming a Carmelite nun and a gifted spiritual writer. What happened?

Triggered by a series of accidental circumstances, one day she found herself in a chapel where, almost against her conscious will, she left herself open to a voice inside her which she had until then mainly ignored, precisely because it had never forced itself upon her freedom. But once touched, it gushed up as the deepest and most real thing inside her and set the direction of her life forever.

Like C.S. Lewis, she too, once she had opened herself to it, felt that voice as an unyielding moral compulsion opening her to ultimate liberation.

This is true too for me. When I was seventeen years old and graduating from high school, I had no natural desire whatsoever to become a Roman Catholic priest. But, despite a strong affective resistance, I felt a call to enter a religious order and become a Catholic priest. Despite that strong resistance inside me, I obeyed that call, that compulsion. Now, sixty years later, I look back on that decision as the clearest, most unselfish, faith-based, and life-giving decision I have ever made. I could have ignored that beckoning. I’m forever grateful I didn’t.

Fredrick Buechner suggests that God is present inside us as a subterranean presence of grace. The grace of God is “beneath the surface; it’s not right there like the brass band announcing itself, but it comes and it touches and it strikes in ways that leave us free to either not even notice it or to draw back from it.”

God never tries to overwhelm us. More than anyone else, God respects our freedom. God lies everywhere, inside us and around us, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored, a quiet, gentle nudge; but, if drawn upon, the ultimate stream of love and life.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese
As in a responsorial psalm, repeat after me: God is in the obstacle.

Or so they thought. Or so they said. However, for some, in that desert, after a little while, when the buzz quiets, something else takes over – a kind of resistance, acedia. It is not just monks and nuns who suffer this; married people, singles, anyone can fall prey.

Kathleen Norris, in her exceptional book “Acedia & Me,” tells how the word itself has gone through a myriad of definitions since the earliest writings in “The Praktikos” of Evagrius Ponticus (345–399). Some are: “Acedia: the deadly sin of sloth; or spiritual torpor and apathy,” according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “accidie” as heedlessness, torpor … a non-caring state. The Online Medical Dictionary describes “acedia” as a mental syndrome whose chief features are listlessness, carelessness, apathy and melancholia.

Repeat: God is in the obstacle.

When the seeker would ask about this struggle, Abba Poemen would advise: “Watchfulness, self-knowledge, and discernment. These are the guides of the soul,” according to “Desert Fathers and Mothers” by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
Isadore of Pelusia offered this: “Many desire virtue, but fear to go forward on the way that leads to it, while others consider that virtue does not even exist. So, it is necessary to persuade the former to give up their habitual idleness, and to teach the others what virtue really is.”

Amma Syncletica said there is an asceticism determined by the enemy and practiced by his disciples. She asked, “How are we to distinguish between the divine and demonic tyranny?” Her answer was: “We must arm ourselves in every way against the demons. For they attack us from outside, and they also stir us up from within; and the soul is like a ship when great waves break over it, and it sinks because the hold is too full,” as recorded in “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers” by Benedicta Ward. And you ask, how is God in the obstacle?

Amma Theodora, renowned for her wisdom, tells us it is good to live in peace, practicing perpetual prayer. “However,” she says, “you should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul through accidie, faintheartedness and evil thoughts. It also attacks your body through sickness, debility, weakening of the knees and all the members. It dissipates the strength of the soul and body, so that one believes one is ill and no longer able to pray,” also from “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.”

Yes, you’ve had this experience. You sit down to pray, feeling quite good, knowing you will talk with God … when you remember your shopping list, calling your mother or watering the plants. It will only take a minute, so you do that thing. Then the phone rings, the TV goes off, the kids pack in from school … and it keeps happening. Those little demons of distress wiggle into your soul, and it seems there’s not much you can do about the indifference, weariness, lax intentions or dryness that grows.

Cassian wrote that “if we are overcome by sloth or carelessness and spend our time in idle gossip, or are entangled in the cares of this world and unnecessary anxieties, the result will be that a sort of species of tares will spring up and occupy our hearts, and as our Lord and Savior says, wherever the treasure of our works or purpose may be, there also our heart is sure to continue.”

Sloth is a culpable lack of physical or spiritual effort; acedia or laziness. One of the capital sins, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, sins are called “capital” because “they engender other sins or vices.” (1866) This spiritual effort manifests itself mainly during prayer and in the life of one given to God; this is a disaster. “Someone said to Antony, ‘Pray for me.’ The old man said to him, ‘I will have no mercy upon you, nor will God have any, if you yourself do not make an effort,’” writes Benedicta Ward from Carrigan’s “The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.”

Acedia in full bloom looks like frustration or weariness, experienced as sadness – “sadness in relation to a spiritual good … a retreat from the divine good itself,” as St. Thomas Aquinas says in “Summa Theologica.” I just don’t care. I can’t be bothered.

Kenneth Russell, in his article in “Review for Religious,” writes that “acedia is a gray morning’s inclination not to intensify the original yes to God, community or spouse … choose to swim no further. … What they really opt for is some means of control over their own comfort. … The victims of acedia tread water and console their anxieties with sleep or attempt to dissipate them in one distraction after another.”

David of Augsburg (d. 1272) described “accidie” in three kinds: the first is bitterness of mind that cannot be pleased by anything cheerful or wholesome; the second, a kind of indolent torpor loving sleep and comfort; and the third, “a weariness in such things as belong to God, praying without devotion, rushing through, thinking of other things as not to be bored.” Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale” notes that “envy and anger cause bitterness, which is the mother of acedia, and takes from a man the love of all goodness. Then is acedia the anguish of the troubled heart; as St. Augustine says, ‘It is the sadness of goodness and the joy of evil.’”

How can God be here?

It has been a very hot summer; maybe your prayer is distressed? Think of the Noonday Devil, as acedia is often called – for at the height of noon the sun beats down, the pray-er is hungry, nothing is going right, and one could not be convinced God is in these obstacles. Give up. But I was meant for this – this community, this vocation, this spouse. Or was I? The demon of doubt squeaks in. This is where my talent lies – the very one given to me by God, you try to think. Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur, quipped: “Talent without effort is wasted talent. And while effort is the one thing we can control, applying that effort intelligently is next on the list.”

Finally, Abbot Jean-Charles Nault, OSB, sums it up when he writes that “acedia is the enemy of spiritual joy … a profound withdrawal into self to save one’s freedom at any price … no longer any room for an abandonment to the other or for the joy of gift. What remains is sadness or bitterness … distancing oneself, separated from others and likewise separated from God,” as he wrote in “Enemy of Spiritual Joy” in Communio journal.

What to do: Intensify your prayer. Don’t look for distractions. Be vigilant. Don’t settle for being less than you can. Don’t refuse responsibility. Do for others. Search for God in the obstacles. Life in God is not a spectator sport.

“And should our branches be broken off by negligence, carelessness, disdain or ruin, may these reckless prunings carry even more significance as symbols of peace in a broken world,” wrote Sister M. Guider, OSF.

God is in the obstacles.

God has found you.

Blessings.

(sister alies therese is a canonical hermit who prays and writes.)