Emerging from the Crisis - One Catholic At A Time: How to Find God ... and Discover Your True Self in the Process

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JMJ

It is clear that the Catholic Church will not emerge from the crisis because we simply want and pray for it to happen.

We need to start with ourselves.

My wife is reading a book on Catholic Spirituality written by Dom Hubert Van Zeller in 1957. She compared this gem to her understanding of the spirituality of Archbishop Lefebvre.

While tempted to compare the behaviour of Pope Francis and others to the principles that I have quoted below - we need to honestly compare our own perspective and extract the beam out of our own eye first.

P^3

How To Find God ... and Discover Your True Self in the Process available from Sophia Press.

You must run after spiritual heroism

Almost every excess in the spiritual life, then, can be traced to a desire for God that will not wait, to homesickness for a home that we have never been to, but of which we know enough to realize that we shall never be happy anywhere else. God spells for us security, rest, and belonging. 

If we thought of God more in the terms of what He has revealed about Himself and less in terms of what we shall feel when we have found Him, we would be less liable to error in our approach. We tend to dwell too long upon the idea of finding rest in Heaven and the sense of permanent belonging; to little upon the idea of Heaven being a person and our belonging eternally to Him.

It is only the most superficial singularities in a persons service of God that represent the desire to overplay a part. The real singularities that represent a real part are those that spring from an untamed spiritual yearning. These if not corrected can lead to false mysticism, heresy, presumption, and despair. It is a serious as that. 

The argument for substantiation of the above is, is simply this: nothing so promotes self deception as undisciplined desire.  The appetites can create a sense of urgency and a sense of reality that are quite untrue. Giving himself a liberty to which he has no right, the man who is self-deceived assumes and inside knowledge about all the things that normally call for faith.

It is not that such a man is possessed of insufficient faith. In a sense he is possessed of too much. He believes where there are no grounds for belief, he has substituted faith in himself for Faith in God.

It is not that such a man pays to little attention to the inner voice that tells him what to do. In a sense, he pays too much attention to it - and hears it entirely wrong. He listens only for his own inspiration, not for God's.

Nobody can tell such a man that he is deluded; he knows that the saints have had to endure the same charge. Authority itself may oppose him; but he is ready for that too. "In the company of the Saints and Mystics" he says "I am not subject to ordinary legislation". It is simply, he tells himself sadly, that these material people who criticize him do not understand the ways of the spirit.

There is nobody so well-entrenched or who can take such risks within his entrenchment as the martyred soul. Where the opinions of others might have inhibited him before, now it seems to uninhibit him. Stimulated by the conception of being one lonely voice raised against the majority opinion, the false apostle of spirituality rises majestically above the clamour.