The Spiritual Blessings That Make Possible Our Being Holy and Blameless in God’s Sight, 28th Thursday (II), October 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila
October 15, 2020
Eph 1:1-10, Ps 98, Lk 11:47-54

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today we begin two weeks of study of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which is one of the most uplifting and synthetic of all the great apostle’s teaching of the early Church, in which he makes plain God the Father’s plan and will to bring all things into a union of love through the work of Christ his Son continued and carried out in his body the Church. At the very beginning of the letter, which we have today, St. Paul describes what God has done for us and what he asks of us. It’s important for us to ponder these truths often, especially when we are having a bad day or are tempted to forget who we are.
  • St. Paul begins by reminding us of how blessed we are to be Christians: the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” God held nothing back. There are no blessings we haven’t been given. And we’ve been given those blessings not just through Christ but in Christ who is the greatest blessing of all. God’s greatest blessing is himself.
  • He then reminds us of our vocation: God chose us in Christ, “before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.” Before God said, “Let there be light” and “Let us make man in our image,” he not only had us in mind but chose us and he gave us the vocation to be saints, to be holy and immaculate before him. If he’s given us this vocation, he will provide the means, and those means constitute the “every spiritual blessing in Christ” his Son.
  • He then reminds us of our filiation and inheritance: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.” In St. Paul’s day, when someone was adopted, he was treated identically to a biologically child; if he were older than the eldest biological child, he received all the rights of primogeniture. For St. Paul to talk about our being adopted, he means that we have received the full inheritance of Jesus! How can we not praise the glory of this grace?
  • Though obviously we’re sinners and fallen, God has taken that into consideration as well from before the creation of the world. “In Christ, we have redemption by his Blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace that he has lavished upon us.” He has lavished his mercy upon us in Christ, as part of “every spiritual blessing.”
  • And he has also made plain his plan so that we can cooperate freely and fully with it: “In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.” The mystery is now an open secret: God wants to bring us into communion, communion with God, communion with each other. He wants us to grasp that all of creation is part of God’s plan of love. Christ’s mission is to restore to unity the various divisions that entered through sin.
• That’s God’s blessing, calling, help and plan, but he has made us free and each of us needs to respond to that plan by embracing it and letting our whole life develop in accordance with it. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, “The Lord has made known his salvation,” but we’re called to “sing a new song to the Lord for he has done wondrous deeds.” That’s obviously what the saints do, letting God’s blessing in Christ develop within them so that, redeemed and forgiven by his blood, they might become holy and immaculate. But unfortunately not everyone has received the Lord’s love in that way. Others have rejected it.
• We glimpse that rejection in the rejection of Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel. Jesus says to them, “Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets whom your fathers killed. Consequently, you bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them and you do the building.” God never ceases to send prophets to his people to reveal “the mystery of his will,” but Jesus was saying that the people that God had chosen to be his own, the people he had prepared in order to accomplish his plan in the fullness of time to bring his salvation as a light to the nations, only would honor prophets after they rejected and killed them. A dead prophet was safe; a living prophet was a challenge. In building these memorials, they would delude themselves into thinking they had embraced God and his messenger, whereas they were repeating the same faults as their ancestors, by rejecting those whom God continued to send, something seen in the life of St. John the Baptist and especially in Jesus’ own life as they “began to act with hostility toward him” and “were plotting to catch him at something he might say.” Their lack of receptivity is meant to be a warning to us, lest we just build memorials for the prophets the Jews killed or, worse, just build a static memorial for Jesus — and not receive God’s spiritual blessings, not be holy and without blame before him, not behave as his children, not bathe in his blood, and not enter into communion and let our whole life be summed up by Christ.
• Today we celebrate a saint who, redeemed by Jesus’ blood, eventually become holy and without blemish before him. When she was seven, she took great pleasure in the lives of the saints, making a little hermitage in her back yard where she could read and pray. One day her younger brother Rodrigo was in the back yard with her and they began to think about the happiness of the saints in heaven and got caught up in the thought of living “forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.” Rodrigo asked how they could get to heaven fastest, and Teresa replied that that would be through martyrdom, because the sufferings of the martyrs were nothing compared with the glory they received immediately upon death. Rodrigo asked how they could become martyrs and she said that they would need to go where the Muslims were in order to be killed by them for the faith. Rodrigo asked where the Muslims were and she told him in Morocco. And so off they went walking toward Morocco, forgetting — we can excuse 7 and 5 year olds! — the small geographical complication that there was the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and northern Africa! They got outside the city walls and as far as the ancient Roman Adaja Bridge when they were met by their Uncle Francisco coming back on his horse from hunting who asked them where they were headed. When informed they were heading to Africa to be martyred by the Moors, he told them he would give them a ride on his horse. After they hopped on, he took them back to their home! The episode shows the faith and courage of Teresa from an early age, how she longed to be holy and without blemish:  she was willing to suffer even earthly tortures — like the stories of the martyrs she read with her brother — for the sake of the Gospel. That deep desire never left her, but over the course of time, it attenuated. She entered the Carmelite monastery when she was 20, but the house was in a spiritual malaise. Some nuns had suites of rooms, with servants and pets. Eventually she succumbed to it herself, spending vast amounts of time entertaining visitors and friends in the parlor, giving herself over to various compromises with worldliness and vanity. It was only two decades later, when she was 39, that God reawakened her from her life according to the flesh, from her spiritual worldliness, from tolerating venial sins, trusting in herself, not valuing God’s grace, to a truly fervent life. She gave herself over to God and allowed herself to be led to reform Carmelite life as a whole. The Holy Spirit revivified her desire for holiness, for happiness, for heaven and he guided her through all the stages necessary to give her a foretaste of heavenly union here on earth through prayer. We prayed at the beginning of Mass that God “who through your Spirit raised up Saint Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection” would “grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness.” Her life shows us the way to seek perfection by responding to Jesus’ blessing, his mercy, his call to turn with him always, with longing, and to do everything — including suffer, live and die — with him.
• Her writings described the various stages on which God led her and leads us along the way of perfection. She used the image of an Interior Castle with seven “mansions” (each containing many rooms) of prayer and the spiritual life which leads to it and flows from it. The first mansion begins in the state of grace, but involves a lot of fighting against sin, especially pride. People are pulled by the material world and a desire for possessions, honor and power. The second mansion happens when the person seeks to advance through the castle through daily prayer, thoughts of God, humble recognition of God’s work in the soul, sermons, edifying conversations, good company and other means. The third mansion happens when, moved by grace, the person has a love for God so great that the person has a total aversion to all sin including venial and a desire to do works of love for others for God’s glory. The person begins to have less self-reliance and become more dependent on God. The person has generally reached a high standard of virtue, self-discipline, penance and prudence. These are all stages that are meant to happen in everyone who follows the guidance of the Holy Spirit in ordinary Catholic life. The fourth stage is one of contemplative prayer, when the person no longer seeks to acquire or grow by one’s own efforts but allows God to lead, even in prayer. The person begins to attach lesser importance to the things of this world and far more to God. The person decreases and God increases and experiences many spiritual consolations, like the prayer of Quiet. It no longer shrinks from trials. The fifth mansion begins an experience of union of wills in which the person develops a complete trust in God’s will. There’s no longer a need to control events or lose much time over petty worries, something that opens the person to receive more and more gifts from God. It’s a spiritual betrothal and the faculties of the soul can often go “asleep” in prayer as the soul is completely possessed by God. The sixth mansion is when the person is torn away from outside afflictions and begins to experience not just a betrothal but a love between Lover and Beloved that lasts for long periods of time full of intimacy. It often involves some intense suffering (physical, spiritual, often misunderstanding from others and occasionally a sense of abandonment comparable to the pains of hell) in which through the Cross one’s union with God and longing for God grows. The person begins to become increasingly occupied in the things of God and can have difficulty in every day practical issues. In the seventh mansion, there is a spiritual marriage in which two candles become one, where there is complete transformation and profound peace, when inadvertent venial sins are still possible but there’s great fruitfulness in prayer and action. The person can now continue to fulfill his or her duties without difficulty because there’s a union with God in doing them. The person is engaged fully in the service of God and others with great calm and self-forgetfulness. St. Teresa invited all her sisters through all of these stages of spiritual progress by opening themselves up to the every spiritual blessing that comes from God. She considered it within the reach of everyone who allows the Holy Spirit to lead. She would encourage us to abandon ourselves to the Holy Spirit and let him lead us through the various rooms of each mansion according to God’s pace until, God-willing, we enter into the mansions where we, with her, will live and love God “forever and ever and ever.”
• St. Teresa drew her strength from the Eucharist, which enfleshes every spiritual blessing. She advised us in her Way of Perfection, “After having received the Lord, since you have the Person Himself present, strive to close the eyes of the body and open those of the soul and look into your heart. For I tell you again, and would like to tell you many times that you should acquire the habit of doing this every time. … Though He comes disguised, the disguise, as I have said, does not prevent Him from being recognized in many ways, in conformity with the desire we have to see Him. And you can desire to see Him so much that He will reveal Himself to you entirely” (34:12). She wrote in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, “I think that if we were to approach the Most Blessed Sacrament with great faith and love, once would be enough to make us rich. How much richer from approaching so many times as we do. The trouble is we do so out of routine, and it shows” (M 3.13).
• As we prepare now not to build a memorial of wood or stone, but to enter into Jesus’ new and eternal zikkaron, “do[ing] this in memory of” him. He is the one who is every spiritual blessing in the heavens, the one who transforms us into “sons in the Son,” the one who seeks to redeem us by his precious blood, the one who wishes to bring us in communion and confirm us in our vocation and mission to the praise of his glory. We ask him to send the Holy Spirit so that we will respond to this loving, exhaustive action of the Lord differently from those in the Gospel who reject God’s action, but rather like St. Teresa of Jesus.  Today through her intercession we ask for that gift so that through the Eucharistic transformation that Jesus wishes to work within us, we may become holy and without blemish before him and come at last with her to that place that God has planned for us since before the foundation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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