The ongoing exodus experience, of conversion, is a true ecstasy, a coming out of ourselves in the discovery of God’s self, a greater love of the One who loves us. It’s a call for constantly having a renewed attitude of conversion. Sometimes, conversion has to be met on the level of our attitudes. The conversion of our heart, what’s going on in our heart, the emotions, the moods, all of these things, the thoughts in our minds, all of that is expressed in attitude.

From there comes disposition because when truth goes from the mind to the heart, it goes deeper and takes root in us; it becomes disposition, which is how I’m disposed towards somebody or something. Conversion of heart, as St. Paul says, means ‘being transformed by the renewal of our mind’ (Romans 12:1-2) that we may know what is God’s will and choose it. In other words, our attitude and our disposition enables us to go from what is good to what is pleasing and perfect; to go from good, to better, and to best; to not settle for less, to always strive to grow from the abundance of what God has and what God wants to give.

In order for us to do this, we have to have the right attitude, Mary’s attitude; the openness, the receptivity, docility that comes from surrender and humility and trust, and obedience. That’s the attitude that allows our souls to be cultivated and fertilized in order to bear fruit, and one that is so important for the conversion of heart. Saint Paul says that from conversion comes transformation, “an incessant moving forward.”

What you think when you hear that – an incessant moving forward? That excites and encourages me. In other words, God never becomes stale. God never becomes boring. Other things can become boring, but God doesn’t become boring. An incessant moving forward means what one great mystical theologian calls, the mystical evolution, an ongoing transformation, an incessant going forward.

According to St. Paul, we go ‘from glory to glory, from strength to strength.’ We’re always in a state of growth. In other words, ‘I don’t want to stay in the same stage of spiritual life for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be like the Israelites, going in circles for 40 years before going into the Promised Land. I want to be always growing in my relationship with God, knowing how God is alive in me and expresses Himself in my life. I always want to be growing in that love story and ongoing maturity,’ as St. Paul says, ‘to the extent of the full stature of Christ.’

What’s the full stature of Christ? Transfiguration, resurrection – that’s our destiny. When we see Christ risen and transfigured, it’s not only who He is in His divinity, but it’s who we are called to be, for we have been given a share into adoption through grace; that’s who we are in our deepest self, and that’s how we have to always be, in a state of moving forward and allowing God to come to fruition in us.

According to Pope Francis, “This liberating exodus toward Christ and our brothers and sisters also represents the way for us to fully understand our common humanity.” To hear and answer the Lord’s call is not a private and completely personal matter fraught with momentary emotion; it’s much deeper than that. Rather, it is “a specific, real, and total commitment which embraces the whole of our existence and sets it at the service of the growth of God’s kingdom.” Finally Pope Francis says, “the Christian vocation, [is] rooted in the contemplation of the father’s heart” – that’s his preface, but that’s so important.

Our first vocation is to worship God, to worship the Lord because that’s what the reality of heaven is. It is the festival, the fiesta, the celebration of worship, the exaltation, the human being fully alive in the glory of God. The Christian vocation rooted in the contemplation of the Father’s heart inspires us to solidarity in bringing liberation to our brothers and sisters, especially the poorest.

Pope Francis adds, “A disciple of Jesus has a heart open to His unlimited horizons.” We must allow our hearts to be open to Jesus’s limited unlimited horizons. This is what I hope and trust that the Lord Jesus is going to manifest to you according to your receptivity. According to your openness to His unlimited horizons, He will pour out His heart to yours.

Our exodus is up to us, but what makes us open? Faith and hope. As St. Therese says, confidence in His merciful love. If we have a little confidence, we’ll get a little from Him, but if you have unlimited confidence in the unlimited horizon of His heart you will receive a whole lot. May we be open to enlarge our hearts to God’s heart, and to gaze upon His face that me may receive an outpouring of his grace, in Jesus’s divine, most merciful, and most holy name, Amen.

SOURCE: Consecrated Life Retreat, New Mexico 2016, transcribed by Teresa Linda, ocds

Copyright 2017, Father Robert Barcelos, OCD

The Holy Father writes, “Hearing and following the voice of Christ, the Good Shepherd, means letting ourselves be attracted and guided by Him.” John Paul II would use charmed by Jesus. Have you ever felt that way before? If you haven’t that’s alright, and if you have, I hope and pray in the Holy Spirit that Jesus is going to charm your socks off; that He is going to charm you, and woo you, and school you in what it means to be loved by Him because His love is the cause of our joy.

Mary always wants to communicate, what it means to be loved by God. Our Blessed Mother blows me away. No human being, ever before or during or after, could possibly ever love God as much as Mary did. Nobody could love God as much as Mary did and does. There’s no heart ever that loved God as much as she. There’s nothing, there’s no heart more beautiful than hers. Mary is the most beautiful human being imaginable, and as the cause of our joy, she wants us to enter into that beauty.

Mary’s mission of charity is that we enter into the beauty of what it means to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and especially to know His love for us; to know how God loves us with all His heart, mind, soul, and strength; to let ourselves be attracted and charmed by Him, guided by Him.

We must allow the Holy Spirit to draw us into this missionary dynamism, as Pope Francis says. I hope he just totally speaks to your heart because he’s a total missionary of charity in spirit. He’s a big-time missionary of charity in spirit. Everything he preaches is like St. Francis and St. Mother Teresa boiled down. He speaks to the culture in the way the culture needs to hear the words of the gospel, in a way that we can have an openness to hear, as if for the first time, and not think that we’ve heard it all before. He’s a perfectly chosen prophet and pontiff, by the Holy Spirit, for our time.

I totally believe in him; I have total confidence in him. Some more orthodox, traditional Catholics say, “I don’t know about him, he’s a little bit too unpredictable.” They would’ve said the same thing about Jesus of Nazareth. “He’s mad! He’s crazy! He doesn’t do anything! He breaks the Sabbath!” – just like the Pharisees.

Pope Francis says, “To offer one’s life to enter into the missionary dynamism is possible only if you’re able to leave ourselves behind.” It is very he hard to leave ourselves behind. Similarly, Jesus says, “unless you deny yourself, you shall not save yourself or find yourself. If you desire to follow me, deny yourself and pick up your cross. Those who want to save their lives will lose it.” This language can sometimes go a little bit over our heads, and we don’t quite understand it at face value. But basically, Pope Francis speaks truth in the way a common person can understand: Mission is possible only if we leave ourselves behind.

He adds, “Belief means transcending ourselves, leaving behind our comfort and the inflexibility of our ego.” Can good people have inflexible egos? Yes, they can! Very much! Good people can have inflexible egos. Can religious and consecrated people have inflexible egos? Oh yes!

It’s in human nature, and we have to get out of that. It’s part of conversion “in order to center our life in Jesus Christ,” as Pope Francis says. There are radical fundamentalist anti-Catholic Christians who call the pope the antichrist. You have to wonder, have they ever read anything that the pope has written? He is always talking about Christ. How can he be the antichrist? This prejudice and fundamentalism is ridiculous. Talk about the inflexibility of ego. I know I’m on a tangent, but it’s awful to accuse the Pope of being anti-Christ when He is always proclaiming Christ.

You’ll come across the different ideas people might have towards Catholicism in your ministry. We can’t be intimidated by that. One of the big parts of being a missionary is having courage. To not be afraid of what’s behind the door, whether people understand us or accept us or not, and to know how to brush the dust off our feet.

Pope Francis continues, that in order to center our life in Christ, and leave ourselves behind, we must be profoundly rooted in love. “The Christian vocation is first and foremost a call to love, a love which attracts us and draws us out of ourselves, de-centering us [from being self-centered].” He quotes Pope Benedict the XVI^th, and explains that this love triggers “an ongoing exodus of the closed, inward looking self, to its liberation, through self giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery, and indeed the discovery of God.” This quote, one of my favorites from Pope Benedict the XVI^th, comes from his first encyclical, God is Love. Pope Francis is just part of that continuum of the Holy Spirit, the continuity of truth from one pope to another. The same spirit of God is leading. (to be continued)

SOURCE: Consecrated Life Retreat, New Mexico 2016, transcribed by Teresa Linda, ocds

Copyright 2017, Father Robert Barcelos, OCD

The church in Ephesus had lost their first love, even though they practiced so many other valiant virtues in being faithful to God. They persevered, they endured persecution, they were totally traditional and faithful to the teaching, and they were hard-working. They were doing good things, but they had lost their passion. They lost the fire, they lost the zeal, there was no fervor anymore and so the Lord says to them, ‘I have one thing against you. You have lost the love of your youth, your first love.’

In speaking to religious, Pope Francis spoke on Good Shepherd Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter for the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, and the whole theme of his talk was exodus as an icon, as encapsulating vocation. I want to draw from what he says. In speaking of exodus, Pope Francis draws us to the Old Testament as referring to the origins of the amazing love story between God and his people.

Our faith, our religion as current Catholic Christians is first and foremost a love affair, a love story with God. It is not all about rules, it’s about God transforming us into Himself, who is love itself. Of course transformation will involve rules and obligations because there can be no true love without responsibility. There can be no love without sacrifice, self-giving trust, and vulnerability, risk, a gift of self, a going out beyond yourself. Our religion as Catholic Christians is about this divine romance, this exchange between God and His people, this covenant. It is not something that we’ve invented, but rather, we’ve discovered it. God has revealed it. He’s unveiled the mystery of His purpose of our identity and destiny.

Our religion is not meant to be a burden, but to set us free to be who we’re meant to be. The world does not get that. The spirit of the world has it in reverse; it does not understand and sees our freedom through an opposite lens. But only love is credible; only love can get past all the filters of people’s misconceptions, of people’s prejudices – simply by acts of love. That’s why your vocation is so precious, important, and prophetic because you don’t have to preach a single word. By your very example, God can preach through you.

Pope Francis says, “The exodus is the origins of the amazing love story between God and his people, a history which passes through the dramatic period of slavery in Egypt and the calling of Moses, the experience of liberation and journey toward the Promised Land. All those things are not only historical but also symbolic of the spiritual life.” The Holy Father goes on to speak a little bit about that symbolism. He says we too need to have to pass from the slavery of the old Adam, or our own selves. Perhaps there was a time in our lives when maybe we were little bit more worldly-minded, when our values and priorities, and our mentality or faith weren’t the same.

This exodus experience to new life in Christ, is one of going to the Promised Land, to live our true purpose in what it means to become the person we’re supposed to be in God’s eyes, in his image. This exodus is an event in redemption which takes place through faith. According to the Holy Father,“This Passover is a genuine exodus. It is the journey of each Christian soul and the entire Church, the decisive turning of our lives toward the Father.”

The decisive turning – those words imply a conviction and a choice, a conviction in the heart and choice, an action that has been made. That conviction of the heart and the choice of life, that turnaround is what the gospel refers to as metanoia. That turning around is a conversion.

Ultimately, Exodus is a conversion, a becoming of the best version of ourselves, becoming who we’re created to be, becoming who are meant to be in God’s Divine Mercy. It is a decisive turning of our lives towards the Father, and I would like to add to that, a decisive turning of our lives toward the mystery of Easter.

What captures for me the beautiful mystery of Easter is not simply Jesus risen but Jesus’s radiance through his wounds because His encounters with the apostles were very specifically, encountering them in their weakness. Jesus as the eternal high priest expressed His sympathy with their weakness and by His wounds, He healed their weakness and brought out power. Light comes out of darkness – a new creation out of chaos, victory out of the cross, triumph out of tragedy. This is the mystery of Easter. How do we experience that in us? How do we see that in our lives? Because it will happen; that’s how God works. Jesus brings us into renewed vitality through the pattern of His Paschal mystery – through His suffering, and dying, and rising again. (to be continued)

SOURCE: Consecrated Life Retreat, New Mexico 2016, transcribed by Teresa Linda, ocds

Copyright 2017, Father Robert Barcelos, OCD

This Easter season, I want to touch on the exodus, the ongoing rekindling of our first love. The theme of our first love is so important, in order for us to remain fervent, in order for us to not to lose the fire of desire for God, to have a hunger for God’s holiness; to want him with passion, to be passionate about God in His love for us.

That first love is paramount, it’s so crucial because as St. Paul says, we can do all that we’re called to do, we can do so many things out of generosity, and practice many different types of virtues with God’s help; we can spend ourselves and exhaust ourselves doing, doing, and doing, but if we’ve lost our first love we’ve lost everything. If we’ve lost our passion we’ve become slaves.

We’re just doing because we have to and because were supposed to. As servants of God, we have to be on guard against that spirit of slavery. St. Paul says we’re called to be slaves of righteousness for sanctification, but that’s not meant to be a burden, a bondage, a heaviness, or a frustration. It’s supposed to be the opposite – it’s freedom. To be a slave through self-denial is meant to produce the fruit of freedom. If we are doing it in the right spirit, the spirit of love, the spirit of a child of God, who becomes a slave of righteousness, not because they have to, but because they want to, then there is freedom.

That’s not always easy to preserve. We can start off that way but as we all know, with the facts of life, with interpersonal relationships and human nature being what it is, the daily inconveniences and challenges, we could lose that spark after a while. We always have to go back to the source; we always have to go back to the heart, to the fountain- our first love.

Why am I here? Why did I let God choose this for me? Why did I let myself get into this? We have to go back to our first love and discover the gift in our consent. This relationship is not a curse, but a blessing, and I need to keep that blessing beautiful and fresh that I may be the face of mercy for others. Otherwise, I could become a whole different kind of face. If we don’t process it, we transmit it. If you don’t work through it, it’ll come out eventually. It’ll come out. The whole purpose of why we have prayer specifically set apart for us in the day is because that’s our special time to be able to draw near to the fountain of God’s love, the living water, daily – especially in the Blessed Sacrament. We must always draw back to that fountain.

SOURCE: Consecrated Life Retreat, New Mexico 2016, transcribed by Teresa Linda, ocds

Copyright 2017, Father Robert Barcelos, OCD

The climax of St. Thérèse’s beautiful life on earth was her final agony and amazing ecstasy. Before her final breath, she prophesized with utmost conviction that God had great plans for her on the other side, and of what God would allow her to do on earth, while in heaven. She knew that she was going to be one of the busiest saints in heaven. She would be working all the time.

So much happened right after her death on September 30, 1897.   By 1898, her Carmelite monastery began to publish “The Story of a Soul”. They started with 2000 copies and by 1899, the first favors and cures and miracles were already starting to come in. Twelve years after her death, her cause was introduced for her canonization. By 1910, in one year she had received 9741 letters from people in France and foreign countries.   She was active. She got right to work.

In 1914 the Carmel would receive on average of 200 letters a day. That year, Pope Pius 10^th told a missionary that St. Thérèse would be the greatest saint in modern times.   She was beatified in 1923, and by this time the Carmel was receiving 800 – 1000 letters a day.

By 1925, she was formally canonized.   By 1927 she became the Patroness of Missions, yet she was a cloistered nuns who never left the cloister!  One would never have expected it but Thérèse expected it. She knew.   She knew she was going to be a missionary after she left this life.   It is an amazing testimony to the power of God at work in the world today.

By 1929, the Little Flower had a huge basilica in her honor.   She continues until the end of time to be a blessing to many.   God is the author behind it, the one bringing about the harvest of what she is doing in heaven. The answered prayers are all coming from the cross and resurrection of Jesus.   Thérèse in a specific way shared in that cross with Jesus.   She truly shared in it.   That is part of the amazing truth that is quite startling at times – the measure that we share in the cross of Jesus is the same measure we share in the resurrection. Daunting but very, very true!

I recently went to the shrine of St Padre Pio for the first time. The pilgrimage site is an ongoing fountain of spiritual life that is just bursting at the seam.   So many people from all over come to honor him.   And while I have never been to Thérèse’s basilica, I know that the devotion is the same for St. Thérèse. Her witness is the Gospel, the Bethlehem, the Calvary and the empty tomb transplanted to a new place in the world. Yet it is the same fruit of redemption that is continually flowing. So much of the hidden sacrifices that nobody ever saw in the lives of Thérèse and Father Pio and so many, produced a harvest that came later.   In every sacrifice there is a seed of promise.

One of the ways Thérèse put into practice her zeal, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, which are in separable, was that she made a point to take advantage of every opportunity to offer Jesus some sacrifice in thanksgiving and praise of Him. Whether it was something as simple as a random act of kindness, courtesy, charity, a smile, a phone call, a letter, a card, any little thing – including the negative things like enduring not needing to have the last word in an argument.   She lived and represented the dispositions of Jesus.

To conclude, I have a summary reflection on everything about Thérèse.   In a few words, I would paraphrase In the Footsteps of Thérèse as inspired from Manuscript B as follows:

How awesome is God’s divine and indescribable condescension in Christ, His love that reaches unto folly from the crib to the cross. It is He, Himself, in His zeal for us who in countless ways does all in his power to inspire in us limitless confidence, to not be afraid; to daringly abandon ourselves to His Divine Mercy; to aspire to the most lofty heights to the possession of the plentitude of love, to the bosom of the eternal fire of the blessed trinity.

In this ascent to the inaccessible light Thérèse teaches us that it is our weakness that is to give us the boldness of our full trust and surrender. For in order, as St. Thérèse says, ‘that love, that Jesus may be fully satisfied it is necessary that it lower itself and to lower itself to nothingness’- that is, us in our weakness, us in our littleness and powerlessness, us in our fragile nature – ‘and transform this nothingness into fire.’

Therefore, we must consent to remain always poor and without strength, to love our littleness, to love to feel nothing and to remain very far from all that sparkles. Such humility of a child has power to cast out and conquer all discouragement.   Jesus’ work, His total sacrifice, His accomplishments and merits, His righteousness is the sweet assurance of our salvation. Precious Jesus is our justice, our justification, before the perfect holiness of the Father.

May the divine gaze of God’s holy face dawn upon us and qualify us among his chosen legion of little souls worthy of his everlasting love.

AMEN

SOURCE: San Rafael Carmel Retreat 2016, Transcribed by Linda Dorian

Copyright 2017 Father Robert Barcelos, OCD

In order to express this confidence she has based on God, not on herself, St. Thérèse uses the image in manuscript B of herself as a little bird and Jesus as the Divine Eagle. Manuscript B is dedicated to one of her sisters, Marie, in the convent. After Marie read it, she thought it was beautiful and wonderful for Thérèse but didn’t think applied to her. Thérèse says … NO you are not getting it: It applies to you too.   Thérèse’s response to her sister in letter 197 is this:

“How can you ask me if it is possible for you to love God as I love him?   If you understood the story of the little bird you would not have asked me this question. My virtues, or talents or many gifts are nothing. They are not what give me the unlimited confidence I feel in my heart. They are, to tell the truth, the spiritual riches that render one unjust. Because when one rests in them with complacency and when one believes that they are something great, ahh, now that’s when I really feel it is not this at all the pleases God in my little soul.  

What pleases him though is that he sees me loving my littleness and my poverty. The blind hope that I have in his mercy, that’s my only treasure.   Why should this treasure not be yours? Understand that to love Jesus, the weaker one is without desires for virtues, the more suited one is for the workings of this consuming and transforming love.

But we must consent to remain always poor and without strength. And this is the difficulty.   Let us remain then very far from all that sparkles. Let us love our littleness. Let us love to feel nothing.   Then we shall be poor in spirit and Jesus will come to look for us and he will transform us in flames of love.

She refers many times to this image – this flame of love. But to get more into the wisdom and insight of St Thérèse, I would like to look at the book Divine Mercy by Benedict the XVIth. He writes,

All of God’s perfections are expressions of his merciful love. Even his justice. (Pope Francis also says that justice and mercy are one.)   After so many graces can I not sing with the psalmist ‘How good is the Lord? His mercy endures forever.’ It seems to me that if all creatures have received the same graces I received, God would be feared by nobody but would be loved to the point of folly.

Through love, not through fear, no one would ever consent to cause him any pain. I understand, however, that all souls cannot be the same. It is necessary that there be different types in order to honor each of God’s perfections in a particular way. To me he has granted his infinite mercy and through it I contemplate and adore the other divine perfections. All of these perfections appear to be resplendent with love, even his justice. And perhaps this, even more than the others, seem to me clothed in love.

 What a sweet joy it is to think that God is just; that is, that he takes into account our weakness. He is perfectly aware of our fragile nature. What should I fear then?   Must not the infinitely just God, who deigns to pardon the faults of the prodigal son with so much kindness, be just also towards me who am with him always?

Thérèse thinks ‘If I have always been with Him, then why wouldn’t that love be all the more overflowing?’ This understanding of God’s justice totally casts out every trace of fear in her faith before the face of God. She tries to convince us to be comfortable in the skin of our own weakness and littleness, even as she admits her own weaknesses:

I have my weaknesses also, but I will rejoice in them. A foolish thing I have said or done will torment me, for example.   Then I enter into myself and I say: “Alas I’m at the same place I was at formerly.   But I tell myself this with great gentleness and without any sadness. How good it is to feel one is weak and little.

 She echoes the gospel according Paul: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” In so many other places, as in Ephesians Chapter 2, St Paul expresses this gospel and recognizes that we are saved not for anything that we have done but because of how good He is. Faith working itself out in love is not about earning God’s love or becoming “good enough”. It is God who is all good and it is Him who makes us capable of Himself. This is Grace by which we are healed and saved. And this is the gospel of which Thérèse is speaking but she does so with a beautiful freshness to invigorate our faith.

SOURCE: San Rafael Carmel Retreat 2016, Transcribed by Linda Dorian

Copyright 2017 Father Robert Barcelos, OCD