Ep. 387 - Faith

Faith enables us to know God as He knows Himself, although certainly not exhaustively.  God knows Himself not only as the Creator, bur also as the Trinity and as the Author of grace; it is under these aspects that faith presents Him to us.  By faith, we know creatures as He knows them, that is, in relation to Him and dependent upon Him.  Our intellect can give us only natural light on God and creatures; faith, on the contrary, gives us the supernatural light that is a participation in the light of God, in the knowledge God has of Himself and of creatures.

- Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D.

Join Rob as he discusses a topic that he's often been reluctant to discuss - his Christian faith.  

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Divine Intimacy - Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen OCD

This Book of Meditations is a classic and is steeped in Carmelite spirituality. For every day it offers two meditations, arranged according to the liturgical season (1962 Missal), that enable the soul to enter the conscious presence of God and to reflect on the theme of the day. These are followed by a Colloquy that helps the person at prayer to start a friendly conversation with God where acts of praise and love, petition and thanksgiving are made, together with good resolutions for the future. Here we are at the very heart of prayer, which is a heart-to-heart encounter in faith with the living God. Divine Intimacy is the highest state attainable on earth. In this union of love, the soul produces acts of love which have an immense apostolic influence on a multitude of souls. This knowledge of the ways that lead to God, according to the teaching of the renowned Spanish mystics, is distilled into the pages of this book.

Divine Intimacy - Chad Lemoine  

"What Is The Royal Path?" (The Royal Path Ep 001) - YouTube

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If we stand together, we'll never fall. Well, hi there and welcome back to another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. Today is Wednesday, July 27th, 2022, and this is episode number 387 of a show that provides insight and tools to help us build the lives and homesteads of our dreams. My name is Rob Kaiser and I am your host. Today we've got an episode that covers faith. Financial, physical, personal development, family, spiritual, social, and career. And today we are covering spiritual. We're going to talk about the subject of faith, and we'll get to how we're going to do that in just a moment. But the reason we're talking about this is precisely because I didn't really want to. And the reality is, guys, I did not set my alarm this morning. Did not get well, I'm sorry, check that. I did set my alarm. But after eating terribly last night at dinner with family and eating terribly lately, just in general, I haven't been sleeping well. And I just decided to have a lazy morning. Right? So as I'm going through my morning routine, thinking about how I'm going to approach today's show and talk about spirituality, I decided that I would basically share my morning routine with you and read from the book Divine Intimacy. Okay? Now, this book, Divine Intimacy, is a book that was introduced to me from you. Yeah, the audience. And this is a book that Chad Lemoyne's been reading for quite some time. And he has been doing an iteration of what I'm about to share with you for since December of last year. So for quite some time. So shout out to Chad for sharing this with all of us through Twitter for sharing this message with me, for inspiring me to buy this book and do the same. So for those of you who are curious about this book, like we've done in the past, I've read from a book of meditations, and this is also a book of meditations. This book of meditations is a classic and is seeped in Carmelite spirituality. For every day it offers two meditations in liturgical arrangement that enable the soul to enter the conscious presence of God and to reflect on the theme of the day. These are followed by a colloquy, pronouncing that properly, that helps the person at prayer to start a friendly conversation with God, where acts of praise and love, petition and thanksgiving are made, together with good resolutions for the future. Here we are at the very heart of prayer, which is a heart-to-heart encounter in faith with the living God. Divine intimacy is the highest state attainable on earth. In this union of love, the soul produces acts of love which have an immense apostolic influence on a multitude of souls. This knowledge of the ways that lead to God according to the teaching of the renowned Spanish mystics is distilled into the pages of this book. Here's a little bit about the author. Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene was a Carmelite priest who became one of the most revered masters of the spiritual life. He acquired a vast knowledge of the ways that led to holiness and to union with God. His experience with souls whom he guided to the heights of perfection was outstanding. He was an expert in the spiritual and mystical doctrine of Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross. The discalnort Carmelite nuns of the monastery of St. Joseph in Rome were the heirs to Father Gabriel's vast output of the published works and private manuscripts. For ten years he guided these nuns as their confessor and spiritual director, and it was they who helped him to arrange his material in line with the course of the liturgical year while following the ascent of the soul to transforming union with God or to divine intimacy. Okay. Now let me tell you a little bit about why I was reluctant to talk about this. And why I decided to roll with it anyways. I'm reluctant to talk about it because um, well, I was raised Roman Catholic. This is uh a Roman Catholic book, and I've struggled with Catholicism, if you will, for my entire adult life. Because in large part I misunderstood it. Alright. So I was always looking to pick apart that which was presented to me in order to find flaws in it. Rather than find the positives in it and just discard the flaws and discard that which I didn't find appropriate to me, which is generally what I do most other times in life. But for some reason, with the spirituality in this aspect of life, it's different. And I didn't want to do this today because sometimes I think when we talk about spirituality, especially through the lens of Catholicism, you know, we find that others find it unsavory, and we want to be appealing to the masses, right? So we don't talk about it. Now, my own spiritual journey has taken me from Catholicism of the Western Rite to all different, or not all different, but many different denominations of Christianity, different flavors of uh sherbert at the ice cream bar. And I'm still exploring and I'm still walking down different roads trying to find the right path. Only to have discovered the royal path. But at the end of the day, it all requires faith. And that is what we are looking at on this two hundred and forty-first day of the liturgical year. O Lord, grant that I may understand the great value of faith. And the first of two meditations reads as follows. Because faith is the foundation of all our relations with Him. For the man without faith, God has neither meaning nor value, nor place in His life. On the other hand, the more lively our faith is, the more God enters into our life until finally He becomes our all, the one great reality for which we live, and the one for whom we courageously face sorrow and death. It is only when faith has deeply penetrated his soul that it can exclaim with Saint Paul, quote, For whether we live, we live unto the Lord, or whether we die, we die unto the Lord, close quote. We do not lack faith, but it is not sufficiently alive and practical to make us see God in everything and over everything, thus giving us the sense of his essential, transcendent, and eternal reality, which infinitely surpasses all the immediate, contingent, and passing realities of this life. Faith does not depend upon data received through the senses, on what we can see and touch, nor is it reduced to what we can understand with the intellect, but surpassing all this, it makes us share in God's own knowledge, in his thoughts, in his understanding. Having raised us to the state of divine sonship, God has made us capable of sharing his intimate life, his life of knowledge and love. For this purpose, he has given us the theological virtues together with grace. Faith allows us to share his life of knowledge and charity, his life of love. Faith enables us to know God as he knows himself, although certainly not exhaustibly. God knows himself not only as the creator, but also as the Trinity and as the author of grace. It is under these aspects that faith presents him to us. By faith we know creatures as he knows them, that is, in relation to him and dependent upon him. Our intellect can give us only natural light on God and creatures. Faith, on the contrary, gives us the supernatural light that is a participation in the light of God, in the knowledge God has of himself and of creatures. And the second meditation reads. It is a beginning of eternal life. In fact, by faith we begin to know God as we shall one day know him in heaven. There we shall know him unveiled in the light of glory. Here below we know him dimly by means of the truths which faith proposes to us to believe, truths which give us, however, the very same God. Faith and the beatific vision like the two phases of the same knowledge of God. Faith gives us an initial obscure imperfect knowledge. The beatific vision where faith will end will give us full, clear, perfect knowledge. Now, quote, we know in part, close quote, as Saint Paul says, referring to our knowledge by faith, quote, but when that which is perfect is come, close quote, that is, the beatific vision, that which is in part shall be done away. From 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 9 and 10. Saint John of the Cross gives us a pleasing comparison to make us understand that faith already contains the germ of the beatific vision. He refers to the episode narrated in Scripture of Gideon's soldiers who had quote lamps in their hands, which they saw not, because they had them concealed in the darkness of the pictures. But when these pictures were broken, the light was seen. In like manner, faith which is foreshadowed by those pictures, contains within itself divine light, which, when it is ended and broken, at the ending and breaking of this mortal life will allow the glory and light of the divinity, which was contained in it, to appear. The more lively our faith is, the more we shall enjoy here below in anticipation of the knowledge of God, which we shall possess in heaven. The more lively our faith and the more imbued with love it is, the higher will our the higher will be our degree of glory and hence of our vision of God. Today's faith must prepare us for the beatific vision of tomorrow. It should make us enter even on earth into communion with the thought and the knowledge of God. In this way, faith elevates us immeasurably above our human reasonings, above our human thoughts. And finally the colloquy for today. Anyways. Let us pray. O faith of Christ, my spouse, I turn to you who enclose and conceal within yourself the form of beauty and my beloved. You are the clear, lipid fount, free from error, from which the waters of all spiritual good flow to the soul. Did you not assure the Samaritan woman, O Christ, that in those who believe in you would surge a fountain whose waters would spring up into everlasting life? O faith, such is the likeness between yourself and God, that there is no other difference, save that which exists between seeing God and believing in him. For even as God is infinite, so you set him before us as infinite, and as he is three and one, so you set him before us as three and one, and as God is darkness to our understanding, even so do you blind and dazzle our understanding. And thus, O Lord, by this means alone, you manifest yourself to the soul in divine light which passes all understanding. Increase then, O Lord, my faith, for the stronger my faith is, the more closely shall I be united to you. O my soul, as God is inaccessible, do not concern yourself with how much your faculties can comprehend and your senses can perceive, that you not be satisfied with less than God, and lose not the swiftness that is needed to attain to Him. But walk in naked, pure faith which alone is the proximate and proportionate means to your union with God. O infinite wisdom, O eternal infinite God, you want to be understood by your creature because you are the sovereign good. It can do so understanding you and the way you show yourself to it under the veil of faith. It is indeed a veil, but it is translucent since your word illumines and gives light to the humble. Nevertheless, just as it is impossible for you not to be God, so it is impossible for your creature to understand you fully. He who wishes to attain to the sublime state of union with you, O Lord, must have great faith. Being the sovereign, infinite, immense, and unsearchable good, you can be understood only by yourself. But the more the soul believes in you, so much the more will it come to unite itself to you and to participate in your grandeur. That is faith. Now, this meditation on the interior life for every day of the liturgical year, this was originally published in Italian under the title Intimita Divina. Del other Italian words I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce here. This edition that I'm reading right now is the English translation by the Discount Carmelite Nuns of Boston, published under license from a place in Italy that I, again, can't pronounce. I believe. Yeah, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and unvisible. I believe in Christ. Sounds like we've got a helicopter flying above. And I have faith. A lot of people want to dismiss faith, spirituality, and the church. I'm one that thinks there's something to be said for all of it, including the traditions of it. I think there's something to be said for the church and the path that leads us to the discovery of it. I think there's something to be said for the inherent challenge of it all. And if you're challenged by it, then that is a good thing. If you don't even think about spirituality, I don't really know what to say. Other than that, it makes me somewhat sad. So, guys, that's what I have to say on spirituality today. Not really the direction I intended for the show to go, but a direction I'm glad. And I would encourage you to drop me a line at allaroundgrowth at gmail.com if you want to engage privately about that button. I would really encourage you to join the telegram chat at t.me slash allaroundgrowth and engage with everyone there. Or check us out on other social media like Facebook, Twitter, that's where we're most active. And if you poke around a little bit more, you'll find us elsewhere if you want to help out with social media outside of Facebook and help us grow outside of Facebook as well. Uh let me know. t.me slash all around growth and allaroundgrowth at gmail.com. Look forward to you guys in the chat, and I look forward to another episode with you tomorrow Thursday. The social aspect of our lives and uh if you have any feedback and our would like to uh hear something about that specifically, let me know again t.me slash all around growth or all around growth at gmail.com. This is Rob Keiser, and thank you.