Fr. Paul Says...
At the age of 75, facing cancer and after having two heart bypasses there comes a time when one ponders not only their mortality but their legacy. What will others remember me by?. After fifty years in the priesthood I have worked, met, and ministered with many. The thought came to me if I wanted to be remembered for one thing what would that be? It does not take a lot of wondering. I would like to be remembered on showing people how to access the Presence of the grace of God.
Life is all a matter of perspective. It is about the difference between thinking about how to be a spiritual person on a human journey, or what to do as a human being on a spiritual journey. To understand the difference is to understand the facts of spirituality. These facts are not theological, or philosophical or psychological. They are scientific. That is they are replicable.
The first fact is we all have the grace of God within us. Grace means this Presence of God is given unconditionally and inclusively to all, otherwise it could not be grace. All persons whether they are believers or not have experienced at one time a Peace within themselves that is not theirs.
Secondly it is a scientific fact when a person feels happy, loved and at peace they will think, feel and act on an entirely different level of life than when the same person is feeling unloved, unhappy and insecure under the exact same conditions.
Thirdly we have two ways of thinking, rational and conscious. The rational sees the seen and the conscious senses the unseen. No one has seen Love, yet we know Love exists because we can sense or feel it. Accessing the Presence within is a conscious not a rational act.
These spiritual facts are about how to access the grace not what to do. While the grace is always in all of us we all are not all always in the grace. We need to discover how to access this grace. This truth must be discovered. It cannot b learned. When we look at different things in the same way we will learn more of what we already know. It is only when we look at the same thing in a different way will we discover new things.
There is a problem in trying to understand an irrational but conscious truth. If a person does not know something consciously and they do not know they do not know it rationally, unless they are open to consciously discovering a new truth they will think they know it.
Most people do not know how to experience the grace within them. It is not that they do not know what they did but how they did it escapes them. This is because they are thinking on a rationally human level rather than consciously on a spiritual one. They are thinking what to do to experience the Presence within.
Try asking people how they get into the Presence of God’s grace. They will tell you what they do because they do not know how to do it. Those I ask primarily will say they go to church, take communion, pray prayers, sing praise hymns, others will go to the mountains the ocean or on retreat. This is what they do but it is not how they do it. A person can be filled with consecrated bread, and not be in communion. They can pray prayers and not pray, sing praise hymns and not praise, go on retreat or up to mountains or to the sea and still not have the experience of the Peace.
The problem here is this is not how we get in the grace. We all know we can pray prayers and not pray, sing praise hymns and not praise, be stuffed with Eucharistic Bread and not be in communion, or go on retreats to mountains or the sea and get absolutely nothing out of it. There is only one way we can access the Presence of the grace, and this is when we open our heart. The problem with saying “open our heart” is it cannot be explained rationally. Opening our heart is a conscious movement not a rational act.
Spiritual explanations such as “opening our heart” are metaphors that cannot be rationally explained, only consciously pointed to.
An example of this would be to think of someone you care about who is not present with you right now. As you are thinking about them, sense their presence. If you can do this you have a sense or a feeling of their presence. You have opened your heart. You just did something you were not doing before. If you did not do that you do not have a clue to what the metaphor is pointing to. You cannot see it rationally. Now drop the thought and just consciously sense the Presence. This is a conscious not a rational act. You could not tell anyone what you did. Yet anyone who did it knows exactly what you did, because you did the same thing they did.
Most people have little interest in these facts and their meaning because they think they know how to access the grace. I challenged a close friend of mine if he knew how to access the grace. After several challenges he finally gave in and was willing to be pointed to experience the Presence. He was deeply moved. He then asked his spiritual advisor how to access the grace and was told “awareness”. His response was he now knew how to access the grace. It was “awareness”. He then moved on to write of other things. In all of his writings he has never taken seriously to tell anyone else how to experience the Presence. It is as if he thinks he knows how to do it and everyone else he writes to does also. “Awareness” is a rational what. It becomes a conscious how only when it is done.
If one wishes to understand the conscious they must look at what is pointed to not what is pointing. The problem is few if any in Christianity have ever heard a sermon, read a book or attended a conference that taught them how to access the grace within. While it is not rational, it can be pointed to.
Only the individual can discover the difference. One would ask what difference does this make. What difference does it make in any particular situation when we are out of the grace and feeling insecure or in and feeling at peace? On a human basis we seek the wisdom to get the peace. On a spiritual basis we seek the Peace to get the wisdom by discovering the difference being in or out of the grace makes in any particular time or place in our life.
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