The Irish Catholic Hermit

  Come and See: An Ascetical Confession of the Incarnate Lord I confess You, Lord Jesus Christ, not as an idea grasped by the mind, but as the Word who became flesh and was seen. My faith begins with the Incarnation and stands or falls with it. You did not remain invisible or inaccessible. You entered the limits of creation, took a true body from the Virgin, and lived among men. When Philip said to Nathanael, “Come and see,” he testified that You could be encountered in reality, not imagined or reasoned toward. B ecause You became man, I submit my whole life to this truth. I do not seek You apart from the flesh You assumed, nor do I attempt to rise to You by intellect alone. I renounce spiritual fantasies and private visions, for You have already given Yourself openly in history. I guard my mind from abstractions that separate spirit from body, because You united them in Yourself without confusion and without division. I accept discipline of the body because You sanctified the...

  Blessed Are the Persecuted A h, sure, there’s a way of livin’ that only the truest hearts can understand. It’s a way of walkin’ the earth where the measure of your soul isn’t by the comforts you’ve gathered or the praise you’ve earned, but by how much you align yourself with the Word of God. And when our Lord says, “Blessed are ye when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake,” (Matthew 5:11), well, He’s tellin’ us somethin’ mighty deep. The persecutions we face aren’t random or for nothin’, but because we’ve dared to stand with Him, to hold His words close and let them shape the very core of our lives. T his isn’t just the way of the everyday folk, you see. No, this way belongs to the ones who’ve fallen madly in love with God. Those who’ve chosen to make Him the center of it all. The ones who’ve made up their minds that their will will be crucified and that God's will will rule the day. They’re the ones who’d rather suffer in His...

  The Holy Turnabout of the Soul. T here’s a quare story told among the old desert lads, and there’s more truth in it than in a yard of newspapers. Abba John the Dwarf goes to Abba Poemen, all soft-eyed and settled, and says to him he’s after reachin’ such a grand peace of soul that there’s no temptations left knockin’ at his door. Not a whisper, not a tug, not a bother. And Poemen, the old fox, looks at him and says, near gentle but sharp as a scythe: “Pray to God, brother, that the battle comes back to you, the broken heart, the lowliness you had before. ’Tis only in the fight the soul puts on flesh.” A nd there you have it, the great riddle of the spiritual life, turned upside-down like a creel on the strand. What the world curses as misery and shame, the soul that’s half-awake knows as blessing. What the world runs from, the saints lean into, slow and steady, like a man walkin’ into a headwind he knows will make him strong. T he world has its own crooked wisdom, God help us. It...