The Only Necessary Thing

We look for it in friendship, in marriage, in community. We look for it in sexual intimacy, in moments of ecstasy, in the recognition of our gifts. We look for it through success, admiration, and rewards. But wherever we look, it is communion we seek… The desire for communion… is a Godgiven desire, a desire that causes immense pain as well as immense joy.

Life becomes an unbearable burden whenever we lose touch with the presence of a loving Savior and see only hunger to be alleviated, injustice to be addressed, violence to be overcome, wars to be stopped, and loneliness to be removed. All these are critical issues, and Christians must try to solve them; however, when our concern no longer flows from our personal encounter with the living Christ, we feel oppressive weight

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identification, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life. In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us. In solitude we can listen to the voice of the One who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others

If we accept our aloneness as a gift from God, and convert it into deep solitude, then out of that solitude we can reach out to other people. We can come together in community, because we don’t cling to one another out of loneliness. We don’t use or manipulate one another. Rather, we bow to one another’s solitude. We recognize one another as people who are called by the same God. If I find God in my solitude, and you find God in your solitude, then the same God calls us together, and we can become friends. We can form a community, we can sustain a marriage, we can be together without destroying each other by clinging to each other

Solitude without community leads us to loneliness and despair, but community without solitude hurls us into a “void of words and feelings” (Bonhoeffer)… Solitude is essential to community life because in solitude we grow closer to each other. When we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are in fact participating fully in the growth of community. It is a fallacy to think that we grow closer to each other only when we talk, play, or work together. Much growth certainly occurs in such human interactions, but at least as much growth can take place when we enter into solitude. We take the other with us into solitude, and there the relationship grows and deepens

we can say that persons reborn in the Spirit are characterized by their singlemindedness. They have only one desire: to do God’s will in all things, or to put it in Jesus’ words to Nicodemus to “do the truth” and thus to “come out into the light so that what they are doing may plainly appear as done in God” (John 3:21). They are so caught up in God’s love that everything else can only receive its meaning and purpose in the context of that love. They ask only one question: “What is pleasing to the Spirit of God?” And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit, they follow its promptings even when it upsets their friends, disturbs their environment, and confuses their admirers. They believe unhesitatingly in Jesus, the Son of God, who was sent into the world “not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved” (John 3:17). Their faith is so deeply rooted that they are unafraid

Thus, the Spirit living in our poverty will speak to the Spirit among the poor. Our poor hearts will speak to the poor hearts of those around us. And out of this, a new spiritual community will be molded, not something spectacular, imposing, or world-convincing, but, on the contrary, something small, hidden, and very humble, scarcely noticed by our fastmoving world It is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit from above. It is the greatest gift a human being can receive; a gift to be gently held, carefully protected, and patiently led to full maturity.

As you see more clearly that your vocation is to be a witness to God’s love in this world, and as you become more determined to live out that vocation, the attacks of the enemy will increase. You will hear voices saying, “You are worthless, you having nothing to offer, you are unattractive, undesir able, unlovable.” The more you sense God’s call, the more will discover in your own soul the cosmic battle between God and Satan. Do not be afraid. Keep deepening your conviction that God’s love for you is enough, that you are in safe hands, and that you are being guided every step of the way. Don’t be surprised by the demonic attacks. They will increase, but as you face them without fear, you will discover that they are powerless… The love of Jesus will give you an ever-clearer vision of your call as well as of the many attempts to pull you away from that call. The more you are called to speak for God’s love, the more you will need to deepen the knowledge of that love in your own heart. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when your roots are deep can your fruits be abundant. The enemy is there, waiting to destroy you, but you can face the enemy without fear when you know that you are held safe in the love of Jesus.

I cannot return to God with just half of my being. As I reflected this morning again on the story of the prodigal son and tried to experience myself in the embrace of the father, I suddenly felt a certain resistance to being embraced so fully and totally. I experienced not only a desire to be embraced, but also a fear of losing my independence. I realized that God’s love is a jealous love. God wants not just a part of me, but all of me. Only when I surrender myself completely to God’s parental love can I expect to be free from endless distractions, ready to hear the voice of love, and able to recognize my own unique call. It is going to be a very long road. Every time I pray, I feel the struggle. It is the struggle of letting God be the God of my whole being. It is the struggle to trust that true freedom lies hidden in total surrender to God’s love.

God becomes a stumbling God who falls at the cross, who dies for us, and who is totally in need of love. God does this so that we can get close. The God who loves us is a God who becomes vulnerable, dependent in the manger and dependent on the cross, a God who basically is saying, “Are you there for me?”

. It is in God that we find our neighbors and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.

Imagine. Is it possible that our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives? Yes, it can! The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: “You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will be just another repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best you can.” There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: “There is nothing new under the sun…don’t let yourself be fooled… So what are we to do? First, we must send the foxes back to where they belong: in their foxholes. And then we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-withyou.’ I will wipe away all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (see Rev. 21:2-5). We must choose to listen to that voice, and every choice will open us a little more to discover the new life hidden in the moment, waiting eagerly to be born.

The challenge, however, is not to read a “spiritual” book as a source of interesting information, but rather to listen to it as to a voice that addresses you directly. It isn’t easy to let a text “read” you. Your thirst for knowledge and information often makes you desire to own the word, instead of letting the word own you. Even so, you will learn the most by listening carefully to the Word that seeks admission to your heart.

If you would fully own your treasure, you must hide it in the field where you found it, go off happily to sell everything you own, and then come back and buy the field. You can be truly happy that you have found the treasure. But you should not be so naïve as to think that you already own it… Having found the treasure puts you on a new quest for it. The spiritual life is a long and often arduous search for what you have already found. You can seek God only when you have already found God. The desire for God’s unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love. Because finding the treasure is only the beginning of the search, you have to be careful. If you expose the treasure to others without fully owning it, you might harm yourself and even lose the treasure.

To be calm and quiet by yourself is not the same as sleeping. In fact, it means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside you. It requires the discipline to recognize the urge to get up and go again as a temptation to look elsewhere for what is close at hand. It offers the freedom to stroll in your own inner yard and rake up the leaves and clear the paths so you can easily find the way to your heart. Perhaps there will be fear and uncertainty when you first come upon this “unfamiliar terrain,” but slowly and surely you will discover an order and a familiarity which deepens your longing to stay at home. With this new confidence, we recapture our own life afresh, from within. Along with the new knowledge of our “inner space” where feelings of love and hate, tenderness and pain, forgiveness and greed are separated, strengthened, or reformed, there emerges the mastery of the gentle hand. This is the hand of the gardener who carefully makes space for a new plant to grow and who doesn’t pull weeds too rashly, but uproots only those which threaten to choke the young life.

The great spiritual call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing. This is not as easy as it sounds. The powers of the darkness around us are strong, and our world finds it easier to manipulate self-rejecting people than self-accepting people. But when we keep listening attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, it becomes possible to live our brokenness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an opportunity to purify and deepen the blessing that rests upon us

real “work” of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. This might sound selfindulgent, but, in practice, it is a hard discipline. I am so afraid of being cursed, of hearing that I am no good or not good enough, that I quickly give in to the temptation to start talking and to keep talking in order to control my fears.

How…can we move from fragmentation to unity, from many things to the one necessary thing, from our divided lives to undivided lives in the Spirit? A hard struggle is required. It is the struggle to allow God’s Spirit to work in us and recreate us. But this struggle is not beyond our strength. It calls for some very specific, well-planned steps. It calls for a few moments a day in the presence of God when we can listen to God’s voice precisely in the midst of our many concerns. It also calls for the persistent endeavor to be with others in a new way by seeing them not as people to whom we can cling in fear, but as fellow human beings with whom we can create new space for God

Prayer requires that we stand in God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. This is difficult in a climate where the predominant counsel is, “Do your best and God will do the rest.” When life is divided into “our best” and “God’s rest,” we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our own resources are depleted. Then even the Lord has become the victim of our impatience. Discipleship does not mean to use God when we can no longer function ourselves. On the contrary, it means to recognize that we can do nothing at all,

. We often say, “All of life should be lived in gratitude,” but this is possible only if at certain times we give thanks in a very concrete and visible way. We often say, “All our days should be lived for the glory of God,” but this is possible only if a day is regularly set apart to give glory to God. We often say, “We should love one another always,” but this is possible only if we regularly perform concrete and unambiguous acts of love. Similarly, it is also true that we can say, “All our thoughts should be prayer,” only if there are times in which we make God our only thought… Many people still have the impression that contemplative prayer is something very special, very “high,” or very difficult, and really not for ordinary people with ordinary jobs and ordinary problems. This is unfortunate because the discipline of contemplative prayer is particularly valuable for those who have so much on their minds that they suffer from fragmentation