I will wait, and wait, and wait with the Lord. I will wait with and in the Lord, rather than violate charity. Wanting to speed up time, and make things happen now is a violation of charity. It does violence to the nature of things. But the patient person keeps a perspective that is beyond expedient. Beyond what is immediate, and sees before him or her, all what serves love. This Advent, let’s ask for the grace to serve only what promotes love.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#7 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
Since we are God’s creation, we have come from God and we are returning to God; God has great confidence in His own grace. He has great confidence that his love for us can change us. He knows that we can make progress and be restored to spiritual and moral health. Do you have confidence in God? Do you trust God? Always desiring to restore you, once again, to happiness and interior peace. Advent is a time to be restored. Primarily, the church is asking us to be restored through the sacramental life. Advent is a time to come back to Church; come back to the Mass; come back to the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation, where God is confidently waiting for you, knowing that you can make progress and be restored to spiritual health. And to taste, once again, His happiness that He shares with you.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#6 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
One of our greatest sufferings as Christians is our own impatience with ourselves. We want to be good and holy immediately. St. Francis de Sales said “Have patience with all things. But chiefly, have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage, in considering your own imperfections. But instantly set about to remedy them. Begin every day a task anew.” During Advent, lets make our new task a deeper prayer life, entrusting all our desires for goodness and holiness, to the Most Holy Trinity, who has infinite patience with us. And as we receive this amazing love from the Trinity, let us ask that our own characters be reformed, so that we might have real patience with one another.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#5 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
As human beings, we tend to sin. We all know this about our characters. And many times, it moves us to despair. God sees our sin, but He never loses his patience with us. And one of the reasons why God never loses His patience with His creation, is, of course, because He loves us. But also because His happiness is already fully possessed by Himself. He’s not like us when we get angry at our children, and try to move time forward; try to make things happen quickly. God is perfectly happy in Himself, and so He does no violence to time, or to people’s development. He waits. He calls. He shares His own happiness with us. And He knows in this patience that He fully possesses, that someday we will be attracted to such a powerful person, to such a peaceful person as He revealed Himself to be in Jesus. This Advent, don’t lose patience with yourself. Convert all desires to sin into Jesus’ own heart. Give it to him and He will give you a share in His own happiness.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#4 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
Human beings are called by God, to find their fulfillment patiently, to a life of cultivating virtue. We don’t become saints immediately; we don’t even grow in disdain of our sins immediately. For we are so attached to them, and the immediacy of pleasure that they give us, that it takes time for us to disconnect from that pleasure, and to cultivate a new love, for the only pleasure that lasts, God sharing His own happiness with us. This Advent lets ask the Lord to open our hearts more deeply so that we can receive this happiness from Him. And in so receiving it, be healed of our impatience. For what is being given, and what is coming to us, is more than we could ever imagine.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#3 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
As human beings, we have disordered desires. One of our greatest disordered desires is to want things now, to be impatient, and to want things through our own efforts, without waiting or cooperating with God’s will. To wait and cooperate with God’s will, is to unleash the wonderful character trait of trust. To entrust all of our desires, and all that we wish would be fulfilled into the person of Jesus Christ, whose only desire is our goodness, our happiness, and our holiness. This Advent, let’s trust that God is thinking about us all the time and moving creation in such a way that all that is good will be given to us. Let us ask him to heal our desire to want things now. And to renew within us the desire to want only holiness, to want only what God wants for us, for he knows what is best.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#2 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
We want everything accomplished right away. God only knows that accomplishment follows one thing after another. He knows that it takes time for us to learn what it means to be human, to be those who are loved so deeply by His most Sacred Heart, His mother, and the saints. He knows that it takes time for us to understand that His love, and the reception of His love, is the very origin of our joy. During Advent, we ask even with more fervor, to receive this love. And we ask for the grace to release this joy, especially through the intercession of the saints and the Blessed Mother.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
AR#1 – Advent Reflections with Deacon James Keating, Ph.D.
One of God’s attributes is patience. He suffers His own creation, as it comes to fulfillment in His love. The God that we worship is a God who truly loves us. And in this great love, He waits. He waits for us to respond to all that He has given us. And He doesn’t simply wait in a passive way. He keeps loving us, keeps directing His love toward our hearts to awaken them with a response. This is near the very core of what Advent is about. God-loving us so deeply, directing His love toward us, and Him sharing His life with us so that we might respond in kind. So that we might wait and receive, and then respond to His great love
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
We know that self-involvement is boring because we know all the remedies that Americans try to unleash themselves from that boredom, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We all know that we are bored because we are constantly anesthetizing ourselves. We are constantly escaping. We are constantly distracted as a culture because the one thing that is weighing us down is what the commercial market, governments, popular culture, everyone tells us that we should be involved in, the self. And the only one who doesn’t say we should be involved in the self is the one we crucified and killed.
That’s how powerful the movement to stay self-involved is, even under anesthesia, the anesthesia of the current culture, because God help anyone who tries to free us or release us from this powerful self-involvement, they will be killed. They will be ignored. They will be, in some way, tortured, relegated to the margins, attacked. That’s how much we love the self.
The remedy to that is Sunday mass. And of course, the reason Sunday mass is dwindling in attention, in a de-attention, and we are closing parish after parish across diocese after diocese is because the mass is the only hour not about the self. There is nothing to attract an American to the mass because its objectivity does not pander to immediate gratification. And the whole culture panderers to immediate gratification. And the one holy and sacred place that refuses to play into our wound is the mass. The one place that refuses to profit off of our wound is the mass. Can we jazz it up a bit? Can you make it more like entertainment? Can you please change the prayers every Sunday so it’s not all predictable? And the mass stands its ground of objective revelation of the one act of God, which is our only way into the freedom from the self.
This is my body given for you. Two thousand years, we are not budging on that objective reality. If you want to be relieved of the burden of the self, you must suffer the mass. It is not entertainment. It is reconfiguration of your first interest. And that is a spiritual chiropractic that hurts like hell. It is a reorientation of your first interest. And to be with God, it cannot be you. It has to be the mystery of God’s own self that fascinates us.
So He gives us baptism and He gives us all the other sacraments to assist in this reorientation. And the drama of our lives is very clear. In the end, will he or will he not become sick of himself? Let’s watch and see. And if he becomes sick of himself in the face of the revealing beauty of God and he participates in what has been revealed, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we call that salvation, and we’ll call that man saved, holy. But it is a wrenching drama.
If you look at the next series of notes there, the Eucharist is the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other words, the Eucharist is God pouring out his love. That’s the gift. The Eucharist is God, the Trinitarian God pouring out the gift, which is his love in order to invite us to receive it. See that passive language? In order to invite to receive. There is no coercion in love. We must trust, surrender, and respond to the grace.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO.
