This is the final post in Fr Philip Carter’s series ‘A Thinking Heart’. We will be taking a break of a week before we bring you the next series, ‘Poetry of Faith’.
…drawn by the Father to Jesus
Sandra Schneiders
This basic disposition (openness of heart, the basic readiness to see and hear what is really there) …to accept the truth is what enables the person, regardless of moral weakness and lapse, regardless of ethnic or religious background, regardless of orthodoxy, regardless of religious education or lack thereof, to be interiorly ‘taught by God’. Such a person, no matter how far astray he or she might have wandered, remains tractable and can be drawn by the Father to Jesus.
Sandra Schneiders
Image: Jan Fabre, The Man Who Bears the Cross
Faith – according to Jesus – is critical. But ‘it is not a condition or state of being or possession but an active engagement with God’. Ultimately it’s our only protection against self-deception. No external agency can be a substitute for what Etty calls her ‘inner regulator’ – our conscience trained to be as open as possible to the truth.
Image: Jan Fabre, The Man Who Bears the Cross, Antwerp
How open are you?
How willing are you to say you don’t know?
How generous are you towards the Otherness of Spirit,
‘the unthinkable and uncontrollable one who knows the depth of God’. (Denis Edwards)
Image: Jan Fabre, The Man Who Bears the Cross, Antwerp
Radical compassion, in which an individual puts his own life at risk in order to help another, points to a truth about humankind as being fundamentally oriented toward the other, which is simultaneously a truth which God has revealed about himself.
Oliver Davies
The images in this post are of the work The Man Who Bears the Cross, permanently installed in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp. The parish priest who commissioned the work, Fr, Bart Paepen says of the sculpture,
‘A man bears an enormous wooden cross on his right-hand palm. He is not a prophet, nor an apostle, a martyr, or a saint. He is someone who does what we invite every visitor of the cathedral to do, regardless of his background or his convictions. Take the cross in your hands, a token of the God that is celebrated here, a token of his love for the whole of humankind, a token of the engagement that he asks from all his followers. Take up the cross and balance it. Perhaps you will not succeed in holding it upright. Perhaps it is too heavy or too difficult. Perhaps you should try again later. Perhaps you don’t like it. Just let it down then. Who knows—you may succeed and feel right. Then it could be that you have found a goal and a meaning in your life.’
Source: jan fabre’s ‘man who bears the cross’
Parce Domine, parce populo tuo quia pius es et misericors. Exaudi nos in aeternum, Domine.
Spare, O Lord, spare thy people, for Thou art gracious and merciful. Hear us for ever, O Lord.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
1 Comment
These images remind me of fragility and tenacity in life.