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A Leaven In The World… Look To Our Father In Heaven

May 30, 2016 Our Catholic Faith No Comments

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK

Everyone has made a wrong decision at some point in his or her life, and everyone can speak about the suffering or pain caused by bad decisions.
What, on the other hand, about the suffering or pain that is caused by doing the right thing? How often can we say that we suffered personally and willingly for doing right?
Or that we chose to do what was right and good with foreknowledge of the cost to ourselves?
I recently spoke with a father who is suffering for doing the right thing.
This man is a divorced father who fell in love with a divorced woman, who also has children, and they subsequently decided to move in together.
After some time with this arrangement, however, the man decided that his sense of sin in living with a woman to whom he is not married demanded that he do the right thing: Follow his conscience and break up. Now they are living separately and the relationship has changed to the point where their future together is uncertain.
This man rejected a sinful relationship that simulated spousal love. He chose faithfulness to his vocation as a father and avoided scandal as a Godly example for his children.
Shouldn’t someone feel good if he has done a good thing? Yes. But the reality of sin and of human nature means that the right and the good will sometimes be opposed, even by people we love the most. Opposition can bring the pain of internal conflict even for those with a clear conscience.
Our Heavenly Father is the best of fathers: He always gives us what we need no matter the cost to Him. “He gave His only Son” because that is precisely what we needed — mired in sin and in need of salvation as we were after the sin of our first father, Adam.
“The Word became flesh so that thus we might know God’s love: ‘In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.’ ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 458)
On this Father’s Day we rightly celebrate the selfless and heroic love of all our fathers on Earth.
But we also for that reason rightly look to the Father in Heaven, He from whom all fatherhood on Earth takes its name. Jesus Christ, the only Son, is the one who perfectly reveals the love of the Father.
“Jesus revealed that God is Father in an unheard-of sense: He is Father not only in being Creator; he is eternally Father in relation to his only Son, who is eternally Son only in relation to his Father: ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’” (CCC, n. 240).
Because of the recent Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, we cannot omit mention of the Holy Spirit, who, together with the Father and the Son, is one God.
The Holy Spirit continually ushers us into the life of God, whose inner reality is an ineffable mystery which we try to touch and to understand with the word “Trinity.”
“The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the ‘mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.’ To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit” (CCC, n. 237).
“The love of the Father, the grace of the Son and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you always” to choose what is good no matter the cost in this world which is passing away.

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Join me for a pilgrimage to Italy for the canonization of Mother Teresa in Rome and Assisi, Florence, and Venice from September 1-9, 2016. Go to proximotravel.com for more details or email me for more info at mcitl.blogsm@gmail.com.

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Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. @MCITLFrAphorism

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