Rejoice in the Lord, always

Human beings are meant to be alive and vibrant, full of wonder, love, and happiness—
which is exactly what Scripture promises to those who embrace God’s word fully.
This is what the saints experience, what people who have a deep prayer life know to be the case.
They ‘rejoice in the Lord always’, not just some of the time (Phil 4:4).
Fr Thomas Dubay, S.M.
from Prayer Primer

(looking up at the ceiling in Santa Maria sopra Minerva / Rome, Italy / Julie Cook / 2018)

“With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves.

He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment,
upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end.

Recognizing this utter dependence with respect to the Creator is a source of wisdom and freedom,
of joy and confidence:
‘For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made;
for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.

How would anything have endured, if you had not willed it?

Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?

You spare all things for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living’
(Wisdom 11:24-26).”
— (CCC, 301)
An Excerpt From
Catechism of the Catholic Church

But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold,
I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness.
Isaiah 65:18

fusion

“To join two things together there must be nothing between them or
there cannot be a perfect fusion.
Now realize that this is how God wants our soul to be,
without any selfish love of ourselves or of others in between,
just as God loves us without anything in between.”
St. Catherine of Siena

(image from the Passion of the Christ)

The word fusion, according to Merriam Webster, is defined as a union by or as if by melting:
such as a: a merging of diverse, distinct, or separate elements into a unified whole

A merging of diverse, distinct, separate elements—
Merging…as in combining, blending, joining together… a union…
the binding of two pieces in order to become one.

That is what God desires…a fusion of created to Creator.

But this is actually more of a re-union…a re-joining of two who were long ago separated…
for, in the beginning, there was a union… but with man having chosen to defy the Creator…
the union was torn asunder.

Yet as St Catherine of Siena reminds us, God longs to be reunited…He longs for the two to
be fused back together…

However, for the fusion to hold, there can be nothing which exists in between…
there must be nothing.

Not the thinnest, smallest, tiniest or slightest separation…
not any passion, nor desire, nor want…nothing that we think we simply must have
can exist because if it does, we remain separate and not one.

And so as we read below an excerpt from the Catholic Catechism…
whether we be Catholic or not, we read that it is by Christ’s passion…
his sacrifice, his willingness to offer himself in place of our own damned fate
that we are able to be reunited.
He has fused himself to us as we are re-united in “his redemptive Passion.”
As He joins the Father, we in turn re-join the Father…

“Often Jesus asks the sick to believe.
He makes use of signs to heal: spittle and the laying on of hands, mud and washing.
The sick try to touch him, ‘for power came forth from him and healed them all’.
And so in the sacraments Christ continues to ‘touch’ us in order to heal us.
Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick,
but he makes their miseries his own:
‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases’.
But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God.
They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover.
On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and
took away the ‘sin of the world’, of which illness is only a consequence.
By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering:
it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.”
Excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Chruch, pp.1504-05