Without God, We Are Nothing

Let us therefore make Him our everything

The following meditation is developed from remarks I shared at a recent youth retreat; I share them now in honor of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. —PAK

Basic truths

We would not even exist if God was not every moment causing us to be. We would not be able to act without Him acting in us. We cannot achieve virtue, holiness, or happiness without Him. Jesus put it best: “Without Me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5). We have a profound need to pray every day. Our interior life will wither up and eventually dry out if we do not have recourse to prayer every day. And when we lose our interior, we become an empty shell.

Our Lord says in the Gospel of John:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (Jn. 15:15)

He has given us the gift of His friendship by sharing His life, His truth, His peace, His grace with us. We can describe the Christian life as an ongoing conversation with Christ, so that our friendship with Him can grow ever deeper. When we die and come before Our Lord, we want Him to recognize us as familiar friends and welcome us into His kingdom. We want to hear Him say: “Come in, friend, I have been expecting you and waiting for you these many years, and have so much enjoyed getting to know you during your lifetime that I look forward to dwelling under the same roof with you forever.”

At the same time, Jesus is not merely a friend like any other friend we might have; He is the Lord of glory, the great King over all the earth, the one who knit us together in our mother’s womb, the one who saved us by the outpouring of His blood on the Cross, the one who will be our Judge, merciful and just. Our relationship with Him should therefore be characterized not only by familiarity and intimacy, but also by the most profound worship, reverence, and self-surrender. The first and most proper response to the God-Man is adoration, falling to our knees like those who approached Christ when He walked on earth—just as we do before the Blessed Sacrament today.

Let God enter

This ongoing conversation with the Lord happens in many ways—in personal prayer, whether formal or informal, with or without words; in reading and pondering Scripture; even in our contacts with other people, in whom we try to see Christ and relate to Him. But the highest and most exalted encounter with Our Lord in this life takes place in the public prayer of the Church, what we call her “sacred liturgy,” which consists of the rites of the sacraments, the Divine Office, and, above all, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which Our Lord makes Himself present in our midst so that we may give perfect worship to the Father in union with Him and receive Him as the bread of wayfarers, the food of immortality.

He wants us to live His very own life; He wants us to breathe with His Spirit; He wants to touch our soul and body with His healing, transformative Presence. St. Athanasius said: “God became man that man might become God.” If you want God to become your own and yourself to become God’s own, then you must let God enter you in the way He has chosen: under the form of bread, as your nourishment, as the most basic good without which you would die of starvation.