The only way I can truly help another is first come to accept my need for the Other. Otherwise my actions are just an act of projection. Love begins with poverty.
When God leads a man to a state of poverty, is this not always to bring about an increase of love? ... Prayer does more than make us aware of our limitations: it transforms that part of our life that weighs us down and crushes us, and changes the nature of this poverty...Prayer, after bringing us to accept our limitations and making us aware of our real need, it transforms that need, that deficiency, that poverty into a dependence upon someone else. Love will not rest until it achieves its goal: to share everyting in order to bring about the unity toward which it tends...Love needs the need of another. It nourishes itself and continues to exist on the awareness of this need within itself. God likewise needs our need. Thus, the poverty which before crushed us now becomes, through prayer, a source of wealth, by which we gain possession of the heart of God. To refuse to recognize one's own poverty, is not to recognize God; it means refusing to allow him to be God for us. For me, God is God only when I accept the fact that I need him...thus our poverty becomes a source of wealth, provided that we are conscious every day that I am in the night, but I am no longer in prison, I am no longer alone. ~ Father Bernard Bro, O.P.
Father Bro is a French Dominican priest, a distinguished theologian, and the author of many books.
From Magnificat
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Benedict says near the end of his second volume of Jesus of Nazareth that (a) He has come, but (b) in the Ascension He is not taken to some cosmic "location", but He is taken up into "God's very being, participating in God's powerful presence in the world" (p. 287).
Prayer, the Holy Eucharist, vigilance (p. 288!) all keep us in relation with our Lord in and through this Ascension "being". Have a blessed Octave of Easter!
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