Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius
April 20, 2014 (Easter)
Spiritual Ponderings
The Seven Last Words

A happy and blessed Easter to everyone, I pray that everyone has had a blessed Holy Week. My spiritual ponderings will continue to focus on the last seven words of Christ on the Cross. Another quick quote from Fulton Sheen to get us started: "Men on dying either proclaim their own innocence, or condemn the judge who sentence them to death, or else ask pardon for sins. But Perfect Innocence asked no pardon; as Mediator between God and man He extended pardon."

4. Today you will be with me in paradise. - Luke 23:43
The story of the repent thief is one of the stories that scare me the most in the Bible because I notice that I do not follow Christ's example to well. When I am sick, suffering, or have been wronged, I turn in on myself way too often. If I would have been in Jesus' place the conversation with the good thief would not have taken place because I would have been too absorbed in my own pain and suffering to notice that there was somebody else I could be helping. This is what makes Jesus so extraordinary in my heart. Jesus is always about giving himself away to others even in his own pain and suffering. He is totally selfless and that is why He is my role model and my hero.

Jesus promises the good thief salvation. What is salvation? Salvation is being in a right and proper relationship with God and others. We see the thief receive salvation because he first acknowledges Jesus as God and secondly he realizes his own sinfulness and how that has brought him to where he is. He is no longer making excuses. The love of God will overcome everything but our own stubbornness. Paradise to me would be a place where people knew me and love me for who I was and I knew and loved people for who they are.

"Two thieves crucified on either side of Him at first blasphemed and cursed. Suffering does not necessarily make men better; it can sear and burn the soul, unless men are purified by seeing its redemptive value. Un-spiritualized suffering may cause men to degenerate. The thief on the left asked to be taken down. But the thief on the right, evidently moved by Our Savior?s priestly prayer of intercession asked to be taken up?" Fulton Sheen

5. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? - Mathew 27:46, Mark 15:34
I don't know if I have ever felt truly abandoned by God. There are times in which I doubted He existed and there were definitely times I wish He did not exist but as I pray with this idea I have the feeling that I have never truly felt abandoned by God. I always knew even in my worse hour that God was somehow there. Fulton Sheen puts it this way: "Christ's cry of abandonment which He felt standing in a sinner's place, but it was not despair. The soul that despairs never cries to God."

In my adult years of life I have come to the conclusion that "abandonment" or what St Ignatius of Loyola called "desolation" is one of God?s most powerful tools to bring about conversion and wisdom. Desolation simply means the perceived absence of God.

In desolation God can be doing one of three things. He can be reprimanding us for our own slothfulness. If I am not praying, He is going to respect my free will and not make His presence known in a way that will force me to believe. The second thing is that He may be testing my faithfulness. Am I a fair-weather believer or not? If I am only praying and believing when things are good, God may challenge me to pray when times are bad. Finally God may be reminding me that everything I have is a gift from Him and I cannot earn good feelings. He instead willing gives us all good things.

"Hence He, who loved men unto death, allowed sin to wreak its vengeance upon Him, in order that they might forever understand its horror as the crucifixion of Him who loved them most." - Fulton Sheen