Dear friends of St. Rafael,
Our advice column series continues. Check out part one here if you missed it, and keep your eyes on your inbox for the next installment.
Happy Feast of the Visitation!
Catherine
Dear St. Rafael: My feelings about God have grown cold. How can I warm my heart?
Dear friend,
It’s cold here on earth . . . Cold with the chill of mortal life . . . the chill of a pilgrim with no house or home traversing an empty, impassable desert. […]
Everything comes and goes. Frost and snow will pass, each day and year will pass, tonight will pass and day will break . . . It’s all a matter of knowing how to wait, and in the end, up there, when our lives are over, our souls will quench their thirst at the one true stream, which is God.
Great is divine mercy when it grants the soul a certain condition in which everything inspires it to lift its heart high above all created and earthly things. When the soul is in pain because it cannot see God, what does it care about the world? […] How great is God’s mercy to put a soul in a state like that . . . […] A soul that longs for heaven is a soul that knows its own weaknesses.
The Lord well knows that when I feel my weakest, when I struggle most with the materiality that weighs me down, when my heart is at the mercy of so many things, and when my soul is suffering a pain more human than divine, that is when, kneeling before the tabernacle in the silence of the night, I wail and weep like the deer that thirsts . . .
When [the soul] realizes that what it is experiencing is thirst . . . thirst for divine love, and the pain of going on living, and a desire for eternal life . . . At that moment, but not before, is when its suffering comes to an end, its agony becomes sweet, and everything vanishes: the world and its people, darkness and sunlight . . . everything in creation, everything in existence fades away, leaving only a soul looking up at his God. […]
It’s a passing chill, a momentary one . . . merely lifelong, and life is an instant in eternity, an instant hardly worth our attention.
–St. Rafael
(#137, “As a Deer Longs for Flowing Streams,” My Notebook, December 9, 1936)
Dear St. Rafael: What is the point of a monastic vocation? What good does a monastic vocation do for the church/world?
Dear friend,
This mad world doesn’t listen . . . Crazy and foolish, it rushes about, drunk on its own noise . . . it doesn’t hear Jesus, who is suffering and loving from the cross. But Jesus needs souls who will listen to Him in silence. Jesus needs hearts who, forgetting themselves and going far away from the world, will adore His heart, injured and ripped apart by so much neglect, and love it madly, with wild abandon.
If only you knew, sometimes I laugh inside when I see the pained faces of some people when they learn I’m going to La Trapa . . . They can’t conceive of it. They think I’ve gone mad. It makes me want to shout, “You dimwits, can’t you see that I just love Jesus so much? Can’t you see that it’s God? You don’t know what it is to love God! Don’t you pity me, don’t you cry, don’t you go worrying, even if I were to die . . . I’d do it a thousand times over again if I had a thousand lives to live.”
The world thinks La Trapa is where I belong . . . what a contradiction. Jesus is where I belong, His cross is where I belong . . . I don’t care about La Trapa at all . . . if God were to show me some other place where I might suffer more, and He asked me to go, I’d walk there blindly.
–St. Rafael
(#200, “How good it is to live close to the cross of Christ!” April 7, 1938; #93, letter to María Osorio, December 27, 1935; #189, “Jesus Is Where I Belong!” March 7, 1938)
Dear St. Rafael: Any advice on how to become a saint even if you don't die young of a terrible disease?
Dear friend,
We must love Him above all things. And how hard that is! Only the saints achieved that, but then, the saints were human beings like us . . . Why, then, should we not achieve that too? What one person does with the grace of God, another can do too, with that same grace of God . . . This must be our one and only, unchanging aspiration.
Loving God in silence and solitude, with a heart detached from the world, and only one will: that of Christ. With these three things . . . one can become perfect, so long as one doesn’t forget about Mary.
–St. Rafael
(#46, letter to W. Marino del Hierro, September 2, 1934; #216, undated note in Rafael’s Bible)
Dear St. Rafael: Why does everything feel meaningless?
Dear friend,
What peace it brings to the soul to think that neither human beings nor world events can hinder the coming of what awaits us . . . With each passing day, we are a step closer to the beginning of our true lives. What the world sees as the end is what the monk sees as the beginning. Everything comes, everything goes . . . only God remains.
What else can I say to you? . . . Nothing. Someday soon, when we are at rest in the Lord, we shall see that all these activities and worries that kept us busy down here below were natural and human, because we are people after all, but seen rightly, none of it was worth thinking about, and all the time we spent thinking about ourselves was time wasted, time that we should have devoted to God.
–St. Rafael
(#109, “Knowing How to Wait,” July 12, 1936; #46, letter to W. Marino del Hierro, September 2, 1934)
If you have questions for St. Rafael, keep ‘em coming in the comments or by replying to this email! More answers next week.