"Every moment of life is to be fully enjoyed, celebrated, relished
because each one is willed by God who willed you into existence
and gave you each moment in order to know Him and reach Him now -
in this moment - and in each eternal moment with Him."
If you have not read that before, it is because I just was just now inspired to write it - just for you. After you have pondered that quote and how it applies to your life right now, let us go further: Our minds are created to be expanded infinitely. We will never become infinite in our being but our minds - made in the image and likeness of God - will continue grow - in the capacity of our mind and love - to be expanded by God eternally because He is infinite loveable and eternal.
How will God do this?:
1) First understand that from your conception, your mind/soul began to grow in its capacity to know and love - began developing and expanding - even to this precise moment. You can remember part of this expansion from Kintergarted to High School Graduation, perhaps from college and then the university. But you learned so much from watching your parents and siblings and your teachers..not only in what they told you but by they way they lived their values and handed down their wisdom. My mom was the wisest person I ever met. She only went to the 4th grade, but no doctor, counselor, clergyman could ever surpass her because the wisdom she had was from the Holy Spirit. It was so inspired that even my own brother said: "Mom was never wrong!" Precisely my feelings. She died the way she lived: after receiving three Sacraments of the Church, she was saying the rosary and finishing her last "Hail Mary", took two small breaths and never exhaled. She exhaled in heaven. I watched and experienced her very last moment that God gave her and in which He called her hom. Yes, she was very wise. All the love experiences of her life expanded her mind and soul and made her ready for heaven.
2) When we get to heaven, that's when the expansion of our minds and souls really begin. Here's how:
Now that we are not encombered by our limited human understanding, God can expand our knowledge and love for Him - which is not for His sake - but rather for ours. He does enjoy us expanding our mind and capacity to love Him; but the axiom: "Bonum est diffusivum sui" - "Goodness tends to go out of itself"
is not a static concept but a dynamic one: God will for all eternity do this for you and me:
a) He will reveal to us something we never ever imagined about Himself as we look upon His face in the Beatific Vision. This revelation will so awe us as to make us cry out with astonishment and wonder. We will so well up in the expansion of our minds ans souls as to be totally moved to love God in graitude that we never dreamed was in us. God will let us totally "enjoy, celebrate and relish" this heavenly moment. After having let this revelation expand us further by letting our hearts grow in love for God, then He will do something unexpected:
b) He will give us another revelation of his Being, His Beauty and His Love! But this time it will be predicated on our new capacity to know and love Him. This second revelation will be greater than the first. We will be as they say "blown away" - actually so awed as to almost die of love except in heaven, Love is Life.
c) But this kind of knowledge, if given on earth. would cause a person to die. Even Moses was only able to look at the Back of God lest he die. I have had a "Moses-experience" 15 years ago after attending Mass at Sacred Heart in Dearborn. I was walking in the woods and whimsically telling God: "Father, I see You in the sky and clouds, in the flowers and trees, and can hear You in the running brook and sound of the trees in the wind." Then I heard - still having the Blessed Sacrament/Holy Communion viably in me - the Father emotionally responding to my simple sincere childlike words to Him said to me in an eternal voice that had an echo that echoed down the ages of eternity: "You belong to Me!", I was so awed that I waited for a time thinking that God would take me home and that God was indeen calling me home to Himself. But God was only letting me know that I was His child and that all I have came from Him: body, soul, talents work, parents, siblings, all the love I have given and recieved -- All came from Him. I was denuded and shown that every speck of my being and life belonged to Him! I truly waited to die because infused contemplation by Him was the greatest spiritual experience I ever had until then or after then. I have never experienced God like that ever again. But the memory of that experience erased my Faith. I no longer had to believe. I know God and His love for me. He is more awesome than I could put into words to you. But after waiting and realizing that God was not taking me home with that incredible utterance to me through His Spirit yet coming absolutely from the Heart of God the Father, I then told God with a little comic relief: "Well, Father, if I belong to You that much, then that means You belong to me, too." God had given me as much as my soul could take - just short of His possessive eternal love causing me to die. He was not looking at my soul just at the moment. He has a total knowledge of ALL that I will ever say to Him - the sum total of all my love - the sum total of all I will ever say to Him or be for Him --throughtout all eternity. He thinks eternally in the eternal moment and in the sum total of eternity because He has experienced eternity. There never was a moment that God did not exist! That eternal Self kind of colors His conversations with us...as He addresses not only who we are at this precise moment; but rather He addresses our full total and actualized self - into eternity with Him.
d) For some on this earth, their minds and souls will be so expanded as to be able to bi-locate. This phenomen of being in two places at the same time may be only a natural result of the expansion of their souls. For example: Padre Pio was able to be in his little town of Petrocina and be in Rome at the same exact moment. Many saints could do this. Padre Pio was [according to Joseph Cusamano] so focused on God as to let the Mind of God's pattern of thinking become his own. Padre Pio was so one with Christ as to have the life of Christ living in him. "Christ shared everything," says Joseph. I agree. Padre Pio's mind was so expanded - so focused on God - that he allowed God to take over his whole life, every moment of his life. He died as he kept repeating the names of "Jesus" and "Mary". If we could live like Padre Pio in our own calling and state of life - we would be able to bi-locate, walk on water or go through walls - because Jesus was able to do things. Jesus multiplies His Presence even now - not merely bi-locate - but be "Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity in billions of places at the same time. Even Peter for a time was able to walk on water. This power to walk on water is not supernatural or miraculous. Peter could do it as long as he fully focused on Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit who expands our minds and souls to perform what our bodies can naturally do as long as we are totally supernaturally focused on God.
3) After in heaven when we have had our first two mind-heart expansions resulting from our experiencing God in His new revelations of Himself to each of us, He will give us His third glorious revelation of Himself! This time He has more to work with in us. He can now reveal something that He could not at first because we did not have the capacity to take it in. But after His having expanded our minds and souls to this new level of our being, He will again totally surprise us with His third revelation that will so awe us as to make out love for God soar beyond expression here on earth. God is doing something with great preciseness and plan according to the capacity of each of us. People like Padre Pio have an enormous capacity and headstart on us. But God will be expanding each of our minds and souls according to each one's capacity and response to His Love.
4) Heaven is not a static of boring place. Heaven is so awesome - so dynamic - so interesting - so joyful - so loving - so exciting - so beyond the imagination of mankind - so dynamically social in that as all of us are growing in our knowledge and love for God, we all will become that much more close to each other because we all will be becoming more beautiful in our souls. As loving parents delight in the developement of their children and are surprised by their phenominal growth and beauty, so too will this occur in Heaven. We will all be growing in mind and soul, in our capacity to know and love God and in our capacity to know and love one another. There will be a ever increasing cresendo of love for God and each other. We will all in Heaven enjoy the most dynamic society beyond any utopia ever dreamed of before. And this utopia is expanding not only by new souls coming into heaven - prehaps about 350,000 a day - but by the total upward expansion of our Love for God. Our minds will be ever more be expanded expodentially as God keeps revealing Hiimself for ever. He will continue to expand our minds - eternally!
5) As each new revelation and awesomeness of God which will expand out minds' and souls' capacity to know and love God - each revelation even being greater and greater - because God can freely reveal Himself as our capacity grows and as He actually grows our capacity. How long can God keep up the Divine Crescendo? He can and will keep it up for all eternity. Will not God run our of content of Himself to reveal? No! God's Being is Infinite. For all eternity He can reveals Himself to you and to me without ever being able to exhaust His Being or Capacity to reveal Himself. Why? Because knowing God for us will be an glorious eternal enterprize of Knowing and Loving God. What will be the state of all of us millions of millenia into eternity? Two simple words in Greek - put together - express this state well. The words are "en" - meanning "within/being caught up into" plus the second Greek word, "Theos" meaning "God". Thus we have the English word: "Enthusiasm" which really and etymologically means: "To be caught up into God." We will never be God even if He reveals so much of Himself that we will be so holy and full of love for God. No...the only One who knows God is God. Only God has the capacity to know Himself. The family life of the inner Trinity of the Three Divine Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - infinitely know and love each other and are infinitely "caught up" in their Being. There is a Latin axiom: "Erit Unus Christus Semetipsum amans." which means: "There shall be One Christ loving Himself" - which is the goal of all the Church as we the Body of Christ are caught up in Him. But we can expand this quote to read: Erit Unus Theos Semetipsum Amans" - "There shall be One God loving Himself"; and He will take us all into the inner life of the Holy Trinity because the Father will recognize His Son - the Word of God made flesh - in all of us. We will with Christ enjoy the inner Family of God according to the capacity of each our minds and souls which God the Father will be ever expanding for all eternity.
6) The end result of the Redemption of the whole human race --- from the beginning of time to the end of time - when all humans who loved God are in Heaven - those who have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior and have let the Cruifixion and Death of Jesus wash away all their sins by true repentance and belief and trust in Him ---will be a greater glory for God and of us in Him than if Adam and Eve never sinned in the first place. Why? Because "Where sin abounds, grace abounds more." The most fantastic Infinite Creativity of God is so wondrous that God can bring out a more beautiful result in us and in the Kingdom of God - in the total Economy of God - His Kingdom Come - than if Adam and Eve had never fallen. St. Paul said not to let this be an excuse for sin. It means that God is a God of Love. Love not only forgives: Love repairs and beautifies the Beloved - us - His Bride the Church - as to make it without spot or wrinkle. And in so doing, Jesus shows His tenderness and husbandly love to dry every tear from our eyes. From His wounded side - symbol of His wounded Sacred Heart - Jesus does a marvelous thing: all the confessed and forgiven sins we have given to Him - He uses for our good. Even on earth, this is so. We have seen it in the murderous Saul being transformed into a Saint Paul - greatest traveling apostle for Jesus - who wrote the most beautiful applications of the Gospel of Jesus in the early life of the Church. His letters spoon fed the children of God to nourish and give them life. He went from the killing of St. Stephen to giving life and nourishment - the Eucharist and the Word of God - all the new found churches in Rome and Corinth and many Christian Communities. He was like a Father to all of them...fed them, corrected them, encouraged them and died for them in giving his life in giving them the Gospel no matter the danger or peril or sacrifice. Had Saul not accepted Jesus, we would never have known he ever existed except the one line that "they laid their cloaks at the feet of Saul" Other than that line, we would never have known him. But Jesus - creative Word of God who walked this planet - changed Saul into Paul. And Jesus does this every day for you and me. And we will one day be Jesus' Bride in heaven. As far as we belong to Jesus - knowing and loving Him now as a member of His Church - which is His Bride - to that extent will we enjoy the intimacy with Him in paradise. The whole Divine Romance begins here.
7) In Heaven there is only one non-divine being that enjoys an intimacy with God that even our eternity of growing in capacity and love God will not ever equal. Our etenal growth in Knowledge and Love for God
will never catch up to the one who is God's greatest non-divine human being: She is Mary. Her capacity to know and love God was at her Immaculate Conception greater than all in heaven and on earth put together even with their eternal growth. No one will ever equal Mary. No angel or saint have or will be as holy as she who had the Trinity dwelling in her for 9 months. Jesus - even as a growing Divine Fetus - was the Word totally united to the Father and the Son. Mary was the tabernacle of God. How pure must she be? It is God who has taken us residence in her. She is a mystery. That is why we say the joyful and glorious mysteries of the Rosary: we are trying to take in the mystery of Mary.
Additonally, Mary who has been - in earth time calculations - in heaven for 2000 years and all this time has been growing in her capacity to know and love God, where is she in her "Enthusiam" for God?
How much has she been "caught into God"? How much has her heart been expanded when already was expanded so much earth which made her exclaim: "My soul magnifies the Lord; my sous rejoices in the Lord.." We now understand those words in a much greater depth: the word "magnifies" or "reflects" the glory of the Lord - how much does she do this even now? Has she not taken on the likeness of God into her very being? How much does her soul "rejoice" in the Lord? To know this, we would have to be her. As we cannot imagine the depth of God's Being unless we were God, so, too, we cannot imagine the depth of Mary's being - her holiness, beauty and humility - unless we had the capacity and holiness of Mary. We will never know Mary's beauty fully. Only God has access to her soul. The children of Fatima and Bernadette and St. Therese - all - were mesmorized the by the beauty of Mary. They were enamored of her. They in tears told others of her beauty. If they love her, how much will love her in heaven? She - a tender mom - is so great - as to be Queen of Heaven and earth: Queen of all hearts. All will love her for all eternity - especially knowing that her capacity to know and love God will be growing expodentially beyond any telling.
We speak of devotion to Mary. It is Mary who is devoted totally to us. Devotion mean "love". We also - as we grow in love for God for all eternity - will also grow in our love and devotion for Mary because her beauty will continue to grow for all eternity. We will see the Immaculate Conception grow more and more beautiful.
Will not Heaven be a Glorious Place!!
Mary, our Mother, help us to be faithful to Jesus so we can join you in Heaven. You found Jesus after looking for him for three days. Please keep looking for us when we get lost which is often. Help us to be found in Confession and Eucharist. Don't abandon us when we get so busy about our business and do not see your or your Son's business. Help us to be like Jesus who said: "I must be about My Father's busines."
Mom, make us as beautiful in our souls as you are so we can in our little way "Magnify for Lord" and "Rejoice" in Him. Mom, as you took Jesus home after those three days of looking for him, please help us and safely bring us home to Heaven: to you and Jesus and His Father. Thank you, Mary, for all your devotion to us: for bringing to Confession and Holy Communion so often We give you all....even our sins...we give you all our hopes and.desires, dreams and souls. All the saints in heaven got there because of you. Your greatest work and greatest joy is creating Saints for Heaven. You did it for Juan Diego, for Bernadette, for Maximillian Kolbe, for Therese of Lisieux. Mom, you are a great artist. You create Saints and make them beautiful for God. What a neat hobby you have: making saints. Please make me a saint too.
I give you all your childen on this earth. Make us all saints..because you are our Mom!
Love, Pio
Comments by Benjamin Bourlier - 24 year old musician, composer and philosopher - who just read this blog on October 3, 2011. His comments are as follows:
"I'm a pianist and composer at UofM -- a poet and "philosopher" privately, if you could call it that -- and was talking to Piotre about 'mystic experience', about what he calls here the 'eternal moment', precisely about the way in which it cannot in any conventional sense be 'talked about', as I see it, but rather with luck signified through some miraculous sympathy of aesthetic representation. Even then, I'm not sure we can be said to have 'talked about' this, but have rather been (or have provided) conduits for an experience in another that we cannot control any more than our original experience. It is selfless, essentially, gorgeously, a moment at once numb and infinitely aware and raw. This is essentially how I conceive of what I'm doing when composing, improvising, writing -- wrestling with mystical experience as it might reveal itself in aesthetic representation, not "symbolically", but directly.
The one experience of mine that's stuck with me all my life as the first memorable moment of total self-awareness -- which is at once a "selfless awareness" -- was at age nine or ten. My mother came home from work much later than I came home from school, and as she hadn't copied the apartment key yet, I would sit on the porch or play in the yard until she got back. This particular day I was still coming down from a cold, too sick to play, so I rested on the steps to wait. It was early spring. I began to meditate on what I might now call 'seasonal transformation', on <the enormity of Spring>, but the truth is though I've tried many times, I'll never be able to adequately express exactly <what> I was meditating on. It was a selfless exchange of environmental affect and sick, involuntary coughs, weezes etc, which revealed the selflessness of seasonal transition, the enormity of history not as human construct but as context, environment. As David Foster Wallace would suggest, as he does in his book "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity", I was experiencing my first moment of <abstraction>, that which is 'removed from or transcending concrete particularity, sensuous experience', as he says.
But of course it was not <only abstract>, but, as we'd say, mystical. Piotre asked me about my relationship to God, after I mentioned this, and I said delicately that it is something that must remain personal, not as a choice -- I don't, that is, choose to keep it personal, but rather I feel that to try and share it would be to engage the sentential, propositional logic of language, which can't handle such an expression. It is personal because language has limited it thus. Only through deeply conditional, mannered, subversive use of language in poetry can I construct anything approaching a representation, and then it is most likely totally incomprehensible, as such, to just about anyone, given the contract of language that we enter into when we speak -- if we intend to say anything <meaningful>, consistent, generalized. I've been very influenced by Ludwig Wittegenstein for quite a while now, a philosopher I think of as a kind of mystical figure, a very important one. Of course qualifying him as such would seem to contradict his belief that one cannot speak -- that is, speak clearly, meaningfully -- of the mystic, which is true. But neither can one refrain. Wittgenstein, who did not consider himself religious but who approached everything with "a religious attitude", believed his philosophy, once understood, would reveal itself to be meaningless, a ladder used to climb to a ledge that one then kicked away. I am not a "religious" person, I emphatically do not subscribe to any systematic religious authority, because, in a Wittgensteinian sense I see religion as staying clung to the ladder, as it were. A mystic experience is a moment of freedom not in the familiar sense that we are free to act and navigate our experience, not in the religious sense that we may be free of sin or free of doubt or free of fear, but freedom from the very self and egoic sensibility necessary for worldly decision, the freedom of a waking dream; when younger, around five years old, I remember first considering the limits to the universe, what was beyond that conceptual edge, etc, and trying in that state to conceive of how I related at all to my family members, who were the core of my existence -- how could I "find" my mother and father in this vastness? Similarly, to have knowledge of "God the father" in a mystic state does not make sense to me propositionally, as in that state I have lost myself to discrete relations, I've become associatively continuous.
To say that in the mystic state I have made myself open to "God" makes sense to me only subjectively as I understand I have made myself open to something transcendent of egoic limitation, and I understand that culturally the word "God" has come to signify this transcendence, but the statement in no way does justice to the experience. This is very important to me because often when trying to express this it's assumed I'm talking about "atheism", or my lack of belief, when in fact I'm merely saying that I <can't> discuss my private sense of God, not meaningfully. I can say to you now that I have a very intense inner experience of what another person would call God, but, while true to me as I read it back, this is a nonsensical statement linguistically. A religious person may say that "no statement may do justice to the infinite presence of God", and I would say this is essentially true, because I understand subjectively what they mean to say, but I also understand that logistically this statement is nonsensical, because it is essentially a proposition speaking of itself -- Wittgenstein points out that a proposition may not speak of itself. That is, if the statement "no statement may do justice to God" is true, then it must logistically also be false, something we can privately overlook but with regard to language, can't admit as propositionally meaningful. We can see how mystic experience lies outside linguistic means of representation, inasmuch as language has to conform to propositional logic to be "taken seriously", to be "meaningful", and inasmuch as mystic experience appears contradictory put into such terms, private and self-less, individual and universal, explosive and implosive. We have sympathy with such contradictions, but I will never be able to subscribe to a religious system built on language, on hierarchical human systems dependant on expression in language, because such a system will always be contradictory. Now, this has nothing to do with my personal belief, my capacity to know God etc, but with my awareness of the injustice done to mystic experience by assertive, systematic use of language.
And yet, as Wittgenstein didn't refrain from attempting to articulate this in his philosophy, I don't refrain from trying to articulate something of it now, invited to by Piotre, nor should anybody refrain, I don't think, from allowing language to sensitize one's awareness to the "eternal moment". I would have to write a poem to sincerely attempt to answer Piotre's question about my relationship to God -- as I see it, this is in a sense precisely what I've been doing in writing poetry -- but I have no idea what that poem will mean to someone else, and it will appear new to me after having written it. To quote Wittgenstein on this, I take the following from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
- 6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
- 6.372 Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
- 6.373 The world is independent of my will.
- 6.374 Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only be a favour granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed physical connexion itself is surely not something that we could will.
- 6. 375 Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility.
On that note, I thank Piotre for sharing so openly his beautifully thoughtful blog with me and inviting me to share some of my own experience and thoughts!"
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