Knowledge of our nothingness can bring us closer to God

One thing I learned from my conflict with Emma last night is that I’m still selfish. I’m glad I made the mistake of mentioning something that was unnecessary and that angered her because it reminded me that I’m still selfish. Sometimes I think I forget that if I’ve changed at all for the better, it was God who did all the work. Even the desire to become a better person doesn’t come from me, as Christopher West said in his latest video. That comes from the Holy Spirit. All I’ve done is accept these gifts from God, and it took me almost my entire life to even do that. When we grow even a little spiritually, we often fall into the trap of thinking we deserve credit for the progress we made. But that’s the trap of pride that the enemy has set for us. We fail to recognize that God was trying to break into our hearts and inspire us to return His love our entire lives, but most of the time we rejected His voice and inspirations because we wanted to do our will more than His.

It was God who brought about this change in us, all we did was say yes instead of no at some point and gave Him the freedom to remake us in His image and undo all of the damage we’ve done to Him, ourselves, and His mystical body with our sins.

So even when we grow in holiness, we don’t deserve any credit for that. I think I’ve convinced myself that because I accepted God’s grace and others haven’t, that makes me better than them. But it doesn’t because maybe God didn’t give them as much grace as He gave me, but even if He did, the fact that they have rejected it doesn’t make me better, it just means I realized I needed God more than they did. That realization also is His gift. Why do some people have this realization when others don’t? I think that’s a mystery that only God knows.

It’s like if there are two neighbors who are both living in poverty and someone knocks on their door. One man thinks to himself, “I don’t know who this is, but I’m starving so it would be stupid not to at least open my door and find out. Maybe he has some food, or maybe I could offer him something in exchange for some food”. So he opens the door and finds out that the man is looking for a place to stay for the night and is in fact a king from a distant land. In exchange for letting him stay at his house, the king offers the poor man not only money, but a chance to come live in his palace for the rest of his life, if he agrees to work for him for a while. The man is amazed and says of course I’ll agree to this, thank you so much. Then he runs and tells his wife and kids because he can’t believe how blessed he is.

What he doesn’t know is the king had gone to his neighbor’s house first and knocked on the door three times. His neighbor, who was also a poor man, chose to keep it closed because he told himself “even though I’m poor and starving, I can eventually find a job and become rich. Whoever is knocking on my door in the middle of the night is probably a robber or a drunk man, so I’m not gonna take the chance of opening it”. There was a voice in the back of his head telling him this is no ordinary man at his door, and it’s not a bad man because he’s knocking so gently and patiently, and he can sense that the man wants to help him. But his pride blinds him and overwhelms his reason and desire to receive anything good, and he gives in to his desire to be his own god. So the knocking stops and he goes back to bed, convinced it was a bad man and that he did the right thing.

I think that’s the difference between someone who eventually says yes to God’s love and someone who never does. Does the person who says yes deserve credit for simply answering his door when he’s on the verge of dying from starvation? No. He did the right thing, but it was God who inspired him to do it. All he did was respond to that inspiration. He doesn’t deserve credit for not doing the stupid thing and basically starving himself to death without realizing it. But this isn’t just referring to people who’ve just had a conversion. This is the decision we struggle with every day for our entire lives. Even after we’ve had a conversion, we still have to keep begging for food because we’re just as poor now as we were before our conversion. The only difference is now we recognize our poverty and let God fill us with His gifts. But even after growing in holiness we still sin and fall from our weaknesses. It’s like the poor man who agreed to go work for the king. Some days he works hard and accepts what the king pays him. But other days he’s tired and wants to talk to the king directly. He wants to ask the king when he’ll get to live in his palace and stop working in the fields. Some days he complains about his job and wants to be paid more. Other days he asks some of the other workers how much they make and asks them if they can give him some of their money so he can buy some things he wants. Some days he notices that some workers are being paid more than him for doing the same job and for just starting that job, while he’s been working for years. So every once in a while the king will visit the fields and remind this man that he once was starving and had nothing, including no job, and now he has a stable job and more than enough money to feed himself and his family. The king reveals to him that some workers are paid more than him, but he shouldn’t worry about that because they chose to work for him freely out of love, before they needed his help so desperately, and he rewarded them with greater gifts. But what this man didn’t understand is that even those gifts weren’t meant to be kept, they were meant to be shared with others who are starving now just like this man was. So the king tells the man, “you see, everything I’ve done is for a reason, to build up my kingdom and to share my love, joy, and riches with everyone. Do you see now that everyone is equally poor, and nobody deserves my help, but I give it freely because I love everyone in my kingdom?” Then the man realizes how ungrateful he’s been and how pride has made him foolish and forgetful of how poor he was, and he hangs his head in shame and asks the king to forgive him. But the king doesn’t accuse him of anything, rather he says “I know your weaknesses, that’s why I chose you to work in my fields, so that others could come to know my love through you. I don’t love you any less because of your sins and weaknesses. But I love you too much to let you stay in your poverty. I want you to share in my immense wealth, but in order for that to happen, I need you to accept everything from me, even the days when I don’t pay you at all. It doesn’t matter if you don’t receive money that day because our agreement hasn’t changed, you’ll still be coming to live with me at some point in the future. All you need to know is that I love you and will always give you what you need, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes”. Then the man is filled with love and gratitude for the king and goes back to his job with a new sense of purpose and inspiration and wants to tell all the other workers how good the king really is.

I think this is how we are with God. Even after we’ve decided to live our lives for Him, we get lazy, indifferent, selfish, prideful, and greedy. We still want to go to heaven, but we want to go there on our terms, not God’s. We start to believe we’ve worked hard enough at following His rules and trying to do His will, and deserve some rest and some pleasures when we want them. So every now and then, God has to let us be overcome by our weaknesses and remind us that we are still nothing without Him, and that we should be grateful for everything He’s already given us. Can a being who once was nothing begin to deserve rewards more than another being who also once was nothing? No. Both of those beings deserve nothing, but God offers them both His gifts out of love. It’s up to them whether or not they’ll accept or reject those gifts.

I think now I understand why the saints, and especially Mother Mary viewed themselves as so unworthy to receive anything from God or to be praised. It was because they knew they didn’t deserve the gifts God was giving them, and the holier they became and the more gifts they received, the more they were aware of how unworthy they were. Their worthiness to receive God’s gifts didn’t change as they became holier because the holiness itself was the fruit of their acceptance of God’s spiritual gifts. They were still nothing that was filled with God’s life and love and held in existence by Him. They were still nothing that was being elevated to be one with God. I always thought the saints humbled themselves so much because that was necessary to prevent themselves from becoming prideful, and I still think that’s true to some degree. But now I realize that they humbled themselves mostly because they knew they were unworthy of the state to which God raised them and truly wanted all praise and glory to go to God and none to go to them. They knew the truth about themselves and were simply proclaiming that truth, whereas we still believe the lie from Satan that we deserve praise and rewards for any progress we’ve made.

I often get depressed or feel sad when I’m reminded of a particular fault of mine, especially pride and selfishness, because I foolishly have started to believe I no longer have those faults, or if I do, that there’s hardly any of them left in me. But this shows me how much pride I still have, because if I was humble I wouldn’t be surprised that I still have these faults, nor would I obsessively think about them and feel guilty about them because I’d know that it was God who helped me get this far, and so if I’m not quite as sinful as I once was, I can’t feel proud about that because I didn’t make myself better, God did. What Luisa Piccarreta understood after Jesus revealed it to her is that she really was created out of nothing, and therefore truly is capable of doing nothing on her own except evil. We aren’t capable of doing good things without God or becoming holier people because how can a being who is nothing on its own do anything without the help of the God who gave it its life in the first place? I realized the only reason I become sad and depressed at the revelation of my weaknesses is because there’s a part of me that still believes I deserve credit for any spiritual progress I’ve made and that I’ve worked hard to become who I am, so there shouldn’t be so much sin and weakness left in me. This is the bad part of me that still forgets that if everything good in me is a pure gift of God, I shouldn’t feel sad about my weaknesses because any progress I’ve made so far wasn’t due to my own efforts, it was due to God’s grace at work in me. It is hard work to become holy, but that work isn’t us making ourselves holy, it’s us constantly getting out of God’s way and letting Him do that work. It’s us fighting the devil and our own fallen and sinful natures, but even that desire to fight is the grace of the Holy Spirit moving us. That’s why even though God has chosen us to work for Him, it’s not a one time decision because He always gives us the freedom to continually accept or reject His love. Every day we’re faced with this decision in every situation we’re in and every choice we make. We often choose to reject God’s will and do what we want even though we know what we want is not what He wants. That’s why we have to always keep turning to Him and repenting of our sins, because without Him we can only do bad things. Just because we’re working for Him now, doesn’t mean we can’t become as poor as we once were. In fact our true poverty has never changed, but God has chosen to let us share in His wealth. But we can’t take His gifts for granted, especially the gift of Himself in the Eucharist and in His presence in our hearts because it doesn’t take away our nothingness or our unworthiness, it transforms them into reflections of Himself. True poverty of spirit is when we recognize and admit that no matter how close we become to God, nothing we have belongs to us, including our holiness, and that anything God gave us wasn’t meant for us to possess, it was meant for us to share with all of the other members of the body of Christ. It’s saying no matter how much I change, to the extent I do change, that’s Jesus filling me more with His Holy Spirit and becoming a part of me, whereas that part of me that hasn’t changed yet, that’s what “I” truly am since all I can ever be is sin and weakness without God. The part of me that’s bad, that’s me. The part of me that’s good is God in me. At best I’m just a vessel of His love, which He has chosen to elevate to become His son and share in the joys of His kingdom. If God is everything, then I really am nothing, but God has given me the ability and opportunities to choose to either return to my evil and nothingness, or to become more a part of Him and everything. “I” am nothing more than a being who can continually make this choice and do nothing else.

So I shouldn’t be surprised when my selfishness is revealed to me because I should remember that I’m just as unworthy to receive God’s blessings as anyone else, and if I have become a better person, it wasn’t because of any good in me, but because God changed me for the better through His love, and now wants me to return that love to Him and others so that everyone can share in their Father’s love and joy for all eternity.