Desire and Curiosity: Michael O'Brien
Reading is the first way to listen, and thus to learn.
Invitation to read
From the interview “The Wound of Beauty”
“This book will break your heart, and will show you why your heart needed to be broken.” Thus a reviewer of one of the stories by Michael O’Brien, the Canadian painter and writer (author of Father Elijah: The Apocalypse, among other works). His stories tell of men and women, often humiliated and injured, apparently of little importance, but whose “little” choices, whose journey toward love and truth, prove decisive for the destiny of the world, capable of leading others to love and freedom. O’Brien has been compared to writers like Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, and C. S. Lewis.
During the last Spiritual Exercises, Fr. Carrón continually reminded us of our original dependence on the Mystery of God. He told us that every man is a “direct, exclusive relationship with God, and the reverberation of this is our being poor beggars.” You, on more than one occasion, have reasserted that the most terrible wound inflicted on modern man is the loss of spiritual fatherhood. What does it mean to you to discover yourself as God’s son, a poor beggar of the Mystery of God?
This seeming contradiction, that we are both sons and beggars, is not in fact a contradiction. We are beloved in the eyes of God our Father, yet the image and likeness of God within us has been damaged. We are like beggars because we are profoundly poor in our being, our intellect darkened and our will weakened by the fall of man, and we remain capable of much evil. Yet our Father loves the image of the Son within us. He sees who we truly are in Him, how we were intended to be “from the beginning,” as Sacred Scripture says. Like the Prodigal Son who returns begging to his father, we do not claim any rights for ourselves. We open our hands and hearts in trust. And He pours forth what we need–most importantly, He gives us our identity as true sons. If we are “beggars,” it is as beloved beggars. Christ has lived with us and died with us in our poverty. And He wants to take us with Him back into the Palace as full inheritors of the Kingdom.
In my own life, many powerful graces have come when I pray in a condition of weakness, without any merit of my own, when I have nothing to offer the Lord except my little bit of trust in His promises. The older and older I become, the more I realize that we must grow younger and younger in the heart, and become as little children. In this regard, I must say that poverty is my only riches. And, strangely, it has been the source of much joy. When we are this poor, then we can allow our Father to give to us.
During the last Spiritual Exercises, Fr. Carrón continually reminded us of our original dependence on the Mystery of God. He told us that every man is a “direct, exclusive relationship with God, and the reverberation of this is our being poor beggars.” You, on more than one occasion, have reasserted that the most terrible wound inflicted on modern man is the loss of spiritual fatherhood. What does it mean to you to discover yourself as God’s son, a poor beggar of the Mystery of God?
This seeming contradiction, that we are both sons and beggars, is not in fact a contradiction. We are beloved in the eyes of God our Father, yet the image and likeness of God within us has been damaged. We are like beggars because we are profoundly poor in our being, our intellect darkened and our will weakened by the fall of man, and we remain capable of much evil. Yet our Father loves the image of the Son within us. He sees who we truly are in Him, how we were intended to be “from the beginning,” as Sacred Scripture says. Like the Prodigal Son who returns begging to his father, we do not claim any rights for ourselves. We open our hands and hearts in trust. And He pours forth what we need–most importantly, He gives us our identity as true sons. If we are “beggars,” it is as beloved beggars. Christ has lived with us and died with us in our poverty. And He wants to take us with Him back into the Palace as full inheritors of the Kingdom.
In my own life, many powerful graces have come when I pray in a condition of weakness, without any merit of my own, when I have nothing to offer the Lord except my little bit of trust in His promises. The older and older I become, the more I realize that we must grow younger and younger in the heart, and become as little children. In this regard, I must say that poverty is my only riches. And, strangely, it has been the source of much joy. When we are this poor, then we can allow our Father to give to us.
