Learning to Love God | Getting to Know God, Part 2

In this second meditation of our series on St. Josemaria's homily, Getting to Know God, Fr. Eric Nicolai reflects on St. Josemaria's invitation to move beyond simply knowing about God to truly knowing him through prayer, recollection, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As our relationship with God deepens, we begin to see the world, and ourselves, through his eyes. 

Fr. Eric encourages us to cultivate a faithful interior life, remain attentive to God's presence throughout the day, and grow in the loving friendship that is at the heart of the Christian life. 

Listen and reflect on: 

• Growing in friendship with God 
• The gift of prayer 
• The Holy Spirit's guidance 
• Living in God's presence 
• Deepening the interior life 

 Read the full text of St. Josemaria’s homily, “Getting to Know God”, online here. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me. Let us let us now go back in our prayer to those many years ago in which our father, Saint Josemaria, dedicated himself to the forming of the students of the Roman college, the men and women who would come from different parts of the world to Rome to be close to him, to be close to other members of the work, to be well formed there, so as to go back to their regions well prepared to be able to do opistae in their different regions. We know that our father went to Rome in around 1946, and his first task was to build or to prepare the Roman college. There were, of course, those who would become priests and the numeraries that would end up playing important roles in the different regions throughout the world. They would learn philosophy, they would learn theology, canon law, all the sacred sciences. In the early years in the 40s and 50s and 60s, as I understand, they went to the Gregorian University, they went to the Urbaniana, the Pontifical University of Rome, the Angelicum, run by the Jesuits, and some other pontifical universities, some date back to the 17th century or earlier. And this was all part of their training. Philosophy, theology. But for our father, he wanted his sons and daughters really to become men and women of prayer. Yes, he wanted them to know theology and so forth, but he especially gave importance to guiding them in becoming men and women of prayer. Men and women of deep prayer, not just to know what prayer is, especially so that they could have truly confident conversations with God their Father. This was going to be essential. Well, how does one do this? How do you teach a person? How do you guide a person to be able to have confident conversations with our Lord Himself, Creator of the universe? God our Father? Does one give classes? Does one require exams? Does one say, prove to me that you know how to pray? Answer these questions. Do you know the right frequency to pray with God the Father? Are you on the right channel? How does one do this? He wanted his sons and daughters not only to know stuff, to know theology or philosophy, to know the different codes in canon law. But he wanted them to experience a loving bond, a deep cohesion, to nurture a deep relationship that was real and that was resilient in front of the challenges of life, of work. A deep, resilient bond. Couldn't be something that could be subject to an evaluation like a mark or like a like a tribunal, you know. Yeah, you get assuming come laude in your prayer, you know. It's obvious that we understand that. So during those years in the Roman College, and it continued for many years after, our father preached meditations himself. And with time, others did. And for him it meant doing his own prayer out loud. A meditation. Well, we all we all know what a meditation is. It's it's it's the priest doing his own prayer out loud. Yeah, that's it. Don Alvro would preach meditations, Rosis Buskis would preach meditations, and the early priests. It's as though there was meant to be very little difference between doing one's prayer and preaching. This was a very unique, a unique way of seeing prayer. It was meant to be such that if you go to a meditation, you're not you're not actually like going to a class to learn something. You're meant to be participating in somebody's prayer. The two seem to merge together. So, of course, you learned something, you discovered, you even heard funny things, anecdotes, and so forth. And it's as though our father had a lot of confidence in our preaching as being true prayer. Which is why we sometimes evoke, you know, we we make like references, Lord, you are here with us today, here, you're with us, you're teaching us to pray somehow. I am praying. Now, when our father did that, well, some of those meditations were written down. As I understand, some of them were actually recorded with the probably rather primitive devices that they had back then. They came to be recorded, they came to be written down, somebody put different texts together, and it came to be known as the El Libero de Meditaciones, the Book of Meditations. Of course, originally Spanish and later in English. And these were volumes that started as meditations, our father's own meditations, personal times of prayer, that were turned into these books. And they were, of course, sent to the regions and they were meant to help people. At that time, well, it was, I would say, rather unusual. People were used to hearing uh stories about the lives of saints, uh, there were, you know, Book of Virtues, uh Sacramental theology sort of made into meditations, uh, sometimes uh Ignatian retreat meditations. And well, later on in 1988, uh Francis Fernandez Carvajal, who was in Rome in the 1950s, he published a version that could be made public. Those first ones were just for members of the work and stuff, but but he kind of like started small. He wasn't sure, I don't know how he got the idea of doing it, whether uh the father asked him to do this or what, but Don Alvaro would have been Don Alvaro would have asked him. But he said, Well, okay, let's see. And he started the first volume one, Advent. Just Advent. He put a lot of effort into that, you know, with all the days of Advent and Christmas and that, and published it, and it just flew off the shelves. I mean, this thing sold, sold out. And before you knew it, in conversations with God, the Spanish was hablar con Dios, became the new must-have. You know, to to be in conversations with God, that was the title. It just found this immediate readership, and eventually it sold, literally, it sold millions of copies. Because the idea of being in conversation, hablar condiosis to speak with God, in conversation. Conversation suggests a dialogue, you know. It became this is what we want, this is what I want. And numerous bought it, cooperators and friends, and a lot of people bought it. It's in all the seminaries, the priests bought it, you know, it came out like trickling out, you know, one volume at the time. Because we all want to have a conversation with God. We want it because Saint Osria had already been conversing and dialoguing with his loving father. He had been used to that for years. And he had been teaching others to do it. This is supposed to we could say he was very gifted at that. He was he had that gift. To be able to open risings towards God, you know, that God is close to us, he's right here with us, he is in, we can intimately open our hearts to him right now, as we are doing right now. That was our Father's gift. To make God so make God our Father so accessible for normal people. That he would say, you know, we can hear his heart beating right next to ours. He's not far away. And we don't need to do anything extraordinary, anything formal, no apologies needed, no special vocabulary, no prerequisites. Not even theological knowledge, all that theological knowledge that people were acquiring. Yeah, that was good, of course. Certain way you could say it was necessary, but it was not necessary in order to pray. Just an act of faith of a son in front of his father, a daughter in front of her father. Took years to produce those volumes, the Meditaciones, the Book of Meditations, and as I understand, they're putting out new meditation editions now, more updated. But that was a result, but also is this what our father put together in what we know as friends of God and Christ is passing by. And those two are meditations, but those are direct meditations of our father, the way he preached them, and then afterwards he fixed them up. Here, for some reason they're called homilies. But they're really, I mean, I don't think they're homilies in this. We understand homilies as within the context of a mass. These are meditations, these are our fathers sitting down preaching, and uh there's a famous one I looked at yesterday. It's called uh getting to know God in Friends of God, getting to know God. In Spanish, el trato con Dios, which is not the same, it's not the same meaning exactly. It's like uh saying el trato con Dios is like saying our dealing with God. When we say el trato, well, el trato can mean many things. It can mean uh a contract, el trato, it can mean uh uh trato, it can mean a treatment, but we know our father here means an acquaintance, a dealings with, to know somebody, to have this regular contact, el trato, you know, just dealing with somebody. We understand what he's referring to. It's it refers to el trato, it means a personal relationship, a familiarity, a conversation, an intimacy, you know, el trato. If we we don't have that, it's very hard to get to know him. But our father here is speaking specifically of prayer, which is like a foundation for interior life. Prayer. Prayer. But it's prayer, but it's it's this familiar dealing with the Lord. I read sections again recently. You know, I hadn't read them for a while. I came back to them. You can and you know, you read these um these homilies, well, these homilies, these meditations, you read that one, the one that is getting to know God. And you once you can feel our father preaching there in front of some young men in Vilatevere. You can just like feel it. You can see it, you could picture it. Vilatevere is still under construction, probably dust all over the place. Things are both brand new but still unfinished. But one can feel the intimacy of prayer of our father preaching out loud and these young men listening. And that one, Getting to Know God, was preached on April 5th, 1964. And uh it's the first Sunday after Easter, what we would call today Divine Mercy Sunday. We're in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, which is on a break now, it's on it's in between sessions. And uh the Mass of that day included the Gospel of St. John, about the institution of the Sacrament of Penance, about the declaration of St. Thomas, the Apostle, my Lord and my God, you know, when he doubted, and he says, I will not believe unless I put my my hand into his into his side. It's when he's the account of when he hadn't been there, and he sees the excited apostles, and he hadn't been there. And the apostles tried to convince him that the Lord had risen and he didn't know, and all that famous account that led to his the moniker that they say, you know, the doubting, the doubting apostle. And so in this meditation here, in Friends of God, our father evoked the most intimate moment when the Lord appears in the upper room, and the impact of that now on Thomas, who initially had not been there, who missed that earlier closeness with Jesus. Perhaps he felt a bit uh sidelined, maybe that's why he wasn't uh satisfied with the explanations that the others had given him, perhaps a bit angry at himself for having missed these important moments of the appearance of the Lord. He wasn't expecting that at all. Perhaps a fear in him that this closeness would never be given to him, that he would never experience that closeness that the apostles were now talking about. He could see it in their eyes, the excitement. For our Father, it was an opportunity to kind of outline, to evoke how we should pray. How we should pray. We can picture him now preaching, but really doing his own prayer out loud. He says, This is what he says. I'm just quoting one of the paragraphs here. Let us take another look at the master. You too may find yourself now hearing his gentle reproach to Thomas. Let me have your finger see, here are my hands. Let me have your hand put it into my side, cease your doubting and believe. And with the apostle, a sincere cry of contrition will rise from your soul, my Lord and my God. I acknowledge you once and for all as the master. From now on, with your help, I shall always treasure your teachings, and I shall strive to follow them loyally. You could say that our father is struck by that imperative command of Jesus towards Thomas. It was not a command full of harshness or an imperative command of a kind of like an order, almost as though it were a military order, but rather gentle. Cease your doubting. Stop thinking like that. Cease thinking in a way that is critical. Or in any way that betrays a lack of trust. If I now take your hand forcefully, you will indeed believe the feelings and the touch of your own hand. He's saying this is like he's what our father's evoking here about that command of our Lord. And today, in as we consider Saint Thomas, you and I maybe also at times express the same kind of doubt as St. Thomas. Maybe it is expressed in a form of worry, of stress. Maybe you have experienced anxiety, perhaps some form of doubt like Thomas doubted. We had uh we have all that. Thomas had all that formation necessary to be an apostle. He had received, heard our Lord speak so often. But so now he could not go all the way to the logical but the eventual conclusions of all our Lord's prophecies and all our Lord's words. We too must ask ourselves where I myself do not go all the way in my confidence in God, where I might be seeking compensations, where I'm in the same state of doubt as Thomas, not having confidence, maybe indeed not believing the others who have experienced him. And so it's in this that our Father evokes more about our prayer. He says, if we go back a few pages in the gospel, we can relive the scene in which Jesus retires to pray, and his disciples are nearby, probably watching him. When Jesus has finished, one of them boldly asks him, Lord, teach us how to pray, as John did for his disciples. And he told them, When you pray, you are to say, Father, hallowed be thy name. And our father continues. Note the surprising thing about this reply. The disciples share their daily lives with Jesus. And there, in the course of their ordinary conversations, our Lord tells them how they should pray. He reveals to them the great secret of God's mercy, that we are children of God. And we can talk things over with him and spend time with him just as trustingly as a son does with his father. And then in the next paragraphs, our father speaks about the trust, the confidence we have to have, that we don't need any specific formulas, we don't know what to say, it's okay, just go and do your prayer. But he's giving a lot of importance to seeing his sons and daughters truly as being sons and daughters confident in God the Father. That was so essential for him. You know, the the disciples there asked Jesus to teach them to pray, just as John the Baptist apostles or disciples had taught, had been taught by John the Baptist. Well, what would they have learned from John the Baptist? What kind of prayer was the prayer of John the Baptist? Perhaps it was penitential, perhaps it was a call from mercy, from Yahweh. These are the kind of things St. John the Baptist would have said. He's the one who said, I'm not worthy to untie a shoelace. It would have been a kind of a prayer of humility, of feeling undignified. John the Baptist was the son of a priest. Zachariah was a priest. He would have known all the psalms, he would have taught them how to pray the Psalms. The messianic Psalms. But our father mentions how all this has to happen, this is what he often emphasized, it has to happen in ordinary circumstances. And I would say that often in his meditations he would evoke the experience of discovering the truth of divine filiation. Our father knew about divine filiation, that this was like a common thing that one would learn in theology or in those kinds of environments. But in 1931, he had the sort of actual experience, the existential sense of that, well, what you might call that dogmatic truth. When he was on the tramway, we've heard about this, that he suddenly had this deep experience that I am your father. Talk to me, you are my son. He had the experience of 1928 of seeing the work as a kind of a building, like a kind of facade. But now 1931 he sees the foundation, which he hadn't seen before. And then that the mark it left in his life was the mark of a man of God who had God as his father. Well, I mean, I invite you to go back to that meditation from April 5th, 1964, in Friends of God. It's called Getting to Know God. Because there our father evokes his own experience. Even if we don't know what to say, it's okay. Just go and be a daughter in front of God. That's it. Even if you have nothing to say. Or sometimes our mind is spinning, you know, like the spin cycle in the washing machine, you know, it's like there's the first part, which is the too, to go, to go, you know, it's like the but then the worst part is the spin cycle that sucks out all the all the I was gonna say energy. I don't know. There's no energy in clothing, but uh everything in the clothing gets sucked out by that spin cycle. You can see it in the machine is literally thumping, you know, as it sucks out everything. And we can, and our worries can be like that sometimes, like a spin cycle. Well, we can do our prayer and tell the Lord, here I am, I'm in spin cycle mode. We feel drained. Or just at the level of formulas. And our father wanted us to really to speak, maybe not with great eloquence, maybe with not great formulas, but as sons and daughters. That's what he was so sort of bent on teaching his sons and daughters. I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations you have communicated to me in this meditation. I ask your help to put them into effect. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.