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“The Father draws.”  Attraction to God is a great mystery.  Why are some drawn to Him and others not?  Why do we sometimes feel attracted to God, sometimes repulsed in general by spirituality?  Do I have any control over my attraction to God?  Does God simply not bother attracting some people?  What if God attracts my mind but not my heart?

We know that even if God somehow mysteriously does the attracting and the drawing, we have the freedom to go along with it or not.  Jesus has opened the way for us to God, butHe reveals that we wouldn’t listen to Him if the Father Himself wasn’t causing our hearts to open to what He has to say and what He does.  The love of God is so pure and holy that its seed is planted within us hidden from what we can experience with our senses.  We can either be frustrated at not being able to feel, sense, or understand our attraction to God, or we can begin to cooperate with it by believing in it.  Believing in our attraction to God actually opens our hearts to love much more deeply than if we understood or felt an attraction to God.  As St. Therese said, “I believe because I want to believe.” read more

We are familiar with Jesus’ speeches on the bread of life, but we can too quickly conclude that He is just talking about the Eucharist.  Exegetes are divided about this point, some proposing that Jesus is teaching exclusively about wisdom, others exclusively about the Eucharist, others see the first part of the discourse as about wisdom, the later part about the Eucharist.  Andre Feuillet, a well known Catholic Exegete of profound faith, espouses the “both and” position.  If we follow his intuition it should profoundly expand our contemplation of the mystery.  Christ is “the bread of life,” but also – as He says – the “living bread” and the “true bread.”  These titles don’t mean exactly the same thing.  The Word of God is the Father’s bread – that is the meaning of the “true bread.”  An image so visceral about the relationship between the Father and the Son is astonishing and is certainly more adapted to the mystery of Divine Love than to dogmatic theology. read more

Ephrem the Syrian:

He captivated us with these things, which bring pleasure to the palate, in order to draw us to that which brings life to [our] souls. For this reason, he hid the sweetness in the wine he made, so that they might know what treasure is hidden in his life-giving blood.”

Tertullian:

And so, in petitioning for “daily bread,” we ask for perpetuity in Christ and indivisibility from his body. But, because “bread” is admissible in a carnal sense too, it cannot be so used without the religious remembrance of spiritual discipline. For the Lord commands that bread be prayed for which is the only food necessary for believers. read more