Preparatory Prayer: Lord Jesus, I am once more in your presence. I am setting this time apart for you, so that you can speak to me and I can listen to you. I know and I trust that the words that you will say to me are the words of Truth; that as you have shown me in the Gospel, you know what I need even before I ask for it. So I ask you to grant me in this prayer what I need most of all. I believe that you are present among us in the Eucharist, in a real way, in a personal way. With all your power, all your divinity. But also with all your humanity, your understanding of all I go through, with all your own experience of what it is to be human. I believe that you're here with all the riches and graces in life that I need. I hope in you! I hope that each day, today, this meditation, will be the step that I need to take to come closer to you. I love you and want to love you more. My love, as I try to express it, is very poor when I compare it to yours. It is a love that still hasn't sacrificed, a love that hasn't grown, a love that is easily obsessed and distracted by other things that come along. But I offer you this love, the intention to love that I have, so that you can purify me, and make me able to love you in the way I wish I could. I am just your creature. The gift of life I have received is from you. I'm poor and I come in this meditation to you because you are the source of life and true riches. And I thank you for this opportunity, for your patience, and for your invitation. So once more, I place all that I try to do in Mary's hands. I ask her to teach me how to pray and especially to teach me how to listen and put in effect what you are saying to me. 

1. Contemplation of Creation: Made in the Image of God 

In Chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis, we have a description of how God made man. "Yahweh God fashioned man from the dust of the soil and then He breathed into his nostrils a breath of life. And thus man became a human and a living being." (Gen 2:7) This description gets to the essence of how God made us. A picture is drawn of God, who has made the earth, gathering up some of the dust on the face of the earth, mixing it with water and making a clay out of it. Taking this material creation that he has, he does something extraordinary. "Yahweh God breathed into it the breath of life." With the breath of God man became a human being.  

Another description a little earlier on gives us the following: "God said to himself, 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the heaven and all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth.'" (Gen 1:26) So that is the thought of God before he created us. Genesis has of course already gone through all the days of creation, the creation of the world and giving it order, the separate of darkness from light and the waters from the earth, and then the different beasts and reptiles and everything that God created. When all of that has been done, God says to himself, "Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves." Although he has already made everything else, nothing else was the image of himself. "Let's make something different, let's make man in the image of ourselves. And this man who's going to be in the image of ourselves we're going to give him over all creation, over all the fish of the sea, all the birds of the air, all the cattle and all the wild beasts and all the reptiles upon the earth." In the image of God he created them, and male and female he created them. 

2. Between Two Worlds 

We are the image of God, we are the likeness of God, we're different to the rest of creation, and that's why we've been given dominion and control over creation. We have been made partly of what everything else is made of, and partly of something that's different. This is what we're going to reflect upon with Christ in this meditation, this mixture that we're made of. How God took material things, the soil of the earth, animal creation, what he's already created, and with that he has fashioned something different, and then made it so different by a new element that he put inside it: the breath of God, the breath of his life.  

Isn't it true when we look at our own lives and our own experience of ourselves, that we find these two parts in us? There's a part of us that's tied to the earth, and there's a part of us that's not material, that's heroic. There's a part of us that, when we read the lives of the saints, identifies with them and wants to be like them. There's a part of us that when we read the sagas and the heroic stories and the epics, wants to be the hero: the just person who stands up for what is right. There's a part of us that wants to be a light for others, a part of us that wants others to be able to clutch on to us and depend on us, for us to be the rocks that hold everybody else. That's the breath of God there within us - the part of us that seeks for goodness, seeks for beauty, for what is right, and admires it in others. The part of us that sees the Holy Father and Mother Teresa and recognizes that what they did and what they're doing is really the right and the beautiful and the important thing. We see their self-giving. So there's a part of us that wants that.  

But at the same time there's another part of us that St. Paul speaks about, "I see the things that are good, and I desire the things that are good, but there is in me a law that follows everything else." (cf. Romans 7) Paul spoke of bringing his flesh into subjection so that after preaching all the good and nice things to others that he himself would not be cast into condemnation. Within us there's this one part of us that's seeking what is good and just, seeking and looking for what is beautiful. We also experience the other part of us, the part that is caught by what is immediate. After we've given into it and come back to ourselves, we say we never should have done that -- as when we get carried away by a burst of anger, by a burst of impatience; when we take advantage of our neighbors, when we give in to lustful thoughts , and so forth. We sometimes think that this clash that there is in us is wrong, that it shouldn't be there, but it is actually the way that God made us. 

3. The split 

To be more precise, it's not actually the way God made us. He made Adam and Eve first of all, out of matter and spirit. Only afterward was there the tragedy of original sin, and we inherited a weakened human nature. Something that was harmonious when God first created is now found to be in disharmony. We feel this division much more deeply, and the things that lead us astray much more vividly than God ever intended them to be. Our will, our spiritual part, is much weaker than God intended it to be. The mixture from which God made us helps us to understand our present condition, after original sin. It's almost as if we're made up of two people. The person that goes before God, asks for forgiveness, wants to pick himself up, and then we have the person that goes back and does the same again.  

But we really can't bear to be divided, can we? We have a sense that there's something wrong. We suffer too much when we're pulled in both those two directions. We want to get everything together. We want to be like those people who've put everything together with God's help.  

There are two ways in which we can eliminate this pull, this clash, this contradiction we feel. One is easy, it's the fashion and we're very tempted towards it. You could almost say that we envy it at times. And that's the fashion by which we just suppress our conscience, in which we tell ourselves that there's no sense in searching and seeking for those brave and noble and correct things. If you're going to survive, you've just got to give in and live according to the rules of everybody else. Our free society is almost like the sea against the beach, the waves just crashing against the beach and washing it away in no time. We're living in the world, among friends, going to college, working, and when you switch on the television or pick up a book, what is the wave that's coming against us? It's telling us just live for the present moment. Live for the present enjoyment, don't try to see too far down the road and figure out the forces that are at work in society. You just make some money, you just get comfortable, you just give yourself what you need. This crashing wave strips away what God is trying to do in our soul, like a beach after a squall. 

So the one way for us not to have problems in our lives is not to create them: let's not to sweat this, not question things too much, not sweat this religious thing too much. Nor our conscience - what's right or wrong? If it feels okay you just do it. All of these things just come naturally to you. So that's the message that we're getting from the world. Why respect marriage? Why respect other people? What right have other people got above you? Why respect life? Why be too honest about things? If you can cheat, deal, cut a corner, and make a buck... then do it, as long as you don't get caught. Isn't this the world in which we live? 

There is a second way to solve this split. It is much more challenging, much more difficult, more long-term. It requires you to control the material-human-instinctive-passionate part, and bring it into obedience. It also is the one that brings true happiness. It's what Christ offers us: the Christian life. It brings all that God taught us, all that God brought us, the salvation and grace that Christ brought us, down into our daily life. It changes the things we do, our attitudes and our goals.  

4. Real-World Christianity 

There is an Irishman from Dublin named Matt Talbot who is in the process of canonization. He was a drunk and his father was a drunk. He never married; all the money he would get he drank. Fridays it was straight from pay check to the bars, living from paycheck to paycheck. A moment came in which he wanted to change (there was no such thing as Alcoholics Anonymous at the time). His mother and a priest read the riot act to him. From that moment on, he started living a life of prayer and a life of penance. When he died, they discovered that he wore chains around his body in penance and they were so tight that they had bitten into him. From the time he made his conversion he never slept on a bed, just on a plank with a chunk of wood as a pillow. He would get up early in the morning and do his prayers until the church was opened and then he would go to Mass until it was time for work and then straight after work he would go either to the Church or right home.  

He went straight to the source of his actions, and it certainly wasn't easy for him to change them. He was once going home on a Friday with his paycheck and it had been a while since he had been to the bar. He went into the bar where he usually drank; the money was burning in his pocket and he just wanted a single drink as he sat on the stool there. But he counted it as one of the miracles that God did for him that the bar man never looked at him, never came over to ask him what he wanted, and he was there for a long time shouting at the barman for something to drink, and the barman acted as if he wasn't there. Then he realized what he was doing and he got up and ran out of the pub. From that day on he never wanted money in his pocket. He said, "I am so weak that if I have money in my pocket I'll always be in danger of going in to the pub," so from that moment on he never carried money in his pocket. He changed the way he walked to Church and they way he walked to work so he wouldn't have to walk in front of a bar. (That's very difficult in Dublin; there are usually two or three a block.) But he went all roundabout ways so as to not put himself into temptation.  

What he was doing was changing his life and his actions by cultivating what he knew God wanted from him. He went to Christ, the source of his strength, and then he actually changed what he did, changed where he walked, changed what he put in his pockets, changed the time he got up, changed what he spent his time on. Therefore, the second way that we have of solving this conflict within us is taking the redemption of Christ and changing the things we do with the help of God. Not living at the mercy of circumstance.  

If I am at college and find myself following the activities of the others, and suffering remorse afterwards, what I have to do is change what I do. Decide what I need to change, and not expect it to be easy. Then set about doing it. Our resolutions have to be real, solid, practical. We can have good friends but if they are not the friends we need, they will take away even the good things we have. We've got to look at the people we associate with. At times we've got to change our friendships in order to bring into our lives this coherence and unity, to overcome this split and this division in us.  

That's the second way that we have of overcoming the rift we have in us between what I see and desire when I am guided by my senses (the material part of me), or my spiritual passions (like pride) that are a fruit of my weakened human nature, and what I know pleases God. We acquire unity and peace in our souls by letting him speak and doing what he wants, even if it means paying a price. 

Questionnaire: To help you to examine your life, in the light of the inspirations God just gave you in these moments you shared with him. 

1. Are there any habits in my life that my conscience is telling me that God wants me to change? 

2. Are my friends and the fun I seek to have with them leading me towards God or away from him? 

3. Do I usually make solid resolutions when I pray, or do I easily change my mind and let myself live at the mercy of circumstance?