Preparatory Prayer: Lord Jesus, I come before you in this meditation - time that I have set aside for you, time that you have set aside just for me.  

I believe, Lord. Increase my faith. If I had faith like a mustard seed, nothing would be impossible to me. My faith is even smaller, but it has allowed me to choose you above any other thing in this moment of prayer, it is a faith that has been marking out the steps that I should take in my life. I come to have that faith renewed, because there are so many obstacles and so many dangers to this precious gift of faith that you have given us. I believe you are present, I believe that you are here waiting for me and I believe that you are here, ready to give yourself to me.  

I hope in you. I know that my life has only one meaning and one sense: to use it well so that one day I may be with you and enjoy you forever in the company of your saints. All the pleasures and everything this life has to offer are nothing compared with the joy that you have prepared for us in heaven. I hope to reach that joy one day, but I know that each day of my life now is a step, and I wish to make today, this time with you, a step closer to that happiness I will have when one day in heaven when I will possess you without the veil of the Sacrament. There we will see you face-to-face and not hidden beneath the appearance of bread and the appearance of wine.  

I love you and I wish to love you more. The more I know about you, the closer I come to you, the more I realize how much you love me and how little my love is in correspondence. I come here this morning in humility knowing that my love has not always been what it should be, but I come in trust because here is where you'll renew my love. I know that in this time of prayer you are going to open your soul to me and have me see you as I've never seen you before. Increase my love so that knowing you I can love you truly. There are many things that come between me and you, and I want to purify myself of them, so as to love you in the way your saints have always loved you, the way Mary loved you, your apostles and all of those friends you have had throughout the ages.  

I thank you, Lord. I thank you for the gift of faith by which I can use this prayer well, and I thank you for the time that you are giving me. I thank you for being here in the Eucharist. I thank you for the faith that I have received through my family and for the many means that you have placed in my life. I thank you also for your trials and for your crosses because they have helped purify me and bring me closer to you.  

So I hope to do this meditation in your presence, getting to know you, getting to know how you think. I will do it in the presence of Mary. You gave her to me at the foot of the cross. You told me that she is my mother and that I am her child. So, I take her hand to let her guide me, and let her example show me what you are talking about, as you speak to me in your scriptures and in your gospel. Mary, I ask you to teach me how to pray, teach me how to listen, to do all that he tells me. I place all my efforts in your hands for you to purify them and make me worthy of Jesus your Son. 

1. Created to be free 

We are going to continue to take a closer look at all that God has given us, starting off with one of the psalms and then going to the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew. We're trying to understand the gift of life that God has given us, and we are trying also to shed those things that the world has given us. We are striving to lose those ways of thinking that are more of the world and not of somebody who knows Christ, so as to get really to the root of truth of our own lives.  

In the last meditation, we saw how God created us, in the beautiful Scriptural image of taking this dust of the earth and breathing into it. It is an image of the personal creation of each one of us by God. The Church teaches us that, when we receive a body, we receive the matter from our parents but the soul that gives life is something that is created by God for each individual as he is conceived. The Scriptural picture actually is a picture of what happened in our own conception, our own receiving of life. God does not churn out lives, millions at a time. Your life is an individual creation, something that God has wished to give you, your soul. 

Psalm 8 is a song to the Creator's generosity. "Yahweh, O God, how great is your name throughout the earth. Above the heavens is your majesty chanted by the mouths of children, babes in arms. You set your stronghold firm against your foes to subdue your enemies and rebels. I look upon the heavens made by your fingers: the moon and the stars that you set in place. What is man that you should spare a thought for him? Or the son of man that you should take care of him? You have made man little less than a god. You crown him with glory and splendor. You made him, Lord, over the work of your hands, and you set all things under his feet. Sheep and oxen and all the wild animals too, birds of the air and fish of the sea traveling the paths of the ocean. Yahweh, how great is your name throughout all the earth."  

Now we are going to look at how these "little less than gods" look at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Jesus told the people how we will be judged: he tells the story of everybody coming before the Judgment Seat and the Son of Man coming in his glory, escorted by all the angels. He will take a seat on the Throne of Glory, all the nations will be assembled, and he will begin to separate them. He will separate the sheep from the goats, placing his sheep on his right hand and the goats on the left. And then the king will say to those on his right hand, "Come, those who my father has blessed, and take as for heritage the Kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world." Look at the active verbs that Christ uses: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me, I was imprisoned and you came to see me." All these things that he mentions are the active actions that these people did. Those on his left side who are ordered to "depart from him" are sent off for not having acted.  

Does he say, "Here, you have good theology, so welcome into the kingdom?" Does it say, "You were born in the United States, so welcome into the Kingdom," or "You were born in the twentieth century, so welcome into my kingdom?" What he looks at here is their actions, the things that they have done or, conversely, those they have chosen not to do. Here we see our Lord's understanding of us and what defines us for God, because we have to define ourselves before God. What defines us are the choices that we make and the actions that reflect them.  

God says, "I am going to place man over all the animals and the fish and over all the birds of the air." What is the difference, what makes us masters of everything else? There is something that he gave us that he didn't give any other creature on this earth: the reflection of himself. That reflection is the ability to choose and to exercise our freedom.  

You can't tell a pig not to be a pig. You can tell a kid, "Stop behaving like a pig; eat properly!" but you can't tell a pig not to be a pig. A cat doesn't get up one day and say "I'm tired of meowing all day. I am going to try barking for a change, I'm going to learn the language of dogs and bark." Cats don't do that. Cats don't say, "Well, I'm going to learn how to sing." You might sing well or badly, but a cat can't. They can't stop being themselves. A swallow can't wake up one morning and say, "You know what I think? This spider has the exact same diet as I have; we both eat insects. I think that it's much more practical to make a web and eat the insects that fall into the web than to be flying around using all this energy looking for food, so I'm going to start making webs." A swallow can't say that. God wanted stars in the skies to lighten up the night, so he put stars in the skies and the stars lightened up the night; there is nothing they can do about it. The moon rises on schedule: there is nothing the moon can do about it. All of creation is set, you could almost say, in stone. It can't vary, it can't change, it can't make any choices.  

Now what is better? To have a part of material creation praise God by doing just what it is supposed to do, as the psalm tells us? Or is it better to have somebody who could turn against God choose instead to say "I'll turn towards you and worship you." Which is greater, who has the greater dignity? If a car works, you don't pat it on the hood and say, "Good car!" You might pat the mechanic on the back and say "Good mechanic!" because there is no merit in the car.  

2. What defines you? 

The gift that God gave us that he didn't give the rest of creation is choice. It's inescapable. We have to choose: we can choose or we can decide not to choose, in which case we choose by default. That's the way it works. So God has given us something that makes us different from everything else in creation - the ability we have to choose, the freedom we have. It is so obvious, our Western society is built upon it. The American society, especially in the modern era, is the one that took the first steps in the universal freedom of the individual, individual rights. As a fruit of this greater understanding that man has of himself, we have a dignifying of man - but what I think has happened in our day is that this dignifying of man has become a deifying of man. Am I playing with words? Dignifying comes from dignity, right? In other words discovering our dignity. To deify comes from the Latin for God and that is making gods of ourselves.  

I think it is easier nowadays to make a god out of yourself when we are living in a plush society where all our energy does not have to go into finding our next meal. We very easily make of ourselves the centers of the universe and we very easily talk about our rights and how others have got to respect us and let us do our thing. It doesn't matter what the other thinks, you have to respect him. You may not be in agreement with me, but you have to respect my right to think the way I do. We have turned this God-given freedom that we have into a cult of the individual, to the extent that the worst thing that you can do today is to force somebody's freedom, not let somebody be themselves. (Unless they want to smoke, then you can do anything you want to them.) "Do you really believe that in your conscience that that's what you should do? All right, you can do it." 

In our society today we have defined the human person by his freedom As long as a person is free and has made the choice in freedom, then we have to respect it. Afterwards if there is a clash with my interests we can battle it out, sue each other, we do whatever we want, but in our society you can't say that I'm right and you are wrong. We say, Is it true that if a Buddhist thinks his faith is okay, then his faith is okay for the Buddhist? then there's really no difference, it's just your choice and what you choose is okay. But, what does God think about the gift of freedom that he gave us? We have the answer in the gospel passage we just read in St. Matthew: for God, certain things are right, and certain things are wrong. Certain things are good and certain things are bad, and if we do the bad things God tells us the consequences.  

So for God, this gift of freedom that he gave us when he breathed life into us and made us living beings, when he made us different from the animals and made us able to choose, was a quality that he gave us. Nevertheless, it wasn't the goal that he made us for. He didn't just make us to be free: God made us free so as to do good. He made us free so we could give him to drink, he made us free so we could freely give him to eat, he made us free so when he was a stranger we could freely welcome him. He made us free so that we could visit him in the prison, he made us free so that we could do things freely. Then because we were free, he could say, "Come in, enjoy Heaven."  

What we do defines us. Isn't it beautiful when God gives a gift, and we recognize that he is the one who gave it, and then we offer it to him and use in the way that is most pleasing to him? Doesn't that mean love? Our freedom is really the basis of our ability to love. The choices we make show God that we love him. We show him that we live for him, that we give him his place. The greatest joy for God is to see us love freely, to love the things that he loves. First he gave us the Ten Commandments and Israel said, "Yes, we will do what God wants." Then Christ came and broadened the whole perspective of things, saying "Love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself." And God is pleased to see us loving one another. 

3. Choosing freely to love 

In sum, then, it's not so much the fact of being free, but the fact of what we do with our freedom. Take a look at the society we come from, and ask yourself if the use that people are making of their freedom is correct. Is it going to lead them to freedom or not? Is the use that that I have made of my freedom going to lead me to life or not? Or have I just been loosening the reins and thinking that just doing anything I want is the proper use of my freedom? When we follow the spirit of the world, are we really free? Or are we just becoming slaves to the world? Because when we try just to do what we want, we end up just doing what other people want. Take a kid who wants to express himself. Since they tell me that Nike is beginning to go out of fashion, so that if a kid wants to express himself he's going to use something else instead of Nike. Is that freedom? Expressing yourself by doing what everybody else does?  

You might remember when the Holy Father was in Denver, he was on his way off the stage after one of his appearances, where he had been speaking about responsibility and the Christian message about freedom. Then he turned back to the MC right beside him still with his microphone, took it again and said something to the effect of: "I hope you don't think that the Holy Father has been speaking against the American spirit of freedom. The Holy Father has been speaking about the proper use of freedom, not against the use of freedom." A big difference between us as Christians and the world around us is that we understand that the freedom we have is not everything, that just because we do something freely doesn't make it good; it's what God thinks of it that makes it good. 

Sometimes we don't like the demands that loving God makes us, but do we like the eternal benefits it brings with it. So we have this gospel passage of St. Matthew talking about the judgment, in which God says basically: if the things you do are what I want you to do, if they mirror the love that I have for everyone, well then you are good and you will get life. But just because you choose to do something does not justify it or make it of itself good. The standard is somewhere else. Freedom is the great quality you have, but it is not the reason you were created. You were not just created to be free, you were created to love God and to be with God eternally, freely, through the exercise of your freedom, by choosing freely to do what is right and good. 

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. How do I use my freedom? Do I feel I'm "free" when I do what is right? 

2. What connection do I see between love and freedom? Can I love without being free, can I be free without loving? 

3. How do my actions compare with what Christ expects of us in the judgment?