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It may be true (abstractly) that God is everywhere present, but (concretely) He is not everywhere present to us. If we don’t find God in our heart, we won’t see or be able to access God anywhere else!

 

“Heart” is a tricky word. It’s used in so many different ways, for so many different purposes, with so many different intended meanings.

 

My understanding of “heart” is that one (and only one) thing that we have to give God…. our desire!

 

When we put our “heart” into something, we mean to say that we are putting our full effort, all we can give, with an intention in mind, a goal to attain.

 

Finding God is to look for God sincerely, for as the Lord promises, “those who seek will find.” And the word “seek” is really just another word for “desire,” ie., “heart”.

 

So the practical question remains:,

 

 

Look for the signs! What are we bringing to situations and relationships? Discover that, then you’ll be able to discern things rightly and answer that question about knowing whether you are following the Inspirations of God’s Spirit easily, based on the following three-fold criteria:

 

PEACE: God is a God of peace, where you find peace – authentic peace in the heart – you find the Spirit of God.

When we bring peace to relationships and social situations (as Saint Francis implores in his famous hymn, “Make me a channel of Your Peace”) we become vehicles of God’s Holy Spirit. We also become witnesses and examples of the meekness and humility of Jesus.

 

COMMUNITY: God is a loving God and we are his children, which makes us brothers and sisters to one another. We must love one another from the heart with our full desire, as St John tells us, for those who claim to love God and yet hate their brothers and sisters are liars!

 

ORDER: God is a God of order, and it’s in the very order of things that we can trust that we find what is marvelous, beautiful and miraculous.

Scientists proceed confidently with their work knowing that they will find a precision and mathematical order in the universe that’s beyond comprehension on the one hand, yet completely predictable on the other, highlighting the magnificent Intelligence [God] authoring creation.

Wherever there is order, there is the foundation for both peace and community. We are naturally attracted to order because we find it beautiful and awe-inspiring.

These three characteristics are of course not an exhaustive list of indicators of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit by any means, but I chose these three because of the nature of evil in today’s world.

These three particular characteristics and conditions will suffice to give us the means to find God and bring God to relationships and social situations because they are capable of detecting the presence of evil as it is now manifesting boldly, which is, not surprisingly, the complete antithesis of the three characteristics I just listed, and therefore all marks of the demonic:

 

TURMOIL: The devil wants us all to be full of fear about the future, and constantly anxious about our health and well-being. Such has the narrative been daily with the pharmaceutical industry promising prevention and cures that are profiteering propaganda and increasingly dangerous to people’s health.

There’s no peace possible while living with such a state of mind, making an authentic mental surrender of trust to God impossible (which is essential to receiving the necessary graces to be free in our attention).

We must escape the crippling memories and imaginations of our own minds, inspired not by the Holy Spirit, but the evil one, and resulting from our own lack of faith in the providence and goodness of God, and our failure to trust in that providence and goodness.

 

DISUNITY: When we are full of fear and anxiety we tend to become suspicious of everything, including other people: we can easily start making assumptions that other people have bad intentions, rather than trusting in their fundamental goodness and realizing such assumptions are inappropriate in the absence of evidence.

The devil smiles from horn to horn knowing he has largely succeeded in creating a world where the “go to, safe interior recollection,” happening silently with so many people now will result in divisions and the breakdown of relationships, families, and ultimately, the dissolution of community and creation of social chaos and lawlessness.

 

CHAOS: The ground that needs to first be put down to create the necessary conditions for continuous, collective, states of consciousness predicated on fear and anxiety is an embedded and unrelenting narrative that people hear together, about catastrophic future scenarios and possibilities.

The key is there must be no legitimate means for people to properly evaluate the actual risk, so they are left to trust people in authority, or not, and the majority do.

The result is that most people swallow the fear-mongering and tend to act as if the maximum threat suggested is necessary to prepare for and defend against.

These dynamics now operating within our society are deadly to people and families, as we all know from the last 3 years.

There are a few simple things we can do in our interior, spiritual daily lives to counter these divisive forces and dynamics belonging to the father of lies, the devil. Remember, Satan also carries the title, “the Accuser”.

We forgive each other, we don’t assume the worse and accuse with no evidence, yet that sadly seems to be what many are privately doing more and more these days. Don’t be like those people!