There is a poem attributed to St. Augustine:
“He who seeks from God
Anything less than God
Esteems the gifts of God
More than the Giver.
Has God, then, no reward?
None save Himself.”
Lord Jesus Christ,
You are the visible face of the invisible Father, of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy: let the Church be your visible face in the world, its Lord risen and glorified. You willed that your ministers would also be clothed in weakness in order that they may feel compassion for those in ignorance and error: let everyone who approaches them feel sought after, loved, and forgiven by God. Send your Spirit and consecrate every one of us with His anointing, so that the Jubilee of Mercy may be a year of grace from the Lord, and your Church, with renewed enthusiasm, may bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed, and restore sight to the blind.
—Pope Francis
The word of God has one goal: Fullness of Life in all its abundance—the Kingdom of God within and amongst us, now and to come. This is the greatest gift; and yet we must remind ourselves that the gift itself is not our God. The Evil Spirit can use their intimate connection to deceive us into thinking that God is absent when the “gift” we want is not given.
Prayer is not solely about the gifts we want, but about being with the Giver. The Good Spirit can use this intimate link between gift and Giver to remind us that, just because it hasn’t “rained” spiritually in our lives for a while, does not mean that God, the Giver Himself, ever stops being the only gift we can be sure of.
—Michael Martinez, a Jesuit scholastic of the Antilles Province, is studying philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.