Seized by Christ

They are experiencing Christianity as joy and hope, having thus become lovers of Christ.

Tag: spiritual transformation

  • The Geometry of Grace:

    The Geometry of Grace:

    Why the Yoke is Actually Light

    We’ve all heard the cynical refrain: “Misfortune falls on the good and the bad alike.” We treat life like a chaotic lottery where lightning strikes the saint and the sinner with equal indifference.

    But is that actually true?

    If we look through the lenses of Catholic Exegesis, Neurobiology, and the Hero’s Journey, we discover a startling reality: Grace isn’t just a theological “extra.” It is a fundamental shift in how a human being interacts with reality.

    1. The Suburbs of Heaven

    C.S. Lewis famously suggested that for those who say “Yes” to God, this life is the beginning of Heaven; for those who say “No,” it is the beginning of Hell.

    This isn’t just a poetic thought. It is a description of an internal ecosystem. The Book of Wisdom tells us that those who do good fare well. When you live a life of grace, you are no longer rowing against the current of the universe. You are aligned with the Creator’s design. This alignment creates a “protective shield”—not by magic, but by a radical reordering of your life.

    2. The Biological Advantage of Peace

    Let’s look at the “structure of the brain.” A life of sin—gluttony, drunkenness, aggressive driving, or constant domestic strife—keeps the brain in a state of chronic Amygdala Hijack. This is the “fight or flight” center. When it’s overactive, your body is flooded with cortisol, your immune system weakens, and your peripheral vision literally narrows. You become more “prone to injury” and “susceptible to accidents” because your brain is too cluttered to pay attention.

    A “Real Christian,” however, operates from the Prefrontal Cortex—the seat of peace and discernment. By practicing chastity, fasting, and a clean conscience, you are essentially “fine-tuning” your biological machine.

    • Better Sleep: Because your conscience is clear.
    • Less Sickness: Because your stress levels are lower and your habits are more responsible.
    • Fewer Accidents: Because you are “less in a hurry” and more aware of the people around you.

    3. The Hero’s Risk and the Martyr’s Paradox

    Now, there is one place where the “Safety of Grace” seems to fail: Sacrifice. In the classic Hero’s Journey, the protagonist eventually leaves the “Safe Zone” to face the dragon for the sake of the village. For the Christian, this is the call to be a Martyr or a servant. We are much more willing to take an injury for others.

    But even here, the experience is different. As Brother Lawrence noted, God does not permit a soul totally abandoned to Him to suffer for “any appreciable length of time” without Divine support. When the world sees a catastrophe, the Christian sees a rebirth.

    4. A Different Dimension of Suffering

    When trials do come—and they will—the “Real Christian” isn’t living in the same dimension as the worldling. For those living only for this world, a trial is “sheer hell” because it threatens their only treasure.

    For the person in Grace, suffering is Sacred Alchemy. Following the thought of St. John Paul II, we see that suffering:

    1. Consumes Evil: It burns away the parts of our ego that we haven’t yet surrendered.
    2. Acts as Penance: It helps us understand the true cost of sin—our own and others’.
    3. Opens a Door: It is the “New Jerusalem” mindset, asking not “Why is this happening to me?” but “What is God trying to show me?”

    The Call to Action: Die to the Hurry

    Spiritual transformation isn’t a theory; it’s a practice. If you want to experience this “Light Yoke,” start with the Great Simplification. * Clean your conscience: Go to Confession and clear the mental clutter.

    • Audit your pace: Intentionally move slower this week. Watch how your “luck” changes when you are no longer in a frantic hurry.
    • Fix your eyes: When the next trial hits, ask God for the strength to see it as a “door” rather than a “wall.”

    Edited with assistance from Gemini

  • đź’ś The Call to Humility: Rewiring the Rebellious Heart

    đź’ś The Call to Humility: Rewiring the Rebellious Heart

    Readings for 16 DEC 2025: Zephaniah 3:1-2, 9-13; Psalm 33; Matthew 21:28-32

    I. Introduction: The Rebellious City

    We are deep in the heart of Advent, a season colored Violet—the color of royalty, but also of penance and preparation. The scriptures today issue a stark, powerful challenge, starting with the prophet Zephaniah:

    “Trouble is coming to the rebellious, the defiled, the tyrannical city! She would never listen to the call, would never learn the lesson…” (Zephaniah 3:1-2)

    When we hear the word “city,” our modern mind goes to bricks and mortar. But in the prophetic tradition, the city—Jerusalem—is often a profound metaphor for the human soul. Zephaniah is describing not just a physical place, but the rebellious, unintegrated heart—the ego that refuses counsel, trusts only itself, and never draws near to God.

    This “tyrannical city” is the part of our consciousness that seeks to be King Belshazzar, building its own reality based on pride and self-will.

    II. The Psychological Crisis: Refusal and Tyranny

    The First Reading lays bare the psychological state of the rebellious heart:

    • “She would never listen to the call.”
    • “She has never trusted in the Lord.”
    • “She never drew near to her God.”

    This is the Refusal of the Call in the language of the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell taught that all great myths begin when the hero is called to leave their comfortable, known world, and initially says No. The rebellious heart is stuck in this refusal.

    Psychologically, this refusal is driven by the Limbic System. This ancient, instinctual part of the brain seeks comfort, security, and the avoidance of all risk. To trust God, to draw near to God, means surrendering control, which the Limbic System perceives as an existential threat. This fear of surrender makes the heart tyrannical—it must control everything because it fears everything.

    III. The Gospel’s Two Sons: Action vs. Attitude

    Jesus clarifies this battle between the tyrannical heart and true conversion with the parable of the two sons:

    • The First Son: Said “No,” but afterwards thought better of it and went.
    • The Second Son: Said “Certainly, sir,” but did not go.

    The chief priests and elders, comfortable in their certainty and piety, represent the Second Son. They had the right attitude (the right words, the right liturgy), but their tyrannical, rebellious heart (Zephaniah’s city) remained unchanged.

    The tax collectors and prostitutes represent the First Son. They started in the “tyrannical city” of self-will and sin, but in their moment of brokenness, they experienced the crucial psychological step: thinking better of it—a deliberate act of the will leading to action.

    Jesus’s verdict is stunning: “Tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you.” They embarked on the Hero’s Journey (repentance and action) while the pious were still stuck in the tyranny of their own self-righteous refusal.

    IV. The Great Transformation: Clean Lips and Humility

    The good news, the Advent promise, is that God does not abandon the tyrannical city. Zephaniah promises a profound transformation:

    “Yes, I will then give the peoples lips that are clean, so that all may invoke the name of the Lord and serve him under the same yoke.” (Zephaniah 3:9)

    The “clean lips” are the sign of the transformed heart. Psychologically, this is the victory of the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)—the seat of reason, moral choice, and long-term vision—over the tyrannical Limbic System.

    • The Limbic heart speaks lies and boasts (Zephaniah 3:13: the perjured tongue).
    • The PFC, aligned with God’s will, brings clean lips—it brings truth, humility, and the ability to invoke the Lord’s name.

    This transformation is completed by two essential virtues:

    1. The Removal of Pride: “I will remove your proud boasters from your midst; and you will cease to strut on my holy mountain.” (Zephaniah 3:11)
    2. The Installation of Humility: “In your midst I will leave a humble and lowly people, and those who are left in Israel will seek refuge in the name of the Lord.” (Zephaniah 3:12)

    The spiritual journey is the systematic dismantling of the tyrannical ego and the installation of humility, where the PFC chooses the love of God over the fear of the self.

    V. Call to Action: The Poor Man’s Call

    This Advent, the call is clear: Stop being the Second Son. Stop being the tyrannical city.

    The Responsorial Psalm gives us the path to conversion: “This poor man called; the Lord heard him.”

    The “poor man” is the humble and lowly person Zephaniah promised. He is the person who has surrendered the tyranny of the ego. The Lord hears him because he is close to the “broken-hearted” and those whose “spirit is crushed.”

    Real spiritual transformation today requires two acts of the will:

    1. Stop Strutting: What are you still doing for show? What is the “proud boasting” that keeps you from trusting God? The work of penance is the work of removing pride.
    2. Start Doing: Do not remain in the Refusal phase. Be the first son. That means taking action that requires surrender. That means choosing the hard “Go and work in the vineyard” over the easy “Certainly, sir.”

    The Lord is coming. Let us choose to dismantle the rebellious city in our hearts, surrender the tyranny of fear, and allow the promised “humble and lowly people” to seek refuge in His name.

    Amen.

    Developed with assistance from Gemini AI

  • The Stone That Became a Mountain

    The Stone That Became a Mountain

    A Reflection for Tuesday, November 25, 2025 Based on Daniel 2:31-45; Daniel 3:57-61; and Luke 21:5-11

    (Originally delivered as a 12-minute talk – now expanded for anyone who wants to sit with it longer)

    I’ve never met King Nebuchadnezzar, but some nights I wake up in a cold sweat feeling exactly like him.

    You know the dream: a dazzling statue rises in front of you—head of gold, chest of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, and feet made of iron mixed with crumbling clay. It is magnificent, terrifying, and (you are secretly proud) it looks a lot like the empire you’ve spent your whole life building. Then, out of nowhere, a stone “untouched by human hand” rockets across the void, smashes the feet, and the entire thing explodes into powder. The wind scatters the dust, and the stone keeps growing until it becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth.

    Daniel, barely more than a teenager and a foreign prisoner, looks the most powerful man on the planet in the eye and says: “That stone is God’s Kingdom. Everything you trust will be ground to chaff. Only the Kingdom will last forever.”

    Two and a half millennia later, that dream still haunts us because it is no longer just about Babylon. It is about the statues we keep erecting inside our own skulls.

    Your Brain Is the Statue

    Neuroscience has accidentally given us one of the best commentaries on Daniel 2 ever written.

    • The golden head = the prefrontal cortex: language, long-term planning, morality, the part of you that wants to build something glorious and eternal.
    • The silver arms and chest = the limbic system: love, belonging, tribal identity, emotion.
    • The bronze belly = the older reward circuits: pleasure, ambition, appetite, status.
    • The iron legs = the brainstem and motor strips: raw survival, dominance, fight-or-flight.
    • The feet of iron and clay = the fragile, perpetually uneasy handshake between our ancient reptile brain and our fragile modern consciousness. Strong enough to run a civilization, brittle enough to shatter the first time life hits it wrong.

    Every war, every addiction, every mid-life crisis, every doom-scrolling spiral begins when the lower floors start dictating terms to the upper ones.

    The Universal Story

    Joseph Campbell spent his life showing that every culture tells the same story:

    Ordinary world → Call to adventure → Refusal → Mentor appears → Crossing the threshold → Ordeal and death → Seizing the treasure → Return to give it away.

    Translate the characters:

    Daniel is the mentor who will not bow.

    Jesus is the Stone cut without hands—the true Hero who descends into the realm of death and rises again.

    And you and I? We are the ones being summoned out of the collapsing statue into the growing mountain.

    When the Temple Comes Down

    In today’s Gospel people are gawking at the Jerusalem Temple—literally the most impressive religious building the ancient world had ever seen. Jesus looks at them and says, in effect, “Enjoy the view while it lasts. Not one stone will be left on another.”

    He is not being cruel. He is being honest. Every human temple, every human empire, every human self built only with human hands will one day stand on feet of clay.

    But notice what he says next: “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified… Nation will rise against nation… There will be great earthquakes…” These are not the end. They are the birth pangs.

    In mythology, the false world has to shatter before the real story can begin.

    In psychology, the ego has to crack open before genuine integration can happen.

    In salvation history, the Stone has to strike.

    The Catholic Reading in One Sentence

    The Stone is Christ.

    The Mountain is the Church, born from the rock struck on Calvary and from the side of Christ on the Cross.

    And the dream is being fulfilled right now, every time a human soul lets the Kingdom smash its idols and fill its emptiness.

    So What Do We Actually Do?

    Four concrete, life-changing steps you can start this week:

    1. Name Your Statue
      Tonight, before you go to bed, ask: What is the gold-headed thing I trust more than God? Career? Reputation? Political ideology? My phone? My body? My children’s success? Write it down. That’s your personal Nebuchadnezzar dream.
    2. Let the Stone Strike
      Take that piece of paper (or just the knowledge of it) to confession, to adoration, to the foot of the crucifix. Ask Jesus to touch the feet of clay. It will probably feel like everything is falling apart. Good. That’s the sound of the Kingdom arriving.
    3. One Line, Ten Minutes, Every Morning
      Before you open any app, sit in silence and let one phrase from today’s readings strike you and grow:
      “A stone untouched by human hand…”
      Repeat it slowly, like a breath prayer. Let it smash the noisy empires in your mind. Ten minutes. That’s all. But do it daily and watch what kind of mountain starts growing inside you.
    4. Live the Return
      The hero never keeps the elixir for himself. Bring the peace you find in that silence to your family, your cubicle, your parish council, the grocery checkout line. The world is starving for people who have let the Stone win.

    The Dream Is Still True

    We are living in the age of the feet of clay.

    Globally: superpowers and tech empires that look invincible but are already cracking.

    Personally: hearts that are part iron, part mud, strong enough to function, brittle enough to break.

    But the Gospel acclamation today is shouting at us across two thousand years:

    “Stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand!”

    The statue is already trembling.

    The Stone has already left the mountain.

    The only question left is whether we will cling to the collapsing colossus or open our hands and let the Kingdom break us open—so that, through us, it can fill the whole earth.

    Come, Lord Jesus.

    Strike the feet.

    Grow the mountain.

    Make Your home in us.

    And then send us back out to a world that desperately needs living stones.

    Amen.

    Feel free to share this post, print it, read it aloud to your family, or just sit with it in the quiet. The dream is still coming true—and you’re in it.