King of Hearts

Happy Solemnity of Christ the King! I hope you are able to take advantage of the abundant grace available through this Solemnity! One of the graces offered is to help us experience greater interior freedom. We can do this as we more fully surrender our hearts to Jesus and allow Him to reign there. He desires to fully dwell and make a home in our heart!

Last Friday the Gospel reading was about Jesus zealously cleansing the temple. This is what Jesus desires to do to our souls. We are the temples of His Holy Spirit! He jealously wants to drive out anything that is hindering us from experiencing freedom in Him and His full habitation!

I don't know if anyone else struggles with this, but some days I struggle with irritability. I can easily get annoyed with my own children and other people around me. Don't worry, it's probably not you ;). 

The meditation from Friday's Magnificat was a real gold nugget for me and I've been chewing on it since. It is from Father Simon Tugwell, O.P. Here is a shortened version of it in case anyone else needs greater freedom in this area as well:

Faith, when actualized, leads us to fear God, which leads us to make some attempt to introduce order into our lives. And it is this attempt which shows us what is wrong with us. And it is here that we need to be attentive. The demons will, for instance, try to get us into a frame of mind in which we think that we are entitled to be annoyed at somebody. If we succumb to this, then we shall devote our attention to the thought of the person with whom we are annoyed. What the ascetic needs to do is to focus his attention instead on the fact that he is annoyed. Instead of seeing some other human being angrily, he tries to see his own anger. He can then begin to fight against it. And at first he has to use any device for restraining anger that he can think of.

But more essentially we need to reclaim anger for its proper purpose. It is always a waste of good anger to get annoyed with other human beings. Instead we should turn our anger precisely against our thoughts and against the demons who deploy them.