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Worshipping a Hidden God
“The ways of God are not our ways, and the spiritual life is almost the contrary of what we fancy it.”
So declares author Luis Martinez, the Mexican bishop and mystic whose wise spirituality, rooted in St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux, shows you here how to enter into an intense, sustained communion with God.
Bishop Martinez doesn’t offer new rules of prayer or demand that you abandon the forms of meditation that suit you. He simply reminds you that our God is a hidden God.
To find Him, says Martinez, we have to seek Him, but through His ways, not ours. If we do that, the gaze of faith will always find Him right where He in the spiritual desolation that led us wrongly to believe He was far away.
Martinez shows you how to live in the obscurity of faith, detached both from consolations and desolations, and why this is best for your soul. The Christian who learns to do this leaves behind the perturbations of the world that shake the faith of those who don’t.
In the obscurity of faith, the Divine Master will listen to you, speak to you, and instruct your soul, but without the noise of words.
Says “Once you know how to profit from faith and to live by faith, you will always find God. You will have solved your problem; you will have discovered the great secret of the interior life.”
So declares author Luis Martinez, the Mexican bishop and mystic whose wise spirituality, rooted in St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux, shows you here how to enter into an intense, sustained communion with God.
Bishop Martinez doesn’t offer new rules of prayer or demand that you abandon the forms of meditation that suit you. He simply reminds you that our God is a hidden God.
To find Him, says Martinez, we have to seek Him, but through His ways, not ours. If we do that, the gaze of faith will always find Him right where He in the spiritual desolation that led us wrongly to believe He was far away.
Martinez shows you how to live in the obscurity of faith, detached both from consolations and desolations, and why this is best for your soul. The Christian who learns to do this leaves behind the perturbations of the world that shake the faith of those who don’t.
In the obscurity of faith, the Divine Master will listen to you, speak to you, and instruct your soul, but without the noise of words.
Says “Once you know how to profit from faith and to live by faith, you will always find God. You will have solved your problem; you will have discovered the great secret of the interior life.”
257 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 27, 2014
26 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
Luis M. Martínez
35 books19 followersLuis María Martínez y Rodríguez was the Catholic archbishop of Mexico and a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua ("Mexican Language Academy").
He was born in Molinos de Caballeros, Epitacio Huerta, Michoacán. A philosopher of the scholastic tradition, his focus on the ultimate nature of things led him to theology. He was also a writer of spiritual poetry.
While his traditional values provoked his criticisms of some aspects of Mexico's modernization, he always retained a special relationship with the people. He presided over the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the coronation of Our Lady of Guadalupe, declaring, "I am Zumárraga" in order to draw Mexicans who has "wandered" back to the church. He joined the Academy in 1953, and many of his sermons were translated into French, Italian, and German.
He died on February 9, 1956 in Mexico City.
He was born in Molinos de Caballeros, Epitacio Huerta, Michoacán. A philosopher of the scholastic tradition, his focus on the ultimate nature of things led him to theology. He was also a writer of spiritual poetry.
While his traditional values provoked his criticisms of some aspects of Mexico's modernization, he always retained a special relationship with the people. He presided over the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the coronation of Our Lady of Guadalupe, declaring, "I am Zumárraga" in order to draw Mexicans who has "wandered" back to the church. He joined the Academy in 1953, and many of his sermons were translated into French, Italian, and German.
He died on February 9, 1956 in Mexico City.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 23, 2015
‘When, in our eagerness for God, we desire to possess Him, let us not urge our purity or our virtues or our merits to oblige Him to come to our hearts; for either we do not have these things, or we have received them from Him. Let us show Him what is properly our own, the unspeakable misery of our being. Let us lower ourselves deeper into the depths of our nothingness. Then the Lord will feel the dizziness caused by the abyss, and He will plunge Himself into the limitless void with the impetuous force of His mercy and His goodness.’
These words could have been written by St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897). They sound like her; there is the same recognition of our true state, humility with respect to God and total trust in His mercy and goodness. In fact this quote was written by a slightly younger contemporary, Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, (1881-1956) an ocean away in Mexico.
The archbishop’s book, Worshipping a Hidden God is so sublimely beautiful it doesn’t seem possible it could be a translation. The language is eloquently simple without the least awkwardness.
So our Hidden God comes to us in our lowliness. Reach up to Him and He flees; lower yourself before Him, and He comes down to you. Martinez draws heavily from Sacred Scripture and St. John of the Cross to map out a way for dedicated souls to find their Hidden God. A way which is ever descending, not ascending. ‘With the light of God, the soul makes steady progress in seeing its own misery and in sinking down into it; and with each new illumination, it seems that its eyes have arrived at the base of its nothingness. But our miserableness has no bottom, and only the grace of God can sound the profound depths of that abyss; for us, new revelations of our nothingness always remain, even though we may live a long time and receive torrents of light from God.’
Ah, you say! And I thought I was supposed to get better?! Yes, that’s what I thought too. Not that it was happening, mind you. I just thought it was supposed to happen ... somehow ... sometime.
‘O souls eager for perfection, do not weary of humbling yourselves. Have no fear of whatever plunges you into the depth of your misery! We do not depart from God by lowering ourselves; we do so only by exalting ourselves.’
I would quote the rest of the book if I could. But that is enough of a teaser. We are told to rid ourselves of all which is not God, keep our confidence in Him, and how He sanctifies the soul. We learn about the three stages of sorrow which bring us closer to joy: preparation for union, union itself and the consequences of the union which continues and grows more perfect.
We are urged to strive for a more interior life as there is nothing more important in the supernatural order than our relationship with God. From this, we draw the strength to repel temptations, the self-knowledge to be humble, patience with our neighbors, and the light and strength to practice all the other virtues. We learn the indispensability of the interior life and that our interior life can never be deep enough. One of the secrets of the interior life consists, not in knowing where God is, because we already know that He is everywhere, but in knowing that, wherever He is, He is hidden.
Also, once we find Him, how do we communicate with Him? The good news is our Lord can hide Himself from all things except faith; the bad news is faith rarely satisfies. And yet faith is surer than consolations and apparitions.
Finally, the spiritual advantages that desolations bring us are so many and of such a nature that, if the desolations did not exist, we would have to invent them. No one has been sanctified without experiencing them. Martinez likens these times of desolation or dryness to an operation where we are under spiritual anesthetic — a kind of paralysis of the spirit which renders us helpless. We are doing nothing and so we assume nothing is happening. Yet God is doing a great deal, and really God is always working transformations in us, however much we think otherwise. When the period of trial passes, we find that we are different. Without our knowing how or when, a profound change was wrought in us: our love is more solid; our virtue has become stronger.
We ‘see’ our Hidden God through the eyes of faith and love.
Most highly recommended!
These words could have been written by St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897). They sound like her; there is the same recognition of our true state, humility with respect to God and total trust in His mercy and goodness. In fact this quote was written by a slightly younger contemporary, Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, (1881-1956) an ocean away in Mexico.
The archbishop’s book, Worshipping a Hidden God is so sublimely beautiful it doesn’t seem possible it could be a translation. The language is eloquently simple without the least awkwardness.
So our Hidden God comes to us in our lowliness. Reach up to Him and He flees; lower yourself before Him, and He comes down to you. Martinez draws heavily from Sacred Scripture and St. John of the Cross to map out a way for dedicated souls to find their Hidden God. A way which is ever descending, not ascending. ‘With the light of God, the soul makes steady progress in seeing its own misery and in sinking down into it; and with each new illumination, it seems that its eyes have arrived at the base of its nothingness. But our miserableness has no bottom, and only the grace of God can sound the profound depths of that abyss; for us, new revelations of our nothingness always remain, even though we may live a long time and receive torrents of light from God.’
Ah, you say! And I thought I was supposed to get better?! Yes, that’s what I thought too. Not that it was happening, mind you. I just thought it was supposed to happen ... somehow ... sometime.
‘O souls eager for perfection, do not weary of humbling yourselves. Have no fear of whatever plunges you into the depth of your misery! We do not depart from God by lowering ourselves; we do so only by exalting ourselves.’
I would quote the rest of the book if I could. But that is enough of a teaser. We are told to rid ourselves of all which is not God, keep our confidence in Him, and how He sanctifies the soul. We learn about the three stages of sorrow which bring us closer to joy: preparation for union, union itself and the consequences of the union which continues and grows more perfect.
We are urged to strive for a more interior life as there is nothing more important in the supernatural order than our relationship with God. From this, we draw the strength to repel temptations, the self-knowledge to be humble, patience with our neighbors, and the light and strength to practice all the other virtues. We learn the indispensability of the interior life and that our interior life can never be deep enough. One of the secrets of the interior life consists, not in knowing where God is, because we already know that He is everywhere, but in knowing that, wherever He is, He is hidden.
Also, once we find Him, how do we communicate with Him? The good news is our Lord can hide Himself from all things except faith; the bad news is faith rarely satisfies. And yet faith is surer than consolations and apparitions.
Finally, the spiritual advantages that desolations bring us are so many and of such a nature that, if the desolations did not exist, we would have to invent them. No one has been sanctified without experiencing them. Martinez likens these times of desolation or dryness to an operation where we are under spiritual anesthetic — a kind of paralysis of the spirit which renders us helpless. We are doing nothing and so we assume nothing is happening. Yet God is doing a great deal, and really God is always working transformations in us, however much we think otherwise. When the period of trial passes, we find that we are different. Without our knowing how or when, a profound change was wrought in us: our love is more solid; our virtue has become stronger.
We ‘see’ our Hidden God through the eyes of faith and love.
Most highly recommended!
March 31, 2015
This was a wonderful book and I agree with other reviews that the language (especially for a translation) is beautiful and almost poetic. The points made on confidence were especially enlightening to me. To paraphrase: Do not be fearful, exaggerated fear is displeasing to God. Place in him absolute confidence. He loves too much to allow unfaithfulness. Abandon yourself completely to Him - to His will, to His grace, to His love. Place in God's hand even your correspondence with His grace; make Him responsible; make Him responsible for the use we make of divine favors.
Incredible thoughts...
Incredible thoughts...
January 8, 2019
One of the tenderest, most encouraging guide books to holiness I've read yet. Much needed words of wisdom seem to be on every page, mysteriously at times when you needed to here them most. Awesome little book that I plan on seeking anytime times get tough, or the faith gets obscure.
April 3, 2019
This book is amazing! Gods ways are not our ways in the humility that attracts Him, the inseparable way that love and sorrow are joined together and even in the fog of desolation we must cling to Him. Recommend to everyone. Was a great morning read, just a couple pages a day.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews