A 15-year-old boy wrote a very long email.

I will comment on some of his notes, one at a time.

You can read the first one here below.

The Priest’s answer 

Dear Brian,

1. I will reply… in installments to your lovely email. Some replies will be private because they are too personal.

Now I get to the first: “I am a 15-year-old boy who seeks the Lord every day. Truly, I do not even know how He captured my heart, but I only know now that, after having met Him, I cannot imagine a life without Him.”

2. Yes, God is at the beginning of everything. He is at the beginning of our being and also at the beginning of our thoughts and will.

He is at the beginning of our being and everyone experiences that our existence is ever imbued with God.

St. Thomas says that our parents are the beginning of our becoming, but God is the beginning of our being.

St. Paul, in his great speech to a gathering of philosophers at the Areopagus in Athens, said: “It is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).

3. As He is at the beginning of our being, so He is also the beginning of our thoughts and love.

We could not move from potentiality to act without the communication of His strength to us.

You tell me you do not know how He stole your heart. He stole it because, just as He gave it to you, He turned it toward Himself too.

He turns all toward Himself by acting in everyone’s heart because everyone unconsciously seeks Him.

Here is how: all seek what is good for them.

But, unlike animals, who instinctively move toward what they seem good to them, man seeks it rationally. That is, by weighing what is before him in terms of what he has and what he misses. He then chooses what for him has the greatest preeminence of good at that moment in the light of the limitless good.

And this limitless good is God.

This is the reasoning by both Aristotle and Thomas, who are the greatest thinkers in philosophy and theology, respectively.

4. But you certainly experienced a special grace because, while many seek God only unconsciously and perhaps even deny Him, you know Him, you are aware of Him, and you wonder how that possibly happened.

There is no rational explanation because it is grace, and therefore a supernatural and preventive action of God in your soul.

5. That is like what happened to Paul Claudel at his conversion. He went to vespers at Notre Dame in Paris to find some pretext to mock religion and so write it in the newspaper. He was, in fact, an apprentice journalist.

He found no pretext at all. Moreover, as the boys chanted the Magnificat, he found himself believing.

He explored every possible and imaginable option against religion. But nothing was able to undermine that grace which had been introduced into his life.

The same thing happened to André Frossard, who found himself believing as soon as he entered a church looking for a friend who was not coming out.

He felt drawn to faith in Christ. His parents even hired a psychologist to discover the illness that would have struck their son.

But the psychologist told them that their son was healthy and that what they called an illness, Christians call grace.

6. Just recently I happened to read again about a grace like yours in the Story of a Soul by St. Therese of the Child Jesus.

It was Christmas Eve, in 1887. In early January she would have turned 15.

Here is what she wrote: ‘On this night of grace, the third period of my life began—the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favours. In an instant Our Lord, satisfied with my good will, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years. Like the Apostle I could say: “Master, we have laboured all night, and have taken nothing.”

More merciful to me even than to His beloved disciples, Our Lord Himself took the net, cast it, and drew it out full of fishes.’ [tr: I felt a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners, a desire I had never felt so strongly before…] Love and a spirit of self-forgetfulness took possession of me, and from that time I was perfectly happy’ (Story of a Soul, Ch. V).

7. Now, you say you cannot live without Him.

Yes, just as no life form could arise on earth without the light and warmth by the sun, so it happens to you about God. He is your starting point, your target, and your reference.

As you now dive ever deeper into Him who is your all, I gladly bless you.

Father Angelo

(Read the second part of the answer, which was published one day after)

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