•Here is my servant whom I uphold, … he shall bring forth justice to the nations.” (Isaiah 42:1)
•Give to the LORD the glory due his name, (Psalm 29:1)
•He went about doing good and healing all those oppressed … (Acts 10:38)
•I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit... (Mark 1:8)

 

•Why did Jesus come into the world?
•Why was Jesus baptized?
•What is baptism of the Holy Spirit?
•How do you heal the oppressed(yourself)?

But it turns out that all that he can successfully reach by his own volition is not quite worth having. What he really seeks and needs – love, an authentic identity, a life that has meaning – cannot be had by merely willing and by taking steps to procure them. No amount of ingenuity can “buy” these – no psychological or sociological manipulation can encompass them, no inspirational religious self-help, no aesthetic technique, no drug can do the trick.

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation on our self-willed identity.

¹Merton, Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Image/Doubleday: New York, 1989, p. 224.