I Give Glory to God: Saint Alphonsus Liguori’s Uniformity with God’s Will – Manuel Marrero
February 9, 2026
“No one can prevent what God wills from happening.”
The most important thing is to stay awake. Luminous and contemplative, alert and moving. Even small, repeated motions. Lethal cold is insidious as heat loss outpaces heat generation. You are a candle in a freezer. Be like a votive torch or vigil light; a firework; a festive sparkler. Kierkegaard didn’t choose, couldn’t choose, to be happy. But happiness wasn’t important to him. Fulfillment was.
You are called to be joyful. In historic temperatures, inadequate insulation makes cold more seductive than combative as you are distracted and combat the body. Air leaks, drafts blow, multiple layers of insulation are erased. You stop repositioning or sealing gaps. Then metabolic markers show. Drowsiness. Cognition deteriorates and you stop taking protective actions. You start to want sleep. When desire rules you, you’re answerable to the devil for his due. You’re punch drunk. A beast in the muck.
Do not flee suffering but be present for it. With longsuffering and lovingkindness, and Merit. God crowns his own gifts in our Merit. This is covenant logic. Martyria. “The testimony of our conscience.” Without Merit, you risk collapsing into one of two errors, quietism and legalism.
The horizon of the cross is the pattern. The greatest injustice the means of salvation.
“Your life will be calm and peaceful; your death will be happy.” You will “die the death of saints,” “beyond the possibility of a doubt,” “toughened in the crucible of suffering.” Liguori cautions against virtue heroics and extreme penance. Don’t do too much. “This comes from God.”
Make holy desire first by giving it to God. Make moral decisions by trusting the Holy Spirit. Incarnate your decisions. Overcome the world by faith a witness to the Word and its servant. Ask that he make you the man he wants you to be, that his will be done. Overcome the world with strength to love hierarchy and authority. Don’t complain. Incarnate light. The heart is the seat of the will. Let Eros be transfigured into Agape. God showed us love. The paltry love yes, but the love God gives you to love other people with is so much better than what two people try to do. That’s the cross, discomfort. The fruit borne in that crucible is detachment. And you may come to perfection made cruciform.
“Goodness is diffusive of itself.”
Man is the temple of the living God (Holy Spirit) and the heart is His altar. God isn’t found in the brain but deep within the secret chambers of the soul, and the only way for the chamber walls to crumble and open up is to have our hearts broken. Our hearts break for what breaks his heart. We taste eternity, we see ourselves as crucifiers and are willing to be crucified ourselves. Everything is temporary and more than worth the reward. Now break to form women who are drawn to motherhood above all else. Let one coherent object of desire bear fruit even as a meal ticket for spiritual welfare. Through “blood and birth.”
God is big. His ways are beyond our understanding. Infinite things can’t be contemplated by a finite intellect. His thoughts simply can’t fit in our heads. Yet he is author and finisher. His nature is good, but he permits evil. The voice of the shepherd is quiet enough to melt your face off. There’s this thing called evangelism by honesty, sharing the truth of the interior state and life, for the salvation of souls, for ears conditioned to tune out the ecclesial.
“His Will is that no one should lose his soul.”
Mysticism is the direct experience of God or ultimate reality, the source, that goes beyond ordinary thought and language. The intellect falls silent, the ego loosens, the heart perceives directly, and the soul encounters God or the divine in a way that can’t be fully expressed in words.
Eyes of faith may see one thing, but malice sees the cross as a target. Nothing more high resolution than the eye in the sensible world where the facets of heightened materiality can dull the realm of forms. An incarnational, corporal, and spiritual life, one that incarnates love transcends the world of forms.
The mandorla or glory field cuts deep as a metaphor. The architecture is vesica piscis, almond shape or literally fish bladder, basically a womb or birth portal imagery, generative suggesting new creation, life emerging where heaven meets earth, paradoxical birth and death. It’s theological/cosmic geometry and I’m only being cursory. The mandorla visually says, this is where life comes forth. Its incarnational symbolism goes further, a sanctification of the body, a claim that salvation is corporal, not abstract. Appears in Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic art. Death is a threshold not an end. Christ truly entered matter. Death is a curtain not a wall. Let it fall. Do what is fitting and let it be finished.
Carne vale. Farewell to the flesh.
Your cross configuration says a lot. Calvary, Golgotha. Greek cross, Latin cross. Equal armed. A cosmic intersection, order imposed on chaos, instrument of state violence. I like a typographic, minimalist one, like a prehistoric carving. Unassuming but striking. ASCII for plain quiet faith. A crosslet elemental and crude, not a glyph. A paper doll. An emoticon.
Be faithful and take this chalice, the blood of plenitude. Atheism is a vanishingly improbable mathematical calculation.
A medieval pamphlet for auspicious habitudes. In Catholic moral theology, there’s systematic doctrine and casuistry. There’s apologetics. There are manualists who wrote for confessors and pastoral cases. They became too disconnected from virtue and interior life. Liguori was a corrective. He was a composer. He struggled with severe scrupulosity. Between laxism and rigorism, he forged a new path: equiprobabilism. Sin is a science. Intention, knowledge, and consent are measured. It is analytical and juridical. There is some emphasis on sin as injury and sickness to be cured rather than elective. As an emotional not moral wound. The Orthodox Churches emphasize this aspect more. God doesn’t just forgive, he heals.
If you lack the faculty to experience God, you’re actually asleep. You’re unconscious to sin so you don’t feel it. And culpability may be curtailed, which Thomists have tension with, their allegiance being firmly to truth.
Prayer is relational. It’s infrapersonal. It involves address, dependence, and consent. It is dialogic. Meditation is attentional. It is to remain with fidelity of presence, but the will must lead you to the Blessed Sacrament first, to be fortified. Then contemplation is received, not produced. You consent to remain when God gives it. To receive communion on the tongue, you kneel before a rail and fold or lace your hands behind your back. Because you are receiving.
They all may overlap within a single Holy Hour.
Hold fast to your right hand. Let your right knee touch the ground, genuflect let gravity fall. Rigidity or fluidity, the evaluative nature of the mind in that state of the golden hour of daily mass. Be directionally, definitionally correct. The more you are formed by hardship the more you’ll know Christ’s Peace. And the softer your heart will be. We welcome it while the lord give and take away. We say, I hope that’s not my heart hardening. I hope it’s my innocence shining.
If you’re exhausted, I know a way to be forever young. To be infinitely consoled. It’s called ancient tradition and it’s back. A season of alignments and interior reordering is at hand. Toward sanctification and interior conversion. Your “abuse of grace” meets “efficacious succor” in confession. In connection. In sharing witness and wisdom. The way every meeting in New York is at least extractive, if not transactional, with field notes, because everyone wants something from you. In the midwest, in the south, they’re just existing. They’re just drinking. Good, strong drink. I influence a lot of writers, and I’m influenced by spiritual writers, like James Joyce. James the apostate was formed by Jesuits, and the sacramental structure and liturgical rhythms of his prose are temporal and incarnational in their own way. The heart of Catholic moral theology is mysticism, or intimate “union with God.” It is saying thank you. It is not complaining. Suffering is a gift. Blessed are the meek who receive suffering and endure it as gift, without pride or anger. Imagine botching a martyrdom by making it about you instead of God, in a self dramatizing or mythologizingly self important way The more our hearts resemble Christ’s, pierced and soft and broken, the more we resist hardening them. Love is primordial to creation, it’s Trinitarian, to be forever joined, three from two. It’s a vector too fraught, too prone for fallenness, this casual, situational habituation is so powerful.
Aquinas wrote love letters to God and called a marriage the best possible friendship. Your capacity for intimacy and covenant. To pine to love someone and want to replicate them and reciprocate is monolithically human and tied to the Fall.
Don’t die alone. Desire to find the other. The desire to find the other, our person, and reciprocate with them, is so intrinsic and foundational to the human condition (be fruitful and multiply) that denying it risks denying God.
Don’t deny your desire for marriage. You risk denying your love for God.
Alphonsians c. publication of this pamphlet say to be humble, obedient, and docile. If it’s God’s will that you fall, be thankful. Redemption, moral ascendancy, spiritual growth, and the will to make order over chaos, are secondary. “Rise promptly when you fall.” Spiritual maturation is in a sense spiritual childhood. Return.
It’s an age of fraud, which is worse than violence.