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God who is an abyss of infinite profundity is not therefore far away or distant from us, but rather, in his very transcendence, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves, the innermost ground of our very being. This is the paradox: we grow ever more deeply into him at every moment, and indeed throughout eternity, for he is always beyond what we can comprehensively grasp, and yet in him we live, move, and have our being at every instant of our existence. In fact, as we saw, faith grants us a holy familiarity with this very ineffable mystery, for we realize that its depth is that of Love, that our God is a loving Father ever united to his beloved Son in the love that they share, and who is open to us and ceaselessly inviting us in. Thus, even in our limited contact with him, in our partial knowledge, it is truly God whom we touch, his beauty and truth which we intimate, and his love which burns within us, granting us to share in his life.
God is in all things and all things are in God; in other words, God is immanent in all that exists as its solid and sure foundation, as the “root” of its essence, as it were. And yet at the same time created things, the whole rich beauty of the cosmos and of humanity within it, is not God but infinitely less than God. Therefore this immanence of God in creation is not pantheism, the claim that in the last analysis, at a deep enough level, all things are God, that the universe itself is to be equated with God. Rather, the affirmation of God’s immanence respects what theology calls the analogia entis, that is, the analogical nature of being by which all created things share in the Being of the Creator in an imperfect and participatory way, and are infinitely less than he is in his transcendent Majesty, while nonetheless really and truly revealing him and, to that degree, being “like” him. We can therefore affirm that God does not just stand over and above creation as its Creator, as benign and loving as he may be (rather than the impersonal “clockmaker” or the anonymous “first principle” or even the “giant flying spaghetti monster”). Rather, his manner of being-present-in-his-transcendence is to inhere in all things that exist as their “innermost center.” John of the Cross spoke of this with enthusiasm in the opening stanzas of his Spiritual Canticle. This is also what Gerard Manley Hopkins described so deliciously as “inscape,” the “bounded infinity” by which each created thing, in its very irreducible particularity and limitation, is open to the infinite fullness of God and reveals this very fullness. In fact, if we reflect upon this deeply enough–or rather experience it in faith and surrender–it is not too much to say that every thing that exists is God’s gaze of love directed upon this thing, his love “made flesh” in its created being, which in this way participates in his Being through love. G.K. Chesterton expressed this insight wonderfully when he said: “It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” (Orthodoxy) One thing that this realization helps us to grasp more deeply is that we Westerners are not in fact that far from our Eastern, Asiatic brothers and sisters, nor they from us. Rather, even in the underlying the differences in our traditions (some of them irreconcilable) we are much more spiritually united than we may realize. For we are all searching for the same God who is infinitely immanent in all that exists, even as he surpasses it. We are all caught up in the same fabric of reality and striving to peel back the layers, to descend below the surface, to find silence, recollection, purification, and, eventually, presence. What is different is not what we bring of our humanity–in that respect we are all the same, beggars, sinners, seekers–but rather what God brings to us: and that is the revelation of God’s inner being as interpersonal Love, as Trinity, in the countenance of Jesus Christ seen in the light of the Holy Spirit. But we will get to that. Let us say at the moment, however, that this profound kinship of every spiritual search with every other really does reveal profound capacities not only for dialogue but for deep mutual understanding and co-experience between the West and the East. Indeed, we are more deeply influenced by one another than we realize, and our thought patterns and intuitions are growing together more and more as history progresses and a globalized world is making the spiritual and intellectual riches of one the riches of all. But of course this was already happening centuries and millennia ago whenever the Father and Doctors of the Church were utilizing the thought of pagan philosophers to elucidate the mystery of God’s self-revelation and action in history, and therefore also illumining and transforming philosophy itself. The teaching of John of the Cross, in fact, can be seen as a kind of “baptizing” of the Asiatic approach to God through the mysticism of transcendence-in-immanence and immanence-in-transcendence, lifted up and purified, and carried to its goal, through the gift of God in Jesus Christ and the Church. And thus there is a much more reasonable and profound hope for the evangelization of the East than we may think, and in fact deep reasons to look forward to its abundant realization, and to beautiful enrichment also in Christian thought and life brought by its encounter with the riches of millennia of human searching for God as expressed in the Asiatic religions of Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, and the like (as well as in every other religious and philosophical tradition, indeed, in every culture). Whenever the Church, in Christ’s name, encounters men and women who search for God, who try to draw near to him with all the wealth and poverty of their civilization and culture, their long individual and communal experience, not only is the light of God shining in the face of Christ brought to these people, but so too is the Church’s own understanding of the inestimable gift that she has received from her divine Founder deepened. She comes to understand more and more how in Jesus, in the revelation of the Trinity, all the thoughts, aspirations, hopes, and experiences of humanity are “summed up,” lifted up to their fulfillment and consummation, not by being denied or rejected in all that is good or true in them, but rather in being purified, corrected, affirmed, and fully enlightened. Yves Raguin S.J. expressed this matter very well when he said: “Non-Christian religions are the expression of a burning search for God in the obscurity of creation and the secret places of human nature.” (The Depth of God, 12) If Christ came to respond to this burning search, indeed to reveal God’s even more ardent search for each one of us, then understanding the contours of this search on the human side can help us to understand anew the gift of God. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (Jn 4:10). We can recognize in the history of humanity six different avenues or “ways” in the search for God and the meaning of life, all of which reflect something of the mystery of man’s relationship with the divine, and indeed something of the inner mystery of the Trinity itself. They are: 1) myth and story, 2) the search for wisdom, 3) law, 4) ritual and sacrifice, 5) mysticism, usually manifest as seeking the divine in the immanence in the self, 6) the search for the divine in nature. It is not my intention to explore in extensive depth these different aspects, as there is much written on them elsewhere, but I hope to give you enough to provide a sense of their interrelationship and to discern their path toward convergence in the one, all-unifying mystery. (For more, I would recommend for example The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton or Truth and Tolerance by Joseph Ratzinger, or the Yves Raguin book quoted above.) First, in terms of myth and story, we see this expressed quite vividly in ancient Greece and Rome and their relation to their gods. Even more than an actual belief in the existence or divinity of these beings, the myths of these civilizations expressed the search for the true foundations of reality, even, in its highest expression, for the “God behind the gods.” Their mythologies and dramas and their practices related to these myths express (before their decline) the fabric of their cultural existence and their sense of the transcendent. We can also recognize that our Biblical faith is rooted in story and shall ever be rooted in story; it is the definitive unveiling of the meaning of the human story through the particular story of a “chosen people” to whom God revealed himself and whom he accompanied on the paths of history. And as we will see below, the ultimate fulfillment of this story is the Gospel. Regarding the second, the search for wisdom (including the dimension of an ethical or moral life founded upon wisdom, upon truth), there has been much written. For example, I recommend Benedict XVI’s famous “Regensburg Lecture” in which he talked about the divinely ordained encounter between early Christianity and the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, which led to a profound union of faith and reason, of theology and philosophy, in mutual illumination. This indeed was providential, for without the groundwork of philosophy in thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus, and later in Aristotle as discovered and “baptized” by Thomas Aquinas, the Church would have struggled to give expression to the objective, rational content of its faith in the Trinity, in the Incarnation of the Son of God as man, and our true divinization in the life of God. There is also a historical tension between the first and second way we just mentioned, between myth and wisdom, story and philosophy, as the philosophers condemned the myths of their society in order to emphasize their pursuit of the One beyond these all-too-human imaginings (and this they indeed became in the old age and decline of these societies). Christianity picked this up and purified it by presenting itself not first of all as the “true religion” but as the “true philosophy” (and thus the fulfillment of myth and story), born of the presence of the Wisdom of God made flesh, the perfect Philosopher. But we also see a more harmonious union of myth and wisdom in other cultures, particularly indigenous cultures and religions such as that of certain Native American Indians, who along with their stories of the spirits and the origins of sun and moon, water and land and such, also have a strong sense of the “Creator Father,” the “Father of all.” Here an incipient “ontological” sense, a sense of an objective God, even of God’s divine paternity, is united with a deeply mythic impulse, though we should not romanticize this either. But God truly is near to everyone who seeks him, and many throughout history have come to know and worship him in their hearts through the silent activity of grace working in and alongside nature, even without any explicit divine revelation. And in this we should rejoice even as we seek to bring the good news of God’s complete self-revelation in history, and his awesome love given totally in Christ and inviting us into his very innermost life, to all people. The third way is that of law, which is so evident in God’s dealings with the people of Israel, in his entrusting to them the law as a pedagogy into a life of right and justice, of love and virtue, even as this law was also a means to make them aware of their own sinfulness, their own inability to fulfill the law by their own power, and thus a preparation for grace. Saint Paul expressed this so well: But the scripture consigned all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:22-28) We see this usage of law also, for example, in Confucius, who created an entire cultural reform effected through the promulgation of law. But law also points beyond itself to something more, for the simple fact that it always remains external, and that at most it facilitates and demands the renewal of the heart in individuals, and awakens a recognition of universal, binding values in communities and societies. And thus it draws man to his need for God, his need for atonement and redemption, and, ultimately, to his desperate need for the redemption that comes only from God. And thus we come to the fourth way: that of ritual and sacrifice. This too can be seen in the life and culture of almost every people in history (or even of every people without exception). In fact, I expect that all six of these ways exist in all people to some degree, even if their emphasis is directed upon one or another aspect. We see this practice of ritual in a terrible form in the hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices performed by the Aztecs in what would become Mexico, and which our Lady of Guadalupe so beautifully healed and transformed through her manifestation to the humble Juan Diego. We see it even in the sacrifices of Greece and Rome, as well as in the practices and rituals, for example, of Japanese religion. God in fact invited Israel to walk this path as well, as an essential part of their own purification and maturation as a people, not only giving to them the law and its commandments, but having Moses erect for them a strict ritual structure of worship and sacrifice. But why? Why have cultures throughout history spontaneously turned to sacrificial worship in relating to the divine, and why did God himself use this way as a pedagogy for his people (as well as utilizing the other ways, especially that of wisdom)? One essential reason is the awareness of guilt. Deep in the heart of each man and each society is the awareness, the experience, the intuition of a profound rupture of the way that things are meant to be, and the desire to remedy this, or at least to prevent its spread. There is also a deep awareness of the fragility of existence and at times a desire to make some kind of “deal” with the gods to curry their favor and protection, or, as in the case of the Aztecs above, to prevent them from destroying humanity. It is evident how Jesus Christ in his redeeming Sacrifice lifted up and fulfilled all of these imperfect yearnings, all of these sacrifices that could not effect what they sought, “for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb 10:4). And Saint Peter writes, “For you have been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet 1:18-19). And then sacrifice surpasses guilt and deliverance, and becomes a matter of sheer praise and adoration, of gratuitous love. Now let us move to the two final ways man approaches God without the light of divine revelation, and indeed even continues to seek him when revelation is given, though in a new way and with an incomparable light. These ways are the ways of mysticism, of seeking insight into the foundation of things or of one’s own self, to discover the transcendent mystery in the only way one can: by its immanence in or to all things. This is seeking God in the depths of one’s own self or in the depths of creation. We see this, as it were par excellence, in the Asiatic religions. Without the complete exclusion of the other ways we have mentioned, Asiatic religions have given a pride of place to path of mysticism, particularly a mysticism of immanence, in their efforts to make contact with the divine. As said above, this is the path that descends into the depths of man’s own being to make contact with that core where he is in contact with the Absolute, or with the immanence of this divine in the things that are known in this world. Let us listen more deeply to Yves Raguin in this regard, so that with his assistance we may bring this reflection full circle: God’s immanence in creation, and in man in particular, is not an everyday sense perceptible reality; nor is it one that dissolves Him in matter or history. God is what He is wherever He is. His immanence itself is already an otherness pointing to something beyond the object that reveals it. The absoluteness of immanence is at the same time total transcendence. When we press the analysis of this finite reality where we exist a little further, we very soon discover, as Tillich says, that “the finite world points beyond itself,” or, that it is “self-transcendent.” Compare these two formulas with Pascal’ “Man goes beyond man.” … For the man who pushes to its limits the living experience of this “self-transcendence,” it escapes into the depths and reveals itself as the Other, unique, ever-present since we experience it, yet always out of reach. This Other, perceived within the finite experience of my own person, reveals Himself to me in His own being which I can only perceive in ecstasy. So I can truly say that it is at the confines of enstasis or total interiority, that I reach perfect ecstasy before this Other whom I first perceived in the depths of my being. … To put it simply: the man who knows himself as man discovers he comes from God. We cannot pass over the fact that this basic truth, engraven in human nature, made possible the incarnation and revelation of God in Jesus Christ. … This search for God brought non-Christian thinkers to the threshold of the mystery. But there they had to stop, for they could only listen at the gate of the valley of the mystery of mysteries. Some did indeed experience sudden awareness of the ineffable Absolute. But which of them could dream that this Absolute was Love? Christ had to come to us and say, “I come from the depth of the mystery, and in the beyond of all mystery I am the mystery.” (p. 3-7) This text expresses well the profound positive dimension of these Eastern mysticisms, which are not all completely apophatic (negative) nor inclined solely toward nihilism, nirvana, or escape, but also at least a times more simply and affirmatively the voice for our crying out for the divine, for the ground of our being and the being of all things. One goes into oneself, seeking recollection in the core of one’s being, and the purification of all that on the outside functions like “exile,” not because of a narcissistic tendency, but because of a deep if inchoate awareness that one is the image of God (to use the beautifully objective, personal Biblical language, one rooted in created filiation, which is not as clearly understood in the East, where God and self are not so clearly distinguished, nor the personal nature of the divine). The wording of Raguin is not quite precise enough when he says that it is upon reaching the confines of perfect enstasis or total interiority that we reach total ecstasis before the Other. It would be better to say that this perfect interiority disposes us to such ecstasy, that it leads to the threshold, to the place where we experience the pure relatedness or relationality of our being calling out for God, and existing in a primal relationship with him. We are in touch with our created participation in God’s Being, something not fully perceived or understood, but intuited. Here we see both the limits and the beauty of the natural experience of God, what is classically called “natural theology,” or even “natural mysticism.” For if God truly abides in all things that exist, and most sublimely and completely in the human person created in his image, then to attune deeply enough to the essence of things is to make contact with God, to discover the One in whom all things are united at their Source, and to commune with this source. This is the beauty that encourages us: that all people throughout history who have sought, according to their capacity, for the face of God, have been able to enter into some form of communion with him, some proximity to him. And yet we also recognize the limitation. For this encounter, this presence runs up against a limit. For an intuitive contact with the Absolute at the ground of all things, non-conceptual as it is, is not enough to foster what the human heart really longs for and was made for: a personal relationship of love and interpersonal intimacy. This is something that is never (or very rarely) even dreamed of in any religion outside of divine revelation—and hence a personal mysticism of relationship really only clearly appears in Judaism, Islam (indebted to Biblical revelation), and Christianity. For those who walk the path of nature, the closest one can reliably reach is a contact with that “ineffable something” that is deeply desired and yet unknowable, felt but not understood. The divine is touched but not named, and one is uncertain of whether it is one’s own self or if one’s self is rather absorbed in it, if it is all things or no-thing, whether it is presence or beyond all presence. This all boils down to the essential difference between the Asiatic religions and the religions born of God’s revelation in history: the former are non-personal and the latter are personal, for God in the latter has shown his face, has chosen to step into history and to enter into dialogue with his creature, thus making possible a relationship of an entirely different nature and order. This also has an effect on the way we view the role of the world, of bodiliness, and of concrete existence, whether as an obstacle or as a “sacrament.” This stepping of God into history is something that man, on the basis of nature alone, could never have dreamed of, something that he could hardly have even begun to hope for. This is expressed so beautifully in the cry of the Deuteronomy: “What nation has gods so close to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him?” (Deut 4:7). Let us listen to Raguin a little more: The way of immanence is always a dark way. To try and awaken people for whom this is the only way by announcing that we are the ones with the light, is like indicating landmarks to a man in the dark who cannot possibly verify what we are saying. To bring any light to these people, we have first to understand what is going on inside them. Above all we have to share their experience of the search for God through creation and humanity. God thrusts Christian mystics back into the night and calls them into the desert so that they may know what it means to try and find a way when the divine light is unseen. This is the kind of search people should engage in, not only in Asiatic or African countries, but everywhere in the world where the meaning of Christian revelation has been lost and human techniques have taken the upper hand. In every corner of the globe and through all human situations, we should be looking for continuity between the human and the divine. Nothing in this runs counter to Christianity. We know that for us, God is being and life. However, it is not the number of distinct ideas we have about the Trinity that will unite us to God, but only the inflowing of divine life that fills creation and is the vitality of all human beings. The three great Chinese traditions are, each in its own way, humanisms–even Buddhism, which teaches the non-consistency of the person when compared with the absolute of nirvâna. The three images of perfect man they bring give their own answer to the secularizing world. Through each we can discern one facet of the spiritual core of the human. Where Buddhism seeks for a humanity “liberated” from all illusions and the weight of karma, Taoism looks for human “liberation” from excessive constraints and the return to the state of simple nature. Confucianism, in its turn, wants a “liberated” humanity, but through acceptance of an order that expresses the harmony between heaven and earth. These are the three human ways leading to [or rather, toward] that perfect balance Christ brought when He liberated man for communion with God, the principle of his being. To pass through this human experience in our search for the divine enables us to give people some inkling of the meaning of God’s signs to man on earth. The light burning in man’s heart is no mere divine emanation, but the sign of a presence, the actual approach of a God who loves. Far too often for the Christian, Revelation has been nothing but a set of textbook formulas, and even contemplation has become no more than endless ruminating over them. But the seekers of God outside the Christian faith are calling on us to join them in their immense effort to reach the divine–effort that coincides with God’s striving from the beginning of time to make Himself known through His works and above all, through His likeness in man. When a missionary first comes in contact with the great non-Christian religions it begins to dawn on him what it can really mean to search for God without Revelation, with nothing but human means and anything that comes to hand. To go through such an experience alongside the non-Christian shows up both the greatness of creation as revealing God and its inherent weakness that hides as much as it reveals. Gradually Revelation ceases to be some transcribable product between the covers of a book and becomes the language of God. (p. 14-15) These words merit deep pondering. Truly we walk the same journey, the adherents of all the religions of the world. This does not absolve us of the obligation of sharing the word of Christ, of God’s revelation, for it is also possible to go astray and to come to frustration on this path, and indeed the encounter with God in Christ alone lifts up this journey to its highest fulfillment. But let us recognize the deep commonality in experience, in desire, in struggle, and in humanity that we share. We all walk in darkness and we all seek the light. And we should joyfully and compassionately recognize this, and not arrogantly place ourselves above others because we have been graced with the encounter with God made flesh in Jesus Christ, God made visible and relatable. Rather, we should embrace this universal journey and join our brothers and sisters—or rather recognize that we are already joined with them—as we seek to walk through the mysterious darkness toward the radiance of God’s uncreated light, which is both infinitely transcendent and infinitely immanent, both surpassing all things and inexpressibly close within all things, living in the very heart of all that exists and sustaining it in being. Before tying all the strands of this reflection together, I would like to make one clarifying remark about the above quote, however. Raguin says that “it is not the number of distinct ideas we have about the Trinity that will unite us to God, but only the inflowing of divine life. ” This, of course, is simply an expression of what has been mentioned a number of times throughout these reflections: that God cannot be contained in our conceptual framework or ideas and that only his own divine outpouring in faith, hope, and love can unite us to God as he truly is. Raguin is also in this context speaking against an overly abstract, “textbook formula” approach to Christianity, which in “grasping” God in fact pushes him farther away. Rather, only in sharing in the drama and anguish of the journey for the real God, immanent and transcendent, can we come to respect his mystery as he deserves, even in the language of revelation and dogma. But my clarification is this: one of the paradoxical things manifested to us by God’s self-revelation in history is that God is Word as well as Love, “effable” as well as “ineffable,” knowable as well as unknowable. This may go against much of what we have learned, but it is a simple fact. What I mean is that, just as in beholding the face of the man Jesus we truly see the Father, and just as in receiving his Body and Blood we truly enter into communion with the divine, so too in adhering to the infallible words of our faith, we are truly adhering to God himself, communicated in those words. True Christian mysticism is not a matter, therefore, of moving “beyond” the word, beyond revelation to some “God behind the Trinity,” or seeking some ineffable God behind the God at work in history. They are one God. There is only one God. Rather, the process of Christian mysticism (and thus of Christian life in general) is a matter of purifying our hearts so that we can live our incarnate, bodily life, and can relate to all things, in affection, thought, and will, with a purity that beholds God immanently transcendent within all things, not contained by them but fully present within them, and, mysteriously, truly communicated, received, and understood. This is especially true of the sacraments of his love, of the words of his teaching and of his Church, and of his grace present and operative in all things, fulfilling the natural presence by which all things inhere in him by the very fact of their existing, and yet lifting all things to an infinitely higher life, a life that is supernatural and divine. We must therefore avoid the temptation, in our own personal journey as well as in our ongoing dialogue with other religions (particularly those of the East) of falling into an anti-intellectualism which would fail to respect the tension between apophatic and cataphatic union, between the contact with God beyond all conceptual knowledge and indeed beyond all experience, and the true presence of God in what is known through faith. Just as there is no God beyond that revealed by and in Jesus Christ, so there is no God beyond the Trinity. And so it is truly the case that when I pronounce in faith the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I am touching and communing with God himself, and not only with my limited ideas of him. For this is how he has chosen to reveal himself, as Father, Son, and Spirit; and thus I know God most fully not by abstracting from these titles to a unity beyond the three, or by finding better titles or no titles at all, but rather by affirming that God is these in infinite fullness, in supereminent abundance, such that he is recognized as the consummate perfection of what it means to be Father, Son, and Spirit (shared love). Thus apophatic and cataphatic theology find their fulfillment and harmonization in the way of super-eminence. This is the way of faith, and indeed the mysticism that is available to all, to the little ones, to those who are like children. And therefore an esoteric path is not necessary to come to God, but rather the path of utmost humility, the path of the Cross and its purification and renewal, the path of love. This is the reality, indeed, that has already met us from the first moment of our existence, and that carries us to consummation. Let us be amazed at this. For this is how close God has come to us, that even the little child who can barely speak, in making the Sign of the Cross and pronouncing the names of the Father, Son, and Spirit, is truly entering into objective communion with God and touching him as he is. For in such a way has he given himself, without reserve, in order to be totally available to us as his children in his one Son, and to draw us up into his own life. In conclusion, let us recognize that we can see all six of these “natural ways” of drawing near to God or trying to restore right relationship with him as fulfilled completely in the seventh, final way: in our encounter with the God who becomes flesh in history and thus enters into relationship with us, in his covenant of love consummated in Jesus Christ. Let us see this illustrated in the thought of Saint John the Evangelist, or rather in God’s wonderful synthesis communicated to us through his writings. The theology of John, the beloved disciple (in this Gospel and in the Letters), expresses spectacularly this coming together of all the other ways of drawing near to God. Johannine theology is one of mutual immanence through love: “Abide in me and I in you,” based in the relations of the Persons of the Trinity in which man is called to participate through grace: “And we will come and make our home within him.” Indeed, it is the fulfillment of God’s immanence not only in the depths of man’s heart but in the heart of human love and relationship: “Love one another. If we love one another God abides in us and us in God. For God is Love.” The Trinitarian image is realized in man’s communion with God and in man’s communion with his brother, his sister, and in the intimacy of community life, in communion both human and divine. And this is also the fulfillment and goal of ritual and sacrifice: “For this is love, not that we have loved God but that he has loved us, that he sent his Son as the atonement for our sins.” And this is the fulfillment of the law: “This is my commandment, that you love one another. And this is love, that you follow the commandments, and this is the commandment that you have heard from the beginning, that you love follow love.” This is the great mystery worked in us through the incarnation of God’s Word, his uncreated Wisdom, in our world: “The Word was made flesh and pitched his tent among us, and all who received him received power to become children of God.” Through the Incarnation and the Paschal Sacrifice of the Son, Jesus Christ, in whom God in his fullness dwells, the way of love and communion is open before us, the love of God and of one another, the love of all creation. And this, when understood and lived at a sufficiently deep level, not as mere moralism but as mysticism, as intimate communion with God, as God in us and us in God, fulfills all things: law and wisdom and cult and interiority and story, but each lifted to a higher level, purified, renewed, and consummated in the synthesis, in the convergence, that only the revelation of the Trinity and our incorporation into his life can accomplish. This is the myth that fulfills all myths for the simple fact that it is true, that is it the historical fact that transforms all history and opens it to the definitive happily-ever-after. This is the Wisdom that comes down from heaven to give life to the world, and to unveil the very foundations of all being, to be light for the mind and affection for the heart, to show us the truth for which our hearts long. This is the righteousness that surpasses the law while fulfilling it, for it is the work of redeeming grace within us, renewing us through faith. This is the true worship that fulfills all man’s longings for authentic adoration, and his yearning for the reconciliation that will allow him to overcome the rupture of his being in itself, in relation to creation and to his brothers, and especially in his relation to God. This is the true immanence of God in man and in creation, affirming the natural immanence due to God’s creative and sustaining love, and yet carrying it further: it is the immanence of Incarnate Love, by which God now dwells in man in an incomparable way, not only as the ground of his being but as a singular human, the Son of God who took flesh as his own and lived within it an earthly life, and at the end of this life welcomed this very humanity into God, into the innermost life of the Trinity. He is thus the first-fruits of resurrection and the foundation of our hope that at the end of time the whole visible, created universe shall live forever, remade and consummated in love and unity, in the everlasting embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this is the eighth and final “way,” the day of the definitive resurrection which is also the “first” day of eternal life, a day that knows no end but rather consummates all days. Yes, this awesome reality consummates all the encounters between God and man in this world, and sets the final seal to the definitive union wrought in Jesus Christ, bringing it to its fulfillment by drawing us, in the Son, fully into the bosom of the Father: it is the way of the beatific vision, the way of direct sight of God’s Triune Glory and the unmediated embrace of his life and love in us and us in him. It is our very participation in the circumincession of the three divine Persons, and indeed the utter permeation of the entire cosmos, in the new creation, with the tangible, experiential presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what it means for God to be All in all, and thus to fulfill everything, to bring it to consummation within himself. This is our longing and this is our hope, and this is the sure and certain promise of God in Christ. Let us lean into it, pray for it, and yearn for it with every beat of our hearts. For in the end there is nothing else. Let every sigh, every prayer, everything thought, every inhalation and exhalation, every pulsation of blood in our veins cry out: Glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. In other words, let us make contact in faith and love with the blessed Trinity, receiving his love and letting our own love flow back in response, in adoration and praise and gratitude, in tenderness and affection and joy, in reciprocity blossoming in intimacy. “As it was in the beginning”: as you, Holy Trinity, are in the everlasting bliss of your eternal life before the created world even came to be, in the ceaseless shared delight of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which has always been and shall always be. “Is now”: as it is in the current state of our world, beautiful and holy yet marred by sin and division, opacity and obscurity, rupture and fragmentation–and yet loved by you still and permeated by your presence in all things, by your presence through Christ and the Spirit working toward the redemption of all things like the leaven in the dough. “And will be forever”: as it will be when the whole universe is at last taken up into the heart of your Trinitarian embrace, cradled in the mutual love of the Father and the Son, in the kiss and breath of the Spirit whom you share, and in this place utterly irradiated with your light, your joy, and your love, to be made a partaker in your bliss for eternity without end. Amen. We know you by growing ever deeper into you, in this life through longing and in the next life through belonging. This is the thought that came to me in prayer today. It expresses a fundamental dimension of the life of faith, of the life of the spirit. We must understand that even though God is eternally unchanging, this does not mean that God is eternally static, as if abiding in perfect stillness and thoughtless repose like a Buddha statue. Rather, he is eternal dance, everlasting movement, the ceaseless circulation of gift and reception and reciprocal gift, of the joy of discovery and the cry of gladness, the act of adoration and the happiness of communion. He is Father and Son and Spirit in ceaseless reciprocity, in an ecstasy of love that draws each person perpetually out of himself into the others even as he welcomes the others into himself, and yet all the while each person remains where he is, in his true center, at rest, which is the heart of his Beloved, in the heart of the shared Love that is the Godhead, the essence of God as Three-in-One, as Trinity. For God, rest is vibrant and alive, repose is activity and activity is repose, union is generative and generation is unitive, contemplation is eminently active and action is wholly contemplation. But what does this mean for us?
I cannot give an exhaustive answer here (or anywhere), and I do not intend to try. Rather, I want to just bring one point to the forefront. The first thing to note is that God is infinite. What does this mean? Perhaps we have heard this word so many times that we hardly think anymore about its significance. Perhaps we can get an intimation of infinity when we contemplate the immeasurable depth of the ocean or the boundless expanse of the sky, so far beyond our ability to penetrate to the depths and the height. But even these things are miniscule and insignificance in comparison with God. He is like a truly limitless ocean which one could plunge for all eternity and never reach the bottom (and indeed this is precisely what we will do in heaven!). He is like boundless space that we are invited to forever explore, though we shall never compass it all, but shall find new marvels at every moment without end. He is the Beloved in whose heart we have found repose and yet whom we do not get tired of knowing and loving, so immeasurable are the riches of his beauty and goodness, the depth of his truth, the radiance of his light. Thus God is endless adventure, whom we shall ever be discovering anew and coming to encounter yet again as if for the first time, even though we have also always known him and felt him from the first moment of our existence. We cling not to the past, to what we have already attained, as Saint Paul says, for this would become a “possession” which would clutter, burden, and slow down our ascent into the heart of the One who draws us, whose ravishing beauty attracts us. Rather, we receive anew each moment of existence as a new creation, a new birth, an opportunity to let every burden fall away so that we may rise up toward the splendor of our Beloved, so that we may sink into the depths of his mystery and his love. We come before God with empty hands, not just once, but perpetually, as we enter more and more into God’s own way of living and loving, which is marked precisely by the complete openness of love in which all is receiving and all is giving and nothing is possessiveness. All, rather, is belonging, the joyful truth of being sealed in one’s being by being truly known and loved by another, and held always by their tenderness and care, which has not only created you but received you, and cherishes you always, even as you journey more into this belonging at every moment. Gregory of Nyssa is in a sense the Father of perpetual progress, having explored this mystery by which God is known not in stasis but in continual growth, a ceaseless rising up to what is higher, a descending into the bedrock of reality. For there is only one way for the human spirit, created in God’s image and called to his likeness, to participate in God’s infinity. For if God is infinite in fact, the Abyss of the Father calling in the Spirit to the Abyss of the Son, and the Son forever echoing back in perfect reciprocity and total belonging, the human spirit is infinite in capacity. In other words, we are not infinite. We are limited, circumscribed, not just in our material bodiliness and the confines of time and space in this world, but in our ontological being, our spiritual essence. And yet at the same time this essence is open to infinity. We saw this in our contemplation of the “caverns of the soul” of which John of the Cross speaks. This is the great mystery of human life, and why we are creatures who have the capacity both for such joy and for such sorrow, for such happiness and for such anguished longing and restlessness, for such peaceful communion and for such aching loneliness. C.S. Lewis also spoke eloquently of this when he spoke of joy in this life as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He wrote in Surprised by Joy: I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.1 But let us hear him speak more directly of the joy of God, of our participation in the infinite life of God, which shall bring us closer to our goal: If you want to get warm, you must stand near the fire; if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?2 As Ecclesiastes says: “You have put eternity into their hearts” (Ecl 3:11). And again the book of Wisdom: “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity” (Wis 2:23). Here we see how eternity and infinity are united, inseparable, being the complementary images expressing what in the created universe is known as “time” and “space,” but which in fact are images of something that exists in God in incalculably more real and expansive measure—in the measure beyond all measure. Thus we can already begin to anticipate in time and space, through faith, the reality of heaven. The space of our lives becomes permeable to the infinite richness and depth of the presence of God, provided we live within it with a heart seeking him, seeking his infinity, and receptive to his ever-renewed and ever-new gift. And our time also can be filled with the presence of God provided we let go of regretful or wistful clinging to the past or fearful, controlling clinging to the future, and allow both past and future to be both forgotten and subsumed into the fullness of the present moment lived with empty hands and open heart, which is intersected always by the Eternal “Now” of God, his eternity in which all moments of time and the entirety of the cosmos is present to him in its entirety. All of the longing and loneliness of our hearts, all of our restless and almost unbearable strivings for beauty, for goodness, for encounter, for light and truth, come down to this. We were made for God. We were fashioned in the image of his own eternity, and in order to participate, forever, in his infinite life and love. In this life, as long as the veil of mortality remains and we make contact with God only through the obscure light of faith, hope, and love, we know God through longing, through experiencing the impress of his presence precisely by the “God-shaped hole” that reverberates with pain inside of us—a joyful pain and a painful joy. This is the absence which is a deeper form of presence, the absence which we will feel more every day of our lives, even as the conviction of his presence and the ability to discern this presence everywhere increases. But in heaven. Oh, in heaven! There we shall know and experience God no longer through the darkness of faith, through the anguish of longing and hope, but in the ecstatic joy of definitive belonging! We shall have arrived; and yet at the same moment we shall ever be entering anew, and more deeply, into the Mystery that has already wholly welcomed us, and in which we live always. We shall gaze upon the countenance of the Father and the Son and the Spirit, shall breathe with the Father and the Son their one Spirit, shall share in their sweet and everlasting kiss, and we shall do this more deeply and more intimately in a succession of eternal moments without end. And in the new creation, the whole cosmos itself shall be welcomed into God, and shall be made a partaker in this eternal life of intimacy and joy. This is the destiny that awaits us, and this is the eternity that we already bear in our hearts, stirring us to longing and to hope, that we may taste and know the joy of heaven already now in the mystery of faith, and shall be thrilled by it in the unveiled glory of eternity, when God shall be All in all, belonging totally to us and us to him, in the bliss of enduring and ever-deepening communion. *** NOTES *** 1 . C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 19. 2 . C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Let us delve more deeply now into this great mystery of finding our identity fulfilled in intimacy with God, of experiencing our solitude transformed into communion so that the image of God that we are may be consummated in the likeness of the everlasting unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As we have repeatedly found throughout these reflections, the words of our Carthusian friends have much to teach us (many of which are probably the words of Dom André Poisson, a man of precious wisdom). Let us therefore hear from them for a moment in order to spark our own thoughts and to set them on a solid footing:
Throughout the Gospel, our Lord gives us intimations of this mystery: he speaks of his desire to do the will of the Father; in his teaching, he is only repeating what he hears from his Father, his works have their source in the Father, etc. All this is a pointer for us, but leaves us with a deeper mystery: the mystery of Jesus in the presence of his Father. The exterior actions of our Lord, however rich in teach- ing they may be, are meant to introduce us into the interior movement by which he is turned towards his Father, where he no longer has anything to say to others, or any exterior actions to accomplish, but where his inner being is simply in the presence of the One who gives him birth. ‘Today I have begotten you,’ we often repeat when singing the psalms. The Father engenders the Son; Jesus, the human face of the Father, in turn engenders us. This is the conversion that is required of us: we are to renounce living as autonomous, self-sufficient beings who stand before God and man with a certain self-confidence, as though we had something in ourselves that we had not received. A little child is not only weak, charming and fragile, but above all, someone who receives life from another. Being a son of man not only means receiving material existence from one’s father, a body formed during many months in a mother’s womb; above all, it means receiving one’s being as a person, capable of perceiving the love in the eyes of the father leaning over him, the gaze of a father who sees in his son an absolutely unique being, another himself. On a human level, this reality is always lived in a very imperfect, fragmentary way and fraught with difficulties. But it is an analogy of the infinitely more beautiful and certain reality that we must try to live with our heavenly Father, who reveals himself to us in his Son. It is here that we can see at last the full realization of the call that resounds through the whole of the Old Testament, as a leitmotif: that the light of God’s face should shine upon us, and that this light should be a source of life for us. On a level that we can barely grasp, there is a fundamental difference between human paternity as we know it and the paternity of God which is revealed in secret. For a human child, growing up and becoming himself implies a certain breaking from his father and freeing himself from a state of dependency which is burdensome if it lasts too long, since, by its nature, it is only temporary. But for the child of God, on the contrary, being born is not something that happens once and for all at some particular moment in time, after which he must gradually learn to fly with his own wings: it means receiving from God at every single moment the divine life that makes us his children. It means remaining in the attitude of one who is repeatedly beginning again, opening ourselves continually, as if for the very first time, to the loving gaze of God which gives us our existence. It is this mystery of childhood that is revealed to us in the Presentation of our Lord: Jesus shows himself to us as being the Child par excellence. He was born of Mary and in today’s feast, we begin to see how, in his whole being, he is dependent on the love he receives from the Father. This is the state that is the goal of our own conversion. (p. 168-169) How beautiful. The first “beholding the face of God” occurs not at the end of our journey but at the beginning. And this primal experience is the foundation also of our longing for the last beholding—the definitive seeing of heaven, of the beatific vision—and indeed it is the thread that carries us all through life. I have explored in depth elsewhere this experience of the gaze of love that communicates to us our identity, so I will not comment much on it here. Indeed, what is said in the quote above is eloquent in its simplicity. In the gaze of our earthly mother and father, in the gaze of those who in this life love us, we encounter an image, a symbol, an analogy, of the infinitely deeper and truer reality of the heavenly Father’s gaze of love, which not only sees us and cherishes us but in fact creates us through love, making us to be who we are. And thus if we are rightly meant grow beyond dependence upon the love of our earthly parents into a mature independence, into our own life apart from them (though indebted to them), the path of the spiritual life goes in the opposite direction: it consists in becoming more and more a child who has nothing of his own apart from the love of his Father, who loves him and gives him life at every moment. Indeed, even the freedom and maturity and spontaneity of the Christian life is not something merely natural, something developed through the acquisition of virtue or self-mastery, or a natural human equilibrium that helps us to have control over our actions and to determine our course wisely with reason and will. All of this is true, of course, and is important and necessary on the level of our humanity, as a substratum for the operation of grace even as it is also supported and permeated by grace, and in grace alone is brought to its own most authentic maturity and fulfillment. Here the growth into a mature sense of one’s own independence and individuality is not contrary to growing into total dependence upon God—or rather, growth into total dependence upon God is not contrary to a mature sense of self, of responsibility for my unique life and activity. It is in fact its only foundation, for, as we saw in the last reflection, every other sense of self not born of God’s love is illusory, and leads not to freedom but to slavery. Here we come to the essence of the beautiful mystery of obedience, our participation in the Son’s ceaseless reception of life from the generosity of his Father, first of all in eternity—in the bosom of the all-holy Trinity—and then also in time, at the heart of his earthly life. As A Carthusian Miscellany says: With extreme discretion, but in an infinitely profound way, the Gospels, particularly St John, allow us to enter into the intimate relationship which exists between the Father and Son. We can sense a link of dependency that is…unlimited. Jesus does nothing of himself, but only what he has seen his Father doing. He does not decide anything, for everything comes from the Father. His only real food is to do the will of his Father. And, remarkably, such total dependency does not seem to be a burden to him. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that his constant concern with the Father’s will makes him feel that he is prevented from living life to the full. On the contrary: this is the source of all his joy, all his serenity, and of the unfailing strength which allows him to face up to every situation with equanimity, in spite of so many adversities. For the Lord, obedience is not a constraint which against his very nature. On the contrary, for him, obedience is returning to the roots of his being, as a child of God; it is drawing from the source of life: being the Son of the Father, and being the one whose obedience is perfect, are, for him, identical. …. It is quite simply a relationship of trust in someone. To obey means to turn our heart in trust towards the heart of another who loves us. This does not in any way contradict the great theological principles concerning the eternal laws of God. They are not contradicted, but presented in a form which is both more realistic and more convincing: we are the children of God, and it is this divine filiation that we must continually develop. … It means remaining attentively and trustingly in the presence of the One who, at this very moment in his goodness, is giving us life. We marvel at the intimate relationship between Jesus and his Father. Are we not invited to a similar relationship, in faith? The Lord’s love for us is not abstraction, or a beautiful idea to be set aside when dealing with the practicalities of life. No: it is a living reality which alone gives to every moment of our existence its true, profound meaning. … There is never any need for us to defend our liberty against him, or to build ramparts around ourselves guarantee our autonomy. On the contrary, it is God who is the only true source of this liberty, which enables us to love both him and our brothers. (p. 187-189) This ever deepening dependence upon the love and gift of our Father communicated to us in Christ and the Spirit undergirds every movement into authentic freedom, and alone brings it to fruition. This is also what it means that all is grace. It indicates where the human analogy of love breaks down and we find ourselves transitioning to a superior reality, to the bedrock of all created being as participation in the Son’s eternal reception of life from his Father. For if in relation to my earthly parents I receive life and, after they have formed me, must distinguish myself from them and what I have received from them, making it my own and also growing beyond it (for my parents are limited custodians of this gift, and thus are transitory), with God something much deeper happens. I grow up into maturity and liberty not by growing apart from him but by growing in him and indeed into him. For he is the foundation of my life, the Origin and Consummation of all goodness, beauty, and truth, the very atmosphere of life and love, the air that I breathe, the blood that courses through my veins and through he entire universe, that which I love in everything worth loving, and that which I love also in loving myself in truth: he is my rock and my stronghold, the perennial source of my identity as beloved and as lover, and he is the current of life flowing within me as it courses on from the first beginnings of the experience of love to its fullest consummation in the ecstatic vision and eternal embrace of heaven, when I am taken fully into the innermost embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This leads us to the mystery of poverty once again, not a merely material poverty but a poverty of spirit, which in this respect is identical with the mystery of obedience and of chastity, of meekness and purity of heart. For I am not placed in this world to accumulate the merits of righteous actions to then present to the Lord at judgment day, to gather up for myself the flowers of many virtues and dispositions, to erect my fortress of holiness, so that I may stand in confidence before the just Judge. Rather, as Thérèse understood so clearly, the only way to have any true confidence in the presence of God is to willingly have nothing, nothing of our own apart from him, so that he may clothe us with his mercy and take us to himself out of his sheer generosity and love. This is why, even though she spent every moment of her life trying to respond to grace and to “gather flowers” of love to present to her Beloved, she said that she wanted to stand before him at the end of her life with empty hands. For only empty hands are able to receive, and what do we have that we have not received? We can receive eternal life only as God’s sheer gift. Yes, it is welcomed by us and made truly our own through the energies of grace flowing into us and transforming us, but it is “our own” only in the sense that we are made God’s own, made fully and completely nothing but his beloved child in the one Son. We are drawn into an existence of ceaseless relationship with our Father, into pure and holy dependence that is our created participation in the Son’s eternal reception and reciprocation of his Father’s life and love in the bosom of the Trinity. To sum up these reflections and to bring them to a place of fullness which we can contemplate and interiorize over time, let me share a final quote: Contemplation is a participation in divine life, in the knowledge and love of God. Christian contemplation is the awakening of the life of Christ in us through the breath of the Spirit: his gaze on the Father, his love for mankind. Our prayer is a bringing to the fore of the grace of Christ by which, as members of Christ’s body, sons in the Son, we enter into the life of the Trinity: the exchange of love among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the source of everything; through love he gives everything to the Son. His joy is in giving, in giving his very self: total fruitfulness, eternal poverty, because he keeps nothing back for himself. The Father sends himself forth totally in his unique Word. The Son receives everything from the Father, eternally. To be the Son is always to be turned towards the Father so as to receive everything from him, and by the power of this received life, to give everything back to the Father in a rebounding of love and gratitude. This outpouring, the link which unites the Father and the Son in a reciprocal gift of love, is the Holy Spirit, poverty twice over: born of the gift, in the gift, for the gift. Divine love only exists as giving itself, as losing itself completely and eternally. Since God is love, the life of the Trinity is seen as the unconditional gift of reciprocal love. In the Three Persons, the divine nature exists precisely as given. Who can be poorer than God? He alone knows how to give himself completely. And precisely by this ‘Gift-Love’, he is fulfilled. This law is seen to be verified in the incarnation of the Son. God has filled with his glory the one who emptied himself, and with the Father, the Son becomes a source for us of the gift of the Spirit. In order to receive the gift of God we must follow the example of Christ in his poverty: to turn all our desire towards the Father, to be complete receptivity, welcoming readiness. In order that this may be possible, we must purify our desire of anything that has an undue hold over it, from the many things we covet and from superficial gratifications; we must be poor in spirit with a heart that is poor, free, young and unencumbered. The gift of God, grace, is a unique and indivisible reality, a participation in divine life, which can only be differentiated by the three powers of the soul. Faith is the transferring of all criteria of truth, from the ‘I’ who understands to the eternal ‘Thou’. Hope is the renouncing of the benefits and causes of all human consolation so as to remain solely in expectation of God himself. Charity is the gift of all our being to the beloved God. … At last, we come to understand that we are nothing, but that God loves us in spite of everything; that he became man in order to enter into communion with us, that grace works in us and through us; grace is everything. We have no right to claim as our own the good which we do. … Each morning we must receive everything anew in faith. God creates us truly at every moment. The past, we entrust to his mercy; we must empty our memory of its supposed riches so as to change it into a pure movement toward God himself beyond his gifts. This movement is lived uniquely in the reality of the present moment, in our conforming to the will of the Lord for us, here and now, in our communion of love and our close attention to him. Here poverty and simplicity become one. For the future, we entrust ourselves to God. We do not, as it were, have an account in some celestial bank; all we have is our faith in the love of the Lord, our hope and our desire to love. We must not be anxious before the demands of true spiritual poverty. We are never so well off as when we have nothing. We are free and available for anything. Our ego, weak as it is, would like to cover its nakedness with furs made of material things, and intellectual and spiritual goods. The obscure light of faith is a light indeed, and whoever becomes accustomed to it will not abandon it for all the sweetness and consolations of days gone by. May God preserve us from our virtues! Our faith allows us to discard this deceitful covering in order to walk in truth along the path which is no path, which leads to the Father in Love, that is, in the Spirit of Christ. The man who is poor finds the gates of death open, and he passes freely into the Kingdom of God. For if we despoil ourselves, it is in order to rediscover the innocent nakedness of God’s image in our hearts and thus to clothe ourselves in Christ (Galatians 4:27). Our poverty is the poverty of the children of God, who ‘having nothing, yet possess all’ (2 Corinthians 6:10) in hope and in faith. We have received ‘a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry, “Abba! Father!”’ (Romans 8:15-17). (p. 177-178, 184) I feel that I have explored adequately the mystery and the pain of loneliness, and I would like to turn now to the beauty of redemptive solitude, or better, of the redemption born in solitude. And I am not speaking here in a way that is limited to contemplative religious or to persons who make their life journey in solitude—those called to the “desert”—though they may live with a particular intensity the call of all of us to embrace solitude that it may be transformed into communion. For we are all solitary in this life even as we journey together with others, and we journey together with others even when we are solitary. This is the rich and fruitful tension of what it means to be a person “in via,” on the way to God and to heaven, and thus to bear the capacity for communion (solitude) even while not yet experiencing such communion to the full. We are each one of us called to pass through loneliness into intimacy, to let the echoing solitude our hearts be permeated with communion and thus become a resounding symphony of love.
But how does this happen? For as we have all likely experienced, one’s initial experience of solitude, of deep and prolonged aloneness whether literal or internal, is not necessarily positive, and often far from pleasant. It comes to us not only if we make a retreat or spend a long time in prayer, but whenever the other “things” of our life, however spiritual, however necessary they may seem, fail us, or are called into question, or are plunged into darkness. For when we enter into this kind of solitude—the true depths of our hearts in honesty and vulnerability—rather than finding a blissful garden paradise, we find countless weeds and brambles, and rubbish scattered around, and a lot of useless and hurtful things, some of them even quite attractive and desirable on the surface, which we have accumulated. And yet as we experience when we turn inward to our own solitude, when we try to live on a deep level of solitude rather that the surface of impressions and frenetic activity, these many possession are not actually things that we have freely, but things that “have” us, binding us to countless thoughts and obsessions and preoccupations. There is no need to dwell on this here, as the journey of purification in solitude has been spoken of elsewhere in these reflections, and is written of in many other places as well, and by persons far more clear and succinct than myself. The essential question that the experience of solitude poses to us is this: Who am I seeking? Am I actually seeking myself, or am I seeking the face of God? For if I am seeking myself, that is all that I shall find, in the pain of frustrated loneliness; but if I am seeking God—with the ardent thirst of which we spoke in the last reflection—then I shall find not only him, but also myself in him, and all things besides. In this regard, we see the wisdom of Saint Benedict which led him to place as the one criterion for a prospective monk that he truly seeks God alone. We may think, “Sure, in Benedict’s day perhaps joining a monastery brought a number of benefits and securities, so it is feasible that people entered for various reasons. But in our own day, who would enter a monastery for any reason but God?” Yet this is a superficial way of looking at the question. I may think that I am seeking God, but am I really? Is he really first in my heart, the true King who reigns in me? Or am I drawn by my desire to be special, to achieve a state of satisfactory righteousness, even to “become a saint,” to find spiritual peace and serenity, to be free to pray unobstructed, to realize my dreams of finally having time and space to achieve that thing I have always wanted, whatever it might be? The list goes on. And this does not just apply to those entering the monastery, but to all of us, whatever state of life in which we find ourselves. For we bear this same ambivalence within all of us, which must find a resolution in total commitment. Thus within us is asked the same question, the very core question that “separates soul from spirit, joints from marrow,” and which the Word of God, “sharper than a two-edged sword,” seeks to split asunder, that we may be free. Am I going to seek myself, to seek a security, righteousness, and fulfillment according to my own size and proportions (even to seek God for my own sake), or am I going to seek God for his sake, because he is worthy of all love, even as I feel and embrace my own desperate need to know him and belong to him in order to find my fragile existence caught up into his everlasting security and fulfillment, my solitude taken up into the communion that alone is life. Here, in fact, we come back to the theme that came to the fore in the previous reflection. We stand at the heart of that deepest of all aspirations: the desire to behold the face of God. “Your face, Lord, do I seek!” And the paradox here is that only in beholding God’s face—even in the obscurity of faith in this mortal life—can we come to know ourselves as we truly are, to experience our identity as he has made us, and to be made capable of living from this in freedom and in peace. And here indeed we also come to the most subtle and insidious form of possessiveness, of the “displacement of identity,” in our current ecclesial culture (and perhaps in any culture), since it parades as theological acumen and evangelical radicalism. For every act of possessiveness can be defined precisely in this way, at least when it reaches a certain level: as the displacement of identity, in which we seek to define ourselves through something that is extrinsic to ourselves, rather than by our core and naked truth (more on this at the end of this reflection). What is this form of possessiveness, this false theologism, to which I am referring? It has often been called in common parlance “mission theology.” I am deeply acquainted with this theology’s origins and its expressions, having plunged profoundly into it in the past and drunk deeply from its sources. And while there is certainly truth here, as there is in everything, a partial and necessary truth (and we will draw out this truth below), there is a profound problem: in being made central it not only becomes bloated beyond proportion but it gradually begins to destroy everything else, to gnaw away at the central realities that have now become peripheral. But what is mission theology? The basic claim of mission theology is that “one’s personal identity and one’s mission in life coincide.” The term given to this reality is “theological personhood,” claiming that every person is a “God-given mission” to be realized in this life through strict obedience to God’s call, and that if this call is rejected or for any other reason failed, then the person one was meant to be is now eternally fractured, since it was unable to find realization and expression. Now let me clarify: by “mission” here is meant, not the Lord’s mandate to go make disciples of all nations, to spread his word and his goodness by loving as we have been loved, to make Jesus known to everyone, but rather one’s vocation in life, one’s unique “mission” or “sending” from God. This theology in fact interprets “mission” in this sense into the very heart of God, into the eternal Trinity before the creation of the world, in which Jesus is defined as “mission” from the Father, the One who is sent in perfect obedience for the sake of mission. If you reflect deeply upon this, I trust that you will discover the destructive lie that is hidden underneath this apparent truth. Maybe stating the actual truth can also help illumine things: the Son’s identity for all eternity is to be the beloved of the Father, gratuitously cherished by him and held always, with delighted predilection, in his paternal heart. Thus the core of identity and of reality itself is not mission, but intimacy, the pure expression of love for its own sake that leads to the mutual indwelling of persons in the gladness of their reciprocal belonging. Mission certainly has its place, but only within this pure love and intimacy and at its service. So too can we speak of the truly evangelical understanding of mission in the Biblical sense—the mandate to evangelize the world—in that it focuses on the Lord, on the wonder of God’s love that in Jesus we experience, and on the irresistible urge to share this good news with all, indeed to place our lives at the service of it for the welfare of each one of our brothers and sisters. Thus it springs forth from the primary reality—encountering the loving gaze of God and being drawn into intimacy with him by his sheer goodness and grace—and it serves this, seeking to spread it abroad so that others too may participate in it. But we hear talk nowadays—indeed it is almost impossible to escape it—about finding our “identity” by at last coming to live according to our vocation, whether marriage or consecrated life or priesthood, or even more specifically, by coming to find our “own unique way” that no other person has, our God-given calling and mission in life. And this is the subtle and insidious form of possessiveness of which I spoke above, the imperceptible inversion of values, which displaces our identity from where it truly resides into something secondary and peripheral (even if necessary in its own place). For it is true that we all do have a calling to a state of life in the Church and the world, in other words, that we are all written into the fabric of society and find ourselves caught up into this great family of man, this great Body of the Church. And we have unique gifts given to us by God, unique charisms entrusted to us to be used to build up the Body of Christ. And, yes, we each have our own unrepeatable narrative, our own life-story that God writes for us in his great love, as he draws us gradually back to himself and also harnesses us in union with his own loving desire to spread light and salvation to others. But let me emphasize: none of this is our identity. At most we grow toward experiencing God and ourselves more deeply in the midst of these things, and we also come to express the love of our hearts, and our belonging to God, in and through all the details of life and service and community. Thus, let us not say that we are called to become our vocation, but rather that, in God’s loving providence, our vocation “becomes” us (in the old sense of the term). Our vocational path, and all the unique contours of our journey—guided by the tender hand of our Father—truly “fit” us, and are expressions of his paternal care and closeness as he leads us deeper into his heart. And they also fit us in the sense of giving expression to those gifts that he has given us, to those capacities and desires that he has placed upon us or fashioned within us. But at the same time, the truth of our being is always infinitely more than this, and also immeasurably less. What do I mean? Here we come back to the beginning. Here we come back to the central question: Who am I seeking? For only in God can this question be answered, not in any of these other things. I am who I am only in God, in the intimacy of his Trinitarian embrace. By this “more” and “less,” therefore, I mean that our identity is both deeper, fuller, and richer, far beyond what even the most singular and profound of life experiences can capture, and also that it is poorer, more naked and stripped of all things. In fact, even if I completely “ruin” my vocation in life by sin and infidelity, if I complete reject God’s original intentions for my life, and am left with nothing but wreckage and rubble, loss and disorder, my identity remains the same, and in fact can be experienced profoundly at the very heart of such poverty, and brought to fulfillment in a single moment by God’s mercy. This is what we learn from the profound parable of the “laborers of the eleventh hour.” God is not looking for our service, but for our surrender, so that he can sweep us up into intimacy with himself, even at the very end of our life, even on our deathbed. We see this same theme on almost every page of the Gospels, in which the poorest, weakest, and most pitiful souls encounter Christ, encounter his gaze of love, and continue their life with a new sense of themselves through a new sense of God. Yes, let us never forget the order given in the text concerning the rich young man whom Jesus called to follow him: “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and he said to him, ‘If you would be perfect…’” (Mt 19:21). The call of this man to follow Jesus is born only from and within the experience of his loving gaze. It is thus a call wholly about Jesus, about being close to Jesus, about walking in the footsteps of Jesus back to the Father, to heaven, where solitude is transformed into communion. It is not fundamentally a call to a particular vocation or mission in life, even though it also becomes expressed within these freely. Indeed, when we put the first things first, the second things follow spontaneously, as C.S. Lewis so pithily put it. Or as Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, said: This classification of human activity as only of penultimate importance gives it at the same time an inner liberation: man’s activity can now be carried on in the tranquility, detachment and freedom appropriate to the penultimate. The primacy of acceptance is not intended to condemn man to passivity… On the contrary, it alone makes it possible to do the things of this world in a spirit of responsibility, yet at the same time in an uncramped, cheerful, free way, and to put them at the service of redemptive love.1 What then is my identity if it is not all of these other things? It is who God sees when he looks upon me with love. It is my inner truth where I stand alone and naked before him. I am, in fact, God’s love for me, by which I am continually created from the womb of his tenderness through the Holy Spirit in the likeness of his beloved Son. And in this Son I am loved like no other, truly the apple of his eye, truly precious and irreplaceable, simply because I am who I am, I am who he sees. There are three complementary definitions of identity, each one more profound and comprehensive than the last. And how much we need these today, not only with “head knowledge,” but with a deep and experiential knowledge of the heart that not only fills us but overflows to permeate our programs of education and formation, our ways of preaching and doing ministry, our manner of evangelizing, and our manner of relating both to God and to one another! It really is not possible to embrace and live the rest of life with true poverty and detachment, with authentic freedom, lightness, and joy, until one has not only come to experience this truth, but to live from it habitually. To conclude, allow me to quote another section from my personal rule of life, to illustrate this: In all acts of possessiveness, however subtly, the question of a person’s identity comes into play, in that we often seek to define ourselves through what we have or do rather than through who we are. One’s vocation or state in life is perhaps the greatest “possession” that one can have, the most hidden and insidious form of self-definition. I should therefore always remember and abide in the place of blessed poverty, in which I stand naked before God in my utter destitution and nakedness, knowing myself to be nothing but what his loving gaze sees in me: his precious and beloved child, called to intimacy with himself in his Son. My vocation, in this place, is seen not as a form of self-definition or identity, but as a simple act of obedience whereby I walk the path marked out for me by God, the path by which he wills for me to realize, in the concrete expressions of my life, the gift of myself back to him and to my brothers and sisters. It is therefore poverty that conditions obedience and sustains it, as only the poor heart is capable of hearing and responding to the word of God with purity, readiness, and freedom, even as obedience is the wellspring of evangelical poverty and chastity, my concrete sharing in the filial obedience of Christ before his Father. Last of all, may I never forget the words and example of Jesus who has impressed so strongly upon my heart the desire to “take the lowest place,” to recognize myself as I am: the littlest and the least in the kingdom—a simple child of God, uniquely and infinitely beloved, a brother to each and all. Only in this way can I live myself, and witness to, the universal call to holiness, to that life of love and intimacy, of fraternity and charity, that is meant for all of us. Only in this way can I live and witness to the central reality of love and communion with the Triune God that alone gives meaning to all else in the life and structure of the Church, beyond all the various vocations or particular charisms, like blood flowing from the heart to give life to all the limbs. It is for this reason that God has invited me here, that I may respond to the divine Lover’s longing to unite himself to each one of us in the bosom of his many-personed yet singular Bride, the Church. Let my cry ever be, therefore: “My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not aspire to great things or matters too lofty for me. Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child upon his mother’s breast” (Ps 131:1-2). For the mysteries of the kingdom are hidden from the eyes of those who are “wise and learned” (Mt 11:25), those who are satisfied in their own righteousness, those who look down upon others, and those who have many possessions; they are revealed rather to the childlike, to the little ones, who have nothing but God. Even their fidelity is his gift. These are those who know their weakness and frailty, their littleness and need, and who remain confidently open to the love and mercy of God, not in reliance on themselves or their own merits, but in bold trust in the infinite, gracious love of the Trinity that has redeemed us and sanctifies us, drawing us onward to the consummation of the marriage of the Lamb that awaits in the new creation. By his immeasurable goodness, may he grant that I be one of those guests who, found with a wedding garment, takes his seat at the table; indeed, may he grant that I bring countless others with me, those whom his love within me, at work in the very heart of my poverty, has reached out to rescue and to save. To him be praise and glory forever and ever. Amen. *** NOTE *** 1 . Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), 268. Loneliness is one of the deepest and most intense forms of suffering, and also one of the most fruitful if born of love and borne in truth. But it is also one that can do much harm to our well-being and wholeness if it is not transformed into a journey unto communion, into a gift of love. Why is this? Certainly there are more intense forms of suffering, and also ones that are more harmful to us—or the signs of a great harm that already exists—for example the pain that a person feels in sin and the separation from God that is its terrible consequence. Is not this the greatest of all pains? Indeed, it is. Why then this focus on loneliness? It is not in fact my intention to try to classify loneliness as one kind of suffering alongside others, but rather to point out something essential about reality. For upon deeper reflection, we realize that in all forms of suffering, loneliness is an element, and that the experience of suffering “throws us back upon ourselves” in a profound way such that we experience more tangibly our existential aloneness. Why is this? Simply put, it is because loneliness is in a singular way the voice of the longing of the human heart. It is the profound experience of our solitude as persons oriented toward relationship. And in this lies its intensity and its promise.
We see in many forms of suffering the predominance of the experience of aloneness, or the rupture of relationship: such as grief at the loss of a loved one, or the pain of being misunderstood or rejected, or the sorrow of not having found the truth of belonging. In regard to these sufferings, it should be evident that the element of loneliness is a significant part of them, if not in fact the primary one; it is often the real “stuff” underneath the surface, even if other things also accompany it in the recipe of pain. But what else? Upon reflection, I see three other forms of suffering in this world that are comparable to loneliness in intensity and depth, and yet are distinct from it in their very essence, though not divorced from it. In other words, their pain comes not fundamentally from the feeling of existential aloneness, but from something else: 1) The first is the experience of profound fear, not just a moment of fright or a superficial fear, but a deep-seated fear that sinks its roots into the heart and the memory, the imagination and the mind, and will not let go. The most intense manifestation of such fear is the terror of hurting the heart of God through sin (fruit of a pure love) and, inseparable from this, of being separated from him for all eternity (which is the ultimate loneliness). And the more a heart loves God and yearns for him, the more painful such a suffering can be. Yet God does not wish us to be shackled to such a fear. His way is rather that of confidence and trust. Only the grace of God at work in our poverty and weakness, birthing little by little such an absolute confidence in his love and mercy, can free us from such a terrible form of suffering, and transform it into peaceful surrender that is the perfection of the fear of God in love, as is said in the first letter of John: So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because he first loved us. (1 Jn 4:16-19) 2) The second form of suffering is the anguish of witnessing profound moral evil, of seeing the evil in the world, in human hearts, and the destruction that it causes. For example this is the pain experienced on truly witnessing with the heart the horrors of the concentration camps and exterminations of the Holocaust, or the Gulag, the horrors and atrocities of war, or any of the other profound sacrileges against human life and dignity in the anguished history of humanity. So too is this present in the awareness of human trafficking and sexual slavery, of the death of innocents and the destruction of children, of the culture of death in which so many are disposable, and indeed of the destruction also of faith and the spiritual and cultural values that make life truly happy and free. Whenever one witnesses men and women sliding into a life less than they were created for, sliding indeed into death, or having their innate dignity violated—even with their consent—this deep pain of the heart comes into play. This is a pain fueled not by the experience of one’s own aloneness or longing for communion—or fear at its loss—but by the heart’s deep awareness of good and evil, and its love for the human person created in God’s image, and indeed for all that God has made and which he cherishes as good. Therefore, the more a heart has matured into the likeness of the Heart of God, the more sensitive it has become, the more shall it experience this pain and bear it within itself, unsealing the “baptism of tears,” which is the profound intercession of a heart joined to the Heart of Jesus Christ in his redeeming Passion. 3) There is a third form of suffering as well, which often exists alongside these. Indeed, it is in a certain sense the confluence of these two forms of suffering within one’s own heart: namely the suffering of experiencing one’s own incapacity to do the good, to attain spiritual and moral freedom. Saint Paul expressed the drama of this suffering very well when he said: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:14-15). This is the pain of the great moral struggle of human life, which in fact teaches us humility and deepens in our hearts our sensitivity to the other two forms of suffering mentioned above, making us compassionate, tender, and attuned to all that hurts the heart of God or harms the dignity of his children. And let us also not forget where these words of Saint Paul lead: Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom 7:24-8:4) Indeed, the entirety of Romans chapter 8 can be seen as Paul’s great hymn to the victory of God’s grace over the sorrows of sin and the fragility of life. It is his glorious proclamation of God’s love as the shattering of fear, as the redeeming power of mercy at the heart of the world’s brokenness, and as the liberation of hearts to belong to God, from whom nothing in the universe can separate them. Let us quote much of it here, while these reflections are fresh in our minds: For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified. What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:14-39) But let us turn back to the topic of this reflection, leaving these other profound realities to rest in the silence, to grow in us as seeds according to God’s will. What is loneliness? And in what does the transformation of loneliness consist? As I indicated above, loneliness is the voice of my heart in its longing for love and communion. This is so central and so profound because it goes down to the very core of who I am, and of the purpose of my existence. For I have not been created to accomplish certain tasks in this world or to fulfill a role for society or the Church or to exercise artistic or cultural craftsmanship, or even to co-create with God, to come to knowledge of the truth in the abstract or impersonal sense, to attain the heights of virtue. If I had all of these things and had not love...I would have nothing. I would remain empty. For my heart has been created directly by a God who is eternal Love and Communion—the everlasting intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in their mutual indwelling and their perfect shared knowledge and love—and in order to share in his very own life. Thus my heart is ordained, of its very nature, toward God, and I am restless to enter into union with him, into a deep and lasting friendship with him—indeed a spiritual marriage. And so too, my heart has been created to reflect and extend this same mystery of the Trinity’s life and love into human relationships, into the communion that blossoms between human hearts and lives, weaving persons together and making them truly holy—God-like—in the deep reciprocal seeing, in the profound acceptance and mutual understanding, and in the co-inherence (living in each other’s hearts) that love brings about between persons. Without experiencing this, we are left aching and lonely, even if our many occupations may prevent us from experiencing the depths of this loneliness and its pain. God designed us this way, and no matter how many of the other kinds of goods we might experience, if we do not have friendship, if we do not have truly intimate companions of our heart among our brothers and sisters in this world, we are lacking something essential. Aristotle himself said as much: “For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”1 So loneliness is the tangible experience of our heart’s longing for communion both divine and human. Thus loneliness is the cry of our heart for the restoration of what we have lost, and therefore also the promise of what we were meant for. It is the voice of our thirst. Such loneliness and longing is expressed countless times in the Bible, such as in Psalms 42 and 63: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? (42:1-2); “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory” (63:1-2). And notice that in both Psalms the content of this longing is to behold the face of God. This is the content of our heart’s longing, and the substance of our heaven-homesickness, our nostalgia for the One who created us, for the paradise that in the beginning our race had lost: to no longer know God at a distance, through hearsay, through intermediaries, or only for a passing moment, or in the insecurity of a life buffeted by temptation and threatened with loss. No, we desire to know him as he is, face to face, and to be united with his glory undimmed, to embrace the mystery that embraces us and to be permeated by it through and through, from the highest apex of our spirit to the lowliest particles of our flesh, and everything in between. This is the longing for heaven, without which no human life worthy of the name is possible, for it is the very image of God in us, the reflection of his countenance crying out for fulfillment in his likeness. There, we shall know even as we are known, and love even as we are loved, and there all that is his shall be ours and all that is ours shall be his, in unending mutual possession, in complete reciprocal belonging, in perfect security without end. Thus the heart that has awakened to this holy nostalgia, that has discovered the face of God in its inmost depths, a gaze of tenderness and love both cherishing and inviting, cannot but cry out for fullness: “You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me” (Ps 27:8-9a). Indeed, it can look forward in confident hope to the definitive awakening of eternal life, when it shall at last open its eyes unto fullness of glory. And thus even in this life, it is able to say in faith: “As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding your form” (Ps 17:15). This is the beauty of sanctified loneliness, a loneliness that has discovered its true Object and thus is ordered aright. In other words, it is loneliness that has been transformed into solitude. But this does not mean that it is not painful, at moments of particular intensity even heartrendingly so. And as we may well know from experience, a deep experience of loneliness and longing is not only a spiritual matter, but something deeply bodily, in that it can cause not only the heart to ache but the whole body to tremble or ache with pain, to feel, as the Psalmist says, “dried up with thirst.” It is also a fact of existence that as long as we live in the shadows of this life, in this “vale of tears,” we cannot experience the fullness of intimacy that our hearts desire; and thus a certain loneliness, a certain “solitude” shall remain with us throughout this life, which is tinged by pain and longing even as it is pervaded by the gentle light of a deeper Presence. This is the great drama of our existence, the profound current running like a central narrative through the life of each one of us: the dance between light and darkness, between moments of contact and moments of longing, between tastes of intimacy and the restlessness for still deeper intimacy, between glimpses of the Lord’s face and the yearning to behold him with face unveiled. And this is true even on a human level as well, in the joy of encountering another person on a deep enough and vulnerable enough level to truly glimpse something of the way that God sees them, and to enter into a communion of heart with them, even as there is the recognition that there is so much more yet to be revealed, in an ever-deepening discovery of the other and allowing oneself to be discovered. There is even in the joy the pained recognition that the intimacy for which the heart was created simply cannot be fulfilled in this life, since it presses on to a consummation that awaits in eternity. For only in eternity can the communication, the meeting of hearts and lives which makes up love both human and divine, give way to the fullness that surpasses all mediation, all imperfect ways of relating and trying to receive and to give, and enter into a full and total mutual indwelling, where what is most intimate to the beloved is able to live within me, and I am able to experience with them all that is most intimately theirs, even as the same is true in them for me. This is why loneliness is often experienced the most keenly precisely after graced moments of particularly profound human or divine encounter, a taste of the joy that awaits us drawing our hearts in hope, like the echo of a deeper music—a music proper only to eternity and infinity—which nonetheless sends its vibrations into the heart of time. And however great, and however painful, our longing for communion with God and for communion with other human persons, there is a beautiful truth which we must emphasize: we are not alone even in our loneliness. God is always with us, pervading the whole cosmos with his tenderness and his care, with his gaze which is a light ever at work holding, transforming, and renewing all things. And yet no one has ever seen God, and it is impossible to see him—and thereby to enter into intimacy with him—as we desire unless he himself opens the way for us to do so. And thus he was not content to remain with us in our lonely journey through the desert of this life only in spiritual form. He wanted to truly become visible to us, to walk beside us in the flesh, having made all that is ours his own so that, little by little, all that is his can also become ours. We are not alone! Jesus, the Son of the Father, has come among us and made our loneliness and longing his own, has taken it up into himself and—along with every other form of suffering—has endured it through to the very utmost, crying out in our name to God, “I thirst!” and crying out in God’s name to us, “I thirst!” And thus the light of his loving presence—and as we have seen, the presence of the Father and the Spirit within him—has illumined all human suffering, all human loss, all human loneliness. Now the pain of our solitude has been pervaded, by grace, with con-solation—with the presence of Another with us in our aloneness. Christ is present within it; the Trinity lives within it, within every moment of our pain, working to transform all into the radiant light and abiding joy of communion, born of the very crucible of pain’s longing and suffering’s loss. *** NOTE *** 1 . Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII. Translated by W.D. Ross. Quoted from: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html Whenever I receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion, something amazing happens. In God’s characteristic manner, who cannot be contained by the greatest but chooses to fill the least, he comes to inhabit my very body with the fullness of his presence, becoming “one flesh” with me such that my body becomes his own and his Body becomes mine. Saint Augustine speaks of the act of receiving the Eucharist in this way: when we consume ordinary food, it is assimilated into us and becomes a part of ourselves, but when we consume the food that is Christ, we are assimilated into him and become part of him, become partakers of his own being and life. If our consumption of natural food gives us life because it is transformed into nutrients that sustain and enrich our bodily existence, the consumption of the Eucharist gives us life because is makes us partakers in the eternal life of God, transforming us into that which we receive: “Just as I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6:57). And this is no mere symbolism, no spiritualized imagining, but real flesh-and-blood truth: “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. If you do not eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:55-56). It is no wonder that his hearers were scandalized, and, as John the Evangelist recounts: “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” (Jn 6:66). But let us not be scandalized, but say rather with Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn 6:68-69).
Yes, the Body and Blood of Jesus given for us on the Cross and perpetually uniting himself to us in Holy Communion are not “mere flesh,” dead matter, but the living and glorified humanity of Jesus Christ! For “it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn 6:63). Receiving our God in this great Sacrament, we receive the “whole Christ,” divinity and humanity in their entirety, and we are taken up into him, even as he permeates our entire humanity, from all the particles of our material bodiliness to the innermost wellsprings of our heart and the highest apex of our spirit. And in this way—marvel of marvels!—we are tasting already the nature of matter as it shall exist in the new creation, when the cosmos itself shall be renewed by being taken into the life of God. Our material being is receiving the pledge of eternity, the medicine of immortality, the bread of angels, the seal of future resurrection. And what is the trait of this new, redeemed, glorified matter? Words fail and knowledge falters, and yet we can confidently affirm the essential: matter itself is made capable of communion with the divine, permeated as it is by the energies of divine love present within the glorified Body of Jesus Christ. Matter itself thus becomes a Christ-bearer, a Spirit bearer, a bearer of the heavenly Father, for it no longer remains mere “stuff,” severed from the spiritual life by the rift caused by original sin, but it is rather wholly spiritualized by the presence of the Trinity within it. Thus even the material cosmos, and our own bodies, come to reflect and to share, in their own proper ways, in the essential nature of all being as loving relationship, as participation in the love that eternally unites the Father and the Son in their one Spirit. This is the beauty of the sacramental vision that we come to understand, to experience, and to live at the heart of the Church, who is the sacrament of our communion with God, who is the living locus of our transformation in the Trinity, who is the new creation already present in seed in the midst of this fallen world, who is indeed the “whole Christ,” head and members, on journey to definitive consummation in the Father’s house. And thus we should not be surprised or incredulous that, having given us even his own glorified Body, Jesus also grants us to share in all that is most intimate to himself in his feelings, affections, desires, and experiences. As a true lover, or rather as the perfect Lover beyond all other lovers, he is not content with sharing only a part of himself, but wants to give everything that he is and has to the beloved of his heart, even as he shares in everything that is hers. Thus this growing union with Jesus Christ that occurs in our lives through the operation of grace from Baptism to consummation, ever nourished by prayer, life, contemplation, and sacrament, is a living union that grows from incipient and hidden beginnings to the full and conscious participation of our whole being and experience in all that is proper to Jesus in his union with the Father and in his love for the world. As is said in the Wound of Love: This is the deep reality of my prayer: it is not my lifelong effort to be recollected, and to apply myself to meditation, but meeting the tenderly loving gaze of God resting upon me. This is the permanent, unchanging substance of my prayer; this is the spring of water welling up into eternal life, to which I am continually returning to drink. Beyond all I can see, hear and feel, is the light of the divine Face shining down on me. So, far from enclosing me in a narrow, limited interior world, prayer draws me completely out of my own self. Under the gaze of God, I am placed in his world, and welcomed into the midst of the communion of the Father and of the Son in the Spirit. But under this gaze, I am also incorporated into a wholeness in which I am not alone: in the light of the Spirit I discover that I am the stone of an edifice. When I pray, inevitably I will feel that I have to relate to every other stone in the edifice, and I will know myself to be in intimate solidarity with the whole which lives in me and in which I live. However, the full reality of our prayer is more than this. For the only objective of the Spirit who prays within us is to bring to life in us the reality of all that Jesus has given us. Jesus, the Son, is in fact, and forever, the very substance of our turning to God; he immolated himself for us and with us, in order to bring us into the bosom of the Father. This is what cements our unity, and is the palpable reality of our prayer: the bread that we break together and the cup that we share, his body and his blood. This indeed is what constitutes the plenitude of our prayer. It is something which englobes us completely, body and soul: the fine point of the spirit as well as the visible weight of the flesh, the deepest silence of the soul, and the tender movings of the heart. We are taken over completely, to be assumed into the unity of a renewed humanity, which constitutes the new creation, unified and transformed in the Lamb who is seated on the throne of God for eternity. (p. 226-227) This is the gift that the Trinity bestows upon us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit—this is the gift that is Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is, as Saint Paul says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). This is the freedom that fulfills the law while surpassing it, for it establishes us in the “new nature, created after the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24); it establishes us in Christ. All of Paul’s (and John’s) words on the transition from the law to grace, from the flesh to the spirit, from the old to the new, from the “dispensation of condemnation” to the “dispensation of righteousness” (2 Cor 3:9), from death to life, are to be understood in this way: as our insertion into the life of Jesus, the Son of God, in his eternal union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. And this truly changes everything. Whenever we come to understand it, accept it, and live it, whenever the light of faith stirs in us the surrender and acceptance, the trusting living that gives birth in us—little by little—to deep and intimate understanding, everything changes. God is not a distant God to whom we cling in blind faith, but the very air we breathe, the very substance that permeates our bodies, the very light in which we see all things, the very feeling and thought and desire and affection that fill every moment of our life. Thus it does not matter whether we “feel” him or not, for his presence is both too pure and too all-pervading to be tied down by us into particular interior acts of experience. It takes up all of our experience and little by little, imperceptibly, transforms it, until it becomes an extension of Christ, a bearer of Christ in all that he is, continuing to live his life in us until the end of time, when we shall be admitted into his life, there to live with him forever the everlasting joy of his perfect communion with the Father in the single kiss of their shared Spirit. Thus we can see and understand the growth of contemplative prayer. Without an exceptional grace, we cannot ordinarily experience the feelings and thoughts of another human person, cannot experience the man or woman whom they are deep within, in their own subjectivity and experience, in their vital inner essence and life. We only see these as manifested through their words and actions, their gestures and expressions; and through empathy we approximate their inner experience and make it our own as best we can. So it is with the beginnings of natural prayer, meditative prayer, in which, as Teresa of Avila says, we laboriously draw up water from a deep well of thought and imagination in order to taste something of the substance of the spirit. But God has destined us for so much more than this. For we have received the Spirit of God, not just as a “help” or an assistance in our natural activities, but rather to make us new from within, until all that is God’s is ours. The work of grace is directed, therefore, toward joining us with the subjectivity of Jesus Christ, so that all that he is and has becomes ours, so that his own prayer becomes our prayer, and his own intimacy with the Father our vital life and experience. This is why, at least in substance, prayer matures from a more laborious exercise on the natural level, with many thoughts and acts of the will, with an experience more “in our domain,” to a deep inner union with God in the silence beyond words, in the simplicity in which the acts and movements of our hearts and minds are made so simple they are almost imperceptible, joined to the simplicity and unity of God’s own life. For the image of Christ is impressed upon our heart, and, through the Spirit, the veil is removed from our own spirit that we may behold the luminous beauty of God directly, in purified faith, hope, and love, and thus be transformed into his image from glory unto glory (cf. 2 Cor 3:12-18). Saint Paul expresses this with breathtaking clarity and beauty: For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor 2:11-16) We have the mind of Christ! This does not just mean that we think like Christ or feel like Christ, but that, through his Spirit, Christ truly comes to live within us and to think, feel, love, and act in us, to allow us to experience in him and with him all that he experiences, even as he experiences with us all that is our own. This is our participation in the perichoretic circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! I wrote that sentence to be a little facetious. But it is also entirely true! In plain language: this is our participation in the eternal dance of mutual self-giving of the Trinity, in the shared knowledge and love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by which they live entirely within one another a single life. We are caught up into the heart of this life and live it as our own truest and most intimate life, and yet only as God’s gift, as pure grace! Let us not fear or doubt this awesome gift, even in the shadows and darknesses of this life, recognizing that God’s light is so pure it will often go unnoticed by us even in its most powerful and intimate activity in ourselves and in our world. Let us rather simply surrender as children to the currents of grace flowing within us, to the Spirit who breathes where he wills, and whose sole aim is to draw us into the innermost life of God, into the communion ever lived by the Father and the Son, where he is their shared kiss and the breath of love that ever passes between them. Caught up right into the heart of this love and this intimacy, the same kiss is impressed upon us, the same breath of the Spirit passes through us, filling us with life and vibrating our being through and through with ecstatic joy, everlasting fulfillment, and boundless delight. We come to the final two “p’s” of a Eucharistic life.
12. Passion. The term passion, in its etymology and in its theological significance, refers to two things simultaneously: First, it refers to the heartfelt tenderness of God’s love toward us, the immense affection that he bears toward each one of his children, and the way that he is moved by all that concerns us, by our sins and infidelities as well as by our slightest thoughts, prayers, or actions of love. This is the passion that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux spoke about with such conciseness and depth when he said: Passibilis non est Deus, sed compassibilis. “God cannot suffer, but he can suffer-with.” As was said above in our reflection on patience, the word patior (with a frequent form of passus), from which we derive our English patience and passion and passive, indicates the receptive nature of an experience undergone. The Latin definition thus means “to endure, to suffer, to permit.” However, we should not understand this in a negative a way, as if it implies an unhealthy attitude of defeatism or a focus on pain. In fact, the word suffer in ancient usage did not refer only to the undergoing of pain, but also to more positive experiences, the common trait being that they were not something actively done but something accepted, welcomed, and allowed to happen. Hence the King James translation of Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Here we can begin to discern that passivity is not—as our contemporary, power-driven, and agency-focused world assumes—a negative quality, a sign of weakness or lack. Rather, the ability to receive and welcome and allow things to happen is a virtue, a virtus, a strength, an excellence, a perfection of being. Such receptivity is indeed the wellspring of all authentic presence, tenderness, care, and love, for without reception there can be no true gift, without welcoming there can be no generosity, without listening there can be no true speaking. Thus, Bernard’s words that God cannot suffer but can suffer-with mean this: God cannot suffer in the sense of enduring lack or imperfection, for he is lacking in nothing and does not experience any fault in his being or in the eternity of his endless bliss; however, out of the abundance of his tender kindness and steadfast love, he is not insensitive to us, but rather opens his heart to be moved by us, to “suffer the children to come to him,” to be receptive to us even to the very innermost heart of his being. God truly cares for us so deeply, and is so sensitive to us, that he experiences a kind of “lack” when we do not respond to his loving invitation, when we do not allow ourselves to be loved by him and love him in response. As Jesus said to Teresa of Calcutta: “They do not know me, so they do not want me.” This does not mean that God is a needy God, clingy or dependent or demanding; it rather simply means that God yearns to fill us with his own happiness, with the joy of his own eternal life so deeply and so totally, that he is harnessed profoundly in the yearning that we might receive and respond to this gift. Those who have tasted the joy of God’s love, have come to know something of the everlasting serenity of pure bliss and ecstatic delight that is the eternal life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, understand this with ease. God is not sensitive to us, and filled with longing for our welfare, because he is lacking something, but because we are, because we have not yet been drawn fully into his life as he desires, have not yet come to live in the security of love and the abundance of joy for which he created us. For not only does God love us, but, in a way far beyond our understanding, he is in love with us. His heart is touched and ravished by our beauty and goodness, which he himself has bestowed, and his heart is stirred within him when he gazes upon us. As he says in the book of Hosea, when the sins of his people would stir him to anger, but he is instead moved with pity and overflows with mercy: “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hos 11:8). Thus all the language either of the Bible or of the saints and theologians in the entire history of the Church is to be understood, not as attributing the imperfection of certain human emotions or needs to God, but as pointing our gaze, through these created analogies, to the infinitely higher expressions of God’s own way of living and experiencing—so far beyond our understanding—which is not less vivid, rich, tender, and sensitive than our human emotions and our heartfelt affectivity, our deepest loves and our profoundest joys, but rather so much more so. This leads us directly to the second meaning of the term passion. This second one refers to the Passion of Jesus Christ, to the suffering and death that he embraced out of love for us and for his Father, in order to pass through the darkest darkness of our agony and death and to open up for us the avenue into unending light and life. But the Passion of Jesus, rightly understood, also includes not only his suffering and death, but also the free gift of his love at the Last Supper, his descent to free the prisoners from the underworld on Holy Saturday, and his glorious Resurrection and Ascension to the Father. All of this is truly included in the term “Passion” when we speak of the great Pasch of Christ. And by extension, as the history of theology and spirituality indicates, this term “passion” applies also to our own experiences of suffering—or rather more widely of “being acted upon,” of “undergoing,” of “receiving” with Christ who has joined us to himself and lives his life within us. Thus even prayer, as it matures, becomes less “active” and more “passive” in the sense of being more docile, more interior, more substantial—in the depths of the heart surrendered to God and moved by him freely—permeated by the grace and activity of the Spirit who joins us to the dispositions and experiences of Jesus Christ, and who himself “prays within us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). Saint Paul spoke of this participation in the “suffering” of Christ with brilliant clarity when he said: “And I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is yet to be filled up in the sufferings of Christ on behalf of his Body the Church” (Col 1:24). It is not that Christ did not suffer enough to redeem us, to save all of humanity, but rather that—from the all-sufficiency of Jesus’ Sacrifice—we are invited to drink, and that our drinking makes us not just receivers but participants, in whom the mystery of God lives and is at work until the end of time. We are to receive from this wellspring of his Passion, and to allow it to become so present and alive within us that it spreads abroad its fragrance and its efficacy in our hearts and lives, and thus reaches to our brothers and sisters and fills the whole house of the Church. As Paul said elsewhere, “We are the fragrance of Christ,” and as John the Evangelist indicates so subtly and symbolically of the jar of nard “wasted” by Mary of Bethany on the feet of Jesus: “And the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment” (2 Cor 2:15 and Jn 12:3). By this he indicates that the Passion of Christ, his outpouring of love to the very end, is not a once-and-done matter, but a mystery that—transcending time in its eternal significance, being the Passion of the Son of God—is also made present in each and every moment of time, until the whole of time and space, the whole cosmos, is filled with it. This is the great meaning of the “last times” in which we find ourselves, cradled between the Redemption wrought through the Paschal Mystery accomplished in Jerusalem around 33 A.D. and the definitive Consummation that shall come when the Lord returns at the end of time and inaugurates the new creation, welcoming the whole cosmos into the innermost heart of the life of the Trinity and permeating it fully with his joy and his love. And the Eucharist remains in our midst as the throbbing heartbeat of God’s “passion” for us; and our proximity to Jesus in this great mystery transforms us, filling us with his own affection, his own experience, his own ardent love, with all that is proper to the heart of God in its tender feeling for us. And this leads us to a breathtaking realization, an awesome mystery: Whenever we enter into intimacy with the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist, with the Heart of Jesus in his own Passion, we are experiencing not only the feelings of his own humanity toward us, or even the feeling of the Son, but the feeling and love of the entire Trinity. For in the Passion of the Son the Passion of the Father is manifested and expressed, and the Spirit is always present in them and with them. For the Son has nothing but what he has received from the Father, and whoever sees the Son sees the Father. Thus in the suffering of Jesus on the Cross, in his ardent thirst for our love and our redemption, we encounter the eternal “suffering” of our heavenly Father, who is anxious for our eternal salvation. The Spirit sensitizes our hearts to this great mystery; it is he who opens the eyes of our hearts to see the love of the Father in the Son, and to pass through the Son, and with him, back into the heart of the Father’s embrace. In the great mystery of the Holy Triduum, therefore—in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’ Eucharist, Passion, and Resurrection, perpetuated always in the Church—we receive and are plunged into God’s loving passion for us. Thus we come to know and experience the true heart that he has for us, a heart of sheer and overflowing love, a heart of such tender predilection and desire that he is satisfied with nothing less than drawing us and welcoming us into the innermost heart of his own life of happiness and joy, into the ecstatic intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 13. Permeation. All of this brings us quite spontaneously to the final “p” of a Eucharistic life—of a life made a eucharist in the Eucharist of Jesus Christ, the enfleshed Son of the Father who has chosen to perpetuate his presence among us until the end of time under the humble appearance of bread and wine. Indeed, at this point the term “permeation” as it applies to our topic should at least to some degree be self-evident. From the most personal level to the most universal, from the intimate encounter between Jesus and I to the transfiguration of the entire cosmos, this term expresses God’s great plan and his heart’s desire. As Jesus himself expressed it with incomparable simplicity and depth: Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” (Mt 13:31-33) This is what God seeks: to be allowed to enter into us and to inhabit us so totally that everything is, by his presence, transformed. This is how he transforms the world, too, both in the rich and multifaceted lives of communities and cultures, of families and societies, and also in the very fabric of the cosmic order itself. For ever since the rupture caused by original sin, even the non-personal creation has experienced a fracture from its original purpose, an obscuring of its original transparency, as we see for example in the destruction that weather can cause, or in the violence between animals, or in the very existence of death. The world is still good, still beautiful and holy, and yet it is also crying out with the children of God for the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23). What is the redemption of the body? It is the making-new of all material things, of the entire created world, by their complete permeation by the energies of God’s own uncreated life, which sweeps them up into the ceaseless circulation of the shared love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what every human heart is thirsting for, and what we desperately need to make us whole and happy; and this is what the visible world itself is aching, in its own way, to receive. It seeks to be lifted up in the hearts and lives of humanity—standing at the apex of creation and exercising a holy priesthood entrusting to us by God—and carried back into unity with God. And it is Jesus, the incarnate Son of the Father, who entered into our world and became man, so that he could exercise this priesthood on our behalf, could consolidate us into it by grafting us into himself. And thus his great Sacrifice, the whole and indivisible reality of his Paschal Mystery, is both the permeation of the entire cosmos with the healing and redeeming light and love of the Trinity, and the lifting up of a fractured creation back to its original purpose, and indeed its super-elevation beyond its original state into a consummation that surpasses it, but which has been God’s loving intention from the very beginning. As Psalm 97:11 expresses it: “Light is sown for the righteous.” Yes, the uncreated light of God, which has shone upon the face of Moses after he had conversed with God in the tent of meeting, which has shone forth in the flesh and the garments of the transfigured Jesus, and which has burst forth with radiant clarity and fullness in the “glorification” of Christ in his Passover through death into the glory of the Resurrection—this uncreated light of the Trinity is sown into every single particle of creation. It has implanted itself in every thing that is, like the seed in the soil, like the leaven in the dough, and it spreads abroad throughout time and space through the hidden work of grace, “until the whole batch is leavened.” Let us joyfully and trustingly yield ourselves up to this grace, which is nothing but the loving presence and activity of God through the Spirit, who seeks to fill us to overflowing with his goodness—until we are “filled with the utter fullness of God” (Eph 3:19)—and to lift us up into the depths of his welcoming embrace, so that there, “made partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), we may live with God the very life that God himself eternally lives: the utter bliss of the perfect intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 9. Presence. Do we not often speak of Jesus’ closeness to us in the Eucharist as the “real presence?” And by this we mean not only that his gaze is directed kindly upon us, or that through the symbols of bread and wine he somehow expresses his proximity to us; we mean that he is literally present to us in the fullness of his humanity, this same humanity that was knit together in the womb of Mary, that labored in the workshop of Joseph, that walked the dusty roads of Palestine, that was scourged and nailed to a tree and died, was buried in a tomb, and rose victorious in glory on the third day, and ascended into the very heart of the Trinity, there to live for all eternity.
From the heart of this eternity he gives himself to us still, and indeed more freely and fully even than he could during the confines of his earthly life. For now his very humanity, his very body, having conquered sin and death and all their effects, has become fully “permeable” to the energies of the Trinity’s love. This is the Presence that we encounter when we make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, that we receive when we consume the Sacred Gifts: we welcome the very eternal life of God into ourselves in the Risen Body of Jesus. But what does this term, “presence,” indicate? It indicates that the Jesus whom we encounter is not merely “there,” an inanimate or impersonal object, but is fully alive and fully attentive, both to his Father and to us. He is there for us, in undivided attention and heartfelt care, with a gaze of cherishing love and singular predilection directed upon each one of us. Yes, and this means that Eucharistic exposition is not only a matter of “exposing” Jesus to be beheld by us (after all, he is still hidden under the appearance of bread!), to be looked upon by our faith-filled gaze, but also a matter of allowing us to experience more directly the loving gaze of Jesus ever pouring out upon us from the Blessed Sacrament. “And Jesus looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘One thing only do you lack’” (Mk 10:21). So it is for each one of us. Upon encountering this gaze, this Presence, we are invited to become mutual presence to the One who is ever present to us, to look in love upon the One who looks in love upon us. Yes, the Eucharistic Presence, as silent and hidden as it is, teaches us all things. It teaches us the art of presence, not only to God, but also—from this wellspring—to each one of our brothers and sisters and to the whole of creation. The silent, enduring, tender, and abiding gaze of Jesus gradually transforms our own way of seeing, of being-present, of receiving and responding and loving. We lay aside our impatience and our judgmentalism and our superficiality, our cursory vision and our prideful “having it all figured out,” and we become deep listeners and deep receivers, having learned to receive by being received by Christ and by receiving him in turn. And this is so very important. For at the root of every act of authentic and mature love is the ability to welcome another into the inner spaces of my heart as they truly are, with authentic vulnerability and tenderness, and to let my own love encompass and mold around them as a womb of profound attunement. This is the art of presence that the Real Presence teaches us. Allow me to share a few short quotes from Teresa of Calcutta “strung together” to encourage us to deeper prayer and deeper presence, into a truly “sacramental vision” of all things as revealing to us the beauty and the presence of God who is always giving himself to us, and eliciting our reciprocal response: If you want to prayer better, you must pray more… We need to find God and He cannot be found in noise nor in restlessness. See how [in] nature, trees, flowers, grass, grow in perfect silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… The first means to use is silence. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. We cannot put ourselves directly in the presence of God if we do not practice internal and external silence… Silence of the heart, not only of the mouth—that too is necessary—but more that silence of the mind, silence of the eyes, silence of the touch. Then you can hear him everywhere: in the closing of the door, in the person who needs you, in the birds that sing, in the flowers, the animals—that silence which is wonder and praise. Why? Because God is everywhere and you can see and hear Him. That crow is praising God. I can hear its sound well… We can see Him and hear Him in that crow, and pray… In silence we will find new energy and true unity. The energy of God will be ours to do all things well. The unity of our thoughts with His thoughts, the unity of our prayers with His prayers; the unity of our actions with His actions; of our life with His life. i 10. Peace. Seraphim of Sarov said: “Find peace, and thousands around you will find it as well.” This is the great wonder of our evangelical transformation. This is the peace that Christ offers to us continually at the heart of prayer, at the heart of life, and pouring out ceaselessly from the wellspring of his Eucharistic Heart: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” (Jn 14:27). As we are drawn into unity with God through the work of the Spirit in our souls, through our gradual conformation to Jesus Christ, we come to abide in a state of ceaseless peace. What is peace? It is much more than a subjective experience, a feeling of tranquility or restfulness, or a lack of internal or external conflict. However, it does establish a spirit of abiding repose within us, which endures even in the midst of activity, and a serenity even in the midst of conflict; it brings together into order our internal faculties of thinking, feeling, and knowing, and also aligns our responses and our actions with the sovereign beauty and love of the will of God. In its essence, therefore, it comes about through the integration of our whole life and our whole being in God and with God. Thus, peace is the fruit of union with God, which has gathered all the fragmented pieces of our personality and desires and unified them in one, single, all-encompassing desire: the desire for God and his glory, which includes the desire for the salvation of all his children (which is really inseparable from it and an expression of it). As we saw earlier in our reflection on “interior freedom,” peace cannot reign in a heart that is torn into a thousand pieces through conflicting desires and fractured emotions, worries about past and future, unresolved regrets, excessive plans or bloated hopes, or any of the other ways that the person whom God created me to be—pure relationship with him in filial love in the one Son—is instead turned outward into the “outer darkness,” into the land of exile and dispersion. What is required therefore is an “interior exodus.” The great interior exodus is a journey to peace, the passage through the Red Sea and the traversal of the mystical desert, to the mountain of covenant and espousal and ultimately into the land of promise. This exodus is interior because it occurs not fundamentally outside of ourselves or in the external events of our life (however important they are), but in the inner sanctuary of our being where we stand naked and alone before God, and in this place also, paradoxically, find ourselves most deeply united to all. And this is an exodus because it is not—unlike in many Asiatic or New Age religions and philosophies—a mere “return to oneself” or “descent into apathy/nirvana” or a pursuit of interior unity for its own sake. It is rather the harnessing of my whole being and my every moment, all I am and all I have, in the pursuit of God and in responsiveness to his love. This movement most certainly does bring about unity within myself—and thus has been described as “going into oneself and lifting oneself above oneself”—but this happens not because I make peace or interior integration my central aim, but because I place everything at the service of love. I am unified in this journey beyond myself to the Beloved because such is the essential nature of being: the unity of “identity” and full personal realization comes about not when it is explicitly sought, but whenever I enter into relationship with the Author of my existence, whenever I enter back into filial relationship with my heavenly Father in his Son and his Spirit. And this is why peace has such a magnetizing effect, because it is precisely the “drawing together” of my being into unity with God, in Christ who returned to the Father in his Pasch, his own exodus of love, drawing to himself all the scattered children of God and making peace through the blood of his Cross. And thus peace within draws countless others near and far toward the same peace. And it radiates forth the gentle light of heaven through the limpid purity and transparency of a purified and transfigured heart, which has been transformed from glory unto glory into the very image of God that it reflects. 11. Prophecy. By the term prophecy I am referring here not to the particular charismatic gift of the Spirit that is given to some and not to others, but to the prophetic calling of all the people of God, who share in the threefold office of Christ as priest, prophet, and king—though the former, more limited form of prophecy is born of the same grace and is held by prophecy in the wider sense. What is meant by prophecy? Emerging directly from the previous “p” of peace, prophecy is a manifestation of the magnetism and the radiation of love for the benefit of all. It becomes a living witness to the word of truth and life, the word of love, that God desires to reveal to the world and to make real in the hearts of all. Thus it includes not only spoken or written words but also actions of love and service, and not only words and actions but also the silent witness given by a life lived in God. Words, actions, and witness—in this threefold manner the gift of prophecy given to believers manifests itself, and it does so uniquely as God desires for each one of us. As Charles de Foucauld said: Our entire existence, our whole being must shout the Gospel from the rooftops. Our entire person must breathe Jesus, all our actions. Our whole life must cry out that we belong to Jesus, reflect a Gospel way of living. Our whole being must be a living proclamation, a reflection of Jesus. ii And how is this prophecy an expression of a Eucharistic life? How is it born from the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament? As a spring wells up hiddenly and silently from deep under the earth before bursting forth to nourish those upon her surface, so too is it with the gift of prophecy. No prophecy is possible without prayer, and no prayer is possible without silence. And the source and summit of the Church’s life of prayer—as of her witness, her action, and her word—is the living presence of Jesus Christ within her, given wholly in his very Body and Blood as her Bridegroom, magnetizing her to the Father and radiating forth the love of the Trinity throughout all that she is. And in our own lives, too, the silent bread speaks. For, as the beloved disciple exclaimed when he saw the Risen One standing on the beach: “It is the Lord!” The more we attune to this silent witness of Jesus at the heart of his Church, and let ourselves be buried with him in the mystery of the tabernacle, the more too shall our lives become prophetic witnesses of him for the sake of all, spreading his love and truth abroad to the furthest corners of the world. *** NOTES *** i. Quoted in Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire, 188, 191, 196, 200. ii. Quoted from: https://catholicstand.com/st-charles-de-foucauld-universal-brother/ The Thirteen "P's" of a Eucharistic Life (Part 3): Patience, Perseverance, Praise, Parrhesia10/30/2025
5 and 6. Patience and Perseverance. Let us treat of these two “p’s” together, as they are deeply related, albeit distinct. Patience refers to the disposition of trustful abiding in expectant readiness and receptivity. It comes from the Latin patior, from which we get also our word passion (another of the “p’s”). Patience is born at the heart of a Eucharistic life because we learn directly from Christ, from Christ in the Eucharist, the value of abiding in silence and fidelity “for the long term.” We learn that the great works of God neither sparkle before the eyes nor are accomplished over night, but take years to unfold and spread abroad their richness and their fragrance. So it is in the humble act of Eucharistic adoration, and indeed in the gradual permeation of our humanity through the repeated reception of Holy Communion, and so it is in life itself. Patience is thus the virtue by which we are able to avoid the temptation either of giving up and rushing on to the “next thing” or of filling our present with something more tangible and immediate. It thus remedies the tendency both to dispersion and to distraction, and helps the heart to become centered in the present moment, in all of its unique beauty and meaning, even when this meaning is concealed from the eyes and from the feelings, and accessible only in faith.
And thus patience is the wellspring of perseverance, which is, as it were, patience-in-action, patience carrying me through the trajectory of the long term, indeed carrying me through an entire lifetime made a gift in the likeness of the gift of Christ. And both patience and perseverance are born of love in its inseparable union with faith and hope. These three theological virtues are the true wellspring of patience and perseverance, of the abiding fidelity that allows the seed of the Word of God to take root in us, to grow, and to bear fruit, not as a flower that blossoms today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, but rather as a tree planted beside running streams, so that it bears fruit in due season and for ages enduring. In order to illustrate the nature of patience-perseverance, I would like to share a little quote from something that Abbé Huvelin wrote to Charles de Foucauld. He said: We obey in silence. We do good by what we are more than by what we do. We do good by being of God, by belonging to God. Yes, stability. Gather moss. Let the grace of God penetrate, grow, and solidify in the soul. Avoid agitation and endless new beginnings. It is true that we are always beginners, but at least always in the same way and the same direction. i It is helpful to recognize the context: in the first part of his life of faith (indeed for quite a long time) Charles seemed rather “rootless,” struggling to settle anywhere for very long—always striving for “something more,” “somewhere better”—drawn by his preoccupation with being as close to the poor and obscure Christ as possible in all external details. While some of this was certainly due to his unique life calling, not all was necessarily of God. It was, however, worked for good, and Charles eventually settled down and found peace in living in the present moment, in the limits of his circumstances with gladness and joy. But in the meantime Abbé Huvelin’s words are deeply illustrative and helpful. For even if there are “exceptional” calls that come into some people’s lives to set them out on an entirely new direction—and the renewed call to conversion that comes to each one of us every day, our radical surrender to the God who ever surpasses us—it is nonetheless true that God’s way of acting is not through continual changes and new experiences and alterations, but through stability and enduring fidelity in the way that he has shown. There is a reason that the monastic life is founded upon the vow of stability. Without stability, the tree will never grow and bear its fruit, particularly if this tree is one that is called to be nourished in pure contemplation and to benefit the world not through external ministry or activity but through ceaseless prayer and ardent intercession. In this respect, the outright “rejection” of every other possible option for life, and binding oneself to a single place and a single way, is a profound act of faith in God and surrender to him, one which he shall surely not fail to bring to abundant fruition. Let us not be afraid, therefore, to give him this faith and this surrender. In order to illustrate the living, creative nature of patience and perseverance, which spring from the heartbeat of fidelity—God’s fidelity to us and ours to him—I would like to share some further words for reflection: The call of God is not something isolated, an event that took place at a given moment and is placed totally in the past. Of course, we are conscious of the call as a privileged moment in time, but the call itself is a creative word of God which springs forth from eternity. That first moment when we are aware of the call is never exhausted in meaning: it continues to resonate throughout our life and only reveals its depths in the totality of our living and being. Our ‘Yes’ to the call has, therefore, a story—a story that we cannot foresee unfolding in advance. We must not see the call as a reality completely determined beforehand, programmed, like a disk inserted into a computer according to our first ‘Yes’. Then, without error, the machine does the rest. Rather, we are questioned each moment, entreated by the Spirit to advance further all the time on an unknown path. We must remain always in the attitude of one who is called, who follows the Master in the renewed beginnings of each day. … Our fidelity to the Spirit is expressed over the years in a dynamic fidelity: a ‘yes’ to God is always open and available. How, then, commit myself to a future that I do not know and cannot control? Is this not to hinder the action of the Spirit and freeze movement in our life? The answer to this question can only be found in God. It is he who has called us to give ourselves completely in a particular commitment. It is the Spirit who urges us on. It is to the Lord that we commit ourselves even if we cannot know in clear detail all that this commitment involves. For this we can only abandon ourselves to God in total confidence, knowing that what he has begun in us he will bring to completion. Man...is subject to time in the sense that he grows and develops within its confines: he does not arrive complete. Yet he is above time in that he can free himself from it and, by his thought, link the past to the future, and so commit himself to that which is yet to come. Man transcends the sheer movement of becoming and gives it a meaning. His fidelity is consistency with a meaning he has given his life in a moment of time. His truth is not necessarily the spontaneity of the present moment, taken in limitation and isolation, but that which follows from the choice and commitment in the depths of his being: a commitment that triumphs over the fragmentation of time and gives unity and coherence to his life. Such was the effect of the Fiat of Mary. It matured in her as the Word himself, during the long years of the simple, hidden life of Nazareth, through pondering the sometimes enigmatic events of the life of Jesus (the Presentation in the Temple, the three days when Jesus stayed with the doctors, Cana). It matured as perfect docility to the ever-growing light during the public ministry of her Son; by her faithful presence at the foot of the cross; by her place in the heart of the Church waiting for the Holy Spirit. It was only when the fruit was completely matured that the Lord took her to his side in glory. ii 7. Praise. The connection between the Eucharist and praise should be evident. The very word Eucharist means “thanksgiving,” fulfilling as it does the ancient “todah” sacrifices of the Old Covenant, sacrifices of gratuitous thanksgiving to God for his care and deliverance. Perhaps we do not think much about the connection between the Sacrifice of the Cross—which is re-presented on the altar at every Mass—and the act of thanksgiving. After all, isn’t the Passion of Christ about him suffering to redeem us, about him enduring the pain of our sinful isolation and rejection in order to bridge the distance between ourselves and God, to make it possible for us to be welcomed back into friendship with him and to be made partakers of his life? Yes, this is certainly the central mystery that occurs in the Paschal Mystery, and the very reason for which Christ undertook his “obedience unto death” in filial docility to and conformity with the will of the Father, and indeed offered himself for this very sacrifice from the bosom of eternity. But let us not forget that the One who offers himself upon the altar of the Cross is the eternal Son of the Father, the One who eternally drinks of the Father’s infinite outpouring: the Abyssus of the Father pouring into the Abyssum of the beloved Son in the flowing current of the Spirit’s invocat. And therefore in the very heart of his Paschal Mystery, the Son does nothing but live in the midst of time, in the very heart of suffering, the mystery that he lives for all eternity: he receives the abyss of the Father’s love and reciprocates with the total gift of himself. And since this mutual reception and gift—this abyss calling to abyss—occurs in the very depths of another abyss, the abyss of our sinful world’s estrangement from the Father, its brings about reconciliation, taking up the world itself into the center of the Trinitarian dialogue, into the relationship of love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is precisely how redemption comes about, and in no other way: by permeating our world even in its darkest places with the light of the eternal and unbreakable dialogue of love of the Father and the Son in their one Spirit. But what does this have to do with praise? Perhaps you have already put it together. If understood at a deep enough level, the most exalted and pure act of love is praise. It is the delighted cry of the loving heart at beholding the Beloved: “How good and beautiful you are! I am so glad that you exist!” Or to put it in the terms of the liturgy: “We give you thanks for your great glory.” What does it mean to give God thanks for his glory? It means to praise him for simply being who he is! This is the cry of love that emerged from the suffering heart of Jesus as he hung upon the Cross, and it pierced the very heavens; and this is the cry of the Father to his Son that echoed in the silence of the Paschal darkness, and became radiantly manifest in the glory of the Resurrection. As Jesus said immediately preceding his Passion: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (Jn 17:1). To illustrate this, I wish to share the climax of Psalm 22, the most explicitly “Paschal” of all the Psalms, the one which most clearly portrays both the internal and external contours of Jesus’ Passion. Beginning with the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it concludes not with despair or death or loss, but with deliverance and praise--in other words, with the certainty of Resurrection. I will tell of your name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! all you sons of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the LORD! May your hearts live for ever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. Yes, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and he who cannot keep himself alive. Posterity shall serve him; men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, that he has wrought it. (v.22-31) 8. Parrhesia. Flowing quite spontaneously from this disposition and act of praise is that of parrhesia, a Greek term that means “boldness” or “confidence” or “openness of access.” We have already explored this in a previous reflection, so only a few words are needed now. Parrhesia is the disposition of a child that knows that he or she is loved by an infinitely gentle, compassionate, kind, and generous Father, and sheltered always in the embrace of his tenderness. It springs forth, therefore, not from a confidence in or reliance upon oneself, but rather from the deep experience of one’s own poverty and fragility being loved by the Father. Gradually the experience of his incredible kindness and steadfast love, his abiding presence and his mysterious providence that works all things for good, cannot but bring to birth in the human heart the spirit of childlike confidence and, yes, of deep and intimate familiarity. This is the familiarity of a child who knows that many words and thoughts are not necessary in approaching such a Father, but only a simple relaxation in his arms, a simple leaning against his breast: the surrender born of love and trust. How can we not see that this leads us right back to the previous “p’s” we have explored, and particularly to the first? Parrhesia is our graced participation in the familiarity and intimacy that the beloved Son ever experiences in the heart of his Father, and thus it is the very mature expression of letting ourselves be taken up into him in order to share in his own intimacy with the Father at the heart of the Trinity. But how does the Eucharist, in particular, teach this to us—or draw us into its orbit? A single verse can express it: “The disciple whom Jesus loved was reposing against his breast” (Jn 13:23). In adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, in receiving him in sacramental Communion, we repose against the breast of Jesus, our Lord and Beloved; we share one body with him, one flesh, in the most intimate physical union possible, a physical union that is ordered wholly toward the consummation of the spiritual union of love. And this experience of closeness to Jesus, who in his profound humility and love has come to live among us, to “pitch his tent among us,” as John puts it (Jn 1:14), leads us with Jesus and in Jesus to reposing against the bosom of our Father and his. For “no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son of God, himself God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (Jn 1:18). As we repose on the breast of Christ, so Christ reposes on the breast of his Father, and thus he introduces us, through our intimacy with him, into the intimacy, familiarity, and confidence of his own relationship with his Father. This is our origin and our destiny, the only true home and rest of our restless hearts, the only intimacy that is truly deep enough and full enough to satisfy our infinite longing for love. So let us not be afraid to be drawn by Jesus into this confidence, this parrhesia. For as little Thérèse of Lisieux said so beautifully: It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love. iii *** NOTES *** i. Quoted from: https://www.goodcatholic.com/a-saint-for-sinners-charles-de-foucauld/ ii. The Wound of Love, 154-156. iii. Letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart (17 September 1896), in Letters II: 1890-1897 (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1988), 1000. The remaining “p’s” shall take less time to elucidate, as they all flow from and express the first. In fact, I shall try to share them with a healthy measure of succinctness, so that they may be received not as an outpouring of words but as an invitation to the depth, to penetrate through the text to the reality itself.
2. Play. Born of prayer is the foundational aspect of a “Eucharistic existence:” playful intimacy and playful obedience, in an inseparable relationship. In other words, born of the gratuitous love of the Father which, in Christ and with Christ, I receive and in which I live, I am totally overtaken by the desire to live in and for the Father alone at every moment. I am totally harnessed in the desire to be all his in everything, and to let his name be hallowed in me, to let his kingdom come in me, until all of me is pervaded by his presence and reveals him, indeed until the entire world is permeated by his paternity. This reality is first of all the obedience of being God’s beloved, of receiving the gift of my very being from the Father’s hands and abiding always in his cherishing; and only thus can it also be, with true freedom and expansiveness, with the liberty of the children of God, the obedience of living as God’s beloved, of letting my whole existence be filled with the flood of the Father. This is the mystery of belovedness-blossoming-in-benevolence, of being set free by grace to be transformed, in grace, unto the likeness of God. As Augustine said so pithily: “Give what you command, Lord, and command what you will.” Give sonship, and then I shall be able to live as your son. Give the Spirit to inscribe the law of love upon my heart, and then—and only then—shall I be able to live according to this law in the freedom that you desire, a freedom found only in you, my one true Beloved and my Life. This whole reality is a participation in Jesus’ own filial intimacy with his Father. It is the experience of being drawn into his own reception of the Father’s love and into his reciprocal gift, expressed both in the simple and childlike surrender of the heart beyond all things as well as in sharing in the Son’s boundless, joyful, and spontaneous obedience to his Father. “The Son can do nothing of his own accord but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise; for the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing” (Jn 5:19-20). Obedience understood in this perspective is the wellspring of the Christian life, the resounding echo of the heart that says without ceasing, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” the cry of a beloved heart, a filial heart, a heart that knows that it is loved and is also enkindled with ardent love and affection for God, wanting his life to be realized in the world, and among all of God’s children, without hindrance or obstruction. I have termed this life of filial intimacy and obedience play, for reasons that I will mostly leave you to discern in the silence of your heart. Suffice it to say that the great adventure of our life, the great and beautiful drama of our existence, is hidden here in the Father’s will for us, which we cherish above all things, for it is nothing but the expression of his love for us and for all: and thus it is not a burdensome duty but a space of play, in which childlike lightheartedness and sober responsibility both blossom so deeply that they are interwoven together in a single inseparable reality of love. As a quote to illustrate this disposition, allow me to share the Prayer of Abandonment by Charles de Foucauld as expanded by Magdeleine Hutin: Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you; I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your Will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself to surrender myself into you’re your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence For you are my Father. Amen. I have written more elsewhere of the playful nature of obedience—indeed of the playfulness that enfolds and permeates the whole of life. Let me share one example, from my ratio vivendi, my own personal rule of life: “Before exploring the three counsels [of obedience, chastity, and poverty] distinctly, it is important to express the inner spirit that unites them and which is also their most mature and beautiful fruit. This is also a reality that [is] at the heart of the mystery of our adoption and divinization, the living heartbeat of the inheritance of every one of us as children of God in the Son: namely, the lighthearted playfulness and wonder of a child who knows that he is infinitely loved, and called to share in the eternal playfulness of the Trinity itself. Playfulness in fact is the most fitting atmosphere in which the life of faith and holiness flowers, in which virtue can take root and grace can operate, even as this same playfulness finds its highest maturity only in a heart that has been surrendered totally to God and has found complete interior freedom, has found, in other words, that freedom that fulfills the law while surpassing it, reposing with Jesus the Son in the bosom of the Father. I feel called to live this central truth in my life both as God’s gift to me as his beloved and as a witness and a wellspring of grace for the sake of all. I wish to incarnate in my existence what the words of the book of Proverbs express concerning the eternal Word and Wisdom of God: “I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth, and my delight was in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). Such playfulness does not imply any inconstancy or irresponsibility in living the given contours of my daily life, nor a spirit of immaturity, but rather the spiritual freedom and joyful confidence that blossom from faith and love—implying a heart seeking God beyond all things and also sensitive to his “word” in all created realities—allowing the gratuitous living of intimacy in receiving and giving love to blossom in the unique sacramental meaning of each moment in which God approaches me in his Spirit. This is the atmosphere of sanctity, the foretaste of the “eternal play” of heaven and the new creation, and also the space in which all the depths both of longing for God and of profound solidarity with the sinful world, in compassionate intercession, can blossom without getting lost in the abyss—since they are all held by the unfaltering love of our Father, the same Father who held his beloved Son even through the agony of his Passion and transformed this into the most radical expression of both the eternal love and the everlasting playfulness of the Trinity.” 3. Poverty. What is evangelical poverty, truly? What is the poverty that is born in the human heart through prolonged proximity to the burning furnace of Love that is the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus? In order to answer this, all that is necessary is to look at Jesus himself, at the One who is the source and consummation of all the virtues. What then do we see? We see the he is the Poor One, the One who has nothing of his own, but lives in utter dependence upon his Father at every moment, and in a state of ceaseless sharing born of a heart full of love, a heart that is Love. Indeed, we see another dimension of poverty in Jesus as well: his humility and self-emptying, his ardent movement to occupy the lowest place and to identify with the most lost and miserable, the most marginalized and forgotten. As we saw in the previous reflection on Gospel radicalism, Jesus came into this world as one of the poor, and he lived in poverty—born in a stable and laid in a manger, homeless and displaced as a refugee, a humble workman in the lower class, an itinerant preacher who relied for his every bodily need on the generosity of others, even as he gave of himself without reserve for the welfare of all. And finally, he died in utter destitution and nakedness, bodily and spiritual, upon the Cross, rejected and misunderstood by all but a very few, and bearing in himself the pain of our sinful estrangement from the Father, even as his heart reposed in the Father’s care in the love that would prove stronger than death, bursting forth from the tomb in the glory of the Resurrection, in which poverty would not be eradicated but rather revealed in its true beauty as a participation in the very nature of love as lived eternally by the Trinity. As Jesus had said to the Father in his high priestly prayer: “All that is mine is yours and all that is yours is mine” (Jn 17:10). A poor life, therefore, is not optional for any disciple of Jesus. It is rather an essential aspect of Gospel morality, of our conformity to the love of Jesus, and indeed of the justice that we owe to our neighbor, whether he be the Lazarus on our doorstep or the Lazarus on the other side of the world. The apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te conveys this essentiality of poverty so very well, and it is to be hoped that it will bear fruit in truly helping many in the Church to embrace poverty with greater realism, generosity, and compassion. For as is said in that document: While it is true that the rich care for the poor, the opposite is no less true. This is a remarkable fact confirmed by the entire Christian tradition. Lives can actually be turned around by the realization that the poor have much to teach us about the Gospel and its demands. By their silent witness, they make us confront the precariousness of our existence. The elderly, for example, by their physical frailty, remind us of our own fragility, even as we attempt to conceal it behind our apparent prosperity and outward appearance. The poor, too, remind us how baseless is the attitude of aggressive arrogance with which we frequently confront life’s difficulties. They remind us how uncertain and empty our seemingly safe and secure lives may be. Here again, Saint Gregory the Great has much to tell us: “Let no one consider himself secure, saying, ‘I do not steal from others, but simply enjoy what is rightfully mine.’ The rich man was not punished because he took what belonged to others, but because, while possessing such great riches, he had become impoverished within. This was indeed the reason for his condemnation to hell: in his prosperity, he preserved no sense of justice; the wealth he had received made him proud and caused him to lose all sense of compassion.” (Homilia 40, 10) For us Christians, the problem of the poor leads to the very heart of our faith. Saint John Paul II taught that the preferential option for the poor, namely the Church’s love for the poor, “is essential for her and a part of her constant tradition, and impels her to give attention to a world in which poverty is threatening to assume massive proportions in spite of technological and economic progress.” (Centesimus Annus, 57) For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very “flesh” of Christ. It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this great mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. “A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is; and this is far from easy.” i Let me note only one small yet deeply significant part of this excerpt, which is so very important for a Eucharistic life: the poor are the very flesh of Christ. To touch the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist therefore spontaneously sensitizes us to his flesh in the poor (including in our own flesh), and vice versa. The two exist along a continuum, and they both draw us into a lifelong journey of poverty and identification, until we become so divested that we, too, may enter the kingdom of heaven as the “poor Lazarus” rather than suffer the effects of our isolated wealth and comfort like the nameless rich man of the parable. (See Lk 16:19-31.) 4. Purity. What, truly, is Christian purity—the purity of heart commended by Christ in the Beatitudes, which alone allows us to see God? Well, in its inner essence it is in fact identical with the disposition expressed in the above points. This is the way it is with the evangelical counsels, with this threefold form of love that is obedient, chaste, and poor: when one is perfect they are all perfect, for the mutually inhere in one another. But what can we say to illustrate the unique nuances of this aspect of love, of an existence transformed in the Eucharistic and Paschal Christ? Let us simply invert the Beatitude and suddenly everything becomes clear and simple: Blessed are those who see God always, for they are pure of heart. Authentic purity is the disposition that seeks the face of the Beloved in all circumstances, and him alone, and welcomes everything else that exists only in the context of this primal and all-consuming love of the heart. Only the eyes of such a heart can see. The reality of chastity or purity of heart is therefore not preoccupied with bodily chastity or sexual matters at all; that is in fact but a small part of a much bigger reality. To abide before the One who became flesh for us, became man for us, and who has chosen to remain with us in his bodiliness until the end of time—indeed to receive him into one’s own body and to carry him always within in love and affection—what does this do to a person? It gradually fashions within the person who welcomes Jesus the same dispositions that Jesus himself had (and has), his same loves and affections, his same desires, his same contemplative gaze directed upon the world and upon the Father. Thus union with the Eucharistic Christ seeks to make our bodies, our whole existence—from the innermost heart to the most tangible actions—the same as the Eucharistic presence: a living perpetuation of the Incarnation of Christ throughout time and space, a continuous unfolding of the dynamism of his Paschal Mystery, at the heart of which lies the espousal of God and humanity and the introduction of humanity into the heart of God. The reality of chastity is thus above all and in all mystical, the reality of our permeation and transformation in the grace of the Trinity, drawing us up into his life until our whole existence becomes love and intimacy in the God who is love and intimacy, becomes a ceaseless participation in the innermost communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In order to illustrate this, allow me to quote a little section from the chapter on “Contemplative Chastity” in The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany: Seeing what little light I have, I can trust in the light that comes from God and receive from his word the ultimate knowledge of myself. So I know, in faith, that I am made in the image of God, a subject endowed with freedom, called by God to a communion of love, son of the Father in the Son, by the gift of the Spirit. It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am. My chastity is humble attention before the mystery that dwells in me, that transcends me. And you, the true God? You alone can say my name. As for me, I must let your word break all the idols I have untiringly built in my own image—the tyrant who frightens, the senile grandfather, the primeval mother in whom I am dissolved, law without mercy, the just employer who rewards my merits, etc. Only the Son, given up unto death, reveals you as Father, as the One whose essence is to give life through pure love. But that love is so dazzling for my poor eyes that only the eyes of the spirit can contemplate it and recognize it. I abandon myself to them in order to see, without seeing, beyond every image and every word, the incomprehensible glory of your love in the silence of adoration and praise. So I am immersed in your solitude, there where you are in your truth yourself, eternally unique. But since all subsist in you, and you are all in all, your solitude is the place in which all created beings are in communion among themselves. In you, I find them all, and I love them in their truth; I beget them in your love. Those are the dimensions of our prayer revealed to us by faith. The humble humanity of our distracted and often superficial prayer, our fleeting feelings and our poor words, our wavering desire, our imperfect silence, should not make us deaf to the murmur of the Spirit who prays in us with an ineffable prayer that infallibly reaches God’s heart. Let us not quench it; let us allow Prayer to turn us into prayer. The Spirit breathes in us, and the stars shine and sing out their joy. ii *** NOTES *** i. Numbers 109-110. The last quotation is from Pope Francis, Vigil of Pentecost with the Ecclesial Movements (18 May 2013): L’Osservatore Romano 20-21 May 2013, 5. ii. A Carthusian Miscallany, 194-195. |
Joshua ElznerI am a humble disciple of Jesus Christ who is seeking to share in my Lord's love for his Father and his brotherhood with all in a very "little" life in the silence of solitude. On this blog I will share the little fruits of my contemplation in the hopes of being of service to you on your own journey of faith. I hope that something I have written draws your heart closer to the One who loves you! Archives
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