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We come now to chapter two of John’s Gospel, to the account of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. The first thing we notice is the reference to time: “on the third day.” This has multiple layers of significance. In the first place, in the context of the Gospel it brings to its climax a movement that started with the very first first of chapter one, “In the beginning,” and progressed through the successive numeration of days, “on the next day,” “on the next day,” etc., until finally we are given “on the third day.” What is the significance of this. If the days are counted out as they are given, then we arrive at the seventh day. Now this is not at all surprising, but still quite beautiful, when we consider the parallels that John has expressed in the entirety of his first chapter with the first chapters of the book of Genesis, which also starts with the words “in the beginning” and progresses through seven consecutive days, six of creation and one of rest, six of progression and one of consummation, six the fashioning of a beautiful temple and the seventh the celebration of a marriage in that temple, the marriage of man and woman, yes, but above all the marriage of God and humanity.
The first chapter of John’s Gospel, culminating at the wedding feast in Cana, is thus portraying the coming of Jesus Christ as the renewal of the first creation and the path to the definitive Sabbath: he is the One who comes to make the old world young again, to bring about in his redemptive love the re-creation of the entire cosmos and its admittance into the eternal marriage-feast of the Lamb. This is the ceaseless rejoicing and wonder-filled worship of the everlasting Sabbath rest, where the Bride, who is all humanity made Church, healed and lifted up by the grace of the Holy Spirit, shall rest against the bosom of her Bridegroom, and, in him, be admitted into the very intimacy of the Father. The second layer of meaning present in the reference to “the third day” is that of situating the events of the wedding at Cana as a “theophany,” in other words, as a manifestation of God. The third day in the history of the Old Covenant was a time of encounter, as we see for example in Exodus 19:16-19: On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God; and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. And again, in the prophet Hosea: Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD; his going forth is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. (Hos 6:1-3) Here we witness that the manifestation of God is also the healing of man: the two always go together. Here we catch a glimpse, a vivid prefiguration, of the awesome reality of the Paschal Mystery, of Christ’s descent into the darkness of death and loss and his victory over it through love, in other words his glorious Resurrection, in which the face of God is definitively revealed to us in the Risen Body of Jesus Christ, and yet we also see simultaneously the beauty of our own renewed humanity. The two are profoundly related—God’s unveiling and the fulfillment of man—and in a certain sense the whole mystery and drama of the life of faith, indeed of human life itself, lies in bringing these two together once again. As Saint Irenaeus so beautifully expressed it: “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.” Here is the full quote from him in context: The glory of God gives life; those who see God receive life. For this reason God, who cannot be grasped, comprehended or seen, allows himself to be seen, comprehended and grasped by men, that he may give life to those who see and receive him. It is impossible to live without life, and the actualization of life comes from participation in God, while participation in God is to see God and enjoy his goodness. Men will therefore see God if they are to live; through the vision of God they will become immortal and attain to God himself. As I have said, this was shown in symbols by the prophets: God will be seen by men who bear his Spirit and are always waiting for his coming. As Moses said in the Book of Deuteronomy: On that day we shall see, for God will speak to man, and man will live. God is the source of all activity throughout creation. He cannot be seen or described in his own nature and in all his greatness by any of his creatures. Yet he is certainly not unknown. Through his Word the whole creation learns that there is one God the Father, who holds all things together and gives them there being. As it is written in the Gospel: No man has ever seen God, except the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father; he has revealed him. From the beginning the Son is the one who teaches us about the Father; he is with the Father from the beginning. He was to reveal to the human race visions of prophecy, the diversity of spiritual gifts, his own ways of ministry, the glorification of the Father, all in due order and harmony, at the appointed time and for our instruction. Where there is order, there is also harmony; where there is harmony, there is also correct timing; where there is correct timing, there is also advantage. The Word became the steward of the Father’s grace for the advantage of men, for whose benefit he made such wonderful arrangements. He revealed God to men and presented men to God. He safeguarded the invisibility of the Father to prevent man from treating God with contempt and to set before him a constant goal toward which to make progress. On the other hand, he revealed God to men and made him visible in many ways to prevent man from being totally separated from God and so cease to be. Life in man is the glory of God; the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation gives life to all who live upon the earth, much more does the manifestation of the Father through the Word give life to those who see God. (Against Heresies, lib. 4, 20, 5-7; SC 100, 640-642, 644-648)* John Paul II also expressed this in the beginning of his encyclical on mercy, Dives in Misericordia, when he wrote: The more the Church’s mission is centered upon man—the more it is, so to speak, anthropocentric—the more it must be confirmed and actualized theocentrically, that is to say, be directed in Jesus Christ to the Father. While the various currents of human thought both in the past and at the present have tended and still tend to separate theocentrism and anthropocentrism, and even to set them in opposition to each other, the Church, following Christ, seeks to link them up in human history, in a deep and organic way. And this is also one of the basic principles, perhaps the most important one, of the teaching of the last Council [Vatican II]. Since, therefore, in the present phase of the Church’s history we put before ourselves as our primary task the implementation of the doctrine of the great Council, we must act upon this principle with faith, with an open mind and with all our heart. ... I have tried to show that the deepening and the many-faceted enrichment of the Church’s consciousness resulting from the Council must open our minds and our hearts more widely to Christ. Today I wish to say that openness to Christ, who as the Redeemer of the world fully reveals man himself, can only be achieved through an ever more mature reference to the Father and His love. (n. 1) God has created us for life, for life in abundance, and for this reason when we had gone astray in sin he sent his beloved Son to redeem us, to lift us up in our waywardness, to tend to our wounds, and to carry us back into the intimacy of God’s life once again. This is the awesome beauty of God’s love and goodness, which we shall never cease contemplating and discovering anew as if for the first time, for it is infinite in depth and boundless in breadth, inexhaustible in beauty and wonder. And receiving its generosity, feeling its touch and its sweetness, and plunging into its very heart, into the inmost embrace and kiss of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shall be the substance of heaven and of the new creation in the life that awaits us, as indeed it is the substance of life even here and now, anticipated through faith as a foretaste of our everlasting destiny. God is our life and our joy. When we forget this and betray this, we diminish ourselves. We wound our being in its very core. We become slaves to the elemental forces of the universe (Gal 4:3) and to our own disorder and woundedness. When our culture forgets about God and tries to live as if he did not exists, or as if he could be locked in a tight little comfortable box of “private faith” or “personal devotion,” then that culture dooms itself to self-destruction. When we project onto God images of him that he is not, whether that be distant taskmaster and lawgiver who imposes his will upon us simply because it is greater, because he can, or whether that be any number of wounded projections of our imperfect experiences of fatherhood, motherhood, love, and relationship in this world, we wound ourselves and diminish our humanity. For as we see God, so we see ourselves. Whether we realize it or not, our image of ourselves is always directly correlated to our image of God; and our relationship with ourselves—as well as with our neighbor—directly springs from and reflects our relation with God. Thus in the unveiling of the face of our true, loving Abba, in the giving of his very heart in the heart of his beloved Son become our Bridegroom, we discover simultaneously both the beauty of God and our own human beauty, grandeur, and nobility. For the life of man is the vision of God, the glory and praise of God, that is, living the very life of God by the grace of the Holy Spirit poured into us through Christ who redeemed us. As Saint Paul expressed it: “He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph 1:5-6). Here we witness the reciprocity of love: God delights in our happiness, and this does he seek with all his heart. For “the glory of God is man fully alive.” And yet how can we live, how can we find fullness of life and enduring happiness, except in God who is everlasting Goodness, pure Beauty, radiant Truth, and consummate Love? And such is the mercy of God, that by his own undeserved gift of grace he not only forgives our infidelity but enters into it and all its evil effects, suffering through them so that we may be healed and restored to the intimacy with God that we have lost. His mercy restores true justice, for it draws us back into the truth of love and into the beauty of right relationship, of true communion, with God, and in God with all that exists. ********* NOTE ********* *Here is an alternate translation of the next to last sentence: “For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.” (trans. Robert M. Grant). While I don’t think the original text of Irenaeus in Greek has survived, we do have Latin translations, which express it thus: Gloria Dei est vivens homo. In other words, “The glory of God is the living man,” or “man alive.” The conversation between Jesus and Nathaniel is quite mysterious, and yet beautiful, and though much could be said about it, I do not intend to explore everything in these reflections. After all, if we are going to make it through the entire text of the Gospel, we shall not be able to explore in depth every single verse. (But then again, we are not in a hurry, nor should we ever be in our dialogue with the Word of God!) What I seek, rather, is simply to place myself humbly at God’s service in order to communicate what has been entrusted to me, to allow God’s Word to become more radiant and tangible for you—the written Word of Scripture, but also the Word who is silently at work in every moment of life and who lives and communicates himself both in the depths of the heart as well as, in his full manifest truth, in the Church that is his Bride and his Body.
Let us just note a few points, therefore. First, let us acknowledge something concerning the call of Philip, for it reveals a beautiful truth. We have already seen how God beautifully communicates his love and his call to us through other persons, who become “bridges” for us to the presence of Jesus, whom we then gradually grow to “come” and “see” for ourselves. But it is also true that God can approach us directly, can break into our life and reveal himself to us first of all, whether that be in the sanctuary of our heart in prayer, in the intuition of God’s awareness innate in our humanity, or by some other means, and only secondarily, on the basis of this primal encounter, draw us into the mediation of others and the community of believers. But in fact even such a direct encounter with God takes place within the community of believers, even if our awareness of this is not explicit, and is mediated through the bridal Church who, more than a merely visible institution or structure, is also a living organism of grace and a mystical Body that stretches out even beyond—though never contrary to—her visible confines to take root in the hearts of all who are pursuing the truth and receptive of grace. Here we see again the beautiful interrelationship between “mediated” and “unmediated” grace, which marks the nature of all life in this world, ever flowing from one to the other and back again. God is, and wants to be, directly present to each one of us and to enter into an intimate, nuptial relationship with each person as if we were the only one whom he ever created; it is thus truly as if he became incarnate and suffered and died and rose again for me alone. And yet he also never saves me merely alone, but in and through the mystical Body that he has wedded to himself, within the one Bride in whom I can be confident that I, too, am bride. And as I am grafted into his life and become more and more one with him, I am also necessarily opened wide to my brothers and sisters, to all of humanity, to love them as I have been loved, and indeed to receive his love from them and through them, and thus to manifest the very communion of the eternal Trinity in the contours of my human relationships as well. Moving on, we also encounter something significant in Philip’s words to Nathaniel, a theme which shall recur again repeatedly throughout the Gospel: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law, and all the prophets, wrote” (1:45). This recognition, also explored deeply in the synoptic Gospels and in the letters of the New Testament, is a fundamental one: Jesus does not appear out of the blue, but has been expected, and his coming has long been prepared through the entire history of the chosen people. We have already seen some of the ways in which Moses is a prefigurement of Christ, and in which Jesus is the new, true Moses, the “prophet like Moses” who comes to bring the law to its ultimate fulfillment in the new Torah which is his very self, the living Word of God. Indeed, he comes to inaugurate the true Passover from death into life, redemption from slavery in the spiritual Egypt of sin and separation from God, and entrance into the promised land of grace, blossoming definitively in heaven and the new creation. So too in the prophets there are countless promises and foreshadowings of Jesus Christ, of the Anointed One, of the true and universal King, of the Suffering Servant who is the Priest of the New Covenant, of the One who is God’s true and beloved Son, and who, as Son, makes known to all of humanity the face of the Father and draws them thus into universal fellowship. We will explore many of these realities in due course as they arise in the Gospel; let it suffice to acknowledge now the fundamental point that Jesus does not appear in a historical vacuum; nor does he stand isolated and alone, even if he is the sole-begotten Son of the Father. Rather, he stands in the midst of human history, taking his origin from a man and a woman of the people of Israel, as an heir to the kingship of David, and as the fulfillment of the many prophecies of these people, prophecies which begin with their own special election by God but lead inexorably to the opening up of this calling to the whole human race, and to the promise of a worldwide kingdom and the gift of salvation and communion with God for all men. Jesus immerses himself into the fabric of human history and life, and he weaves himself intimately into all that is ours, making God fully present at the very heart of space and time. He thus becomes God’s direct presence among us, the full and unmediated revelation of the face and the heart of the Father, precisely by taking our flesh as his own and espousing himself to all that is ours. It is henceforth revealed that not in flights of mystical ecstasy or in some esoteric escape from the material world do we encounter the true face of God, but in the contours of his beloved Son, made man in the midst of history even while bursting history open to the eternity of the Trinity. As we explored in our earlier reflections, we come to behold God, to enter into union with him in contemplative beholding, precisely in and through beholding the face of Jesus Christ. As Saint Paul expresses it: “When a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:16-18). This is our true transformation, our true union with God, which does not neglect all the mystical aspirations of humanity nor the yearning for pure, spiritual reality purified of the blindness of the fallen flesh. Rather, it fulfills this in the deepest and richest way possible, not by casting aside the flesh nor the incarnate reality of this world, but precisely by affirming it, purifying it, and elevating it, so that the flesh, too, joined with the spirit, can behold the face of God and be made a partaker in his life, in the very intimacy of love and mutual belonging that is his as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We turn now to the conversation between Jesus and Nathaniel. First the latter replies to Philip’s enthusiasm with a cynical doubt, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” expressing his disbelief that the fulfillment of the hopes and prophecies of his people can come from a town so seemingly irrelevant in their regard. But when he accepts Philip’s calling and meets Jesus himself, “coming” and “seeing,” then everything changes. For Jesus reveals to him his seeing of love, a seeing under the “fig tree,” which is a symbol of abiding in messianic peace, as said by the prophet Micah: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken” (Mic 4:4; cf. also Zec 3:10, 1 Kgs 4:25). But even more than the prophetic fulfillment, this reveals the unique and personal gaze of Jesus himself, of the Son of God, who sees even at a distance, beyond normal human seeing, every moment of the life of his beloved, and cherishes it. And then, Jesus leads him still further. He prophecies a yet deeper and more complete revelation of love: “You shall see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (1:50-51). In these words Jesus hearkens back to the experience of the first Israelite, to Jacob whose name would become Israel. As Genesis recounts: And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I did not know it.” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen 28:12-17) Jesus most likely touches here upon Nathaniel’s own “wrestling with God”—the passage that immediately precedes Jacob’s beholding of the ladder reaching to heaven—which may well have been what he had been doing while sitting under the fig tree. Thus, he is a true son of Israel without duplicity or guile (even though Jacob, who was renamed Israel, was in fact quite duplicitous during his lifetime). Nathaniel lives in himself the true spirit of Israel, which is fidelity to God, wrestling with his word and coming to the point of communion with him through the abiding search of faith and of love. This is how he is a “true Israelite indeed.” And thus Jesus promises to him, though indeed his promise opens out to all who hear him (for the word “you” here is in the plural), that he shall, like Jacob, see the heavens opened and the Bridge revealed that connects heaven and earth, the Bridge who is none other than the High Priest of the New Covenant, Jesus Christ himself at the heart of his Paschal Mystery, wedding God and humanity in an eternal marriage within his own Crucified and Risen Body. We have witnessed that Jesus knows Nathaniel even from afar. Indeed, his eyes always regard him with a gaze of complacence and delight, of compassion and mercy, of intimate care and accompanying presence. So it is for each one of us. And this is, we could even say, the universal experience of all who encounter the love of Jesus throughout history. As new as this experience is, as much as it turns our world inside-out and sets us on a new and unimagined journey of love, it is also simply a fact that we realize quite spontaneously that the love we encounter in Jesus has always been there. Upon experiencing his gaze, his regard, we realize that this gaze has always been directed upon us from the first moment of our existence, indeed that it is the very source and foundation of our being, and that it gentle cradles and sustains every moment of our life.
This is what Jesus’ words mean when they are applied to us: “I saw you under the fig tree.” Wherever I may be in life, whatever I may be experiencing, whether pleasant or unpleasant, whether beautiful or painful or dragging my heart to the limits of anguish, whether I esteem it important or unimportant, little or big—Jesus sees it all, and he holds it in the tenderness of his gaze with profound interest and care. To Jesus everything matters. And it matters immeasurably. He weaves himself and his care into every single instant of my life, into everything that matters to me and even into those things that I do not yet esteem; he weaves himself into my waking and my sleeping, my joys and my sorrows, my work and my play, my solitude and my togetherness with others, my struggles and triumphs as well as my sins and my failures. Yes, he weaves himself lovingly into everything and makes it all, through love and compassion, through tenderness and delight, his own. And if this is the case, if everything I am and have and experience already belongs to God, then I am never alone. He is always present to me through his love, always at work in the hidden spaces of my heart and my life even if I am unaware of this, and even if only at certain times does this activity become more immediately evident to me. He is always present because he always loves, he always cares, and because he is drawn by the tender ardor of his longing for me and his desire to be close to me, indeed to be united to me in an intimate marriage of hearts and lives. And thus, in addition, I am always present to him, held by his care and his tender regard, a gaze that looks not to judge or condemn or impose expectations, but rather a gaze that looks to cherish, delight, affirm, and set free. And as I yield to this gaze, I am indeed gradually set free from all that binds me and keeps me from blossoming in the truth of my being in communion with the radiant fullness of his Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love. I begin to live more and more according to the life of God, rather than as I used to live, closed in upon myself, viewing my life as an isolated reality, unintelligible because not seen in the light of his gaze. So I am present to him who is always present to me, present through his love. And I become present to him when I acknowledge this love, open myself to it in trust and vulnerability, and when I reciprocate this love of his heart with the love of my own. Thus the presence becomes reciprocal, and intimacy is born. The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. And he found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel, and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Nathaniel said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathaniel coming to him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” Nathaniel said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathaniel answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You shall see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” (John 1:43-51)
What is it about the power of Jesus’ presence and his words that evoke such a response in Nathaniel? We have spoken about the very intensity of mystery, of beauty and joy, that radiates from Christ. But we can say even more at this point concerning the experience of Nathaniel. Let us note the progression of conversion that is occurring within him. Let us try to break down this process and to see it unfold. First, let us ask again: what is it, precisely, about Jesus’ presence and words that evokes such a radical response of faith in Nathaniel? If we follow the train of emphasis leading up to this moment, it seems to lie in the mystery of seeing. In his words, “I saw you,” Jesus is saying much more than just that he was able to see Nathaniel from an impossible distance—the external miracle or “sign.” He is in essence saying that, “Before you even drew near, I knew you.” He experiences, in the gaze of Jesus, the piercing seeing that is possible only to God himself—the gaze that pierces the heart and sees the whole person, sees the deepest mystery and identity of each one of us, and calls us by name. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” as God says to Jeremiah the prophet (Jer 1:5). In encountering Jesus, then, this is what Nathaniel experiences: he is known completely and totally by God, and not only is he known, but he is loved. Now, this is something tremendously important to understand. Why? Because it is the very origin and basis of authentic faith. Belief in the truth taught by the Catholic Church and in the divinity of Christ, to be a fully mature faith, cannot be a mere deduction from rational and intellectual reasoning. These things can help clear the way for belief, but faith is ultimately born from an encounter—from finding God not as “He,” but as “You.” Indeed, it is born in the heart, not primarily through finding God, but through realizing that one is found by God, that one is known and loved by him. Yes, as we have already said, this is the true origin and the burning heart of faith—and from it blossom all the other elements of Christian life, and from it they continually draw their strength. This, also, is the wellspring from which we continually need to draw, so that we do not die of thirst, so that we do not forget the love that gives meaning to our life. How important it is—every day—to lay aside our need to achieve, to control, to see, and simply to allow ourselves to be looked upon by the God who loves us! This is the heart of prayer. And it is precisely from here, and from here alone—from the simple and childlike attitude of allowing ourselves to be loved—that we can also learn to see, and to love as we have been loved. This is what Jesus’ next words indicate. After he has pierced the heart of Nathaniel with the light of his own vision and awakened faith within him, he then says, “You will see.” “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (Jn 1:51). What does this mean? On the natural and literal level, Jesus is drawing a comparison with the vision of the patriarch Jacob who, while he slept, had a dream of a ladder set upon the earth and reaching up to heaven, upon which the angels of God were ascending and descending. Upon awakening, he cried out, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I did not know it. … How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:16-17). These words are very similar to the words of Nathaniel. Jesus, gazing so deeply upon Nathaniel, is thus opening up the way to vision for him in turn. Because Nathaniel expresses the faith, the childlike trust, that Jesus seeks, the Lord is able to lead him deeper into vision. Did we not say that trust is the doorway to seeing? And the vision which he promises him is precisely the vision at the heart of the Gospel and of the Church’s life: the vision of Jesus as the Covenant between God and humanity, as the place of their dialogue and espousal between heaven and earth. The ladder that Jacob saw is now recognized to be a prophecy of the Cross and Resurrection. In Jesus himself communion between the Trinity and humanity is established and heaven and earth are reconciled. Again, just as with the title “Lamb of God,” we are already seeing the mystery of the coming Passion inscribed into the narrative of the Gospel. In all of his words, John the Evangelist is preparing us for this climactic event. This event, however, is not a mystery of darkness and failure, but a mystery of glorification, a mystery of vision—for here God will truly open himself, will rend the heavens, to lay bare his compassionate Heart before us. In the opened Heart of Christ we will see and feel the Heart of the eternal Father, burning with love for us. And, as we allow ourselves to be drawn to the One who is lifted up on the Cross, he in turn will draw us back to the God from whom we have fallen. Further, from him will unceasingly flow, never more to dry up, the wellspring of healing love and gentle mercy, a river of life in the midst of our thirsty world. In this first chapter of John’s Gospel, we have noticed the relationship between “seeing” and “abiding.” The experience of beholding another in love awakens in the heart a deep longing for union with the one who is seen, whose beauty touches the beholder. The two disciples, Andrew and John, see Jesus and follow him, drawn by his mystery and his beauty, and ask him where he is staying. His response, in turn, is turn and look upon them, to gaze upon them deeply, and then to invite them to a deeper seeing still: “Come and see.” We see the same thing in the encounter with Nathaniel, who feels himself to be intimately “known” by Jesus. He experiences the gaze of love that pierces the depths of his being and awakens in him a profound faith. In response to Christ’s gaze, Nathaniel proclaims the incarnate Son’s divinity, and leaves all to follow him. He enters into the magnetic movement of the Lord’s love, allowing himself to be drawn, just as the other disciples have allowed themselves to be drawn before him. Each one of them, touched by the loving gaze of Christ, have had their eyes open to gaze upon Christ in return. And in this mutual gaze, they are enabled to surrender all; the thirst, the desire, the confidence awakens in them that leads them to abandon themselves entirely into Christ’s loving hands, and to make him their very Life. From now on, he is Everything for them…their Beloved, their All, their Hope and Joy. In a word, from now on they make their home within the love of Christ, against his Sacred Heart. This is what it means, most basically, to be a disciple. It is to be one who leans against the breast of Jesus and listens intently to the beating of his Heart. But this resting and listening is also, as we have seen, a mystery of beholding, in which we look at the One who is always lovingly looking upon us. Yes, the mystery of prayer is a mutual beholding—in which God’s gaze awakens our own loving gaze upon him. It is also a mutual “listening” to the heart of the beloved. God is always intimately attuned to our slightest heartbeat, the slightest movements of our soul, as if his ear were pressed against our chest. All that occurs within us finds a profound reverberation within him and his own Heart. And, on the other hand, he yearns to be able to share his Heart with us, to open up to us his own deepest desires and aspirations, so that they may find a home within us. This deep heart-listening is part of what it means to abide against his breast in contemplative love. We rest in him, silent and still, listening deeply to the surging of his Heart, while he gazes upon us with infinite tenderness and love. We see this mystery of “beholding” and “abiding” expressed beautifully in the Song of Songs. There is indeed a profound connection between the first chapter of the Song of Songs and the first chapter of the Gospel. The bride says: Draw me after you, let us make haste. The King has brought me into his chambers. … With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. … I am my Beloved’s, and his desire is for me. (Song 1:4; 2:3-4; 7:10) This yearning to be drawn, to make haste into the chambers of the King, is the same mystery that is being realized in the experience of the disciples. Rather than sitting under the shadow of John the Baptist, or under the “fig tree,” they are now placing their lives entirely in Christ’s care and sitting in his shadow, eating the fruit of his love that he so freely offers them. To sit in the shadow of the Lord, to rest in his shade…this is the great invitation of God’s love. But what, more precisely, is this “fruit” of love that we experience as we consent to sit in the shadow of Christ, leaning against his breast? It is but the mystery of “abiding” in him, and he in us: the gift of deep and lasting intimacy. Jesus opens the way to this intimacy through the loving words he pronounces to us, words that reveal the truth of what he “sees” as he looks upon us, what he feels a he listens to our heart. Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold you are beautiful… You have ravished my heart… you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes. (Song 1:15; 4:1, 9) Do we not desire to truly be seen by another, to be seen and understood and loved? And yet we are also afraid of this. We feel insecure about what the other will see, fearful that, if they look deep enough they will be repulsed by what they see and will pull away. Surely, if we bear this shame within us, and want to hide ourselves from the piercing gaze of another, our fear and shame must be justified, right? But God draws near to us in Christ; he gazes upon us intensely and lovingly. His gaze sees and knows all…and his love does not lessen or draw back. No, his very gaze of love constitutes us in our unique and unrepeatable beauty…a beauty that belongs to no other person in the whole of creation, fashioned in us directly by the creative love and tenderness of God. To welcome this gaze, to allow it to irradiate the very depths of my being, the most hidden recesses of my heart, is to find myself gradually healed and set free by Love. Yes, this gaze touches me in my own authentic personal truth, and in touching me this gaze awakens me to life. God says to me: “Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold you are beautiful.” This is not a lie, or an exaggeration, or a wish…no, it is the simple truth of God’s vision, which sees in me what I myself cannot see, what is covered over with shame and fear and regret. His eyes of love illumine my darkness, and this gaze brings his entire loving presence, which enfolds me in itself. I find myself nestled within the enveloping Love of God…upheld, sheltered, and carried by him who is the perfect Lover. This loving gaze of God awakens in me the truth of who I am in his eyes; it gives me the confidence to live in this identity, this truth of being loved. Also, it awakens in me the desire and the ability to turn my gaze to God in response, to look into the eyes of the One who looks upon me. And what does God experience in this reciprocal gaze? What does he feel when he sees in my eyes my love and longing for him, as frail as it may be, when he sees welling up in my gaze the depths of my soul? He has told me what he feels, the profound way in which he is affected and touched by me: “You have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes.” Ah…to ravish the heart of God with my own gaze! What a loving God we have! And what profound things this means about who I am for him! God, by his gaze, ravishes my heart with the gentle yet powerful touch of his Love…and through this touch he awakens my heart to gaze upon him in return: and in this mutual beholding is born an unspeakable intimacy, as if, through the eyes, our hearts are knit together as one in love. Another beautiful point can be made regarding the experience of being looked upon by the gaze of God’s tenderness and love. We see it in the dynamic movement by which Andrew, on encountering Christ, goes to his brother Peter and says, “We have found the Messiah,” and by which Philip does likewise for Nathaniel (cf. 1:41, 45). The point becomes particularly vivid whenever Philip mirrors the very words of Jesus, saying to Nathaniel, “Come and see.”
Here we witness the first “witnessing” of the disciples in the Gospel of John, though we have already explored the testimony of John the Baptist and the reality of witnessing in general. What emerges before us here, though, in our contact with the text, allows us to go deeper into this reality. Here we see illustrated so beautiful how encounter with Christ, with the love of the Father incarnate in the Son, comes first, and becomes the foundation which then impels us—in the enthusiasm of faith—to reach out to others to share with them the good news of the love that we have first discovered. We can hear the joy of the disciples in their words, “We have found him!” And we can hear the voice of Christ himself echoing in the voices of those whom he loves, as they say to others—indeed as they say to us—“Come and see!” Thus a bridge is created, a bridge bringing the loving gaze of God to me through another person, and thus awakening me, setting me on the journey of trust and vulnerability that leads into my experiencing this gaze directly, for myself. Mediation leads into direct contact. The presence of another in whom Jesus lives become an encounter with the person of Jesus himself. Experiencing the love and witness of another person becomes a bridge both by which God comes to me and by which I, too, go to God. This is how beautifully intimate God’s presence in the world has become, how closely he desires to draw near to us and how profoundly he wants to work even in our human relationships, in our actions and our words, our demeanor and our life, and in the communion that unites us all as children of one Father. We become “sacraments” of his love for one another, mediators of his presence and his grace, priests and prophets of his goodness in the rich beauty of mutual custodianship and care, witness and belonging, cherishing and reciprocity. Indeed, a Latin word for “priest” is pontifex, which means literally “bridge”; this is the universal priesthood of believers, by which in love we bear one another before God in prayer and compassion, lifting them up closer to his loving heart, and also bear God’s own love and tenderness, his own mercy and wisdom, near to others in order that it may become a tangible and efficacious force in their lives. And indeed this priesthood is exercised not only in direct personal relationships, though this is certainly true, but—as we have already explored—in the hidden communion of all our hearts in the single Body of Christ in whom we are one, in the mysterious reality of “bearing” or “vicarious atonement.” In this mystery you live in me and I live in you, and thus when I pray, love, and suffer, you do so in me and I do so in you, thus bringing all that concerns you into closer proximity to God and all this is God’s closer into proximity to you, until they touch, encounter, and are united. Love is thus a matter of building bridges of reciprocal communication between persons, communication in truth and goodness that allows God himself to unveil his face, to make tangible the tender beating of his heart, and to draw hearts into unmediated contact with himself in the intimacy of prayer and life. And such unmediated contact with God, he truly intends for each one of us in his absolute and singular love for us—directed upon us as if we were the only person whom he has ever created, his “first” and his “only.” And this unmediated contact in the sanctuary of our own heart and conscience, in the depth of our own irreducible personal mystery—our own “coming and seeing” for ourselves—is not opposed to or radically apart from our togetherness in God’s love by which we continue to mediate his love and wisdom and goodness to each other as well. God is glad to work in both ways, directly in the heart and also through the sacramentality of other persons and of the world itself. So it was at the very beginning of the Gospel when Andrew found his brother Simon and Philip found Nathaniel, and so it is now and shall be until the end of time. Indeed even in the bliss of heaven and the glory of the new creation this shall continue to be the case, as the mutual enrichment of one another that occurs through encountering God’s beauty shining through the heart and life of another person shall not cease. Rather it shall find its fullest and most perfect consummation. We shall at last be able to reverence and understand to the full the “word” of God echoing in the being and life of another person, and to join our own heart wholly to his own love for them, cherishing them as he does. And so too we shall at last be able to receive to the full both the other person’s love as well as his love incarnate and expressed in and through them. In fact, every moment even of their life upon this earth, all of the work that they accomplished, all of the things that they created, every word that they uttered, every sigh and prayer or their heart, and indeed even the pain and sin and failure and loss that they endured, shall be permeated by grace and lifted to a level of fulfillment and enduring truth incomprehensible to us in this present life, but which shall be the very “stuff” of our existence in the life to come. Here, wedded to the Truth who is God, witness shall be consummated; here each one of us shall at last become a perfectly transparent, completely radiant mirror of the Beauty of Christ, an image of his Goodness, and an incarnation of his Love. Here we shall experience without ceasing, in the whole of our consciousness, a completely realized union of utmost intimacy with the beloved Son, our Bridegroom, and, in him and through the sweet anointing and intimate kiss of the Holy Spirit dwelling in our heart and our body, with our loving Abba, the heavenly Father. And this union with God shall encompass and permeate also all of our relationships with one another and with the entirety of the redeemed and re-created world, lifted up into the very innermost heart of the Trinity itself. All mediation shall thus be, not a necessary corrective to the invisibility or hiddenness of God, like crumbs of bread by which he feeds us in the exile and desert of our longing in a broken world. Rather, they shall simply manifest in a yet more superabundant way the overflow of his goodness and the fullness of his gift. For the unmediated shall be our daily bread, our perpetual experience at every moment of the full and direct love and intimacy of the Trinity. God shall be our “atmosphere,” but also more than our atmosphere. We shall stand, rejoice, dance, and play without surfeit in the joy of beholding God’s face, in looking into his loving gaze that is ceaselessly looking upon us. Indeed, we shall thrill with delight, and rest in peace, and act and live with wonder, in the utter joy of his most intimate embrace by which he cradles us in his bosom—yes, by which he pours himself into us and welcomes us into himself, so that we abide in him and he in us, in consummate mutual indwelling. Upon seeing Simon the brother of Andrew, Jesus says to him, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas (which means Peter)” (1:42). Again we encounter the piercing gaze of the Son of God, whose eyes, directed always upon the radiant countenance of his Father, also look upon the children of men with perfect clarity and lucidity. This gaze of Jesus Christ mediating to us the loving gaze of our heavenly Father, of our Abba, is indeed so foundational in Christian life and experience that an entire theology of prayer can be constructed upon it, even while it blossoms out from this encounter of gazes into the other images, themes, and experiences, including all the richness of our participation in the life of the Trinity and our cooperation with his grace and activity in this world. In a sense the most basic presupposition of all prayer—of the possibility of prayer—lies here, in the question: Does God see me? Does God know me? Does God care?
If the answer to this is negative, then nothing else can follow. But if it is positive, as it most certainly is, then the path begins. The journey commences. The gaze of love directed upon us from God, the eyes of love, become a bridge leading us out from our loneliness and fear, from our isolated and sinful solitude and into loving relationship, into the dynamic movement of reciprocity both in gaze and in act, in word and in surrender, blossoming in the intimacy of mutual belonging and in the rich overflow of spiritual fruitfulness. In Peter’s gaze we witness quite vividly the blossoming of this encounter of gazes in the story of his walking upon the water, where Christ comes toward the boat walking on the waves in the midst of the storm and, seeing him, Peter calls out, “Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water.” And Jesus replies, “Come.” Peter walks suspended upon the gaze of the Son of God, this gaze of love that has, from the moment of encounter, more and more become the foundation of his life and the atmosphere of his existence. He is held by the love of Jesus. He is upheld by his tender gaze. And he looks out in response, looks out across the waves, through the storm, and meets this gaze with his own eyes. And in doing so he finds not only confidence and trust—the confidence to walk even upon water—but also ardent desire and longing: the desire of a beloved heart that yearns more than anything to plunge into the embrace of the One who loves. This passage is a beautiful illustration of the reality of faith, of the journey of discipleship, and it calls us, too, to allow ourselves to be lovingly looked upon by God, and to let our reciprocal gaze—a gaze of contemplation, love, and delight—be awakened in response. Here indeed the threefold reality of faith, hope, and love is illuminated, and it situates the entirety of human existence within the context of a reciprocal bond of love—born of mutual beholding—between God and ourselves. Faith is the foundational trust on which all relationship rests, and in which alone it can begin to blossom; hope is the longing and desire that stretches out toward the Lover and also makes space for the Lover’s approach to me; and love is the full expression of both trust and desire in the reciprocity of gift, in the totality of commitment, that brings to blossom the abiding truth of complete belonging and the joy of intimacy between Lover and beloved. The experience of being loved by God is the origin and the consummation, the beginning and the end, and also sustains and upholds each moment of the journey. But so too this experience of being loved awakens love within us, it harnesses us in love that we might become lovers too, lovers of God and of all of God’s children. It permeates into us to transform us in the very wellsprings of our being, setting free within us all the hidden potentialities of our humanity even while lifting them up into contact with the divine outpouring of grace, healing, ennobling, and transfiguring us to become partakers in the divine nature, to be made capable of living, in God and with God, the very life of God himself. We see the root of all this in the many encounters throughout the Gospels, and indeed throughout the Bible, in which a person makes contact with the loving gaze of God. For Saint Paul, this encounter carries him in its trajectory, along the impetus of its longing—the longing of God himself ever inclined tenderly and ardently toward his children, and awakening his own reciprocal longing—from the first moment of “It pleased God to reveal his Son to me” and to the consummation of “I live no longer I, but Christ lives within me; the life I live now I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gaze himself for me” (Gal 2:20). So too in Peter. “You are Simon son of John; you shall be called Cephas,” carries us forward through the miraculous catch of fish that elicits Peter’s falling down at Jesus’ feet, and through the walking on the water, to his confession of Jesus’ messiahship and his divinity—and the entrustment to Peter of the primacy of authority in the Church of Christ—and at last to the final conversation with the Risen Christ, wherein he asks the all-important question that, being beginning, must also be end: “Do you love me?” (cf. 21:15-17). All in human life is situated within this reality of being loved by God, of being “beloved.” For in this gaze God looks upon us—our Abba looks upon us with the eyes of his beloved Son, and proclaims us beloved too—and sees our true identity before him, an identity which is nothing but our belovedness, our unique and irreducible beauty as a person. God’s own gaze reveals the foundational nature of our being and our personhood just as he is the source of this nature, its Creator and its Safeguard. He reveals our true being as a living relation with God, as someone who is ceaselessly held and sustained in existence by the very love of the Trinity: of the Father in Christ through the Holy Spirit. For if the Father’s eyes look through the Son, such that not only are Jesus’ words true that “he who sees me sees the Father” but also the inverse, “whoever experiences my gaze experiences the gaze of the Father,” so too the power of this gaze is impressed upon us and made real within us by the activity of the Holy Spirit, who is the breath and the sweetness of God. And as the fruit of this encounter love grows and matures; it carries us through the exodus of which we have already spoken, this exodus out of the enclosed self and into the blossoming of loving relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters. So too everything else in our life is herein contained, all of our particular gifts and “callings,” all of the tasks and responsibilities entrusted to us, our particular roles and services and relationships throughout the trajectory of our unique life as we journey homeward, toward our true dwelling in heaven and in the new creation. Here we find rest and everlasting gladness in the embrace of the Trinity who, by welcoming all things into himself, affirms them in their true being and, healing and elevating them, brings them to endless consummation within himself. John the Evangelist says to us that “one of those who followed Jesus was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter” (1:40). The other disciple remains unnamed. This is a curious fact, unless we consider that it is probably John himself. Throughout his Gospel, as we said, John refuses to give his own name, though his identity becomes more and more clear as the Gospel progresses, until we encounter him, the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” leaning against the Lord’s breast at the Last Supper and abiding at the foot of the Cross with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and the other women (cf. Jn 13:23; 19:26).
Why does he not give his name? The first answer to that question is simply that he does. He says what is most important about himself, he reveals the deepest truth about who he is: he is one who is loved by God. He is God’s beloved. The second reason he doesn’t give his name is a beautiful blossoming from the first: he calls himself the “disciple whom Jesus loved” precisely to invite us to place ourselves in the same position. The love that John received is not given to him alone, but to every person. The love that he has received opens his eyes to see every person enveloped and bathed within its light. We only need to open ourselves to this love, as John did, to open ourselves to welcome this gift, to be willing to draw near to the Lord who invites us—and we will experience the same healing and life-giving mystery. There is something very beautiful here. In this intimate and personal place where I know myself to be loved by God, in my unrepeatable and unique encounter with God, I simultaneously draw near to every other person. In this reality of being loved—yes, loved by God as if I were the only person ever to exist—I come to know and experience both my own authentic uniqueness as a child of God and, in the same moment, I discover the place where I am truly closest to every other person. In the mystery of childhood, I experience both the depth of my solitude with the Lord and the depth of communion with all of his children, my brothers and sisters, within the love that binds us all together. There is another person in the Gospel whose name John never gives: the Mother of Jesus. She appears at crucial moments in the unfolding of the life of Jesus, as we will see, but she is always called simply “the Mother of Jesus,” or, from the mouth of Christ himself, “Woman”(2:4; 19). Why does John not call her “Mary?” It seems to be for much the same reason as he does not give his own name. She is the Woman at the foot of the Cross of Jesus, the one whose very presence invites us to be where she is. The presence of both John and Mary in their intimacy with the Son of God, an intimacy that becomes compassion when the Lord walks the way of suffering—a compassion that allows a yet deeper intimacy still—this presence is an invitation for all of us. But that is not all. Mary and John cannot be reduced to mere “archetypes,” as if in loving them and drawing them to himself God swallows up their individuality. No, that is most definitely not the case. The love of God never dispenses with the individual, with what is unique and unrepeatable about each person, even in their concrete and limited humanity, but rather affirms this very individuality. Indeed, God alone truly sees the beauty impressed upon every atom, every single fiber of each person whom he has created—and in gazing upon us, he loves us, and in loving us he affirms and accepts us, and in accepting us he sets us free as the children of God whom he has created us to be. Each one of us is, therefore, such a profound mystery that God alone truly knows our name. When he looks upon us, he sees our truth, and he speaks within our heart the truth of who we are: You are my beloved child. Yes, we hear the words echoing within us: “I have called you by name, you are mine. You are precious in my eyes, and I love you” (cf. Isaiah 43:1, 4). This very gaze and word of God, indeed, makes us who we are. What is required of us is simply that we accept this gift, that we welcome the love given to us by God, that we allow ourselves to be loved. But accepting this love is not merely some passive attitude which allows love to “wash over” us without really penetrating into our being and liberating us from all that hinders us from living to the full the truth of childhood. Rather, it is a fully active and alert welcoming, by which, in letting myself be looked upon by the One who is Love, I allow myself to be truly conformed to the beauty that God sees, a beauty often trapped and stifled through sin and fear. Mary, for her part, never knew sin, and so her welcoming of the word of God that came to her was perfectly free and unreserved, not knowing the slightest shadow of resistance. Still, she was subject to all the human and creaturely limitations that we are, and she too had to trust, she too had to face fear and uncertainty with filial boldness and humble faith. Living in the depths of her own truth as a daughter of God, however, she allowed God to surpass and transform every difficulty through the radiant simplicity of love, working at the heart of her wholehearted welcoming of the love that came to her unceasingly from God. Finally, precisely in and through her filial receptivity, her perfect daughterhood, she also allowed herself to truly be a bride, espoused to the God who descended upon her to unite her to himself. And, knowing this love so intimately, she freely became a mother, the Mother of the Son of God, while remaining always both a child and a bride. The Church herself expresses this truth in the Preface for the Mass of the Immaculate Conception. We see the beautiful cord that ties together her daughterhood (conception) with her motherhood and with the spousal mystery that she most intimately lived: For you preserved the most Blessed Virgin Mary from all stain of original sin, so that in her, endowed with the rich fullness of your grace, you might prepare a worthy Mother of your Son and signify the beginning of the Church, his beautiful Bride without spot or wrinkle. To conclude this reflection, let us take a deeper glance at the mystery of Mary’s “name.” This name that God alone knows is precisely the name given by his love for her—it is simply the name “beloved,” as it is indeed for each and every one of us. This is how Pope Benedict XVI expressed this beautiful mystery, explaining the Angel Gabriel’s words to Mary at the Annunciation: “Hail, full of grace.” From generation to generation, the wonder evoked by this ineffable mystery never ceases. St Augustine imagines a dialogue between himself and the Angel of the Annunciation, in which he asks: “Tell me, O Angel, why did this happen in Mary?” The answer, says the Messenger, is contained in the very words of the greeting: “Hail, full of grace” (cf. Sermo 291:6). In fact, the Angel, “appearing to her”, does not call her by her earthly name, Mary, but by her divine name, as she has always been seen and characterized by God: “Full of grace--gratia plena”, which in the original Greek is kekaritomene [κεχαριτωμένη], “full of grace”, and the grace is none other than the love of God; thus, in the end, we can translate this word: “beloved” of God (cf. Lk 1:28). … It is a title expressed in passive form, but this “passivity” of Mary, who has always been and is for ever “loved” by the Lord, implies her free consent, her personal and original response: in being loved, in receiving the gift of God, Mary is fully active, because she accepts with personal generosity the wave of God’s love poured out upon her. In this too, she is the perfect disciple of her Son, who realizes the fullness of his freedom and thus exercises this freedom through obedience to the Father. (Homily, March 25, 2006) Before moving on to the next passages of the Gospel, let us touch more deeply upon the theme of “abiding,” also translated as “remaining” or “staying.” The disciples ask Jesus “Where are you staying?” or “Where do you abide?” and he invites them to come and see for themselves, and so they do: they stay with him that day, and are converted. We have already glimpsed the theological depth hidden in that little term, meneis, “abide,” and we shall see it much more deeply later: for in the Gospel of John the term abide is used to express the mutual relations of the three Persons of the Trinity. It communicates to us, in some way makes visible before us, the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Through the complete reciprocity of their acceptance of one another, of their total self-giving, and of their complete devotion, each Person of the Trinity lives within the Others, such that the life they share is only one, while present uniquely in each Person according to the relations that he lives with and toward the Others.
Theology has given a term to this reality: it is circumincession. This means precisely that the Person of the Trinity do not merely stand over and against one another, as, for example, two men in this world shall sit facing one another as they converse. Rather, the life of the Trinity, the reality of the Trinity’s intimacy, is both deeper and fuller, such that while they stand before one another, they also live within one another: the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, and the Spirit in both the Son and the Father and the Son and the Father in the Spirit. Here is the fullness of intimacy and the completeness of belonging. And here too we glimpse the true beauty and profundity of the intimacy for which we long and for which we have been created. In human communion of the maturest and closest sort we get glimpses of this mystery, tastes and hints of this Trinitarian communion. But in human communion alone we cannot find rest; indeed it stirs in us restless longing just as much as it brings us repose, or rather even more so. For we can find rest only in God himself, even as our communion with God does not eradicate or erase human love and communion, but rather becomes the wellspring of its authenticity and the path to its true maturity and depth. We glimpse God’s mystery in creation, for creation has been fashioned by God out of the depth of his own life, and this life is, through and through, Trinitarian. It is the Love of three Persons eternally united in complete mutual belonging and in the delight of deepest intimacy. We see this in the mystery of a child held wholly within the body of her mother even as the child is a distinct, individual person. We see this in the affection and love with which persons hold those they care for within the recesses of their hearts, and are granted to live, in turn, in the hearts of those who love them. We see this in the conjugal union of man and woman in which the face-to-face communication also becomes a mutual interpenetration, an entering into one another in a profound way. We see this, in the hidden sphere of the spirit and especially in the reality of grace, in the mystery of our mutual co-existence as brothers and sisters in a single family of humanity. We see this in the reality of “bearing” by which I live in other and others live in me, and our experiences, our burden and our guilt as well as our longing and our hope, are born as one. All of this is not only a reflection of the life of the Trinity but, when we yield to it in docility to grace—or rather yield to grace in and through it—a reality participation in the intimacy of the Trinity. Not only do our human relations extend in some way the way of relating and loving proper to the Trinity, but even more so they open us up to, and impel us toward, the blossoming of living relationship with the Trinity himself. For we are called, not only to abide in communion as the Persons of the Trinity abide in one another, but to be so totally handed over to God, so totally receptive of his gift and his presence, that he lives in us and we live in him, mutually indwelling and co-acting in the very hidden wellsprings of our thought and feeling, our choice and action. All of this is so very beautiful and central, so radiant with light, for it is the heart of reality, the apex of history, the fulfillment of human desire. And yet even as we contemplate it and try in some way to glimpse it, we are led to another aspect of the term “abide,” which complements what we have just said even though it is quite secondary. It exists wholly in service of what we have just explored. And that, namely, is the reality of perseverance. We shall explore both dimensions of the term “abide” when we come, for example, to John chapter 15, the discourse on the “vine and the branches,” where Jesus portrays our abiding in him as the source of true fruitfulness, as well as in chapter 17, the “high priestly prayer,” where Christ’s prays explicitly “that they, Father, may be one, even as you are in me and I am in you, that they also may be in us” (v. 21), the full blossoming of gratuitous intimacy in mutual belonging. But one of the key features of authentic education is repetition, and indeed that is just the nature of life: that things take root more deeply within us, and we enter more deeply into them, upon repeated contact. And so we introduce here a theme we shall treat later, and it is one which in fact these meditations in their entirety seek both to facilitate and to deepen: our persevering contact with God in prayer and in life. Upon the moment of conversion there is often a burst of light and of fervor, of realizing and of longing, which wrenches us out of our “old world” of self-enclosure and grants us a glimpse of the new world, the broad and beautiful world of love, and the depth both of transformation and of intimacy for which we were made, and for which Christ redeemed us. And yet a single moment of conversion is not an entire life. And so as we live the reality of perseverance inevitably enters the picture and indeed becomes quite central, as long as we understand “central” here in the correct way. For it is not central in the sense that the core of Christian life consists in enduring, in patient consistency in the tasks and responsibilities of daily life, nor in fidelity to prayer even in times of darkness or dryness, or practicing virtue always even when it is difficult. All of this is important, yes, for if there is no consistency, no perseverance, then the seed of grace planted in our hearts by the divine Sower will never germinate and bear fruit. Then the promise of relationship, of communion, and the birth of the “new man” in the likeness of Christ, never comes about. It remains little more than a promise, for it is not given space to grow, but is rather choked into impotence and perhaps even dies (cf. Mt 13:21-22). And we are made for so much more! The grace of redemption won for us in the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, though accomplished all at once in him, takes place within us only gradually and over the length of an entire life. Indeed, this redemptive mystery is the heart of human history, implanted like a hidden seed in the soil of humanity and the world, and germinating, growing, and spreading to touch, heal, and make new. Whether this be the purification and transformation of an individual human life converted from sin and selfishness to new life in the Spirit and gradually transformed into God’s very likeness, or the healing and ennoblement of a culture and society itself, this is all the fruit of that single seed of grace. It is that life of God poured out from the opened heart of Christ as he gives himself fully upon the Cross, and as he inhabits our humanity and the entire cosmos in the boundless expanse of his own Risen Body. And our fidelity to this gift is not only first fervor but mature fullness; not only the young and enthusiastic beginnings but the long-developed savor of mature wine, of deep flowing currents of grace carving out wide rivers, even oceans, that have coursed through our hearts for decades, or through the history of the world for millennia. The commitment of our will, our enthusiastic cooperation with God, ever renewed with each passing moment, each day, each year, is needed. But so too, when we dig deep into this perseverance in love, we discover that our hearts are led again to the primary things once again: to childlike wonder and the spirit of play in the love of our good Father, to the nuptial longing of a bridal heart for her Beloved, and to the gently yet ardently burning longing of true compassion for the healing and salvation of the world. These are the fonts of true perseverance and the atmosphere in which grace takes root and blossoms. Even if they are not always tangibly felt or even seen in the darkness of nights of purification and in the long desert journeys through which we all pass, they enfold us and carry us nonetheless. For not only are they our way of relating to God, dispositions that he fashions within us by his activity, but they are also his way of relating to us, the contours of the arms by which he reaches out to embrace us: the arms of a loving Father, a Bridegroom Son, and a Spirit of infinite tenderness and boundless joy. The true life of man is to habitare secum through his habitare cum Christo, to abide authentically within himself through his abiding with Christ in the bosom of the Father: in sinu Patris. Or, said differently, it is to become authentically himself so that he may authentically love God and his brothers and sisters, thus entering into the inner life of the Trinity. Of course this is primarily the work of grace within him—the fruit of belovedness—but it also harnesses his full and free cooperation and sets him on the great journey of life. This reality, as we have seen again and again, is a central theme of the Gospel of John. Touching the inmost desire of each one of us, and, in the light of his loving gaze saying unto us, “What do you seek?” Jesus draws us in the power of the Holy Spirit to the Father. He grants us access into his own eternal habitation, his own dwelling-place in the intimacy of the Father’s embrace, so that “where he is we may also be” (17:24), for “in the Father’s house there are many rooms, and he goes to prepare a place for us” (14:2). All that is required of us is our courage and faith, our trusting willingness to step into the great adventure of hope and love. It is our willingness to “come and see.” For truly our coming—our stepping into God’s life in faith—brings about in us a knowledge, a seeing, deeper and more certain than any other knowledge, for it is born of love and sustained wholly by love.
In all of these meditations I have sought to remain in a deep contemplative gaze upon the heart of reality, upon the center of the Gospel that unifies the diverse strands of truth into one in the convergence point of all things: the Heart of Jesus Christ who admits us into the intimacy of the Trinity’s embrace. Because of this I have avoided getting caught up in condemning the errors of the past or the present, except insofar as this is but the flip-side of a deeper beholding of the one truth in all its purity and radiance. And yes, this is often in fact important, and thus in these reflections one can find a kind of dialectic, or better, a paradoxical approach, which reaches out across the distance between two extremes—two errors—to draw them into the place where their excesses are purified and the seeds of truth within them are unified in the greater and all-enfolding Truth. G.K. Chesterton spoke wonderfully of this paradoxical trait of Catholic truth in his book Orthodoxy, in which he explained his own journey from agnosticism and the “modern heresies” to true faith in the creed and life of the Church. He said he was impressed by how the critics of the Christian faith always seemed to criticize contradiction elements of it, one person focusing on one extreme and one person on another. His conclusion, to which this experience led him, was that the Church must be the unification of all extremes in their purified form, in other words, the custodian of the fullness of truth. Here are his own words: I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll’s atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” I was in a desperate way. This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind—the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. … It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. … And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.i Why do I share all this in the context of our current reflections? Because there is a small point that I think it is important to make following upon our meditations on authentic freedom and the true “carrying of the cross” in the following of Christ. For our world is being torn apart by two extremes in responding to the gift and the call of Christ, in responding to the challenge of the truth and love of God which invite us to embark upon the path to life. We see this in how sadly “politicized” theology has become in our day—either liberal or traditionalist, either progressive or reactionary—as well as in the political and ethical debate itself. We have ceased to look upon the face of Christ at the heart of his living Church, to abide in the center and to allow the center, through our humble and childlike faith, to educate us and expand us to the proportions of the truth itself. Rather we are engrossed either in arguing with one another or with pursuing our own way, doing all we can to rationalize it and “baptize” it as good, as the right way, as the best way possible. Whether that is the Woke extreme that is trying to paint the entire world its own colors (black and white and yellow and tan, male and female and all the “fill-in-the-blanks,” and all the colors of the rainbow of sexual preference) or the radical traditionalist extreme that is claiming to be the one surviving bastion of true Catholicism whenever the Church of the ordinary, of the millions of believing Catholics in union with the pope and the living hierarchy, are in error—it does not matter. Or whether it is any of the countless other shades of error that are finding expression in our day and age as they have throughout history, it does not matter. What matters is that the truth and love of God are unchanging, even as they carry us on a journey throughout history, a blossoming romance, toward the consummation that awaits us at the end of time. I would like, therefore, as a way of bringing these reflections full circle, to share some words of Pope Benedict on the parable of the two brothers which we have already referenced. These words clearly apply, with a particular aptness and vigor, to the polarized society of today—to the two extremes of liberalism and traditionalism, to the “left” and the “right” (whereas the Church is always the center!). But above all, they speak into the intimate recesses of the heart of each one of us and invite us to a humble and honest examination of our conscience. Which brother am I? Am I the rebellious brother—or am I the brother of slavish service? How can I open myself to the true God, to the one who is in all reality my Good Father, and whose Love is the true center and essence of this parable, as of the entirety of life an existence itself? These words are thus an invitation to become more like the Third Brother, the unspoken Brother who himself speaks the parable to us—the One who is the eternal Son of the perfect Father, and who came to us to welcome us into the joy and intimacy of his Father’s house, so that “all that is mine may be yours, and all that is yours mine” (17:10). Benedict writes: The first figure we meet is that of the prodigal son, but right at the beginning we also see the magnanimity of the father. He complies with the younger son’s wish for his share of the property and divides up the inheritance. He gives freedom. He can imagine what the younger son is going to do, but he lets him go his way. The son journeys “into a far country.” The Church Fathers read this above all as interior estrangement from the world of the father—the world of God—as interior rupture of relation, as the great abandonment of all that is authentically one’s own. The son squanders his inheritance. He just wants to enjoy himself. He wants to scoop life out till there is nothing left. He wants to have “life in abundance” as he understands it. He no longer wants to be subject to any commandment, any authority. He seeks radical freedom. He wants to live only for himself, free of any other claim. He enjoys life; he feels that he is completely autonomous. Is it difficult for us to see clearly reflected here the of the modern rebellion against God and God’s law? The leaving behind of everything we once depended on and the will to a freedom without limits? The Greek word used in the parable for the property that the son dissipates means “essence” in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy. The prodigal dissipates “his essence,” himself. At the end it is all gone. He who was once completely free is now truly a slave—a swineherd, who would be happy to be given pig feed to eat. Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom. His very nature contains direction and norm, and becoming inwardly one with this direction and norm is what freedom is all about. A false autonomy thus leads to slavery: In the meantime history has taught us this all too clearly. For Jews the pig is an unclean animal, which means that the swineherd is the expression of man’s most extreme alienation and destitution. The totally free man has become a wretched slave. At this point the “conversion” takes place. The prodigal son realizes that he is lost—that at home he was free and that his father’s servants are freer than he now is, who had once considered himself completely free. “He went into himself,” the Gospel says (Lk 15:17). As with the passage about the “far country,” these words set the Church Fathers thinking philosophically: Living far away from home, from his origin, this man had also strayed far away from himself. He lived away from the truth of his existence. His change of heart, his “conversion,” consists in his recognition of this, his realization that he has become alienated and wandered into truly “alien lands,” and his return to himself. What he finds in himself, though, is the compass pointing toward the father, toward the true freedom of a “son.” The speech he prepares for his homecoming reveals to us the full extent of the inner pilgrimage he is now making. His words show that his whole life is now a steady progress leading “home”—through so many deserts—to himself and to the father. He is on a pilgrimage toward the truth of his existence, and that means “homeward.” … The older brother now makes his appearance. He comes home from working in the fields, hears feasting at home, finds out why, and becomes angry. He finds it simply unfair that this good-for-nothing, who has squandered his entire fortune—the father’s property—with prostitutes, should now be given a splendid feast straightaway without any period of probation, without any time of penance. That contradicts his sense of justice: The life he has spent working is made to look of no account in comparison to the dissolute past of the other. Bitterness arises in him: “Lo, these many years I have served and I never disobeyed one of your commands,” he his father, “yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk 15:29). The father goes out to meet the older brother, too, and now he speaks kindly to his son. The older brother knows nothing of the inner transformations and wanderings experienced by the younger brother, of his journey into distant parts, of his fall and his new selfdiscovery. He sees only injustice. And this betrays the fact that he too had secretly dreamed of a freedom without limits, that his obedience has made him inwardly bitter, and that he has no awareness of the grace of being at home, of the true freedom that he enjoys as a son. “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). The father explains to him the great value of sonship with these words—the same words that Jesus uses in his high-priestly prayer to describe his relationship to the Father: “All that is mine is thine, and all that is thine is mine” (Jn 17:10). … [W]hat Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel (the sinners who came to him were Jews, too), but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are “en règle,” at rights with God, as Grelot puts it (p. 229). In this connection, Grelot places emphasis on the sentence “I never disobeyed one of your commandments.” For them, more than anything else God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble. Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon: Their bitterness toward God’s goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience. In their heart of hearts, they would have gladly journeyed out into that great “freedom” as well. There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with. They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother and made him realize what it means to be free and what it means to be a son. They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sonship. They, too, are still in need of a path; they can find it if they simply admit that God is right and accept his feast as their own. In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.ii ************* NOTES ************* i. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 6: The Paradoxes of Christianity. ii. Jesus of Nazareth, 203-205, 208-209, 210-211. The disciples’ response to the seeing and the words of Christ, “What do you seek?” is a reciprocal question, but also an authentic answer to his query: “Where do you abide?” This in fact is a beautiful encapsulation of the mystery of human desire, innately ordered toward intimacy with God and at rest in him alone. It corresponds, indeed, with the most ardent and intimate desire of Jesus Christ himself, as he expressed it at the Last Supper: “That they may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which you have given me in your love for me before the foundation of the world” (17:24). To be where the Son is, in the bosom of the Father, caught up into the heart of the Trinity’s everlasting intimacy. That is the heart of human desire and its highest expression; indeed it is the desire that lives within every other desire and gives it meaning. “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (17:22-23).
Here we see illustrated what we mentioned early about the quite special and profound use of the Greek term μένεις, meneis, to open before us a reality of incredible depth. Where Jesus’ “abides” does not imply merely where he “stays.” Sure, the disciples on the lowest and most basic level of the text are asking where Jesus is staying, in what locale he has made his abode, that they may stay with him and learn from him directly. They want to find access into the heart of his teaching and his personhood, and they know that they can only do this by staying with him. Indeed, in Mark’s Gospel a disciple is defined first of all as one who is called to “be with him,” and only secondarily as one who is “sent out” to bring his love and truth and healing to others. (See Mk 3:13-15.) Jesus does not offer the disciples an explanation of where he is staying and why, but simply invites them to witness for themselves—or better, to step into the orbit of his own abiding, to participate in it and co-live it with him, and thus to know firsthand both him and his message, or better, him and his Father. “Come and see.” Indeed the words here are significant. He asks them to step out of their old way of life, a life lived in expectation but without the fullness of his presence, and to let a new impetus take hold of them, a new movement: that of “coming,” of being drawn up into the great passion at the heart of the life of the incarnate Son, which passes all the way from his entrance into the world, through his redeeming Passion and Resurrection, and to his return to the Father: “When Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1) But to be honest, have we not seen and contemplated all of this before already in our meditations? Have we not already reflected upon the mystery of discipleship as entering into Jesus’ life and, through him, with him, and in him, into the very life of the Father? Have we not seen that the heart of the Gospel of John is the invitation to “see” God through the only-begotten Son who alone can make his visible to us, being the One who is nearest the Father’s heart (cf. 1:18)? Indeed, haven’t we seen that the disciple is revealed as one who rests against the Son’s bosom just as the Son rests against the bosom of the Father, and thus, in the Son, is granted access into the heart of the Father himself, into the Son’s eternal “abode” (cf. 13:25, 14:2-3)? Yes, we have reflected upon all of this before, though for a heart filled with wonder and awe at the great mystery of God’s love given in Christ, at the amazing reality of our incorporation into his life, one mention is not enough, but only a lifetime of plunging into this reality, reflecting upon it, and above all living it and experiencing it until its consummation in heaven. What is most important therefore is not pursuing new insights but living the reality itself ever more profoundly and intimately, and cherishing every moment of this new life, and sharing it with others. Nonetheless, is there anything new that we can discover in our present reflections that may illuminate an aspect of this mystery as yet unexplored, or may help to colonize other parts of our heart and humanity with the healing light of God’s love incarnate in Christ? In the truth of the disciples’ “abiding with Christ” we can discern some profound lessons. The whole movement of their coming to Christ and becoming his followers indeed illuminates for us profoundly the beautiful mystery of our own conversion, maturation, and transformation in the love of God. This is something that we have already explored at length, but which is so rich and profound that we have hardly scratched the surface; and indeed no mere words can do justice to it, but only the lived reality itself. But let us direct our attention to one aspect of this mystery now, in order to hopefully come to deeper understanding and hence to more authentic living. I have spoken about the “exodus of love” that is the path to true freedom and happiness in the embrace of Love and in the abiding communion for which we were created; the exodus that allows us also to become a true lover of our fellow man in the likeness of the One who has first loved us, and, in his love, set us free. This, while being the conversion called for by the words of Christ in which he says to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, for whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (cf. Mt 16:24-25, Mk 8:34-35, Lk 9:23-24), is also the truth of the words of the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs: Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come to me, for behold, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the cooing of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth her first figs, and the vines, with their blossoms, give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come to me. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the hidden places of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. (Sg 2:10-14) In other words, it is a call of love ordained wholly toward intimacy in mutual belonging, toward the reestablishment of the relationships of true communion that God has intended for us in the beginning—first and most of all with himself, our one true Beloved and the Lover of our hearts, but also with each one of our brothers and sisters. It is the path to true life, to authentic health and wholeness, and to the liberty—the real freedom—for which God has so lovingly created us. And the “deny yourself” is an essential dimension of this call, not, as we have seen, because my own unique identity or personhood is bad or ugly or unwanted (quite the opposite on every account!), but simply because there are tendencies within me that are self-defeating. That is the paradox: insofar as I seek myself, I lose myself, and insofar as I surrender myself to another, I come home to myself. For I exist ceaselessly in relationship with God; indeed, I am living relationship with God at the very core of my being and identity. The call to come to Christ and to find myself in him, therefore, is a call to return to this place of my true being, a being which is inseparable from the being of the Son who sustains me, and in whom, alone, I am child. I am so easily inclined, however, to seeking myself in my daily life that at first I am hardly aware of it; and yet insofar as I remain within this closed circle of self-seeking, I actually lose myself, I limit and hinder the truth of my being and the real capacities of my personhood as ordained toward love and truth. I become petty and small, like a mouse running in circles and unable to see the big picture; and indeed even the deeper and wider things that I receive, I diminish to my own size and make them “about me,” thus rendering them void of their true depth, grandeur, and liberating power. I render everything about me rather than about God. And yet in God and as God’s gratuitous gift, everything does also become gift for me, flowing ceaselessly from his abundant generosity which cherishes me tenderly at every moment with utmost attention. And he cherishes me thus not to close me in upon myself, as if he wants me to remain either self-satisfied with my own efforts and activities—like the Pharisee in the Gospel who stands “praying to himself” and thanking God “that you have not made me like other men” Lk 18:11)—nor as some prelude to actually shaming me and discarding me and demanding of me a falsely altruistic service, nor in order to leave me in the whirlpool of my own anxieties, obsessions, and fears. Rather, he loves me simply because, in his eyes which see only the truth, I am beautiful, precious, and desirable. And thus he calls me out of the place in which I habitually dwell, the “self” that I must lose in order to truly find myself. He calls me out of lies and into truth, out of self-watching and into a gaze upon his face, upon the faces of my brothers and sisters, and upon the countenance of reality itself. He calls me out of self-protection and into the vulnerability and risk of love that embraces the adventure of relationship, the ecstasy of self-giving, the exodus of surrender into the arms of Another; and he sets me on the path of ever-increasing dilation where my narrowed and petty heart, which before was preoccupied only with my own affairs and making everything “about me,” instead walks forth in the freedom of belovedness—no longer needing to cling to security or control since all peace and security is given in the never-failing love of God who cherishes me singly and uniquely like no other person—yes, walks forth on the great journey of true life, into ever deeper communion with God and with others, into the joy of care and compassion, service and custodianship, mutual belonging and true intimacy. Here, indeed, the words of Saint Benedict are deeply illumining for us. He speaks about a reality which he terms habitare secum, in other words “dwelling within oneself” or “dwelling with oneself.” And by this he does not mean a clinging to the “old self,” the selfish self-clinging, but rather a true homecoming unto oneself, and indeed an abiding within the core of one’s being in a full presence both to oneself, to God, and to all that is real. This contrasts with the selfishness that in the very process of collapsing into itself actually finds itself exiled from its own authentic truth, lost in “faraway places” distant from the sanctuary of the heart, to use the words of the Parable of the Two Sons and the Good Father (cf. Lk 15:11-32). Truly, in seeking ourselves wrongly, we lose ourselves and are lost living on the periphery of our being, and on the periphery of reality itself. For our home is in God! And thus to step out on the great journey into the heart of God, the great journey of love that opens wide our hearts to the depth and expanse of all reality as his gift, is also to make the true homecoming. It is a homecoming into the bosom of the Father, into the embrace of the Son, into the sweet security of the Spirit; and precisely thus it is also a homecoming into our own deepest and most personal truth. |
Joshua ElznerI am a Catholic layperson devoting my life specifically to prayer and contemplation, and to sharing the fruits of contemplation in writing and creative activity. Archives
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