|
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. The Gospel recounts, after the witness of John the Baptist that we have already explored—and his pregnant words referring to Jesus as the Lamb of God, anointed by the Holy Spirit—the gathering of the disciples. Here we see how John’s own life and prophetic witness proved to be a “school” in discipleship that prepared others to follow Jesus and to become his disciples in turn. In this respect too John is but a Forerunner of Jesus, and he directed those who came to him to the Christ. This explains to a great degree the immediate response of certain of the men who become Jesus’ disciples: that they leave everything and follow him without hesitation (cf. 1:37). They have been prepared by the Precursor to follow the One who comes after. And so it is here:
And on the next day, as John stood with two of his disciples, he saw Jesus walking and he said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” and the disciples, hearing this, followed him. And Jesus, turning, said to them, “What do you seek?” And they said, “Where are you staying?” And he said to them, “Come and see.” And they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. (1:35-39) Most of our contemporary translations of this passage lose a great deal of its original impact, not able to capture to eloquent simplicity of the Greek. For in the original language the conversation between Jesus and the disciples sounds off like a volley of gunshots, simple and short statements that nonetheless are full of meaning. Rather than the disappointingly weak “What are you looking for?” of the New American Bible, for example, in the Greek Jesus says, Pou zeteite? “What do you seek?” And the disciples reply with a corresponding simplicity and depth: Pou meneis? “Where do you abide?” And then Jesus: Erchesthe kai opsethse. “Come and see.” This short dialogue in a sense provides a “blueprint” of the encounter between the human spirit and its Redeemer, unveiling contours of the meeting between human longing and divine grace. Of course, as many encounters as there are, so many variations are there, with as many nuances and unique contours as there are people whom God has created. Nonetheless, this passage touches on something universal, something central and enduring, which is present in all true encounters. “What do you seek?” — “Where do you abide?” — “Come and see.” First, it is deeply telling that the dialogue is begun, not by the human heart, but by Christ himself. God always takes the initiative. Even in cases where to our weak human vision it appears that we first approach God, it is simply a fact that our very turning to him, our very seeking of him, is but a response to his own love that has first touched us and awakened within us the capacity to seek him. And indeed this is true not only “in general,” in other words in the truth that we couldn’t seek God unless he made us to be the kinds of creatures that seek their Creator. No, it is more than that: it is that every good and noble movement of our hearts, every act and longing and prayer and thought that moves toward him, is by him also awakened and sustained, though the mysterious manner of this co-operation between human freedom and divine freedom is beyond our comprehension and too deep and profound to be pinned down and analyzed. And so we see that it is Christ who turns toward us and sees us, looking upon us with love, with a love of predilection, and says, “What do you seek?” In other words, he reaches out to us with both his gaze and his voice, touching the inmost desire within us, our longing for God, but also touching all the laziness, selfishness, and compromise as well, and asking for our honest response: “What do you seek?” He knows that there is little hope of our responding to his call, or rather none at all, unless we have to some degree allowed ourselves to become “persons of desire.” For God does not call us merely through duty or obligation, as if the religion that he wishes for us is one of impersonally fulfilling tasks that are set before us simply because we have no other choice or even because we are afraid of the consequences otherwise. Nor does he see or call for obedience as an imposition of his “stronger” will over and against our own, “inferior” will. This is the diabolical twisting of the image of God which afflicts so many hearts, not only in our day and age but throughout history, and which so deeply needs to be corrected. For in truth the entire relationship that God desires to establish with us, to live with us, is one of free and gratuitous and reciprocal love. And thus it must be a relationship born from desire and sustained by desire: by our own desire as well as his. So the words of Christ, “What do you seek?” unveil the long history that has already carried the disciples from the beginning of their lives until this moment: all of their seeking, when authentic, has been for him; and all of their disordered desires and acts have been a betrayal of him. And this is a seeking or a betrayal, not of an inanimate object or of a distant reality, but rather of One who is always already in the process of drawing near to us, seeking us, and entering into our lives with tenderness and care. It is the same reality that is expressed in the encounter between Christ and the young man who asks him about what is good, and whom he invites to follow him. The Gospel of Mark tells us: “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack but one thing. If you would be perfect, go, sell all your possessions and give to the poor, and come, follow me’” (Mk 10:21). This gaze of love, which is also a choice and a commitment, which is also cherishing delight and contemplative rest in the beauty of our being and our belovedness, which is also care and enfolding and protection—this gaze of love always precedes us. And it is this gaze, too, which gives us the capacity to step out of our own enclosed “self” and to set out on the great journey of love into the fullness of reality, into the blossoming of communion with God and, in God, with all things. And it is a reciprocal gaze of love and desire that God seeks from us, nothing different and nothing less, a gaze and a desire that harnesses us in a love that transfigures our whole life according to the likeness of the One who has first looked upon us and loved us: harnesses us in his love. For his love is the beginning and the end, and every moment in between. And this love touches us at the heart of our heart, at the core of our desire, at the center of our longing and our capacity, and seeks to set us free to be what we have been fashioned to be, and thus to grant us happiness: happiness in the God who is abundant desire and overflowing love and intimacy. In the light of all of this, let us conclude this reflection on the first words of this dialogue with a beautiful passage from Saint Augustine, which we already had cause to quote in the introduction, but which merits revisiting now: I implore you to live with me and, by believing, to run with me; let us long for our heavenly country, let us sigh for our heavenly home, let us truly feel that here we are strangers. What shall we then see? Let the gospel tell us: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. You will come to the fountain, with whose dew you have already been sprinkled. Instead of the ray of light which was sent through slanting and winding ways into the heart of your darkness, you will see the light itself in all its purity and brightness. It is to see and experience this light that you are now being cleansed. Dearly beloved, John himself says, we are the sons of God, and it has not yet been disclosed what we shall be; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.i ******** NOTE ******** i. From A Treatise on John, 35.8-9. In the Liturgy of the Hours, Office of Readings for Tuesday of the Thirty-Fourth Week in Ordinary Time. In this meditation I would like to include another reflection from the book mentioned above, and to thus bring full circle our little excursus on the beauty of intimacy with God and the full blossoming of prayer. In the book Responding to the Thirst of God I have spoken of the spiritual marriage, the state of mature union with God, as the complete reciprocal “yes” of loving surrender between God and the human person, and as the intimacy born of this complete mutual gift. I have also tried to show, illustrated by the experience recounted by John of the Cross, how this union—achieved by the pure grace of God transfiguring all the faculties of the person—effects a complete permeation of the individual by divine love, such that in all things they are moved by love to love in the very likeness of God’s own love, “loving God in God through God with the love of God.” Here all the energies of soul and body, previously fractured, dissipated, and dulled by sin, are healed and set free by love, to flow in undimmed light and unhindered intensity back to God. And in God they flow also in response to the authentic voice of all created reality, speaking its word from God, and allowing the person to discover and love God in and through them, since now, indeed, it discovers and loves all things in God whom it loves beyond all things.
After this, I tried to illustrate how this “pure love,” this gratuitous exercise of love in God, is the source of all authentic fruitfulness, healing, and transformation in the world, since, in the last analysis, “God makes use of nothing else than love.” Whatever may be our vocation or the unique contours of our life, God looks and sees only love, naked before him to whose gaze all things are revealed. And so tapping into this boundless source of love, this abundant wellspring of charity, this font of intimacy, is the all-important gift and task of human life. Sanctity is the great mystery to which we are invited, sanctity as a return to the original state lost in Eden, and indeed a holiness transcending what was possible there, through the Redemption and Transfiguration wrought by Jesus Christ through his Paschal Mystery. By letting this Redemption unfold itself in our lives—through the reciprocal encounter of thirsts, through the growing movement of shared surrender, through a gaze of love that becomes love loving love, beloved loving lover and lover loving beloved, purifying the heart to its deepest wellsprings and ordering it wholly to God in God—by truly allowing Redemption to have its effect in us, we come to know, live, and experience what it means to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). And here we come to the most important, most central of the dimensions of sanctity, of transformation in and union with God. For as I have tried to emphasize again and again, sanctity is not merely a state of virtue or natural human wholeness, nor is it best understood as an ascetical achievement nor even, in fact, as the climax of human virtue. It is rather the manifestation and fruit of passionate love. Yes, in its inner core and throbbing heartbeat it is the Trinity. Sanctity is union with the Trinity, a living, vibrant, unreserved intimacy with the Trinity in faith, hope, and love, that permeates all of a person’s life and the entirety of their being. Let us take a look now more deeply at what this intimacy looks like, as a way of glimpsing—through the lens of mystical experience—the breathtaking destiny that awaits us in heaven: This breathing of the air is an ability that the soul states God will give her there in the communication of the Holy Spirit. By his divine breathlike spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father. This spiration of love is the Holy Spirit himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation in order to unite her to himself. There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity in an open and manifest degree. And this kind of spiration of the Holy Spirit in the soul, by which God transforms her into himself, is so sublime, delicate, and deep a delight that a mortal tongue finds it indescribable, nor can the human intellect, as such, in any way grasp it. Even what comes to pass in the communication given in this temporal transformation is unspeakable, for the soul united and transformed in God breathed out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her. In the transformation that the soul possesses in this life, the same spiration passes from God to the soul and from the soul to God with notable frequency and blissful love, although not in the open and manifest degree proper to the next life. Such I believe was St. Paul’s meaning when he said: Since you are children of God, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, calling to the Father [Gal. 4:6]. This is true of the Blessed in the next life and of the perfect in this life according to the ways described. One should not think it impossible that the soul be capable of so sublime an activity as this breathing in God through participation as God breathes in her. For, granted that God favors her by union with the Most Blessed Trinity, in which she becomes deiform and God through participation, how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself! Yet God accomplishes this in the soul through communication and participation. This is transformation in the three Persons in power and wisdom and love, and thus the soul is like God through this transformation. He created her in his image and likeness that she might attain such resemblance. No knowledge or power can describe how this happens, unless by explaining how the Son of God attained and merited such a high state for us, the power to be children of God, as St. John says [Jn. 1:12]. Thus the Son asked of the Father in St. John’s Gospel: Father, I desire that where I am those you have given me may also be with me, that they may see the glory you have given me [Jn. 17:24], that is, that they may perform in us by participation the same work that I do by nature; that is, breathe the Holy Spirit. And he adds: I do not ask, Father, only for those present, but for those also who will believe in me through their doctrine; that all of them may be one as you, Father, in me and I in you, that thus they be one in us. The glory which you have given me I have given them that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me; that they may be perfect in one; that the world may know that you have sent me and loved them as you have loved me [Jn. 17:20-23]. The Father loves them by communicating to them the same love he communicates to the Son, though not naturally as to the Son but, as we said, through unity and transformation of love. It should not be thought that the Son desires here to ask the Father that the saints be one with him essentially and naturally as the Son is with the Father, but that they may be so through the union of love, just as the Father and the Son are one in unity of love. Accordingly, souls possess the same goods by participation that the Son possesses by nature. As a result they are truly gods by participation, equals and companions of God. Wherefore St. Peter said: May grace and peace be accomplished and perfect in you in the knowledge of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, as all things of his divine power that pertain to life and piety are given us through the knowledge of him who called us with his own glory and power, by whom he has given us very great and precious promises, that by these we may be made partakers of the divine nature [2 Pet. 1:2-4]. These are words from St. Peter in which he clearly indicates that the soul will participate in God himself by performing in him, in company with him, the work of the Most Blessed Trinity because of the substantial union between the soul and God. Although this participation will be perfectly accomplished in the next life, still in this life when the soul has reached the state of perfection, as has the soul we are here discussing, she obtains a foretaste and noticeable trace of it in the way we are describing, although as we said it is indescribable. (The Spiritual Canticle, 39.3-6) “The soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her.” I remember quite vividly that, when I was in high school, I had printed out this sentence on a small slip of paper and put it on a poster board on the wall of my bedroom. I read it often, as the words burst with meaning, almost the like breath of God himself, the Holy Spirit shared by the Father and the Son, was reaching out to make himself known and felt. Such is God’s desire for us. He uses every means possible in order to draw near to us, to open our hearts to him, to make space in us for his gift, and, finally, to transform us and elevate to make us capable of participating in the very innermost mystery of his own divine life! And as we see in these words of John of the Cross, the innermost life of God is a most blessed embrace, a sweet and everlasting kiss, the union of the Father and the Son in the shared breath of their single Spirit. How should it be incredible, indeed, that these words deeply touch the heart, for they reach back to our most fundamental origin in God at the beginning of our lives—breathed forth through his creative Spirit—and towards our eternal destiny, in which we shall breathe with the Father and the Son the one Holy Spirit whom they share? But it is indeed incredible! Yet God wants us to believe, and not to doubt, for “how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself!” To understand, know, and love in the Trinity as the Trinity itself understands, knows, and loves. What greater union is there than this, to be so immersed in God, so permeated with God, so intimately joined to him that, as Saint Paul says, “I shall know even as I myself am known” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12). To see, know, and love all things as God himself does, since God’s own mind, his own heart, his own gaze of love, his own experience, has become my own, my birthright through adoption and my very life through nuptial union! Yes, this is my destiny, to know and love all things in God, through God, to know and love myself in the gaze of his own love for me, to know and love each person in his gaze upon them; but above all, it is to know and love God himself in God, to love the Father with the love of the Son, and the Son with the love of the Father, and the Spirit with the love of both and both Father and Son with the love of the Spirit! For the love of God is one, shared indivisibly among the three divine Persons, this love that is the very substance, the very essence, of the divinity. And through grace it too becomes the very substance and essence of my own life, joined as my own human nature is to it, elevated and transfigured by the mystery of Redemption and sanctification. What blessed beauty, what radiant joy, what perfect freedom! To be caught up by God’s sheer gift into the innermost embrace of the Trinity, to be right in the midst of their ecstatic intimacy! To be so close, to be so intimately given and received, and to receive them so deeply, to be so permeated by their love, that I breathe with the Father and the Son the breath of their Spirit, poured out ceaselessly into me with all the force and intensity of their love for me; and that my whole being thrills with joy as the Spirit vibrates through me, speaking a word of pure and perfect love back to the Son, my Bridegroom, and, with the Son, to the Father, who has become my Father too, and in whose delighted gaze I eternally rejoice. I cannot avoid giving expression here, in the context of prayer and the anointing of the Spirit, to the radiant expanse of beauty that opens out before our contemplating gaze. I cannot avoid giving at least some gesture toward the awesome depths to which intimacy with God leads, in order to stir up anew in our hearts a longing for the One who made us—a thirst corresponding to his thirst for us—and for the joy of consummate intimacy with him. And while the ways and degrees of explicitness with which such blossoming of union with God are experienced in this life are as various as there are persons in whom it is realized, the inner essence is the same for all, and truly transfigures both life, thought, and feeling such that they are as they have never been before, a true “new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24), yes “a new man, for “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). And the intimate knowledge of faith, the ardent longing and peaceful reaching-out of hope, and the tender surrender and kindly exodus of love—the mystery of God’s abiding in us and us in him—is realized in all of us if we allow it to be, even though it is the journey of a lifetime. And there, beyond the differences that mark us—and also within them—we meet and are united in the single truth that grips us all and draws us into the intimacy of the Trinity’s embrace.
Allow me, therefore, to share some words that I have written before in the book Responding to the Thirst of God, which seek to tap into the heart of the mystery of prayer and intimacy with God. Hopefully doing so in this context shall help to deepen and widen our meditations considerably, and, more primarily, shall help to make the love of God and the depth of the union he desire to have with us all the more tangible, that we may plunge into it without reserve in confident childlike trust and spousal ardor. And so we begin, in the remainder of this meditation and in the next: The reason of our existence is to quench the thirst of God. I don’t say even “Jesus” or “on the cross,” but “of God.” Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, “Thirst of God.” (Mother Teresa) i These few words indicate, I believe, a deep intuition and experience of the heart of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, which, in her simplicity, she saw no need to expound upon. And indeed it is best known by walking the path ourselves, the path of love-responding-to-love, the path that leads us ever deeper into the discovery of the thirst in the heart of God. We should indeed pray and contemplate deeply on these words: the thirst of God. This is not merely the thirst of the man Jesus; it is the thirst of the entire Trinity, the fullness of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it is not merely a momentary thirst either—“on the Cross”—but rather an eternal trait of the divinity itself, one of the attributes of the interpersonal relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit. It is, in fact, simply a God-given icon, an image, of the very nature of God’s own love, both in the ardor of its eternal movement—the never-ceasing dance of mutual delight and reciprocal self-giving between the three divine Persons—as well as in its condescending, compassionate, and pained longing for the redemption and salvation of each one of God’s children. Is not God’s desire for us to know the nature of his thirst an expression of the ardor, purity, and intimacy of his love? In other words, he wants us to experience his love so deeply that we know not only what it feels like to be loved by him but also what it feels like for him to love. This is indeed a trait, perhaps the essential trait, of a mature love, even on the natural human level. Whenever my heart is expanded to the point that I am able to feel with and for another person their own experience, and not merely to be preoccupied with my experience of them or with what they think of me, the true tenderness of love is born. And here a thirst is awakened that far surpasses what so often parades itself as true love, as eros, as desire for another. For it is a thirst born not only of my innate desire and capacity for relationship, for intimacy, my own desire to be loved, but equally and inseparably of my capacity to love in the act of going out of myself, to empathize with another, to care for them and enter into their own subjectivity. Here, indeed, eros and agape are already becoming one as they are inseparably one in God. John Paul II indeed understood sanctity and the new creation—that state of eternal consummation that awaits us and the entire cosmos at the end of time—in these terms: in terms of “intersubjectivity” through love. He writes: The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God’s gift of himself to man. In this reciprocal gift of self by man, a gift that will become completely and definitively beatifying as the response worthy of a personal subject to God’s gift of himself, the “virginity” or rather the virginal state of the body will manifest itself completely as the eschatological fulfillment of the “spousal” meaning of the body, as the specific sign and authentic expression of personal subjectivity as a whole. In this way, then, the eschatological situation in which “they will take neither wife nor husband” has its solid foundation in the future state of the personal subject, when, as a consequence of the vision of God “face to face,” a love of such depth and power of concentration on God himself will be born in the person that it completely absorbs the person’s whole psychosomatic subjectivity. This concentration of knowledge (“vision”) and love on God himself—a concentration that cannot be anything but full participation in God’s inner life, that is, in trinitarian Reality itself—will at the same time be the discovery in God of the whole “world” of relations that are constitutive of the world’s perennial order (“cosmos”). This concentration will above all be man’s rediscovery of himself, not only in the depths of his own person, but also in that union that is proper to the world of persons in their psychosomatic constitution. Certainly this is a union of communion. The concentration of knowledge and love on God himself in the trinitarian communion of Persons can find a beatifying response in those who will become sharers in the “other world” only through realizing reciprocal communion commensurate with created persons. … We should think of the reality of the “other world” in the categories of the rediscovery of a new, perfect subjectivity of each person and at the same time of the rediscovery of a new, perfect intersubjectivity of all. In this way this reality means the true and definitive fulfillment of human subjectivity and, on this basis, the definitive fulfillment of the “spousal” meaning of the body. The total concentration of created, redeemed, and glorified subjectivity on God himself will not take man away from this fulfillment, but—on the contrary—will introduce him into it and consolidate him in it. One can say, finally, that in this way the eschatological reality will become the source of the perfect realization of the “trinitarian order” in the created world of persons. (Theology of the Body, 68.3-4, 395-396) We see the radiant fruit of the total mutual surrender of love: permeating our consciousness completely with participation in the life of God, and indeed making the entire cosmos radiant with the light of the Trinity. In the new creation, all things, all relationships, will be perfectly fulfilled precisely through returning fully into God, not there to be submerged, lost, or made anonymous, but rather to be affirmed and consummated in their true meaning and beauty in the light of the love of the Trinity. To return now to the theme of this reflection. We see unfolded before us a central dimension of the Catholic faith and of true spirituality: it passes by way of Christ, in the Spirit, to the Father. It passes through the heart of the Paschal Mystery into the heart of the Blessed Trinity. For the Paschal Mystery is not defined merely on the basis of death and resurrection, of suffering and solidarity—being the passage of Christ’s loving gift of self from the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, through the Passion on Good Friday and the silence of Holy Saturday, to the glorious Resurrection on Easter Sunday. It also marks out our own path of healing and transformation, our own passage into the fullness of love: assimilating into ourselves the very life of Jesus, passing with him from death into life, from loneliness into communion, from the narrowness of sin into the expansiveness of love, in which, in fact, we are assimilated into him. Through this assimilation, we are made partakers of the divine nature, made capable of sharing, with Christ and in Christ, in the very eternal life of the Trinity. Yes, for in fact the Paschal Mystery seen in its deepest meaning is a window onto the heart of God. This is the impact of Mother Teresa’s words quoted at the beginning of this reflection. The thirst revealed to her through the Crucified Jesus, the thirst with which the Son of God cried out as he hung upon the Cross, was not a merely passing thirst, a desperate cry of pain or loneliness or suffering. No, it was a manifestation of the eternal thirst in the heart of the Trinity to give himself to us in love, and, through this love, to awaken and receive our reciprocal gift. It was the revelation of God’s infinite desire to love and to be loved. It was a marriage of God and humanity, wedded as one in the flesh of Jesus Christ, totally given and totally welcoming us. It was the exhalation of the very breath of the Holy Spirit into the suffocating lungs of humanity, and the inhalation of humanity into the heart of God himself: this is what the cry of love, and the final breath of Christ on the Cross, means! And this is the significance of his Resurrection! His Paschal Mystery, in other words, was the unveiling—and the gift!—of the essence of God as intimacy, as the perfect communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which even in the pain of the Passion was not torn asunder, not even lessened in intensity or subjective depth, but rather pervaded our entire universe, even into its darkest places, with the healing and consoling light of eternal love. For here Christ cries out: “I still love you and long for you, however broken you find yourself to be! I have come to you, touched you, and redeemed you, espousing you in this way to myself, that I may be one with you in this life and for all eternity. Yes, I want you to be with me forever, where I myself eternally am, in the bosom of the Father, that you may behold there my glory which he has given me before the foundation of the world. Yes, in beholding my glory you are made one with my glory, taken up like the log of wood into the burning flames, pervaded, healed, transfigured, and made a participant in the very Love that first created you. And now this Love has redeemed you, granting you the capacity—by responding to my thirst, my invitation, my gift—to share in this Love forever, with me, breathing before our Father the one Holy Spirit who eternally unites us.” The Paschal Mystery in its historical dimension, therefore—as suffering, solidarity, light breaking through darkness—begins to fade, even as its eternal significance comes to the fore and proves everlastingly significant, eternally present before and within the heart of the Trinity. For it is nothing but the mutual breathing of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit, nothing but their ecstatic mutual self-giving, penetrating into the entire cosmos and every human heart, in order to sweep us all up into the innermost embrace that is theirs. Through this gift we share with them, with utmost subjective intensity and totality, the joy of their own subjective life of love: in the gaze of mutual delight, the perfect gift of reciprocal self-donation, and the utter and endless joy of complete intimacy. *************** NOTES *************** i. Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire, 280. |
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
January 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
