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Let us continue to contemplate the mystery of play, of the gratuity of love and intimacy. If we are honest with ourselves, we all long for this mystery of playfulness and intimacy, for the intimacy of play, more than for anything else—and if we truly love, we desire it not only for ourselves but for all persons. For play is defined precisely as that reality that is sought and embraced, not in pursuit of another end or out of necessity, but simply for its own sake, because it is in itself supremely desirable; it is in itself beautiful, good, and true. It is, therefore, by definition beatitude. That is: heaven.
But it is also not any kind of play in the sense that it is identical with entertainment. In fact, play and entertainment are very different, almost on opposite ends of the spectrum. For I experience entertainment whenever I am doing or receiving something that merely feels good and relaxing on the sensible and emotional level of my being, something that in a sense limits me and distracts me from the deeper dimensions of myself and of the world. Such at least is its meaning in common parlance. Authentic play and playfulness of course integrate these good elements into something higher, deeper, and purer, more rich and more full. In this respect, the word “entertainment” could just as well refer to something more akin to play, though we would need to re-evangelize the word so that it could again mean what is implied in the text from Hebrews 13:2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” To entertain is thus to open myself to welcome what approaches me from the outside, to allow it to enter into myself and to enrich me, and just as importantly to be a good host to it that it may find fitting reception. This is true for “entertaining guests,” and thus is primal hospitality of heart, and it is also true for our receptivity to the beauty and meaning of reality itself and of every moment of life. In this respect, play and entertainment are the same at their root, though play goes farther and stretches wider, for it is what blossoms in the fullness with which we entertain reality, namely, the abundance of meaningful living: it is the activity which is also contemplation and the contemplation that is also action, the rest that is also attentiveness and the leisure that is re-creation, the work which manifests gratuity and the gratuity that stirs us to work, the striving that is held in the certainty of already-having-been-found and the sense of having been found that stirs us to generous response, the compassion that suffers with the beloved and seeks their welfare and the peace of God that allows us to experience and bear such compassion without the disturbance that makes us bereft of light. Play is therefore both an activity and a disposition. It is a disposition that can manifest in every activity, a way of being and of seeing, which is capable of pervading, sanctifying, setting free, and transfiguring all of life, in its every aspect; it is capable of transforming the most burdensome of responsibilities and the most difficult of struggles to the most fragile and transient of joys, giving them all the savor of God’s eternity and granting us the sure and certain hope that all our struggle is meaningful, is indeed held by loving hands that assure the victory, and that all we desire, all we taste of happiness and joy in this life, of love and communion, will exist forever—utterly fulfilled—in the home of the Trinity’s everlasting embrace. In a very mysterious way, in a transformed heart love and play become identical. For love is the responsiveness to be moved by what is beautiful, good, and true, to offer my heart and my life as a home for who and what I love, that I may be moved by it, and that, with utmost tenderness and attunement, I may dance around it in cherishing care, in delight, and in reverent esteem. It is also the acceptance of being loved, cherished, and delighted in by the one who loves me, and who thus welcomes me into the dance of his love. And if God loves us in such a manner, we are truly his playmates. We have been created, beyond everything else and in everything else, to be his eternal playmates, sharing in the joy of his own intimacy. And our whole journey through this life, with all of its loss and its finding, its darkness and its light, its fears and its hopes, is really just cradled in that short moment after mother hides her face until, at the end of life, she reveals herself and says “Peek-a-boo!” and we cannot help but laugh in utter delight. Indeed, this very mystery is woven throughout every moment and drama of our life, if only we have the eyes to see it and the hearts to embrace it. All of our sins and struggles, as long as we are willing to continue seeking God, are nothing in comparison with his love and his providence, which weaves all together for our good. It does not matter how great this is or how much we feel mired and stuck in our brokenness and sin, for in fact the more we live the more we realize, with the deep knowledge of the heart, the depth and extent of our sinfulness, of our poverty and woundedness. But this awareness itself grows from the soil of God’s mercy, cradled in his grace, and so too he makes water flow from the rock, and confidence in him springs from our very poverty. Therefore, the best thing for us to do is not to get uptight and fearful, rigid and forceful, and preoccupied with ourselves, but to let our hearts be enraptured by God’s beauty and love, which comes to us without ceasing, and which gradually sets us free from ourselves and into ourselves, into Christ, for it sets us free for love. To play, in this regard, means both 1) to live gratuitously, to gaze upon God in self-forgetfulness, captured by his beauty and goodness both in himself and in all that he has made, and also 2) to strive for holiness with humor, taking ourselves lightly and never being surprised by our sins and foolishness, but rather welcoming every moment as an opportunity to encounter his sweet mercy anew and more deeply. It also means 3) devoting ourselves to listening to and responding to the unique word of God spoken in every created reality and in every single person, living our whole life as a “dance” of attunement, in sensitivity and wonder, to all that approaches us in our poverty, ready to say always anew: “So this is what you are about here, my God!” Play is therefore intrinsically generous, or oblative, if it is truly alive. It is the creativity and inventiveness of love that responds with wholehearted generosity and lighthearted wonder in every moment. And this is why the saints are the most playful of creatures, for they lived lives of total and radical love for God and others, a love buoyed up by ravishing beauty, a love born of the certainty of having been loved first, and always, with God’s infinite and eternal Love. As we come to know such love, and the confidence that it generates, we can be like Thérèse who delighted to be too little to confront the spiritual warfare with demons head-on, but instead “ducked under” temptation as she once, as a small child, went under a horse’s legs into the house of her father. Then we can be like John of the Cross who said that the surest way of conquering any temptation is not to fight it, but simply to turn to God and to make an act of faith, hope, and love, to look upon the One before whom the demons flee, and before whom indeed all that is broken and disordered within us eventually dissolves like dew melting in the blazing sun. All evil, in the end, is conquered best and most effectively not by all of our efforts or our self-preoccupation, all of our practices and resolutions and goals, but simply by a bridal love for Jesus. Or even better: by his love for us. “Not I, but Christ my Lord.” And all of life, the good and the bad, can be subsumed into glory through our Abba’s utter and sure goodness, his incredible and world-conquering mercy, and the childlike confidence that this births within us. It can all be subsumed into the wonder-filled and lighthearted beauty of authentic play—his play in us and our play in him—for whether we acknowledge it or not, we are already held right in the heart of God’s own eternal Play, which is identical with his Love, with the everlasting, playful intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Saint Augustine speaks about two different attitudes that we can have toward the realities that we encounter in our life: one is the attitude of use (uti) and the other is the attitude of disinterested contemplation or delight (frui). Uti refers to using something for the sake of an end outside of and extrinsic to itself, for an other end than itself, whether that be our own benefit or some other matter. On the other hand, frui refers to delighting in and cherishing something for its own sake, simply because it is good and worthy of such a response; and thus it is the gratuity of sheer for-its-own-sake-ness. There is obviously a domain of rightful uti in the life of each one of us—for example, working and eating and exercising and sleeping and many other things are done, not fundamentally because we find them meaningful or valuable in themselves, but because of what they serve, what they facilitate and make possible (though of course in utilitarian things we can also tap into a wellspring of fruitfulness and also the sheer fruition of beauty in the reality itself). There are, on the other hand, things before which no utility is possible or appropriate; for instance I cannot turn the gratuitous beauty of a sunset to my own ends, even if I may wish to do so. In fact, the sunset shall have its effect within me, it shall do things only whenever I do not try to make it do anything, but simply let it be what it is for its own sake, let its beauty speak its word and sing its song in itself and in me.
In fact, a paradoxical truth is that whenever I relate to reality, not in mere uti, but in the gratuity of love and contemplation—without seeking any other end, even my own enrichment—I am spontaneously enriched in the deepest way by the beauty that God has made, and which he himself ceaselessly affirms and in which he delights; I am enriched by the unique dignity and irreplaceable dignity of who God has made the other person to be, or of the beauty he has poured out into this particular reality that he has made, be it a flower, or a sky, or a landscape, or music, or anything else. This is the fruition of authentic frui, which overflows of its own nature to enrich and to bear fruit. It is something far different than productivity, which is born of uti; utility leads to productivity and frui leads to fruition, to authentic creativity and fruitfulness, to conceiving and giving birth, and thus to co-creation. And indeed we could say that a contemplative frui, a loving gaze upon the dignity, value, and unique beauty of reality is precisely the wellspring of authentic love—and thus love is not merely obedience to an external command, which is also legitimate and necessary, though it organically leads to a fuller receptive-responsiveness. Love is a way of treating other persons and things first of all because it is a way of being, a stance of receptivity and responsiveness, that allows them to be, and that shares in God’s own delight and contemplation before all that he has made: “God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good” (Gen 1:31). When I truly love someone or something, I cannot help but devote time and attention to that which I love, seeking to foster and care for and enhance that upon which my affection has been fixed. And this attitude of frui is in fact far more fruitful and effective than mere uti could ever be. For example, if I write fairy stories in order to turn a profit or even to try to convince other people of certain truths, utilizing the stories for a purpose other than themselves, they shall be far less profound and indeed far less effective and fruitful, than if I wrote them simply because I love them. This, in fact, is what it most authentically means to exist for the praise of God’s glory, which every created thing already intrinsically does, and which is a mystery we are also meant to embrace and to enhance through our attention and activity, our contemplation and creativity; it means to live and to love gratuitously, recognizing that all is God, all is God’s sacrament, all shines with his mysterious light, embracing reality simply because it is beautiful, because God lives in it and it sings forth his wonders. The example of fairy stories is an apt one, for part of the genius of imaginative fiction, and specifically of what we term in our contemporary culture “fantasy,” is that it reconnects us to the gratuity and for-its-own-sake-ness of life and being, and teaches us again how to engage with reality, with the narrative and the drama of existence, precisely because of its mysterious beauty, its adventure, its romance, rather than as a burdensome task or a moralistic demand. It opens us again to wonder and play and contemplation, to contact with what G.K. Chesterton term “the ethics of elfland,” which is in fact the only true foundation upon which mature responsibility and activity in this world can be built and can flourish in the abundance that God originally intended. We see this clearly in the Garden of Eden before sin, in which Adam’s “tilling and keeping” of the beauty of creation entrusted to his care was held wholly within his primal wonder and playful responsiveness to all that God had made and given to him in sheer generosity. His work was identical to his play and was held by playfulness, just as God’s own creative activity in the world, and his own creation of the world in the beginning, is but an expression of the eternal playfulness ever existing in the intimate life shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the heart of the Trinity. Thus human play is in fact a reflection of and a share in the innermost disposition and act of God himself, of the Holy Trinity, who is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit eternally united in a ceaseless act of reciprocal play which goes by the name of intimacy. G.K. Chesterton said:
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.i This reveals another dimension of play, paradoxical and yet liberating. True playfulness reaches maturity in a human heart only with the simultaneous blossoming of love, the love that conquers fear. This is why the licentious freedoms of modernity do not unseal authentic liberty and the joy born of it, but rather lead to sadness and disillusionment, to the burden of compromise, to the confusion of wondering why all of my best efforts keep running up against limits and frustrations. On the other hand, a generous heart that lovingly embraces the burdens of responsibility, of the law of God and the call to care for others, as well as the deepest and most authentic inclinations of one’s own humanity fashioned by God, sets out upon the path to true freedom and wonder. But the inverse is also true: a heart that is open to wonder-filled awe before reality, and the play that is born within it, alone can truly embrace and live the drama and responsibility of life authentically, as the true story that it is being written by the hand and heart of a loving, playful God. In both cases we touch the paradoxical fullness of the one and only path to freedom, namely, truth; and truth is not merely an ideal to be pursuit or a spiritual goal but something inscribed in the very fabric of the universe, and of the human body itself. It is the primal playfulness that permeates the cosmos. And when the Scriptures and the Church speak to us of the nature of authentic play, setting limits on the unrestricted use of our freedom which would harm us rather than help us, enslave us rather than liberate us, they are in fact not imposing anything beyond what is already given in God’s creative intentions from the beginning, setting our feet on the broad path of liberty and wholeness, preventing us from countless pitfalls which we perhaps cannot see. As Chesterton says elsewhere: [The Catholic Church’s] experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them. On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. … Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.ii We thus see a paradoxical “coming-together” of precisely the dimensions of life that we have been seeking to traverse between and thread together in these fragments: the constraints that set love free and the freedom of love that gives meaning to restraint even while keeping its eyes on the joyous freedom of God. They really are brother and sister, or even better, they really are like lungs and the ribs that protect them, or like the human body and its epidermis, or a womb that encloses the child and both protects and nourishes it. Love always has form because love is always specific, enacted, incarnate. And the restraints that give form to love are part of love’s blossoming; they do not thereby constrict the heart in such a way that it loses either its sensitivity to uniqueness, its spontaneity, or its capacity for mature judgment of specific situations. And this is true not only because such rules set an “outer limit,” a wall to shield from a precipice, but also because they reveal a trajectory. When truly understood, they not only show pitfalls but also unveil values, being a pedagogy in freedom and the true nature of play. This is how the Psalmist is able to say: “In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word” (Ps 119:14-16). May we rediscover anew today that the word of God truly gives joy to the heart, acting as both a balm and as light, giving understanding to the eyes of the soul and stirring that wonder—every in hoary-haired old men—that is native only to small children. The law is not opposed to the spirit, for any spirit that is truly alive—any spirit truly in accord with the Spirit—spontaneously embraces the law, the word, and in fact cherishes it as sweet nourishment and delightful fare. And yet the inverse is also true, and in fact even more fundamentally so: that only the spirit of love, of gratuity and play and wonder, can discern the authentic meaning of the “form” of love, and embrace it freely and fully in the manner and the disposition that God desires, which is that of play. In this way alone can the heart mature into that liberty that springs forth from the very center of the heart, from its inner wellspring where the Trinity dwells, and thus receive also every word and call of God with freedom, spontaneity, and the spirit of lightness and confidence, for it corresponds with the deep voice of the Spirit that already springs up within the human heart. When we mature deeply into the love that fulfills the law even while surpassing it, we realize that love and truth are one and the same. We realize that the word of longing in our heart for freedom and the word of truth that approaches us from the outside are one and inseparable, in the same manner that the eternal Word of the Father is inseparable from the Spirit in whom he is begotten, and whom he breathes forth into our world, that Spirit who draws us all to him, to the Word, in whom we become one with the Father. ***************** i. G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 4. ed. George Martin et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 167. ii. First part from: “Why I Am A Catholic.” https://www.chesterton.org/why-i-am-a-catholic/ Second from: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1959), 145. Available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130 At the end of this cycle of fragments, I would like to spend a moment reflecting upon this one final thing, taking a very deliberate turn back to the center. Or rather, I would like to consolidate and deepen, with prolonged and explicit attention, what the last handful of fragments have brought to the fore, and to solidify this re-centering movement that they have begun. I am humbly aware that an ill-spoken word, or inappropriately given advice, or a perspective too narrowly-written, can have agonizing consequences for an individual, leading them not deeper into the truth of God’s unique plan and specific call for them, but rather out of it, into a place of obscurity, confusion, and doubt. This is one of the difficulties and limitations of the written word, that advice that may be right for one person could be diametrically the opposite for another. In all that we read, we must therefore hold ourselves at a certain objective distance, not in order not to listen, no to be docile to the Spirit, but precisely in order to be authentically docile, to listen with true discernment. For what I read, in the plans of providence, may in fact become nothing but a foil for God to speak into me the direct opposite of what I have read. This happens often, I suspect. But often this confrontation doesn’t happen without conflict and pain, as the heart parses out what is true from what is false, what is wrongly applied from what is truly the voice of the Spirit. This, in fact, is one of the reasons why in all of my writings, I always try to speak from the centermost point where the lines of paradox intersect, and to speak in such a way that persons on both sides of the spectrum can benefit. I hope in some small measure I have succeeded in this, even in the prior fragments in which I have spoken of more secondary things.
But don’t take my word for it. Bishop Erik Varden himself writes: Even as it is risky and irresponsible to cite verses of Scripture out of context as if they were absolute, self-sufficient utterances, we must beware of reading the sayings of the Fathers isolatedly. We may of course have recourse to anthologies of the sayings, or put together our own, which is rather what I am doing in this series. What we must guard against is the attempt to simplify a many-faceted tradition. The very idea of a ‘systematic collection’ of teachings could lead us to assume that a single coherent line is being followed, with all component parts aligned to it. But no; there is immense variety in the Fathers’ approaches, for human experience is various, as are human needs, human vocations. The sayings, we must never forget, are almost always situational. They respond to specific questions arisen in specific circumstances. A counsel appropriate for one monk in a particular temptation might be disastrous for another monk going through something quite different. The Fathers sought to be ‘all things to all people’. The foundation for their discernment was undisputed: Christ’s Gospel in all its radicality, with not an iota laid aside for convenience. They knew, though, that Christ, supremely free, ‘plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his’; and so that the task of a spiritual father or mother is not to impose a single one-size-fits-all model of putative perfection, but to assist the workings of a personal providence. As a result we find instances, in the collection, of apparent contradiction as, now and again, advice is given that seems to fly in the face of principles previously laid down as axiomatic.i This reality of “personal providence,” and a profound sensitivity to the rich diversity of situations and calls, is very important. Indeed, without it, a balanced appraisal and implementation of the principles of the spiritual life, and of truth itself, is simply impossible. But for now let me turn to that center that I referenced in the beginning of this fragment. In all of my words until now, I have been passing back and forth across the distance between two extremes, as it were, in order to try to weave them together into a harmonious unity: letter and spirit, discipline and freedom, removal and rediscovery, tradition as both ressourcement and aggiornamento, the importance of striving for holiness and yet the utterly miniscule significance of such striving in comparison with the breathtaking love of God that saves us in the very midst of our frailty and weakness. One of the deepest lessons I have learned in my life is that the reality that encompasses all of these paradoxes is play. Really, play? Yes, really. If the mystery of play is understood deeply and broadly enough, it is a doorway into the deepest and widest dimension of reality, indeed is our participation within it—namely, the manner of living and loving proper to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the heart of eternity. The purpose of man’s life is play, that is, the gratuitous beauty of sheer for-its-own-sake-ness, which also goes by the name love. All that I have written in my life can perhaps be contained in that one sentence. All the drama of life and growth, all the beauty of creation and of God, all the tension between longing for eternity and joy in the present, between longing in the present and the joy of eternity—everything is held and bound together with the golden cord of God’s own eternal playfulness. As the book of Proverbs expresses in the person of the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, the Son of the Father: “I was before him like a little child; I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). The Father created the world in his Son, in this single gaze of delight in which he ever looks upon his beloved Son, and upon us, and the Son pervades and fills the world with his own eternal life of delighted play, even to the point of entering into this world to redeem it and fulfill it—like an author writing himself into a story that he may share in its narrative and its drama, and thus in its unique beauty and its consummation—so that it may rediscover its true meaning and vocation once again, and be enabled to live it forever: and this vocation is to participate fully in the eternal play of the Father and the Son in the joy and intimacy of the Spirit whom they share. God holds the world forever in the gaze of his delight, playing upon its surface and insinuating himself into its every part, into every atom or quark, into every structure, into every life and relationship, every pain or loss, beauty or gift, every grief and every joy, writing through all of it a single beautiful story of redemption, a beautiful romance, a narrative of love for each and every one of us and for humanity as a whole, indeed for the entire cosmos, which is destined to find its everlasting consummation in the embrace of the Trinity. **************** i. https://coramfratribus.com/archive/desert-fathers-33/ To this end, let us not allow ourselves to get caught up in the round-and-round ruts of our own circular thinking or our self-referential striving. For hyper-intellectualism and hyper-asceticism are just as much illnesses of the human spirit as everything else, even if they are less visible. For they do not look like the “tax collectors and prostitutes” of Jesus’ day—and of our own—publicly scandalous and therefore widely condemned; they rather appear like the Pharisees who considered themselves the spiritual elite, and, in fact, even like the humble Pharisees who in their fearful or energetic striving for righteousness faced up against the limits of their own hearts and minds, their own activity and resolve. There is a reason that Jesus said to Nicodemus, a Pharisee who came to him in the night of his own striving, that he had to be born again. There is no other way for us to attain true freedom than a radical revolution of spirit and of mind. And this happens not only at the beginning of our journey of faith, but again and again. We cannot give into the temptation to “settle down” in our spiritual life, to find security and repose in our spiritual practices or theological concepts. For if we do so then our “spirituality” becomes a prison, even if it is a padded prison, and we fail to take flight into the expansive breadth of life and love for which God has created and redeemed us.
As G.K. Chesterton said about the appropriate remedy for those bound in the cycles of unhealthy thought: In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Really, the only way to get free of our self-preoccupation and our narrow “certainties” or fears is to “get off the train” in an act of faith and surrender, placing our life entirely in the hands of Another and setting out on an adventure into the abyss of his love. I am not, of course, speaking against the dogmas of our faith or the certainties that are born in the intellect and the heart in response to God’s self-revelation. These are not just signposts of some other reality beyond themselves, but purveyors of the everlasting truth of God and his way of relating to the world. But they are also not to be reduced to dry and sterile formulas that we can set as trophies on the shelves of our minds to display whenever we are asked a question or whenever we feel insecure and vulnerable before the anguish and the beauty of a reality that always surpasses our limited comprehension. They, rather, are but the voice of God communicating the mystery to which we surrender, and inviting ever anew precisely such surrender. After all, the very thesis of Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, from which these quotes come, is that the Christian creed alone can safeguard the true adventure and freedom of love from the countless pitfalls both moral and intellectual which could derail it. As he says, we all long for “the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.” Chesterton is also a proponent of the limits that safeguard freedom and provide it a space for flourishing. Whether they be the limits of a creed, or an act of the will, or a commitment, or anything else, love blossoms not in vagueness but in specificity, in the long-abiding contemplation of a single flower, in the enduring fidelity of a love that grows from first fervor to rich and succulent fruit. In this regard, he is of one mind with C.S. Lewis who spoke of the mystery of reality in which things, like the stable in Bethlehem, are “bigger on the inside that they are on the outside.” This is true whether it be the institution of marriage or small acts of charity or the depths of intimacy wrought between God and a human heart in apparently mundane and ordinary prayer. And precisely because of this, in all that we do, let us not cling or perform or build ourselves up. Let us rather walk in poverty and in wonder (they are really one and the same). Here let us call to mind the words of Thérèse of Lisieux, which reveal the real path of sanctity for all of us and the one disposition by which we can truly stand confidently in God’s presence: that of total poverty and empty-handedness, which receives everything from his hands like a beggar, like a child, at every moment. She said: After earth’s Exile, I hope to go and enjoy you in the Fatherland, But I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for your Love Alone with the one purpose of pleasing you: To console your Sacred Heart, and to save souls who will love you forever. In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands. Lord, I do not ask you to count my works. All our justice is stained in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own Justice and by your Love to receive you as my eternal possession. No other Throne, no other Crown do I want but you, my Beloved! i *********** i. Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. Quoted from: https://stpaulcenter.com/posts/st-thérèses-act-of-oblation-to-merciful-love G.K. Chesterton said about the mindset of those caught in narrow ruts of cyclical thinking and acting:
But if we attempt to trace [the madman’s] error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical [that of a paranoid man]; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: “Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, “All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth.” Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!” Do we not all need a little dose of this personal-cosmos shattering at certain times in our lives? Let us not give in to the temptation to suppose that the great drama of our life can be contained and delineated by what we can comprehend, classify, and control. Christianity in its earliest beginnings was called the Way for a reason. What we need is not to strengthen our systems and to reinforce our rigidity, but to have our “cosmos” smashed, so that we may be left in the open, vulnerable and exposed to the light of truth and the free breath of the Spirit. Indeed, as Chesterton says, how much larger our life is to the degree that our own self becomes smaller in it, for then we can really look out on other persons with wonder and awe, with curiosity and with pleasure, and can simply stand before the mystery of reality not with hands and heart, mind and members grasping, but with a spirit ready to journey ever deeper into the very heart of a Beauty that is ever new and surprising and yet ever welcoming and familiar. This adventure of beauty and of love, this romance before which all other romance pales in comparison, this is the true spirit of Christianity. Let us not allow it to grow stale. G.K. Chesterton wisely and pertly remarked:
The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. These words are highly important as we bring to a close these fragments relating to the nature of true reform, and on the interrelationship between letter and spirit, discipline and freedom, constancy and spontaneity. Obviously, without discipline there can be no freedom. Nonetheless, let us not deceive ourselves for a single minute into thinking that structures and disciplines by themselves can give us freedom, or even, for that matter, that they by themselves can preserve it. As Bishop Varden said, they must be filled with fire. And because of this, they also must recognize their penultimate significance, their secondary character, and yield up to the freedom that surpasses them, the freedom of the Spirit in us, who blows where he wills. For nothing can ultimately facilitate and preserve freedom except love itself, and the abundant exuberance of life that characterizes love. Of course, love makes use of everything, cherishing the “fence around the playground,” embracing with purposefulness and gratitude every part of life in this world and placing it all at the service of the freedom of love. Even so, it is not a stickler for details, not obsessed with observing every little petty aspect of life and getting bogged down with minor and peripheral observances, and certainly not with “arranging all one’s ducks in a row” in order, however subtly, to gather up spiritual riches to hold before God. After all, even as Jesus affirmed that every little thing has significance and beauty in the eyes of God, and that love loves also in the seemingly insignificant matters, he also issued a liberating invitation to cast off our self-centered preoccupation with minutae and instead to gain a large and expansive heart: “Woe to you, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Mt:23:23-34). Let us not be camel-swallowers! Let us not be “madmen” in the terms used by Chesterton, those who have lost the sense of imagination, of the poetry of life—what the French call joie de vivre—and have instead become trapped into the maze of their own thinking, running in circles trying to make sure every idea, every observance, every detail is in its proper place. If we do that we will run ourselves into the ground with complexity and all the breath of life within our existence will be spent going in circles rather than exhaling our life into the God who has first exhaled himself lovingly into us. Rather, let us recapture the wonder, the adventure, and the drama of the life of faith, which sets out into the great unknown and casts everything else aside in doing so. Whatever established structures, observances, and responsibilities there may be in our given vocation, whether priesthood or religious life or marriage or the way of the littlest and the least, or even whatever contours there may be to our daily life, even as we live them to the utmost with generosity and joy, let us hold them lightly—or rather let us not hold them at all. For God wants our poverty, not because it gives him something he doesn’t have or makes us righteous before him, but because it is the only disposition that allows us to participate in the expansive liberty and spontaneous joy of his own divine life of love and intimacy. And poverty is poetry. As Chesterton said: Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. God has created us, not to analyze and classify everything nor to offer some perfect performance of a program of asceticism, nor indeed to infallibly avoid the faults and foibles that make up our life in this world, but rather simply, in all and through all, to grow ever deeper into his love. And the key to this is simple: it is to accept everything. And in order to do this, the best attitude is that of the longing that God himself has already placed within us, the desire for the love that casts out fear: the longing to enter into the expansiveness of beauty, goodness, and truth, the boundless mystery of the Trinity, there, losing ourselves in childlike wonder and awe, to find ourselves cradled with the Son in the bosom of our loving Father and breathing with them the single Spirit of ecstatic delight whom they eternally share. Our life is meant to be one of ceaseless singing, for only in this way can we truly allow Christ in us to conquer the wiles of the devil, to heal in us the disorders of the world and the flesh, and to direct all, in him, to the glory of the Father and the salvation of our brothers and sisters, indeed, to grant us access into the gratuitous intimacy and wonder-filled play for which we were created and redeemed, and which is the very essence and atmosphere of the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This call to “ceaseless singing” is therefore yet another way of expressing what I have said before about the “primal playfulness” that is meant to mark human and Christian life. The primordial vocation of each one of us is truly to live in ourselves, by grace, what was spoken by the eternal Word and Wisdom of God in the book of Proverbs: “I was before him like a little child; I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing on the face of his earth and delighting in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). When this disposition and this act is understood deeply and widely enough, it truly encompasses everything else: prayer and contemplation, compassion and service, missionary evangelism and heartfelt charity, solitude and togetherness, ascetical striving for growth and gratuitous abiding, the daily process of conversion and peace in living our poverty and woundedness in which the love of God shines, enduring fidelity and happy gratitude for the sacramental beauty of each day, the humble constancy in obedience and love and finding newness present in the most mundane of moments, newness that is indeed unique only to today, and much more.
In all things and through all things, we are invited to sing. We are invited to play. We are invited to praise and thank the Father and to give witness to his goodness before all men. This is what Jesus himself, the incarnate Son and Word of the Father, did during every moment of his earthly life, just as he does it forever in the womb of eternity, in the intimacy he shares with the Father and the Spirit in the intimacy of the Trinity’s life. He loved and praised the Father and he loved and served each one of his children. His whole life was thus a Eucharist—a Eucharist that the final hours of his life illumined and expressed in the fullest way and yet which indeed existed from the very first instant of his conception in his mother’s womb. This Eucharist was inseparably gratuitous gratitude and perpetual praise, on the one hand, and heartfelt compassion and sacrificial service on the other. And indeed these two are inseparable, different dimensions of the same mystery, just as our own ever-renewed conversion to Christ both springs from and expresses the wonder of having first been seen, loved, and chosen by him. So let us never turn away from those eyes of love that look with mercy and predilection, and let us never cease to walk on the waves of this world toward his outstretched arms, which, even as they mysteriously hold us in grace, also await us ever more deeply and intimately in prayer and silence, await us in our neighbor, and await us, finally, in the consummation at the end of our life and at the end of time, in the glorious intimacy of heaven and the new creation. Amy Carmichael said:
The reason why singing is such a splendid shield against the fiery darts of the devil is that it greatly helps us to forget him, and he cannot endure being forgotten. He likes us to be occupied with him, what he is doing (our temptations), with his victories (our falls), with anything but our glorious Lord. So sing. Never be afraid of singing too much. We are much more likely to sing too little. There is incredible wisdom to be found in the monastic tradition. In fact, I believe that if we as a community of believers were able to receive, grasp, and truly understand the essence of monasticism, so much of the polemic and struggle and fragmentation in our ecclesial culture would begin to heal. But it is also important to realize that monasticism has never understood itself as a “special” way in the Church or as a particular “brand” of Christian life, or even as a unique charism from the Holy Spirit like the other charisms of the more recent religious institutes (such as teaching, service of the poor, etc.). Rather, monasticism has understood itself, and still does, as simply giving voice to the universal and central human longing, to the ceaseless conversion asked of each on of us in the following of Christ. All that is necessary is to seek God unconditionally with a humble heart, and in this way to enter into life. Thus we can look beyond the external observances of the monastic way (though recognizing and learning from the wisdom of these as well) and touch that deeper reality that unites us all, beyond the distinction of vocations: the longing to behold the face of God and to enter into intimacy with him, indeed, to let his light and love so permeate and possess us that we may become a living eucharist in Christ for the praise of God and the salvation of all, and do so in deep communion with our brothers and sister, with whom we journey together. Monasticism, thus, is simply a way of pilgrimage, by which we seek God and the fullness of life, embracing the xeniteia (the pilgrim exile) inherent in the life of each one of us and committing ourselves to yielding in a process of continual conversion to God’s grace, indeed to tapping into the gratuity, the playfulness, and the sheer, wonder-filled contemplation deeper than all things, that we may experience already in our pilgrimage the mystery of the homecoming that awaits, where we shall share endlessly and fully in the eternal play and ecstatic intimacy of the Trinity himself. This journey, cradled by gratuity and play and experienced thus as a true adventure of love, is to live to the full our own graced, baptismal participation in the “exodus” of Christ from this world to his Father, his Paschal Mystery by which he both descends into the depths of the poverty and need, longing and pain, darkness and misery of this world, bringing therein the light of God’s redeeming love, and also ascends, carrying all that God has made, and each and every human heart into the healing and reconciling embrace of the Trinity, where all is consummated in an everlasting embrace of perfect intimacy in reciprocal knowledge and love. What does all of this have to do with the quote at the beginning of this fragment? A lot, actually. We know that the life of monks is marked by a struggle with the spirits of evil, with the world, the flesh, and the devil, indeed against “the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12). And yet even more deeply, the monastic life is marked by singing. By ceaseless play in the presence of God. Monks truly worthy of the name sing a lot. Of course, none of us are ever really worthy; yet, like Saint Anthony, we begin anew each day as if it were the first, born anew through grace and mercy: “Today, I begin.” The entire life of the monastic is meant to be one ceaseless song of praise, and thus in truth their entire life consists in singing, whether in the long hours in the choir among their brethren as they intone the Psalms and readings and prayers of the Divine Office, or in their humble and silent labor in workshop or field or cell, or in their frequent and prolonged engagement with the Word of God and its most enduring proponents in the Church’s living tradition, or in their silent prayer and contemplation in which heart speaks to heart without need for words, or in their moments of fraternal community and sharing, in which they love and encourage one another, tasting the unity that is “like precious oil upon the head” (Ps 133:2). Nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God, says Saint Benedict. In fact, this is equivalent to saying, “We have come to the monastery so that our entire life, in all of its facets, through the obedience that makes it an oblation of love, may become a ceaseless liturgy for the praise of God and for the salvation of ourselves and of the whole world.” And is not this but a microcosm of the calling of the universal Church, the Bride and Body of Christ? Is it not the call of each one of us, who indeed should not consider ourselves second-class or in unfitting circumstances to be a ceaseless hymn of love and praise of God, unfitting circumstances to shine like a radiant light and to burst forth like a holy eucharist received and given in Jesus in all the beauty and intimacy of love? Let us therefore look beyond the externals of particular callings, monastic or otherwise, beyond those things that are not proper to us in God’s unique call, and instead discern at the heart of our own life—in the sacred grace present in the here and now—the song that God desires us uniquely to sing. And in precisely this way we shall discover not only what is most uniquely our own and entrusted to us by God, but also the very heartbeat of the holy Church. For this is precisely the mystery that she lives on her sojourn through a strange yet beautiful land, her own xeniteia, her own anticipation of the eternal play of heaven in the very midst of her pilgrim journey, as she walks in union with Christ her Bridegroom, letting her life be continually conformed to his Pasch, to his Eucharist, Passion, and Resurrection, sharing fully in the mystery of his life and mediating its grace and salvation to all. Pope Leo, in a wonderful and succinct audience of January 21, 2026, offers us a beautiful summation of many of the themes that we have been exploring. Let us spend a few moments “abiding” with his words and letting them center us anew in the heart of God’s love and truth, in the heart of the gift we have received from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit of love.
There are four central points that the pope makes, elucidating upon the beautiful self-revelation of God by which the Trinity makes himself known to us and unveils his own heart, his own love, and his own life, that we may share in it. 1. First, Leo emphasizes “that God reveals himself in a dialogue of covenant, in which he addresses us as friends. It is therefore a relational knowledge, which not only communicates ideas, but shares a history and calls for communion in reciprocity. The fulfillment of this revelation takes place in a historical and personal encounter in which God himself gives himself to us, making himself present, and we discover that we are known in our deepest truth. It is what happens in Jesus Christ.” What a rich and condensed expression of the central dimensions of our faith! God writes salvation history, inscribing his own loving presence into our lives and our history—both as individuals and as a community—not primarily in order to impart ideas to us, to give us things to think about, or a framework of life, or even lofty ideals to attain. No, he enters into our world and writes his history into ours and ours into his precisely to draw us into a covenant of love, into a dialogue of intimate and loving reciprocity between Lover and beloved, Father and child, Bridegroom and bride. God’s self-giving is not an imposition or an abstract or moralistic demand, but the approach of One who is in love with us, who is drawn by longing for us and delight in us, who lays his heart and his affection naked before us, hoping to elicit our reciprocal openness, affection, and love. For in this reciprocity the intimacy of mutual belonging is born, the sweet kiss of encounter by which God breathes into us the Spirit who gives us life—his own life, his own joy—and by which in the Spirit we breathe ourselves back to the One who loves us. In this encounter, in this weaving together of hearts and lives, we find ultimate security and peace in the shelter of God’s Love, boundless wonder and ceaseless play, and fulfillment in the communion of his life, which he lives eternally in the consummate intimacy of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which we are granted to share to the full and without any veils separating us from the overflowing abundance of his glorious beauty and ravishing love. 2. As his second point, Leo writes that “Jesus reveals the Father to us by involving us in his own relationship with Him. In the Son sent by God the Father ‘man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature.’ We therefore reach full knowledge of God by entering into the Son’s relationship with his Father, by virtue of the action of the Spirit. This is attested to, for example, by the Evangelist Luke when he recounts the Lord’s prayer of jubilation: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Lk 10:21-22).” We need not expound upon this any further, since it has occupied us extensively in this book, and indeed was the very context with which we opened these pages, and has occupied us throughout. 3. The third point is this: Thanks to Jesus we know God as we are known by Him (cf. Gal 4:9); 1 Cor 13:13). Indeed, in Christ, God has communicated himself to us and, at the same time, he has manifested to us our true identity as his children, created in the image of the Word. This “eternal Word … enlightens all men” (DV 4), revealing their truth in the eyes of the Father: “Your Father, who sees in secret will reward you” (Mt 6:4, 6, 18), says Jesus, and he adds that “your Father knows that you need all these things” (cf. Mt 6:32). Jesus Christ is the place where we recognize the truth of God the Father, while we discover ourselves known by Him as sons in the Son, called to the same destiny of full life. Saint Paul writes: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son … so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “’Abba!’, Father!” (Gal 4:4-6). Amen to this! Truly, Christ is the revelation of the tenderness and predilection of the heavenly Father’s gaze upon each one of us, cherishing us as his beloved children and thus both revealing our identity and setting us free, in love, to the fullness of love, to the joy of intimacy in reciprocal belonging. As the Son delights to remain always in the gaze of the Father’s delight, and in his presence plays without ceasing, so too he has come among us to awaken us to this same delight, to incorporate us into this same play, to welcome us into the innermost heartbeat of this same intimacy. 4. The final point that Pope Leo makes is: Finally, Jesus Christ reveals the Father with his own humanity. Precisely because he is the Word incarnate that dwells among men, Jesus reveals God to us with his own true and integral humanity: “To see Jesus is to see His Father (Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation, fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth” (DV, 4). In order to know God in Christ, we must welcome his integral humanity: God’s truth is not fully revealed where it takes something away from the human, just as the integrity of Jesus’ humanity does not diminish the fullness of the divine gift. It is the integral humanity of Jesus that tells us the truth of the Father (cf. Jn 1:18). It is not only the death and resurrection of Jesus that saves us and calls us together, but his very person: the Lord who becomes incarnate, is born, heals, teaches, suffers, dies, rises again and remains among us. Therefore, to honor the greatness of the Incarnation, it is not enough to consider Jesus as the channel of transmission of intellectual truths. If Jesus has a real body, the communication of the truth of God is realized in that body, with its own way of perceiving and feeling reality, with its own way of inhabiting and passing through the world. Jesus himself invites us to share his perception of reality: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Mt 6:26). God himself becomes man in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son sent into the world. God becomes man, a unity of body and spirit in perfect harmony in the single Person of the eternal Son. God becomes man, experiencing the three faculties of intellect, will, and affection, rooted in the inner “I” of his own Sacred Heart, radiating forth as the very “I” of the divine Son who is always in the bosom of the Father. God becomes man, feeling with human skin, walking with human legs, working with human hands, holding with human arms, and welcoming into himself, through his body, the whole beauty and brokenness of our world. And through his body the inner mystery of his Person pours forth into our world, radiant and beautiful. He is, even in the flesh, “the most beautiful of the sons of men” (cf. Ps 45:2), and yet this beauty is but the irradiation of his divine Beauty. He is good, in every act, every word, every thought and expression, with the very Goodness of the God who he is. He is the living Truth incarnate in our flesh and walking our earth, teaching us in human words, touching us palpably, and yet through all of this welcoming us into the spiritual space of his inner Being, so that, resting against his breast, we may find ourselves sheltered in the very embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…the ceaseless throbbing of their eternal heartbeat enveloping us and indeed stirring within our own hearts. Jesus reveals God through his way of perceiving and feeling reality in the body, through his own way of inhabiting and passing through the world in the body, and he invites us to share in this way of perceiving and living, that as he lived, so we too may live. As he beheld the beauty of the Trinity shining forth through all created things, with eyes of flesh that see the invisible, so too can we, in him. We are by grace called and enabled to look out upon the world with the very eyes of the incarnate Son of God, to behold the grass waving in the wind as a revelation of divine love, to behold the flesh of the human body as a sacrament of God, to behold all the creatures of God as signs of divine generosity and care, and indeed to embrace our own bodies as living sanctuaries of the Spirit and tabernacles of Christ. Through union with the body of Jesus, through union with him in the whole of his integral humanity, we are made capable of passing with him into the very heartbeat of the divine mystery of the Trinity, to find ourselves caught up into the innermost heart of the everlasting embrace and eternal play of the Father and the Son in the single kiss of the Spirit whom they share. |
Joshua ElznerI am a humble disciple of Jesus Christ who seeks to live in prayerful intimacy with the Trinity and in loving service to all through a life devoted to prayer, compassion, and creativity. On this blog I will share the little fruits of my contemplation in the hopes of being of service to you on your own journey of faith. I hope that something I have written draws your heart closer to the One who loves you! Archives
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