The Thirteen "P's" of a Eucharistic Life (Part 3): Patience, Perseverance, Praise, Parrhesia10/30/2025
5 and 6. Patience and Perseverance. Let us treat of these two “p’s” together, as they are deeply related, albeit distinct. Patience refers to the disposition of trustful abiding in expectant readiness and receptivity. It comes from the Latin patior, from which we get also our word passion (another of the “p’s”). Patience is born at the heart of a Eucharistic life because we learn directly from Christ, from Christ in the Eucharist, the value of abiding in silence and fidelity “for the long term.” We learn that the great works of God neither sparkle before the eyes nor are accomplished over night, but take years to unfold and spread abroad their richness and their fragrance. So it is in the humble act of Eucharistic adoration, and indeed in the gradual permeation of our humanity through the repeated reception of Holy Communion, and so it is in life itself. Patience is thus the virtue by which we are able to avoid the temptation either of giving up and rushing on to the “next thing” or of filling our present with something more tangible and immediate. It thus remedies the tendency both to dispersion and to distraction, and helps the heart to become centered in the present moment, in all of its unique beauty and meaning, even when this meaning is concealed from the eyes and from the feelings, and accessible only in faith.
And thus patience is the wellspring of perseverance, which is, as it were, patience-in-action, patience carrying me through the trajectory of the long term, indeed carrying me through an entire lifetime made a gift in the likeness of the gift of Christ. And both patience and perseverance are born of love in its inseparable union with faith and hope. These three theological virtues are the true wellspring of patience and perseverance, of the abiding fidelity that allows the seed of the Word of God to take root in us, to grow, and to bear fruit, not as a flower that blossoms today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, but rather as a tree planted beside running streams, so that it bears fruit in due season and for ages enduring. In order to illustrate the nature of patience-perseverance, I would like to share a little quote from something that Abbé Huvelin wrote to Charles de Foucauld. He said: We obey in silence. We do good by what we are more than by what we do. We do good by being of God, by belonging to God. Yes, stability. Gather moss. Let the grace of God penetrate, grow, and solidify in the soul. Avoid agitation and endless new beginnings. It is true that we are always beginners, but at least always in the same way and the same direction. i It is helpful to recognize the context: in the first part of his life of faith (indeed for quite a long time) Charles seemed rather “rootless,” struggling to settle anywhere for very long—always striving for “something more,” “somewhere better”—drawn by his preoccupation with being as close to the poor and obscure Christ as possible in all external details. While some of this was certainly due to his unique life calling, not all was necessarily of God. It was, however, worked for good, and Charles eventually settled down and found peace in living in the present moment, in the limits of his circumstances with gladness and joy. But in the meantime Abbé Huvelin’s words are deeply illustrative and helpful. For even if there are “exceptional” calls that come into some people’s lives to set them out on an entirely new direction—and the renewed call to conversion that comes to each one of us every day, our radical surrender to the God who ever surpasses us—it is nonetheless true that God’s way of acting is not through continual changes and new experiences and alterations, but through stability and enduring fidelity in the way that he has shown. There is a reason that the monastic life is founded upon the vow of stability. Without stability, the tree will never grow and bear its fruit, particularly if this tree is one that is called to be nourished in pure contemplation and to benefit the world not through external ministry or activity but through ceaseless prayer and ardent intercession. In this respect, the outright “rejection” of every other possible option for life, and binding oneself to a single place and a single way, is a profound act of faith in God and surrender to him, one which he shall surely not fail to bring to abundant fruition. Let us not be afraid, therefore, to give him this faith and this surrender. In order to illustrate the living, creative nature of patience and perseverance, which spring from the heartbeat of fidelity—God’s fidelity to us and ours to him—I would like to share some further words for reflection: The call of God is not something isolated, an event that took place at a given moment and is placed totally in the past. Of course, we are conscious of the call as a privileged moment in time, but the call itself is a creative word of God which springs forth from eternity. That first moment when we are aware of the call is never exhausted in meaning: it continues to resonate throughout our life and only reveals its depths in the totality of our living and being. Our ‘Yes’ to the call has, therefore, a story—a story that we cannot foresee unfolding in advance. We must not see the call as a reality completely determined beforehand, programmed, like a disk inserted into a computer according to our first ‘Yes’. Then, without error, the machine does the rest. Rather, we are questioned each moment, entreated by the Spirit to advance further all the time on an unknown path. We must remain always in the attitude of one who is called, who follows the Master in the renewed beginnings of each day. … Our fidelity to the Spirit is expressed over the years in a dynamic fidelity: a ‘yes’ to God is always open and available. How, then, commit myself to a future that I do not know and cannot control? Is this not to hinder the action of the Spirit and freeze movement in our life? The answer to this question can only be found in God. It is he who has called us to give ourselves completely in a particular commitment. It is the Spirit who urges us on. It is to the Lord that we commit ourselves even if we cannot know in clear detail all that this commitment involves. For this we can only abandon ourselves to God in total confidence, knowing that what he has begun in us he will bring to completion. Man...is subject to time in the sense that he grows and develops within its confines: he does not arrive complete. Yet he is above time in that he can free himself from it and, by his thought, link the past to the future, and so commit himself to that which is yet to come. Man transcends the sheer movement of becoming and gives it a meaning. His fidelity is consistency with a meaning he has given his life in a moment of time. His truth is not necessarily the spontaneity of the present moment, taken in limitation and isolation, but that which follows from the choice and commitment in the depths of his being: a commitment that triumphs over the fragmentation of time and gives unity and coherence to his life. Such was the effect of the Fiat of Mary. It matured in her as the Word himself, during the long years of the simple, hidden life of Nazareth, through pondering the sometimes enigmatic events of the life of Jesus (the Presentation in the Temple, the three days when Jesus stayed with the doctors, Cana). It matured as perfect docility to the ever-growing light during the public ministry of her Son; by her faithful presence at the foot of the cross; by her place in the heart of the Church waiting for the Holy Spirit. It was only when the fruit was completely matured that the Lord took her to his side in glory. ii 7. Praise. The connection between the Eucharist and praise should be evident. The very word Eucharist means “thanksgiving,” fulfilling as it does the ancient “todah” sacrifices of the Old Covenant, sacrifices of gratuitous thanksgiving to God for his care and deliverance. Perhaps we do not think much about the connection between the Sacrifice of the Cross—which is re-presented on the altar at every Mass—and the act of thanksgiving. After all, isn’t the Passion of Christ about him suffering to redeem us, about him enduring the pain of our sinful isolation and rejection in order to bridge the distance between ourselves and God, to make it possible for us to be welcomed back into friendship with him and to be made partakers of his life? Yes, this is certainly the central mystery that occurs in the Paschal Mystery, and the very reason for which Christ undertook his “obedience unto death” in filial docility to and conformity with the will of the Father, and indeed offered himself for this very sacrifice from the bosom of eternity. But let us not forget that the One who offers himself upon the altar of the Cross is the eternal Son of the Father, the One who eternally drinks of the Father’s infinite outpouring: the Abyssus of the Father pouring into the Abyssum of the beloved Son in the flowing current of the Spirit’s invocat. And therefore in the very heart of his Paschal Mystery, the Son does nothing but live in the midst of time, in the very heart of suffering, the mystery that he lives for all eternity: he receives the abyss of the Father’s love and reciprocates with the total gift of himself. And since this mutual reception and gift—this abyss calling to abyss—occurs in the very depths of another abyss, the abyss of our sinful world’s estrangement from the Father, its brings about reconciliation, taking up the world itself into the center of the Trinitarian dialogue, into the relationship of love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is precisely how redemption comes about, and in no other way: by permeating our world even in its darkest places with the light of the eternal and unbreakable dialogue of love of the Father and the Son in their one Spirit. But what does this have to do with praise? Perhaps you have already put it together. If understood at a deep enough level, the most exalted and pure act of love is praise. It is the delighted cry of the loving heart at beholding the Beloved: “How good and beautiful you are! I am so glad that you exist!” Or to put it in the terms of the liturgy: “We give you thanks for your great glory.” What does it mean to give God thanks for his glory? It means to praise him for simply being who he is! This is the cry of love that emerged from the suffering heart of Jesus as he hung upon the Cross, and it pierced the very heavens; and this is the cry of the Father to his Son that echoed in the silence of the Paschal darkness, and became radiantly manifest in the glory of the Resurrection. As Jesus said immediately preceding his Passion: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (Jn 17:1). To illustrate this, I wish to share the climax of Psalm 22, the most explicitly “Paschal” of all the Psalms, the one which most clearly portrays both the internal and external contours of Jesus’ Passion. Beginning with the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it concludes not with despair or death or loss, but with deliverance and praise--in other words, with the certainty of Resurrection. I will tell of your name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! all you sons of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the LORD! May your hearts live for ever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. Yes, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and he who cannot keep himself alive. Posterity shall serve him; men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, that he has wrought it. (v.22-31) 8. Parrhesia. Flowing quite spontaneously from this disposition and act of praise is that of parrhesia, a Greek term that means “boldness” or “confidence” or “openness of access.” We have already explored this in a previous reflection, so only a few words are needed now. Parrhesia is the disposition of a child that knows that he or she is loved by an infinitely gentle, compassionate, kind, and generous Father, and sheltered always in the embrace of his tenderness. It springs forth, therefore, not from a confidence in or reliance upon oneself, but rather from the deep experience of one’s own poverty and fragility being loved by the Father. Gradually the experience of his incredible kindness and steadfast love, his abiding presence and his mysterious providence that works all things for good, cannot but bring to birth in the human heart the spirit of childlike confidence and, yes, of deep and intimate familiarity. This is the familiarity of a child who knows that many words and thoughts are not necessary in approaching such a Father, but only a simple relaxation in his arms, a simple leaning against his breast: the surrender born of love and trust. How can we not see that this leads us right back to the previous “p’s” we have explored, and particularly to the first? Parrhesia is our graced participation in the familiarity and intimacy that the beloved Son ever experiences in the heart of his Father, and thus it is the very mature expression of letting ourselves be taken up into him in order to share in his own intimacy with the Father at the heart of the Trinity. But how does the Eucharist, in particular, teach this to us—or draw us into its orbit? A single verse can express it: “The disciple whom Jesus loved was reposing against his breast” (Jn 13:23). In adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, in receiving him in sacramental Communion, we repose against the breast of Jesus, our Lord and Beloved; we share one body with him, one flesh, in the most intimate physical union possible, a physical union that is ordered wholly toward the consummation of the spiritual union of love. And this experience of closeness to Jesus, who in his profound humility and love has come to live among us, to “pitch his tent among us,” as John puts it (Jn 1:14), leads us with Jesus and in Jesus to reposing against the bosom of our Father and his. For “no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son of God, himself God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (Jn 1:18). As we repose on the breast of Christ, so Christ reposes on the breast of his Father, and thus he introduces us, through our intimacy with him, into the intimacy, familiarity, and confidence of his own relationship with his Father. This is our origin and our destiny, the only true home and rest of our restless hearts, the only intimacy that is truly deep enough and full enough to satisfy our infinite longing for love. So let us not be afraid to be drawn by Jesus into this confidence, this parrhesia. For as little Thérèse of Lisieux said so beautifully: It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love. iii *** NOTES *** i. Quoted from: https://www.goodcatholic.com/a-saint-for-sinners-charles-de-foucauld/ ii. The Wound of Love, 154-156. iii. Letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart (17 September 1896), in Letters II: 1890-1897 (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1988), 1000. The remaining “p’s” shall take less time to elucidate, as they all flow from and express the first. In fact, I shall try to share them with a healthy measure of succinctness, so that they may be received not as an outpouring of words but as an invitation to the depth, to penetrate through the text to the reality itself.
2. Play. Born of prayer is the foundational aspect of a “Eucharistic existence:” playful intimacy and playful obedience, in an inseparable relationship. In other words, born of the gratuitous love of the Father which, in Christ and with Christ, I receive and in which I live, I am totally overtaken by the desire to live in and for the Father alone at every moment. I am totally harnessed in the desire to be all his in everything, and to let his name be hallowed in me, to let his kingdom come in me, until all of me is pervaded by his presence and reveals him, indeed until the entire world is permeated by his paternity. This reality is first of all the obedience of being God’s beloved, of receiving the gift of my very being from the Father’s hands and abiding always in his cherishing; and only thus can it also be, with true freedom and expansiveness, with the liberty of the children of God, the obedience of living as God’s beloved, of letting my whole existence be filled with the flood of the Father. This is the mystery of belovedness-blossoming-in-benevolence, of being set free by grace to be transformed, in grace, unto the likeness of God. As Augustine said so pithily: “Give what you command, Lord, and command what you will.” Give sonship, and then I shall be able to live as your son. Give the Spirit to inscribe the law of love upon my heart, and then—and only then—shall I be able to live according to this law in the freedom that you desire, a freedom found only in you, my one true Beloved and my Life. This whole reality is a participation in Jesus’ own filial intimacy with his Father. It is the experience of being drawn into his own reception of the Father’s love and into his reciprocal gift, expressed both in the simple and childlike surrender of the heart beyond all things as well as in sharing in the Son’s boundless, joyful, and spontaneous obedience to his Father. “The Son can do nothing of his own accord but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise; for the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing” (Jn 5:19-20). Obedience understood in this perspective is the wellspring of the Christian life, the resounding echo of the heart that says without ceasing, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” the cry of a beloved heart, a filial heart, a heart that knows that it is loved and is also enkindled with ardent love and affection for God, wanting his life to be realized in the world, and among all of God’s children, without hindrance or obstruction. I have termed this life of filial intimacy and obedience play, for reasons that I will mostly leave you to discern in the silence of your heart. Suffice it to say that the great adventure of our life, the great and beautiful drama of our existence, is hidden here in the Father’s will for us, which we cherish above all things, for it is nothing but the expression of his love for us and for all: and thus it is not a burdensome duty but a space of play, in which childlike lightheartedness and sober responsibility both blossom so deeply that they are interwoven together in a single inseparable reality of love. As a quote to illustrate this disposition, allow me to share the Prayer of Abandonment by Charles de Foucauld as expanded by Magdeleine Hutin: Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you; I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your Will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself to surrender myself into you’re your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence For you are my Father. Amen. I have written more elsewhere of the playful nature of obedience—indeed of the playfulness that enfolds and permeates the whole of life. Let me share one example, from my ratio vivendi, my own personal rule of life: “Before exploring the three counsels [of obedience, chastity, and poverty] distinctly, it is important to express the inner spirit that unites them and which is also their most mature and beautiful fruit. This is also a reality that [is] at the heart of the mystery of our adoption and divinization, the living heartbeat of the inheritance of every one of us as children of God in the Son: namely, the lighthearted playfulness and wonder of a child who knows that he is infinitely loved, and called to share in the eternal playfulness of the Trinity itself. Playfulness in fact is the most fitting atmosphere in which the life of faith and holiness flowers, in which virtue can take root and grace can operate, even as this same playfulness finds its highest maturity only in a heart that has been surrendered totally to God and has found complete interior freedom, has found, in other words, that freedom that fulfills the law while surpassing it, reposing with Jesus the Son in the bosom of the Father. I feel called to live this central truth in my life both as God’s gift to me as his beloved and as a witness and a wellspring of grace for the sake of all. I wish to incarnate in my existence what the words of the book of Proverbs express concerning the eternal Word and Wisdom of God: “I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth, and my delight was in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). Such playfulness does not imply any inconstancy or irresponsibility in living the given contours of my daily life, nor a spirit of immaturity, but rather the spiritual freedom and joyful confidence that blossom from faith and love—implying a heart seeking God beyond all things and also sensitive to his “word” in all created realities—allowing the gratuitous living of intimacy in receiving and giving love to blossom in the unique sacramental meaning of each moment in which God approaches me in his Spirit. This is the atmosphere of sanctity, the foretaste of the “eternal play” of heaven and the new creation, and also the space in which all the depths both of longing for God and of profound solidarity with the sinful world, in compassionate intercession, can blossom without getting lost in the abyss—since they are all held by the unfaltering love of our Father, the same Father who held his beloved Son even through the agony of his Passion and transformed this into the most radical expression of both the eternal love and the everlasting playfulness of the Trinity.” 3. Poverty. What is evangelical poverty, truly? What is the poverty that is born in the human heart through prolonged proximity to the burning furnace of Love that is the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus? In order to answer this, all that is necessary is to look at Jesus himself, at the One who is the source and consummation of all the virtues. What then do we see? We see the he is the Poor One, the One who has nothing of his own, but lives in utter dependence upon his Father at every moment, and in a state of ceaseless sharing born of a heart full of love, a heart that is Love. Indeed, we see another dimension of poverty in Jesus as well: his humility and self-emptying, his ardent movement to occupy the lowest place and to identify with the most lost and miserable, the most marginalized and forgotten. As we saw in the previous reflection on Gospel radicalism, Jesus came into this world as one of the poor, and he lived in poverty—born in a stable and laid in a manger, homeless and displaced as a refugee, a humble workman in the lower class, an itinerant preacher who relied for his every bodily need on the generosity of others, even as he gave of himself without reserve for the welfare of all. And finally, he died in utter destitution and nakedness, bodily and spiritual, upon the Cross, rejected and misunderstood by all but a very few, and bearing in himself the pain of our sinful estrangement from the Father, even as his heart reposed in the Father’s care in the love that would prove stronger than death, bursting forth from the tomb in the glory of the Resurrection, in which poverty would not be eradicated but rather revealed in its true beauty as a participation in the very nature of love as lived eternally by the Trinity. As Jesus had said to the Father in his high priestly prayer: “All that is mine is yours and all that is yours is mine” (Jn 17:10). A poor life, therefore, is not optional for any disciple of Jesus. It is rather an essential aspect of Gospel morality, of our conformity to the love of Jesus, and indeed of the justice that we owe to our neighbor, whether he be the Lazarus on our doorstep or the Lazarus on the other side of the world. The apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te conveys this essentiality of poverty so very well, and it is to be hoped that it will bear fruit in truly helping many in the Church to embrace poverty with greater realism, generosity, and compassion. For as is said in that document: While it is true that the rich care for the poor, the opposite is no less true. This is a remarkable fact confirmed by the entire Christian tradition. Lives can actually be turned around by the realization that the poor have much to teach us about the Gospel and its demands. By their silent witness, they make us confront the precariousness of our existence. The elderly, for example, by their physical frailty, remind us of our own fragility, even as we attempt to conceal it behind our apparent prosperity and outward appearance. The poor, too, remind us how baseless is the attitude of aggressive arrogance with which we frequently confront life’s difficulties. They remind us how uncertain and empty our seemingly safe and secure lives may be. Here again, Saint Gregory the Great has much to tell us: “Let no one consider himself secure, saying, ‘I do not steal from others, but simply enjoy what is rightfully mine.’ The rich man was not punished because he took what belonged to others, but because, while possessing such great riches, he had become impoverished within. This was indeed the reason for his condemnation to hell: in his prosperity, he preserved no sense of justice; the wealth he had received made him proud and caused him to lose all sense of compassion.” (Homilia 40, 10) For us Christians, the problem of the poor leads to the very heart of our faith. Saint John Paul II taught that the preferential option for the poor, namely the Church’s love for the poor, “is essential for her and a part of her constant tradition, and impels her to give attention to a world in which poverty is threatening to assume massive proportions in spite of technological and economic progress.” (Centesimus Annus, 57) For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very “flesh” of Christ. It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this great mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. “A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is; and this is far from easy.” i Let me note only one small yet deeply significant part of this excerpt, which is so very important for a Eucharistic life: the poor are the very flesh of Christ. To touch the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist therefore spontaneously sensitizes us to his flesh in the poor (including in our own flesh), and vice versa. The two exist along a continuum, and they both draw us into a lifelong journey of poverty and identification, until we become so divested that we, too, may enter the kingdom of heaven as the “poor Lazarus” rather than suffer the effects of our isolated wealth and comfort like the nameless rich man of the parable. (See Lk 16:19-31.) 4. Purity. What, truly, is Christian purity—the purity of heart commended by Christ in the Beatitudes, which alone allows us to see God? Well, in its inner essence it is in fact identical with the disposition expressed in the above points. This is the way it is with the evangelical counsels, with this threefold form of love that is obedient, chaste, and poor: when one is perfect they are all perfect, for the mutually inhere in one another. But what can we say to illustrate the unique nuances of this aspect of love, of an existence transformed in the Eucharistic and Paschal Christ? Let us simply invert the Beatitude and suddenly everything becomes clear and simple: Blessed are those who see God always, for they are pure of heart. Authentic purity is the disposition that seeks the face of the Beloved in all circumstances, and him alone, and welcomes everything else that exists only in the context of this primal and all-consuming love of the heart. Only the eyes of such a heart can see. The reality of chastity or purity of heart is therefore not preoccupied with bodily chastity or sexual matters at all; that is in fact but a small part of a much bigger reality. To abide before the One who became flesh for us, became man for us, and who has chosen to remain with us in his bodiliness until the end of time—indeed to receive him into one’s own body and to carry him always within in love and affection—what does this do to a person? It gradually fashions within the person who welcomes Jesus the same dispositions that Jesus himself had (and has), his same loves and affections, his same desires, his same contemplative gaze directed upon the world and upon the Father. Thus union with the Eucharistic Christ seeks to make our bodies, our whole existence—from the innermost heart to the most tangible actions—the same as the Eucharistic presence: a living perpetuation of the Incarnation of Christ throughout time and space, a continuous unfolding of the dynamism of his Paschal Mystery, at the heart of which lies the espousal of God and humanity and the introduction of humanity into the heart of God. The reality of chastity is thus above all and in all mystical, the reality of our permeation and transformation in the grace of the Trinity, drawing us up into his life until our whole existence becomes love and intimacy in the God who is love and intimacy, becomes a ceaseless participation in the innermost communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In order to illustrate this, allow me to quote a little section from the chapter on “Contemplative Chastity” in The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany: Seeing what little light I have, I can trust in the light that comes from God and receive from his word the ultimate knowledge of myself. So I know, in faith, that I am made in the image of God, a subject endowed with freedom, called by God to a communion of love, son of the Father in the Son, by the gift of the Spirit. It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am. My chastity is humble attention before the mystery that dwells in me, that transcends me. And you, the true God? You alone can say my name. As for me, I must let your word break all the idols I have untiringly built in my own image—the tyrant who frightens, the senile grandfather, the primeval mother in whom I am dissolved, law without mercy, the just employer who rewards my merits, etc. Only the Son, given up unto death, reveals you as Father, as the One whose essence is to give life through pure love. But that love is so dazzling for my poor eyes that only the eyes of the spirit can contemplate it and recognize it. I abandon myself to them in order to see, without seeing, beyond every image and every word, the incomprehensible glory of your love in the silence of adoration and praise. So I am immersed in your solitude, there where you are in your truth yourself, eternally unique. But since all subsist in you, and you are all in all, your solitude is the place in which all created beings are in communion among themselves. In you, I find them all, and I love them in their truth; I beget them in your love. Those are the dimensions of our prayer revealed to us by faith. The humble humanity of our distracted and often superficial prayer, our fleeting feelings and our poor words, our wavering desire, our imperfect silence, should not make us deaf to the murmur of the Spirit who prays in us with an ineffable prayer that infallibly reaches God’s heart. Let us not quench it; let us allow Prayer to turn us into prayer. The Spirit breathes in us, and the stars shine and sing out their joy. ii *** NOTES *** i. Numbers 109-110. The last quotation is from Pope Francis, Vigil of Pentecost with the Ecclesial Movements (18 May 2013): L’Osservatore Romano 20-21 May 2013, 5. ii. A Carthusian Miscallany, 194-195. I explored previously the contours of a “Eucharistic life,” a life in which one is gradually conformed to the love and the gift of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, in which the whole of his Paschal Mystery is contained and perpetuated throughout history. I spoke of this as a process of being taken, blessed, broken, and given to be at the service of the gathering together of the children of God into unity, at the service of all that is good in the world. This journey is born of the encounter with God’s love present to us in Jesus, a true experience of the meaning of the Cross and the Resurrection, and the little-by-little distilling of this mystery and this love into our hearts and our lives. In prayer, work, fidelity, contemplation, and the sacramental life we remain close to Jesus who has made himself close to us, has wedded himself to our humanity and has wished to remain so always in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is his Body and Blood, his whole integral, risen humanity present in the midst of time and space, that he may accompany us always, pitching his tent among us. In other words, a Eucharistic life is remaining close to the One who is always close to us, and through this abiding proximity gradually being transformed into his likeness, until he is able to live in us the same life that he lives in the Eucharist, as we become little “hosts” of his glory “shining like lights in the world” (Phil 2:15).
In this and the following reflections, I would like to share thirteen different dimensions of a life in contact with the mystery of the Eucharist, a life which through the Eucharist is drawn into the heart of the Paschal Mystery, and through the Paschal Mystery into the heart of the Trinity. For that is the trajectory marked out for all of us, the destination and the way, even as it is realized uniquely in each one of us according to the plan of God. 1. Prayer. Prayer is the foundation of human and Christian life, and the prime requisite of everything else good in us and in the renewal of the world. It is the wellspring without which the desert cannot be transformed into a garden, without which the pilgrim journey through the wilderness of exile shall never lead home, without which man’s search for his identity shall never find fulfillment, and without which his efforts to better the world shall never find their true and fullest fruition. For the human person is before all else and in all else a pray-er. This is his nature, rooted in his identity as one who has been loved forth from the heart of a praying God and called to be a dialogue-partner with the divine. For as the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, from the womb of his everlasting delight and predilection, his paternal tenderness, his loving outpouring, finding in this love his own identity, so too the Son becomes for the Father all that the Father is for the Son. And yet he is so in the unique contours of Sonship: he is reciprocal delight, predilection, tenderness, reception of the gift and its giving-back, with all that he is, to the Father. This is the deepest foundation and highest interpretation of that beautiful text from Psalm 42: Abyssus abyssum invocat. Abyss calls to abyss. The Father is like an infinite waterfall of boundless fullness and intensity forever pouring out in love to the Son, and the Son is infinite and boundless receptivity and responsive gift, being in himself equally infinite: the Abyss to the Abyss calls and the Abyss responds in love, and all is love and the unity of love. For the Spirit is this shared Love of the Father and the Son, the current of their mutual gift and delight and seeing and predilection: the invocat shared by the abyss of Father and the abyss of the Son. The Spirit is the vibrant atmosphere and the sweet fruit of the shared love of the Father and the Son, the silence in which the Word echoes, the music of eternal harmony, the breath of shared life and indwelling, the kiss of complete mutual surrender. And he is loved in his own right by the Father and the Son with the same love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and he is toward both Father and Son what they are toward him. And this total mutual possession of love—or rather this total mutual being of love—allows the three divine Persons to reciprocally inhere in one another completely, to live each in the other. To use the theological terms that we have received from the tradition, the dance of their reciprocal self-giving (perichoresis) allows them to live in one another completely (circumincession). The three divine Persons truly live each in the other so completely that there is no “private” or enclosed space kept from the others, but rather each shares in the very subjectivity of the others so that they all share one consciousness, only in three “subjects,” for lack of a better word; they all share a single life, love, and being in three distinct Persons. This is the awe-inspiring and joy-begetting mystery from which we have been created, born as we are from the very heart of the shared love of the Father and the Son in their one Spirit. And this is the mystery in which we are invited to participate. By allowing ourselves to gradually enter into the life of God, we become pray-ers with the God who is eternal Prayer, that is, who is the ceaseless dialogue of eternal love, the ceaseless consummation of the threefold relationship of perfect intimacy. Thus our identity—the unique and unrepeatable identity of each one of us as God’s singularly beloved—is brought to fulfillment in the fullness of intimacy, in the full flowering of relationship between God and ourselves, by which we are taken up into the heart of the shared life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. By the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the womb of our mother the abyss of God’s love brings us into being from the abyss of nothingness, and makes us creatures and children of God. And yet our natural creation is not enough, for we are ordained toward something more, toward being not only God’s image but also his likeness, participants in his own way of living and loving, and sharers in his eternal dialogue. And this is not possible except through our grafting into the humanity of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of the Father, who bridges the distance between the Abyss of infinite Love and the abyss of creaturely poverty and need. It is he who came to us in our weakness and frailty, in the crying of our hearts for God, indeed in the waywardness of our sin and the fractured state of our world, and shared life with us, shared with us all that is ours, even to the estrangement and loss of death, the ultimate rupture of communion and of life, and drew all back to the Father. Thus in him and through him—and only thus—we find our fractured humanity being drawn back together into unity, being taken and blessed and gathered together in him in whom we are again made one within ourselves through oneness with God. And we are opened thus also to oneness with our brothers and sisters, who are children of God as we are, and with all that exists, created by the hand of God and destined to live for all eternity within his fulfilling embrace, when all things are made new. But what does this have to do with the Eucharist? In the Eucharist is contained this entire drama in its fullness, and it is contained here in order to be made fully accessible for us to receive and to participate in. In the Host is contained the entire boundless mystery of the Blessed Trinity seeking to dwell within our hearts and bodies; in the consecrated wine become the Blood of Christ is contained the very Wellspring of all being which thirsts to be drunk. When we adore the Blessed Sacrament we adore not only Christ in his divinity and his humanity, but the Father and the Son within him and with him. And when we receive this most beautiful of sacraments, this Sacrament of all sacraments, we receive into our very earthly flesh the Body of the One who, through conquering death and rising into new life in the bosom of the Father, has made all flesh new. This is how the Eucharist is the “medicine of immortality,” and how Jesus was able to say that “he who eats me will live because of me,” for just as the Son lives because of the Father so the one who consumes Jesus shall live because of him (Jn 6:57), receiving the abyss of his outpouring love, tenderness, predilection, and delight as he receives it from his Father. Yes, my weak and faltering flesh, sown in weakness, shall be raised in glory, because it is joined to the One who lives forever, whose very flesh has become pure relationship, pure love, taken up as it is into his Sonship in its everlasting intimacy with the Father in the Spirit. There too I shall live, a son in the Son, a daughter in the Son, in the heart of God himself.  In the previous reflection I tried to contemplate the sanctity that consists not in doing things extraordinarily well, but rather in the surrender to God of our poverty and limitation so that this may be made holy by him, made a bearer of Christ who seeks to live and perpetuate in each of us his love for the Father and for humanity. In this regard, I tried to illustrate (even if indirectly) that sanctity does not consist in having an ongoing experience of fervor or enthusiasm, or in having particular gifts that we offer to others—again, things that we do “particularly well”—but rather in the conformity of our hearts to the Heart of Jesus Christ. And here lies the true depth, beauty, and expansiveness of the Gospel, of God’s love given to us in Christ, which—affirming all of our unique limitations and capacities—also does not tolerate in us the least expressions of spiritual mediocrity. In the affluent West (though perhaps in fact in all cultures throughout history) we are in danger of forgetting this, of “toning down” the true demands of the Gospel and the radicalism with which we are called to follow in the footsteps of our Beloved Lord.
One need only think, for example, of the reality of poverty and love for the poor which is so essential to a truly faithful living of Christianity, a true response to the call of Jesus. The passages in the Bible which speak the clarion call to divest ourselves of material goods in order to follow Christ, and, with him and in him, to both give to the poor and indeed to become poor ourselves in their likeness—these passages have for many years been so glossed over with “comfortable” interpretations that their true meaning has become very difficult to hear. Their radicalism has been toned down into what is culturally acceptable to the people of our given age. Whether this consists in all-too-human statements about the need for “prudence” or “living according to one’s state and milieu” or “these words are for a specific vocation,” we are in a profound cultural tension to truly hear the words of Jesus with the impact with which they were first spoken and received. This does not mean that the seeds of truth in these narratives—prudence, distinction in states of life, and some people being called to a more complete divestment of goods than others—are not true, for they are; but they have been exaggerated beyond all proportions and have obscured the central and primary truth that these passages seek to convey, and the call to continual conversion that they contain. After all, as the beautiful apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, started by Pope Francis and finished by Pope Leo says: Christians too, on a number of occasions, have succumbed to attitudes shaped by secular ideologies or political and economic approaches that lead to gross generalizations and mistaken conclusions. The fact that some dismiss or ridicule charitable works, as if they were an obsession on the part of a few and not the burning heart of the Church’s mission, convinces me of the need to go back and re-read the Gospel, lest we risk replacing it with the wisdom of this world. The poor cannot be neglected if we are to remain within the great current of the Church’s life that has its source in the Gospel and bears fruit in every time and place. ... By his Incarnation, [Jesus] “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2:7), and in that form he brought us salvation. His was a radical poverty, grounded in his mission to reveal fully God’s love for us (cf. Jn 1:18; 1 Jn 4:9). As Saint Paul puts it in his customarily brief but striking manner: “You know well the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). The Gospel shows us that poverty marked every aspect of Jesus’ life. From the moment he entered the world, Jesus knew the bitter experience of rejection. The Evangelist Luke tells how Joseph and Mary, who was about to give birth, arrived in Bethlehem, and then adds, poignantly, that “there was no place for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). Jesus was born in humble surroundings and laid in a manger; then, to save him from being killed, they fled to Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-15). At the dawn of his public ministry, after announcing in the synagogue of Nazareth that the year of grace which would bring joy to the poor was fulfilled in him, he was driven out of town (cf. Lk 4:14-30). He died as an outcast, led out of Jerusalem to be crucified (cf. Mk 15:22). Indeed, that is how Jesus’ poverty is best described: he experienced the same exclusion that is the lot of the poor, the outcast of society. Jesus is a manifestation of this privilegium pauperum. He presented himself to the world not only as a poor Messiah, but also as the Messiah of and for the poor. There are some clues about Jesus’ social status. First of all, he worked as a craftsman or carpenter, téktōn (cf. Mk 6:3). These were people who earned their living by manual labor. Not owning land, they were considered inferior to farmers. When the baby Jesus was presented in the Temple by Joseph and Mary, his parents offered a pair of turtledoves or pigeons (cf. Lk 2:22-24), which according to the prescriptions of the Book of Leviticus (cf. 12:8) was the offering of the poor. A fairly significant episode in the Gospel tells us how Jesus, together with his disciples, gathered heads of grain to eat as they passed through the fields (cf. Mk 2:23-28). Only the poor were allowed to do this gleaning in the fields. Moreover, Jesus says of himself: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20; Lk 9:58). He is, in fact, an itinerant teacher, whose poverty and precariousness are signs of his bond with the Father. They are also conditions for those who wish to follow him on the path of discipleship. In this way, the renunciation of goods, riches and worldly securities becomes a visible sign of entrusting oneself to God and his providence. And the Church, if she wants to be Christ’s Church, must be a Church of the Beatitudes, one that makes room for the little ones and walks poor with the poor, a place where the poor have a privileged place (cf. Jas 2:2-4). … The clear and forceful words of the Gospel must be put into practice “without any ‘ifs or buts’ that could lessen their force. Our Lord made it very clear that holiness cannot be understood or lived apart from these demands.” i To grasp and feel the true radicalism of the Gospel in this regard (one example of a similar radicalism in so many others) I would recommend the little book, Happy Are You Poor, by Thomas Dubay, and perhaps also a thorough study of the life and spirituality of Saint Charles de Foucauld. Let us actually take a moment to hear from Charles’ own heart, for in his simple and intense pursuit of Jesus, he directs us wonderfully to the very heart of the Gospel. This is because his life was so obviously and so unstintingly, from the very first moment of his conversion, a sequela Christi, a following of Christ. He truly fell “head over heels” in love with Jesus from the first moment of encounter and sought to become as close to Jesus and as conformed to Jesus as possible. This led him first to a monastery where he hoped he could live “hidden and obscure” with the poor Christ, and then, when his hopes were foiled, to Jerusalem and Nazareth, where he discovered in abundance a way of living in conformity with the utter poverty and humility of Jesus who “being rich became poor” and identified wholly with the poor as their brother, even to the gift of his life. And indeed this conformity led him finally into the midst of the Tamanrasset desert, into a place where he lived in ceaseless prayer and humble work a wholly Eucharistic life, and indeed was granted the great gift of shedding his blood in the likeness of his Redeemer and his Beloved. In Jesus’ humble presence at the heart of our humanity, in his daily labor, his compassionate love, and his constant prayerful dialogue with the Father, he reveals to us the very heart of God. So too, Charles de Foucauld, by letting himself be totally conformed to this life of Jesus, became a living icon who reveals to us the heart of Jesus. This is the great meaning and beauty of discipleship. As Pope Francis said of Charles: Today I would like to talk to you about a man who made Jesus and his poorest brothers and sisters his life passion. I am referring to Saint Charles de Foucauld, who “drawing upon his intense experience of God, made a journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all” (Encyclical Letter Fratelli tutti, 286). And what was the “secret” of Charles de Foucauld, of his life? After living his youth being distant from God, without believing in anything other than the disordered pursuit of pleasure, he confides this to a non-believing friend, to whom, after having converted by accepting the grace of God’s forgiveness in Confession, he reveals the reason of his life. He writes: “I have lost my heart to Jesus of Nazareth”. Brother Charles thus reminds us that the first step in evangelizing is to have Jesus inside one’s heart; it is to “fall head over heels” for him. If this does not happen, we can hardly show it with our lives. Instead, we risk talking about ourselves, the group to which we belong, a morality or, even worse, a set of rules, but not about Jesus, his love, his mercy. I see this in some new movements that are emerging: they talk about their vision of humanity, they talk about their spirituality and they feel theirs is a new path… But why do you not talk about Jesus? They talk about many things, about organization, about spiritual journeys, but they do not know how to talk about Jesus. I think that today it would be good for each one of us to ask him or herself: “Do I have Jesus at the center of my heart? Have I ‘lost my head’ a bit for Jesus?” ii I encountered a wonderful little “self-disclosure” on the part of Pope Francis in which he speaks about how important Charles was to him in his own life. I think it is very illustrative of just how much we need to let ourselves be continually led back to the centrality and simplicity of the Gospel message, to the person of Jesus and to his revelation of the Father, to a wholehearted and radical living of the evangelical lifestyle, far beyond the comforts and consolations we are tempted to give ourselves of having “arrived,” whether through a theological framework or works we have accomplished or a vocation we have embraced, or anything else for that matter. Pope Francis says: In him we can see a prophet of our time, who knew how to bring to light the essentiality and universality of faith. Essentiality, condensing the meaning of believing into two simple words, in which everything is contained: “Iesus—Caritas” [Jesus—Love]; and above all, returning to the spirit of the origins, the spirit of Nazareth. I hope that you too, like Brother Charles, will continue to imagine Jesus who walks in the midst of the people, who patiently carries out laborious work, who lives in the daily life of a family and of a city. How happy the Lord is to see that he is imitated in the way of smallness, humility, sharing with the poor! Charles de Foucauld, in the silence of the hermit’s life, in worship and in service to his brothers, wrote that while “we are inclined to favor works, whose effects are visible and tangible, God gives first place to love and then to sacrifice inspired by love and to obedience derived from love” (Letter to Marie de Bondy, 20 May 1915). As a Church we need to return to the essential, to not get lost in so many secondary matters, at the risk of losing sight of the simple purity of the Gospel. And then universality. The new Saint lived his Christian existence as a brother to all, starting from the smallest. His goal was not to convert others but to live God’s freely given love, putting into effect “the apostolate of goodness”. He wrote: “I want to accustom all Christians, Muslims, Jews and idolaters to consider me as their brother, the universal brother” (Letter to Marie de Bondy, 7 January 1902). And to do this, he opened the doors of his house so that it might be “a port” for all, “the shelter of the Good Shepherd”. I thank you for carrying on this witness, which does so much good, especially at a time when there is a risk of closing oneself in particularisms, of increasing distances, of losing sight of one’s brother. We unfortunately see this in the news every day. Brother Charles, in the hardships and poverty of the desert, remarked: “My soul is always in joy” (Letter to Fr. Huvelin, 1 February 1898). Dear sisters and brothers, may Our Lady grant you the ability to cherish and nourish the same joy, because joy is the clearest witness we can give to Jesus in every place and in every time. And I would also like to thank Saint Charles de Foucauld because his spirituality did me so much good when I was studying theology, a time of maturation and also of crisis. It came to me through Fr Paoli and through the books of Voillaume which I read constantly. It helped me so much to overcome crises and to find a way of Christian life that was simpler, less Pelagian, closer to the Lord. I thank the Saint and bear witness to this, because it did me so much good. iii These words, in their succinctness, are splendid. Essentiality, universality, and joy—this is indeed what our world so desperately needs today. To be led back beyond the fragmenting polarization and polemic of our world to the central realities, and to find in these very central realities the capacity to open wide to universal fraternity, to being a brother or sister to each and all. Here true evangelization flourishes not so much in words as in presence, in deep and abiding love and communion, in friendship and in solidarity, in identification even in places of darkness and suffering. And here joy is born—for true joy, Christian joy, supernatural joy, cannot be born in a heart that holds itself back from God and makes excuses, but only in a heart that surrenders everything. As Mother Teresa expressed it, the three dispositions she sought to instill in her communities (and the three are inseparably related), are: loving trust, total surrender, and cheerfulness. Without a trust permeated by love and a love born of trust, there can be no total surrender, and without total surrender there can be no joy. For God desires everything, all of us, our entire life, everything that we have and are. He will settle with nothing less, for he is aflame with an infinite longing to love and to be loved, to draw us to himself and to grant us a place in his own life—indeed, to grant this blessing unto all the world, to each and every lost and suffering heart. Let us allow our hearts to be drawn so near to this burning fire of love and longing that we too will be set ablaze, that we will be so rooted (radix!) in him that we may know the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, and be filled with all the fullness of God (cf. Eph 3:18-19), thus mediating this fullness also to others. *** NOTES *** i. “Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te of the Holy Father Leo XIV to All Christians on Love for the Poor,” 15, 18-20. ii. Pope Francis, “General Audience,” Wednesday, 18 October 2023. iii. “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Members of the Charles de Foucauld Spiritual Family Association,” Wednesday, 18 May 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2022/may/documents/20220518-fam-de-foucauld.html I admit that the title of this reflection is deliberately a little provocative. For what could be beautiful about mediocrity, about being mediocre?—which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance,” and which the Cambridge dictionary more forcefully says is “the quality of being not very good,” or even “a person that is not very good at something or not very good at anything in particular, or something that is not very good.” We can see why calling someone mediocre has become an insult in our world. For no one wants to be mediocre or to live with mediocrity. But at the same time a profound need lies within each one of us precisely to recognize and embrace our own mediocrity. For only in this way can we discern the contours of God’s presence to us and within us, in the very heart of our creaturely poverty and destitution, which will allow him to do within us what is truly great: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant...the Almighty has done great things for me” (cf. Lk 1:36-39).
Let me share a little quote from The Wound of Love, a book we have quoted a couple times in these reflections, which will hopefully propel us deeper into this mystery: One does not need to spend very long in a Charterhouse to become aware that it is rampant with many petty problems and the presence of ordinary human weaknesses, even if everyone is doing his honest best to strive towards that perfection of which the Father is the supreme model. There is nothing new about this. … A deeper insight into souls gradually allows us to discover that behind these disappointing exteriors often lie real treasures of interior life, of generosity, and of an authentic search for God. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these precious gems are often buried in unattractive dress. How could it be otherwise, face to face with the Absolute? Is this not the price of such dangerous proximity to fire? For it highlights all our faults, all our roughness of character and all the petty misery which in other circumstances would be swallowed up in the surrounding sea of trivialities. To wish to come face to face with the light of God is deliberately to consent to expose all our faults and pettiness to the hard light of day. These first become apparent to others, and then, as we become enlightened, to ourselves. We first discover mediocrity in others and afterwards, in ourselves. Risks are always involved when our aim is high. Seeing ourselves apparently ever more distant and removed from our goal is a painful suffering. On a more prosaic level, this mediocrity is the consequence of our separation from the world. To the extent that solitude is effective, it deprives us of a great many advantages which might introduce into the community an élan or a renewal which would mask the mediocrity or remedy it in some way. The critical choice must be made: either choose God and accept that perfection must come first and foremost from within, or leave open certain gates to the world so that certain means, other than those proper to the desert, play a part in one’s life. i It is likely you have never heard monastic life explained in that way before: as a place designed to create mediocrity. We usually hear the opposite, that monasteries—and indeed religious life in general—is the “state of perfection” or the “way of perfection.” And this gives an impression of everything in these places and these lifestyles being ordained to funnel our energies straight to God, to lift us up into an enduring state of spiritual elevation, fervor, courage, and commitment. But is it not true that true fervor can only ever come from within, that commitment, to be true and enduring, either springs from the depths of the heart or is no commitment at all? Of course, this is not to deny the proper radicalism of solitude—the desert—which is being spoken of in this quote, in which all of the normal “props” and “supports” of the world are deliberately foregone so that, as was expressed so beautifully, “God can well up from within.” This is precisely the humble witness that the solitary gives to the world, and for the sake of which they renounce so many things: that it may be seen with clarity that God alone truly is enough for the human heart. This is essential to the desert journey, for the monk or hermit goes into the desert precisely to remain in its aridity, to face its spiritual warfare and difficulty, until the words of the Prophet Isaiah become true: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing” (Is 35:1-2a). And again: I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together; that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it. (Is 41:18-20) Throughout history the transformation of a desert into a garden has been central to the great human drama both for individuals and for societies. For our history began in a garden, in Eden, which was a microcosm of the whole universe in its richness and beauty, a locus wherein man and woman were to live in intimacy with God and with one another. And yet in the rupture of loving relationship caused by sin they were exiled from this garden into the desert, and only after long centuries of struggle were to taste again something of the garden for which they were made. The whole history of the people of Israel plays out in this mysterious duality, in the recurring movement from exile to return and from desert to garden. But only in the New Covenant is this reality brought to its fulfillment, and the lost state of Eden inaugurated again in the new Jerusalem—present already in this world in the Church—and awaiting its definitive consummation when earth shall itself become heaven and the full mystery of the Bride of the Lamb shall be revealed, and we shall all be part of it, at the heart of the city of God which is also the garden of the Lord. For a beautiful little summary of this, I would recommend Bishop Erik Varden’s lecture On Paradise, given on September 26th, 2025 at the Ecumenical Conference at Pannonhalma. But let us include some of his central words in this context: The promise of the Land, stirring Israelite hearts in exile, was presented as the promise of a garden. The grapes, figs, and pomegranates brought from Canaan by the spies Moses sent heartened the nation encamped in the wilderness of Paran (Nb 12.16-13.25). The fruits displayed a connatural link between the goal they had set out to reach and the setting for which man had first been created: both stood for bounty and sharable abundance. The thought of the land was, still is, caught up with prospects of everyone sitting ‘under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid’ (Micah 4.4). Once the land had been reached and the temple was built in it, Israel’s cult, too, was envisaged in horticultural terms. ‘The righteous’, says a Psalm, shall ‘flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bring forth fruit in old age, ever full of sap and green’ (Ps 91.12-14). The notion of the faithful Israelite as a verdant, fruitful tree sprung from nurturing soil contrasts with that of the dry ‘chaff’ which is all ‘the wicked’ amount to, destined to be driven away by the cleansing wind (Ps 1.4). The garden motif flows into the register of Messianic hope. Isaiah’s end-time vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together harks back to the account of Eden (Isa 11.6). Christ draws on this register in his farming parables, in his image of the vine, and not least in his self-identification as the ‘good’, or ‘beautiful’, shepherd, ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, the prototype of human nature restored to immaculateness. Christ the shepherd knows his sheep, quite as Adam in paradise knew the totality of creatures; he would teach us to know likewise. The symbolic bridge between a primal, integral world and a world restored is accomplished when Jesus on the cross, having sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, says to the thief: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Lk 23.43). At that point, the gatekeeping cherubim lay down their fiery swords. The gate shut on Adam is reopened. Christ’s faithful are invited in while grace pours out in a new dispensation of grace, whose consequence is glimpsed in the eschatological vision of St John’s Apocalypse. Eden is mystically reconciled, there, with Jerusalem. The garden finds fulfilment as a city. The city reveals its purpose as a garden, its twelve gates open to channel the overflow of ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, [that flows] from the throne of God and of the Lamb’, pouring gladness forth, lined by ‘the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Ap 22.1-2). This story in its entirety, the full sweep of Biblical history, is presupposed in the remark Athanasius makes in his Life of Antony, a seminal text in Christian and monastic history, when he records what awaited him as, travelling south from his see of Alexandria, freely or by force in one of his multiple exiles, he entered the Egyptian wilderness settled by Antony’s disciples. He saw, as he put it, in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, […], rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other […]. [On seeing it, one was led to exclaim:] Lovely are your dwellings, Jacob, and your tents, Israel; like shady groves and like a paradise beside a river, and like tents that the Lord has staked. On these terms the Atonine movement made ‘of the desert a city’, a heavenward city imaging the Gan Eden in a world still fallen but now illumined by light pouring forth from Christ’s glorious Cross and from his joy-bearing resurrection. This theme is intrinsic to monastic self-consciousness from Antony on. Monks and nuns go out into the wilderness to place themselves into God’s hands, there to be healed, restored, refashioned, and made whole in order, in tempore opportuno, to appear, the way Antony did, as ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος, human beings once again recognisably God’s, reflecting their Maker’s beauty, goodness, and light, and so irresistibly attractive, bearers of hope in the midst of hopelessness. ii What is true in a concentrated form in monastic life is nonetheless true for all of us in our own journey of faith: we shall all taste the desert, and we shall all be invited to allow God to transform this into a garden. Yes, there comes a point whenever all external things shall fail us, whenever our own hearts shall fail us, and we shall stand face to face with our own mediocrity, indeed our own sinfulness and infidelity. And what then? Then, provided we allow our hearts to open to grace rather than to close in bitterness, God shows himself abundantly to be our Redeemer. Then “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” And even in this refashioning of grace, this blossoming of the garden of paradise that is the grace of the Trinity at work in our humanity and our communities, we should not expect to see marvelous and exalted things—at least not on the surface. It is a simple fact, after all, that a human being cannot excel at everything. In some aspects of our life, we shall always remain “mediocre,” middling-in-quality, not in virtue but in the “excellence” that sparkles before the eyes, not in union with God but in some of its tangible manifestations. Indeed, perhaps even the riches of God’s grace that he bestows upon us, and the deepening journey of intimacy with him that transforms us within “from glory unto glory into the image that we reflect” (2 Cor 3:18), will appear on the surface—to our own eyes and those of others—as little more than ordinary. The true marvels of grace are often hidden so deep within that only attentive, receptive eyes can perceive them. After all, not all of God’s saints are meant to be as immediately and universally attractive as, for example, John Paul II and Teresa of Calcutta. We also have the more humble and hidden saints such as John Henry Newman, Benedict XVI, Charles de Foucauld, and the countless unnamed “holy ones” of God. While in all of us, the fruit of sanctity shall be manifest in an abiding and radiant peace and joy (with all of their many “tenors”), in the tender kindness of abiding charity, in a spontaneous and abiding attentiveness to God in ceaseless prayer, and in that “aura” of union with God that marks all who belong to him, let us not try to replicate in ourselves something that is not properly God’s gift to us. God seeks to be glorified not in the saint that I wish myself to be, but in the saint that he has created me to be, and which shall be the fruit of his own fashioning. Let us be ourselves, therefore, and not another; but let us be ourselves not by “navel-gazing” and fashioning whatever personality we think we “should” have, gauging by our own imagination what is essential or inessential in following Christ and responding to his call. Rather, let us accept ourselves as we are and yet not close ourselves up in this acceptance, but allow it to be immediately transformed into an act of oblation and surrender to God—a self-offering on the altar of the heart to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, sanctified by his love and presence, and made fruitful for the welfare of all of our brothers and sisters. Let us place ourselves wholly at the service of Christ and into his merciful Heart, surrendering totally to him until we are able to say with Saint Paul: “I live no longer I, but Christ lives within me” (Gal 2:20). And let us remember: Christ has as many faces as there are men. And he wants his face to be fully revealed in me, directed always upon the Father and shining the light of love upon humanity, in a way that it can be in no other. For in each one of us he: Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is -- Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. *** NOTES *** i. The Wound of Love, 32-33. ii. https://coramfratribus.com/life-illumined/on-paradise/ Perhaps my words in the previous reflection have given the impression that these two Teresas found light in the darkness, found peace and joy in the night, because they were content with disinterested service without any contact with God or his love. It is perhaps important to say something about this since such ideas still persist in the Church, and indeed are experiencing among some a resurgence—ideas that are rooted in a falsely spiritualized and dehumanized view of Christian transformation and vocational service, one that takes examples from hagiography of the past and imposes them “externalistically” as models of life without adequately understand the rich interrelationship between nature and grace, between human wholeness and the capacity for sacrificial service, and the wellspring of all gift, all fruitfulness, in an intimacy that exists wholly for its own sake. A superficial glance at the lives of these two Teresas may give this impression of false altruism, and indeed some less “full” and “mature” statements, such as Teresa of Calcutta’s statement that she would gladly serve and love God even if he were to condemn her forever, could make us think so.1 Yet there must be something more here, for as we know, “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us” (1 Jn 4:10). Indeed, Teresa of Calcutta expressed this beautifully this need to always receive God’s love when she wrote:
Do you really know the living Jesus—not from books, but from being with Him in your heart? Have you heard the loving words He speaks to you? Ask for this grace, He is longing to give it. Never give up this daily intimate contact with Jesus as a real living Person—not just an idea. How can we last—even one day living our life without hearing Jesus say “I love you”—impossible. Our soul needs that as much as the body needs to breathe the air. If not, prayer is dead—meditation is only thinking. Jesus wants you each to hear Him—speaking in the silence of your heart. “How can we last even one day living our life without hearing Jesus say ‘I love you’—impossible.” These are not the words of a falsely altruistic, disinterested service, but of a deeply human heart, a beloved heart, that—even through fifty years of “bearing” the darkness of the poor and abandoned and feeling, with them, rejected and forgotten by God—came to know and receive the love of God each day, and to live on this love as the sole source of sustenance and life. This is the maturity of faith of which we have been speaking, a faith that God has so transformed that it is able to hear this “I love you” of Jesus not only in times of experiential closeness, of comfort and consolation, of tangible intimacy with God, but also in the experience of absence, of darkness, of painful solidarity. Both Teresa of Calcutta and Thérèse of Lisieux found the love and the closeness of Jesus in their darkness, and thus found peace in the oblation of their hearts with him for the sake of all. And so it can be in the life of each one of us, in the, for most of us, much shorter and less burdensome moments of darkness through which we, too, shall pass. Therefore it benefits us to understand that each of these women—and indeed all the saints—walked a journey through the darkness to deeper understanding and acceptance of the love of God that is always near. This “journey” is more easily seen in Mother Teresa, since her darkness lasted much longer and she also tended to struggle with it more in the beginning. There is a clearly discernible transition in her life from her initial negative response, her struggle and resistance, to her not only accepting it but loving it and making it her own, as she came to say: “I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus’ darkness and pain on the earth.” And she was thus able to say to Jesus, her Beloved: “I want to satiate your thirst with every single drop of blood that you can find in me. Please do not take the trouble to return soon.” She was able to experience, in other words, the closeness of Jesus even in his absence, and to recognize that even the experience of “distance” in this world is fruitful, indeed is a form of intimacy, for it impels the heart yet further into the abyss of the love and the mystery of God, as well as harnesses it in his descending compassion into the darkest and most lost places of our world, where his hurting children need him the most. Let us not, therefore, get “hung up” on the surface level of the darkness that certain saints experienced, or that we ourselves experience during our lives—and which is never the “last word,” for the dawn shall always come, and the life of eternity is pure and undimmed light and intimacy! Let us recognize that the darkness is an invitation, an invitation to set out on the journey of love into yet deeper intimacy with God and conformity with him in his love for all, his light that shines in the darkness and is never overcome. As he said to Mother Teresa before her own journey: “Come, be my light,” thus indicating that her dark journey was in fact one, not of darkness, but of light conquering the darkness. So he says to each one of us. And what gives us the strength to continue to walk this journey, to continue to love in the darkness, even when it lasts for months or years, whenever our hearts feel spent? How indeed can we find renewed fervor, joy, and ardent love even when all—on the surface—feels dry and desiccated and empty? After all, Teresa of Calcutta’s life was not one of perpetual burden and sadness, of just “willing” her way through each day. Rather, she was aflame with a fire and illumined by a light not of this earth, one that carried her each day in a gladness and peace and serenity that was not of her own making, but which never abandoned her. As is written of her: We always saw her smiling. She had a playful smile, mischievous, as if privy to some secret joke. Especially when she was around children, she beamed with delight. In private, she had a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor, and sometimes doubled over from laughing so hard. So many people who spent time with her came away saying that she was the most joyful person they had ever met.i This is the beautiful reality of union with God, a union forged in the maturity of faith, hope, and love, which endure and blossom in all circumstances, and transform all into light. Therefore, there is always more than seems to be the case on the surface, more than the fluctuation of experiences of “light” and “darkness.” And it is faith, hope, and love that give us access to this profound reality, where all abides in ceaseless calm, stability, peace, and, yes, abundant joy. This is the joy of knowing who God is with a certainty far beyond the natural—the God who is everlasting joy as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and knowing also who he is for each and every one of us, his precious and beloved children. Father Joseph Langford expresses this so beautifully, capturing the paradoxical nature of Mother Teresa’s life and spirit, the true wellspring of her happiness and peace—a light too pure for her to tangibly feel in this life, but from which she drank deeply each day nonetheless, and which filled her to overflowing: In the heart of God, Mother Teresa encountered a love not inspired by condescension or pity, nor much less by obligation, but a love that delights in us, that finds joy in loving us. … Such exuberance points to a God who not only loves us, but likes us, enjoys us, and delights to be with us. “I was...delighting in the sons of men” (Prov 8:30, 31). We please God just by existing; like parents who thoroughly delight in their children, long before they are old enough to do anything “worthy” of their delight. Does the artist not delight in his handiwork? Does God’s thirst for us not indicate his delight? … To all who approached her, Mother Teresa mirrored and mediated the experience of God’s delight in us. Almost universally, those who met her would remark on this sense of basking in her delight, of finding such welcome and attention, such interest and obvious delight in her look and smile and warmth of touch. Even when surrounded by a crowd, people invariably felt as if they alone existed for her in all the world, as if Mother Teresa had nothing else to do but attend to them, and no other desire than to be with them. Her eyes would light up whenever someone approached, making them feel like a long-lost relative finally come home. She would help them to sit down, and hold their hand while she listened to them intently. When anyone was in her presence, time seemed to stop. It was as if she, and by extension the God who sent her, neither had nor wanted anyplace else to pour their love. … Since only his freely given love makes us lovable, it is our willing acceptance of that love, our acceptance of his delight, that transforms us and makes us “grace-ful,” and beautiful, and loving in turn. … Look at Mother Teresa herself. There was an aura about her, a radiance and beauty beyond worldly attractiveness. She possessed the unmistakable bearing and exuberance of one who lived in a state of being loved. … God’s delight makes us delightful; but it works its sacred alchemy [fully] only if we choose to believe it, and are open to receive it. Meeting God’s unqualified acceptance of us banishes our fears and renders our defenses needless, allowing them to fall away one by one. God’s loving gaze, the same we glimpsed reflected in Mother Teresa’s eyes, frees us to journey to our depths, and to make peace with those parts of ourselves we had feared admitting. We become more sincere, more vulnerable and open, and more tender in turn. The more we are in touch with God’s pleasure in loving us, the more we ourselves become pleasing. As Mother Teresa reminds us, in words reminiscent of her own inner journey, our task is to believe unswervingly in God’s delight, and to remember it in times of trouble: You are precious to Him. He loves you, and He loves you so tenderly that He carved you on the palm of His hand. When your heart feels restless, when your heart feels hurt, when your heart feels like breaking, remember, I am precious to Him, He loves me. He has called me by my name. I am His. Being in Mother Teresa’s presence gave the poor of Calcutta, and those of us who watched from afar, a glimmer of what awaits us in the kingdom, in that ocean of delight that is the Father’s heart. She has granted us a foreshadowing of what it will be like to rest in the Father’s loving gaze, and to spend our eternity in his cherishing.ii ******** 1It should be clear that this statement, made earlier in her life, does not manifest in any way the actual manner of God’s way of dealing with his children, and thus really presents an impossible scenario. God would never condemn a heart that wants so ardently and disinterestedly to serve him. What Teresa was expressing, and rightly so, even if her language was not the best, is simply: I want to love God for his own sake, gratuitously, because he deserves it, and not only for my sake. And the paradox is that only a beloved heart, which has been made happy by God, can find such freedom. And God loves to bless and fill with joy precisely such hearts, even in their union with the Crucified Jesus in his gift for the world. i . Quoted from: https://catholicexchange.com/mother-teresas-long-dark-night/ ii . Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire: The Encounter That Changed Her Life, and How It Can Transform Your Own (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2006), 93-96. What I wish to express in this reflection is more an intuition than a formulated train of thought, and therefore even though the awareness itself will not take long to express, it may take some time to make it accessible and easy to understand. Because of this “gradual approach,” I hope that what I say proves a source of illumination, clarity, and encouragement. Summarily put, this intuition consists in an awareness that much of our contemporary commentary on “times of darkness” and “times of light,” times of night and times of renewal—as if these are radically opposed to one another—can be unhelpful rather than helpful, superficial rather than profound. That is the negative way to put it, and to put it negatively is deeply inadequate. This is because what is said about these things, even if incomplete, is certainly true on one level, and to recognize a deeper perspective is not to negate the other, but to illumine it from above and from within, and, in the process, to correct and align it.
Therefore, to express it more positively, it is to recognize that God’s love is so deep and so wide that he is present and active within us not only in times of tangible consolation or insight or experiential closeness, but just as well in times of darkness or obscurity or the feeling of God’s absence. The point is that we should not be disturbed in times of darkness or “night” as if we have lost our Beloved, and rejoice in times of light because we have found him again, but rather seek for the deeper unity within these two states by which they become expressions of a single, abiding, and unchanging reality of love and intimacy. But is this really anything more than what John of the Cross already expressed in his treatise on the Dark Night, or even in the beginning of his Spiritual Canticle, when he wrote the following? It is noteworthy that, however elevated God’s communications and the experiences of his presence are, and however sublime a person’s knowledge of him may be, these are not God essentially, nor are they comparable to him because, indeed, he is still hidden to the soul. Hence, regardless of all these lofty experiences, a person should think of him as hidden and seek him as one who is hidden, saying, “Where have You hidden?” Neither the sublime communication nor the sensible awareness of his nearness is a sure testimony of his gracious presence, nor are dryness and the lack of these a reflection of his absence.i In a certain sense, no, it is nothing more than this. But I think exploring it could be helpful nonetheless precisely because a mere knowledge of this truth is not enough to effect within us the appropriate disposition toward which this reality points, the disposition that marks the mature heart. But first an important clarifying note: by speaking of moving “beyond” a focus on the experiences of light and darkness, I do not mean to speak about the more specific aspects of spiritual warfare, about the oppression and darkness of the evil spirits, nor about the particular moments of consolation given by the Spirit to instill his truth in us and to awaken us to the call of Christ. I do not mean to belittle or disagree in any respect with the profound insights of Ignatius of Loyola in his rules for the discernment of spirits. What he describes as “consolation” and “desolation” are rather very different things than the “light” and “darkness” that I am describing, and they can and do take place within the wider context of periods of light and darkness (which are really global manners of God’s mystical “being present”). Consolation for Ignatius is marked by the “lifting up” of the heart in which God and the things of God are more attractive and tangible, in which faith, hope, and love are as it were taking flight, in which all the virtues come forth and express themselves with greater ease. Or even more deeply, consolation is a deep sense of peace or clarity, however subtle, that resounds within the human spirit when the Spirit of God speaks within it. Desolation, on the other hand, is marked by the exact opposite: a sense of heaviness, absence, and discouragement, in which faith feels dry and hope shriveled and love meaningless, and in which the things of God and right action feel burdensome and distant. Or even more deeply, it is the reverberation in our humanity of the oppressive presence of evil, particularly of diabolical evil, which causes great affliction and confusion, which drags us down and out with lies and deceptions and seeks to blot out the sun. In this respect we cannot speak of “going beyond” experiences of light and darkness--of consolation and desolation, of God’s Spirit and the spirits of evil--as if there were some deeper synthesis beyond them; for they are simply incompatible: one being the grace of God, of the Spirit of God, breathing through us to draw us closer to himself, and the other being the fruit of the opacity and sluggishness of the world and the flesh and even the spirits of evil seeking to crush and burden us and draw us away from God. Yet upon deeper inspection, even here there is a higher “beyond” possible not by harmonizing the elements of consolation and desolation, but by being deeply enough established in faith, hope, and love, mature and rich in virtue such that even in times of spiritual attack or desolate dryness, one still does what is right and good, still maintains peace and serenity, not only with fidelity, but with spontaneity, ease, and joy. After all, this is how the Church describes the “heroic virtue” that she looks for in considering individuals for canonization: that in all circumstances they exercised all of the virtues with such promptness, naturalness, and joy that they are truly “connatural” to the individual, truly trademarks and signs of a person transformed in God and habitually united to him. Thus the fluctuations between consolation and desolation in a holy soul will be far less drastic than in a soul that is less united to God and less mature in virtue, particularly the theological virtues; or rather, regardless of how intense their consolation in God may be or the spiritual attack that they suffer, they remain rooted in the “center,” in a mature and sober faith that is neither bloated up nor cast down by spiritual experiences. But less mature individuals tend to live more on the level of their immediate experience, on how they feel, and thus are more swayed up and down by the fluctuations of spiritual experience or immediate understanding; a soul rooted in God will remain constant and unmoving in faith regardless of the fluctuations on the surface level, even while being attentive to all that occurs on this level insofar as it is important for listening to the voice of the Spirit. But let us return to the other reality, to those other two “poles” of spiritual experience, which are not in opposition to consolation and desolation but rather express more “foundational” ways of experiencing and relating to God. In this respect, at the risk of being misunderstood, we can say that the insights of Ignatian spirituality fit comfortably and beautifully within the wider insights of Carmelite spirituality: consolation-desolation within the orbit of light-darkness (or cataphatic-apophatic theology), and mission and readiness for service within the context of God’s gratuitous call to intimacy with himself in filial and nuptial reciprocity. Secondary things are important, indeed essential, but they find their place within the things that are primary; wider things do not eradicate things that are more limited and specific, but rather hold them and illumine them, just as the wider also seek to be expressed in the more limited and specific. But such an exploration is outside the scope of this reflection. Let us focus rather on the mystery of God’s obscure light and luminous darkness, in order to come to the core of their meeting and mysterious union. God is infinitely transcendent and cannot be grasped and contained in any of our experiences of him, nor is a feeling of his closeness or a sense of his presence, as good as this is, actually capable of communicating him in his fullness, which shall only be known in this way, “unveiled,” in heaven. Thus we draw closer to God in this life not by the path of ever increasing knowledge and insight as if on a kind of human continuum, but by progressing to a newfound form of knowledge born of faith, hope, and love. And this implies also a passage through “rupture,” through a darkness of “unknowing” in order to enter into this deeper and purer form of knowledge. Nonetheless, even here there is a deeper continuity, namely that found in the way of “super-eminence.” (See the reflection “The Eight Ways of Knowing God” below.) Thus God cannot, in this life, be found only in “light,” but also must be found in “darkness”—not the darkness of desolation, of sin or error or any of the other biblical forms of “darkness” (which are evil or disordered and must be resisted), but simply in the darkness of mystery, the darkness of his ineffable presence that, because it surpasses us so radically, is experienced as blinding light, as a profound absence which is but a harbinger of a deeper, though more mysterious, presence. And yet even this dark knowledge, this “knowing through unknowing,” carrying on the trajectory of the natural intuition of the heart even as it lifts it to an infinitely higher level, does not lead to nothingness, to an annihilation of all knowledge, or even of all concepts, images, and affections in the mind, imagination, and heart. No, this new knowledge does not eradicate or make irrelevant the natural forms of knowledge, but rather allows us to hold them with the poverty and detachment that they deserve, as vessels of the inexpressible, and thus, paradoxically, to hold them with yet greater appreciation and reverence. As a Carthusian said: In the end, our intellectual poverty is to renounce all rational ‘possession’ of God (in other words to renounce all the idols which we have made in our image and to our own measure) in order to be pure receptivity to the Mystery that he will forever remain, even while giving himself completely to us as he is. Communion with this Mystery really does exist. The darkness nurtures a hidden fire which, otherwise, would swallow it up. Loving faith rediscovers signs, but in a different manner; its purified gaze makes signs transparent to God, to the world of revealed truth, to the humanity of Christ: while remaining exactly what they are, they nonetheless become like clear crystal through which the divine light passes unobstructed. A tree is a tree, bread is bread, wind is wind; but in another dimension, on another level of consciousness, all is light, all is God.ii My “intuition” regarding all of this, therefore, is simply this: for a mature heart the fluctuations between darkness and light become less and less pronounced until they become, not irrelevant, but profoundly secondary. The experience of God and the non-experience of God become like inhale and exhale, like sleeping and waking, like work and leisure (the analogies are inadequate). And why? Because the heart lives habitually and profoundly in the context of a new reality, a new knowledge and experience which is both darkness and light, the obscure light of faith and the radiant darkness of hope, in which God is both possessed and longed for, both believed to be intimately close and also felt to be absent in his fullness. Yes, and this very absence is discovered to be a deeper form of presence, this longing a deeper experience of intimacy. We see this “convergence” of light and darkness in saints such as the two contemporary “Teresas,” Thérèse of Lisieux and Teresa of Calcutta. They both experienced prolonged periods of “darkness,” of a profound and painful sense of the absence of God, and also a heavy burden of solidarity with the loss and anguish of the sinful world to which they were united. And yet both found in this very darkness a deeper and more intimate form of closeness to the One whom they loved, a privileged form of intimacy with Jesus Christ in his oblation on the Cross, in his love for the Father and in his tender compassion for all humanity. Thus for them darkness truly was transformed into light; it became a place wherein the light shone even more brightly, even more victoriously, even more powerfully, than if there had never been any darkness at all. So it can be in the life of each one of us according to our own unique journey with the One who is ever near to us and who ever surpasses us in his infinite mystery. For in the Heart of his Son he invites us right into the center of that ineffable mystery, there to find everlasting gladness and fulfillment—when at last the lingering shadows of darkness shall disappear and, with the definitive Dawn of the everlasting Day, light alone shall remain, in face to face vision and unmediated embrace. ************ i . The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 479. The Spiritual Canticle, 1.3. ii . The Wound of Love, 181-182. Recently I re-read, after many years, the first chapter of the book Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer, by Thomas Dubay. This book was profoundly instrumental for me in my adolescence when I first read it, and it led me, among other things, to plunge myself more deeply into these great mystical doctors of the Church. However, I also recall the experience, for a good number of years afterward, of “growing beyond” certain things that in the text are unfortunately narrow or immaturely expressed; and that is my impression on encountering the text again now. Indeed, it is much more clear to me now both the immense beauty of the realities of which Father Dubay writes, and also certain corrections that are necessary to allow us to truly benefit in an enduring and universal (and also authentically particular) way from the teaching of these two Carmelite saints, masters of contemplative prayer.
And in fact what I am about to say is not strictly about Dubay’s text itself, and not an examination of it, but rather about trends in the interpretation of John and Teresa—and in understanding growth in mystical prayer—in the centuries since they lived. For there was actually a great deal of debate about the proper understanding of their teaching in these last five centuries, and much of it was perhaps focused on the wrong things: on how to discern and identify the “stages” of spiritual growth and on what “experiences,” if any, were necessary in order to attain the summits of holiness. These things miss the essential reality—which is in fact the “thesis” of Dubay’s book—that the core teaching of Teresa and John is nothing but an elucidation of the Gospel. It is an elucidation of the Gospel through lived experience from the earliest beginnings of prayer and fidelity to God to the highest consummation of intimacy with the Trinity through grace. This is the correct and fruitful approach: not to understand their teaching as giving us “more” than the Gospel gives, more ability to classify ourselves or to grasp for some semblance of “order” in the life of faith, nor more hope for extraordinary experiences of a mystical order, but rather simply to understand their lived-experience and their insights as a particularly vivid magnifying glass upon the central realities of God’s covenant with us and his desire to draw us into communion with himself. Without going into too much detail or offering a long and exhaustive exposition, let me unfold as simply as I can the two essential things that I see need correction in these trends, that we may understand and integrate their teaching on mystical prayer and the path to transforming union aright into our own lives. They are simply what I already mentioned above: in this tradition of interpretation, and in a certain degree in the writings of the two saints themselves (though certainly not as much as in many of their “interpreters”), there is an excessive focus on both stages and experiences. The classic stages of the spiritual life, the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways—or, as John also says, the way of beginners, proficient, and perfect—have things to teach us about the trajectory of spiritual maturity. But they are also much too stiff and impersonal, if used as a strict or generalized guide, to actually do justice to the rich experience of the life of holiness. Not only are the distinctions between the stages (or better: moments of emphasis) in fact porous, but they are also more deeply united than an external view may indicate. In reality, they can not only alternate back and forth in many respects, but they also flow together and coexist side by side simultaneously. This is particularly true of “prayer experiences” that may seem proper to one state and not to another, for in fact prayer can not only fluctuate profoundly according to God’s intentions, but also every person’s path is unique. And yet this “porousness” does not apply to everything, and is not true for certain other things, such as the struggle with serious sin—proper to the early purgative state—on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the ardent longing for death—proper to the illuminative and unitive state. All in all, the “stages” are helpful not in that they allow us to pass judgment on ourselves or our progress, but only insofar as they reveal a general trend and trajectory. They give not strict laws of spiritual growth but guideposts that can help us to see the beauty and dangers of the journey more clearly. For example, as we hinted above, the way of the beginners is marked by saying a firm “no” to grievous sin in one’s life (when this is understood as the Church actually teaches and not scrupulously). And yet this is certainly not an issue for those who are farther along in their relationship with God. Their hearts are free to focus upon and to live a much deeper, more interior purification of the roots of sinfulness, as well to run forward in an exponential growth of ardor and freedom in loving God and others. It is also often noted that the prayer of beginners is marked by almost complete dependence upon vocal and meditative prayers, a very “natural” way of praying; whereas the prayer of the proficient and the perfect has become simplified and unified and they pray more deeply from the heart in a place beyond words. Indeed God has gradually taken the driver’s seat in their prayer and led them beyond natural ways of praying, into infused contemplation where they are passive (or passive-active) recipients of God’s own divine activity within them. This is true in so far as the general trends are concerned: prayer does progress from complexity and “headiness” to greater simplicity, depth, and “cordiality.” But it is also true (though more rare) that a person’s early prayer life may be marked by more tangible experiences of God and yet as they mature these experiences lessen or disappear, to be replaced by apparent “ordinariness.” The prayer of every person will be unique, and many persons can well grow into consummate intimacy with God in this life while still exercising the “natural” ways of praying, vocal prayer and meditation: it is only that these have been transformed in their inner essence, perhaps unbeknownst to the praying individual, by the presence of God and the heart’s attunement to his presence in mature faith, hope, and love. Indeed, during a single period of prayer, a mature heart can experience and engage in both natural Scripture reading, a rosary or other vocal prayers, and also any number of forms of mystical contact with God, whether more ordinary or more extraordinary in expression. The tradition of lectio divina indeed expresses this “organic humanity” of prayer very beautifully, as it recognizes that in prayer natural reading and reflection, and the simple cry of the heart in response, can lead up to, and follow upon, and be the catalyst for, the deepest of contemplation, just as deepest contemplation can inhabit these more natural human activities. Thus the strict insistence of John of the Cross that a person will leave behind meditative, natural prayer when growing in sanctity and being drawn closer to God can be easily misunderstood. Yes, his words are completely right and justified when he warns spiritual directors who, not understanding the nature of infused contemplation, do harm to those under their care by insisting that they try to pray actively when God is leading them into passive prayer. The Holy Spirit will lead us, and whenever we find our prayer entering a new stage, and when our old, accustomed way of prayer begins to hold us back, we must cast out into the deep with courage, must raise our sails and allow his wind to blow us wherever it will. Our more human way of relating to God, of thinking about him, imagining him, and talking to him will be taken away—and necessarily so—so that we can approach him, not according to our own measure or standards, but according to his own. For he is doing something new: he is introducing us into a way of praying and relating to him (and to all things), not merely on the basis of our natural faculties or tendencies, but on the basis of faith, hope, and love, which is his own divine life within us. And in this transition there is experienced a painful “rupture” when one form of prayer is being lost and yet the person is not yet fully established in the new form of prayer. One life, the old life, is dying away, and yet the new life has not yet come fully to birth. This is the “first night” that John of the Cross speaks about and treats in the first book of his treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul. An individual’s spiritual senses are not yet attuned to the pure, general, intangible light of God, which does not fit in any concept or image or sensory experience, but rather pours into us from within, like an invisible radiance from our deepest depths and also from our highest height, indeed from beyond us in the transcendent presence of God who sustains all things while infinitely surpassing them. And great gentleness and docility is called for in allowing God to lead us into this “divine darkness,” that we may learn to relate to him as his children, as partakers of the divine nature, and not in our old, earthly way. But even here there is fluctuation, and just because infused contemplation has become present does not mean old forms of prayer become bad or forbidden, as if they are a regression to a more immature state. What matters is that one follows the Spirit freely. For these “natural” ways of prayer could well become expressions of the new state, received anew, purified and reborn. As a heart matures beyond this transition period, it is well possible that natural forms of prayer will be reintroduced, not as a sign of regression but rather of maturity: now faith, hope, and love have grown to such a level of maturity that they can inhabit and permeate also the natural activity of the faculties, making them “spiritualized.” The letter released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI), entitled “On Some Aspects of Christian Meditation,” speaks well of the trials of faith that occur to every believer along the journey of prayer: For the person who makes a serious effort there will, however, be moments in which he seems to be wandering in a desert and, in spite of all his efforts, he “feels” nothing of God. He should know that these trials are not spared anyone who takes prayer seriously. However, he should not immediately see this experience, common to all Christians who pray, as the “dark night” in the mystical sense. In any case in these moments, his prayer, which he will resolutely strive to keep to, could give him the impression of a certain “artificiality,” although really it is something totally different: in fact it is at that very moment an expression of his fidelity to God, in whose presence he wishes to remain even when he receives no subjective consolation in return. In these apparently negative moments, it becomes clear what the person who is praying really seeks: is he indeed looking for God who, in his infinite freedom, always surpasses him; or is he only seeking himself, without managing to go beyond his own “experiences,” whether they be positive “experiences” of union with God or negative “experiences” of mystical “emptiness.”i In other words, both positive and negative experiences can become “idols” that obstruct the purity and transparency of our pursuit of God, the lucid simplicity of our prayer. Relationship with God is not so complicated a matter as that. He seeks not for us to fit into a particular mold or to undergo certain experiences, of whatever nature, but rather to remain faithful to him in all things, and to let our hearts be purified to the point that they seek him alone. We each shall have our own path, providentially guided by God, and the perfection of our way lies in walking this path, not another. This applies not only to the “first night” of which John speaks, but also to the second, of which we will soon give a summary. As a footnote in the same document just quoted clarifies: No one who prays, unless he receives a special grace, covets an overall vision of the revelations of God, such as St. Gregory recognized in St. Benedict, or that mystical impulse with which St. Francis of Assisi would contemplate God in all his creatures, or an equally global vision, such as that given to St. Ignatius at the River Cardoner and of which he said that for him it could have taken the place of Sacred Scripture. The “dark night” described by St. John of the Cross is part of his personal charism of prayer. Not every member of his order needs to experience it in the same way so as to reach that perfection of prayer to which God has called him.ii In other words, everything I am about to say is not a “directive” that intends to say: “If you want to be a saint, you will need to undergo all that I describe in exactly the way that John expounds it.” Rather, my intention in speaking of the night is to tap into the deeper currents of God’s activity that this particular experience reveals, those currents that flow in the life of each one of us. John calls this other, deeper reality the “dark night of the spirit” (as opposed to the “dark night of the senses”). This second dark night of purification is of another order entirely; it is no longer marked by the transition from natural prayer to mystical prayer, or to mystically-inhabited-natural-prayer. It is rather marked by the intense encounter—necessarily deeply felt, though in various ways—with the purifying light of God that meets us in our misery and sinfulness. This light is at first experienced by us in this place not as a consoling warmth but as a burning fire, as a brilliant light that, because it is so bright, blinds us. This fire dries up the log of wood that we are, bringing out all of its sap and moisture and evaporating it, leaving it feeling desiccated and empty, and then it blackens it and assails it, until, finally, the wood itself is sufficiently purified and yielded to the fire to become itself flame: fire within the Fire of God. In the intense light of God’s loving gaze pouring forth upon us—a gaze which is always gentle, kind, and compassionate, but which also sees all that is within us—we become intensely aware of every speck of dust within us, every disorder, illness, selfishness, pride, and sin. And our hearts, in this light, are also made profoundly sensitive to the slightest fault against God, and we have an overwhelming awareness of the evil of sin and the darkness not only of the world generally, but of the darkness that we bear within ourselves, and which in the light of God’s gaze is gradually being atoned. This second night is a deep interior participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ, in his passage through death to the Resurrection, in his becoming-pure-gift, his coming to exist-in-pure-relation, that is the very mystery of the risen life, and of the new creation that awaits us. There are two extremes in speaking of the dark night and trying to apply it to individual lives: the first is the common tendency to say that any form of suffering or difficulty in the journey of faith is a “dark night,” and the second is the position that says that only mystical prayer constitutes a dark night rightly understood. The second trend is more or less the position rejected by the letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith quoted above. But let us return to the first trend of interpretation. This first extreme, if understood narrowly, has the danger of robbing the term that John of the Cross formulated, this rich and beautiful theological reality of “night,” and the mystery that he so profoundly elucidated, of its true and unique content. It takes a specific term and uses it in an analogous way to describe every difficulty one may encounter in seeking God. And this has the side effect of making much that John says about the night irrelevant, at least to a certain degree. For I think that it is a simple fact of human experience that, granting the truth of the statements of the Congregation, there are many people in the world in every age who do find great light and encouragement in the words of John’s book The Dark Night of the Soul (both parts), and discover that it illumines their experience of prayer. Perhaps indeed at some point each one of us can find ourselves inscribed within it. Yes, we do not “fit the mold” perfectly, and we should not. But it is also true that, laying particular experiences aside, we all experience mystical prayer in our lives if we are seeking God honestly and being receptive to his grace. Or perhaps it is better to say that mystical prayer is at work in all of us—all the time—whether we realize it or not. The particular experience of “passive prayer” or “infused contemplation” is really just a matter of the hidden operation of grace within us becoming for a moment less hidden. But it can work just as well in hiddenness, and it does. This, I think, helps us to truly situate the genius of John of the Cross (and of Teresa) more authentically: their gift to us is not that they describe experiences we are meant to have or stages we must pass through, but rather that they bring out into the open before our eyes that deep mystery that happens in most of us hidden under the veil of faith, hope, and love. And, after all, the real essence of John’s teaching and his gift to us is not in his ascetical theology or his teaching on prayer experience, but in his constant and clear insistence that only the exercise of the theological virtues—God’s life in us—is the proximate and proportionate means to union with the Trinity. It is in believing, hoping, and loving, in trusting, desiring, and surrendering, that we enter into communion with God, and not in any particular experiences. But let us return to the two extremes in speaking of the second dark night described by John of the Cross. We explained that the first extreme, which says all forms of difficulty in the journey of faith are a “dark night,” tends to drain the very term of its meaning. For it severs it entirely from its source and wellspring: God’s unique and direct action upon the human person to lead them somewhere that they cannot go on their own. And thus, yes, if understood authentically we can affirm that mystical prayer is at the center of the dark night of the soul, and therefore necessary. The external experience just reflects, in various ways, the inner reality of God’s grace that purifies us, not merely through external events, but through the direct contact of his heart and our heart in the nakedness of prayer, where we stand before his loving and purifying gaze. The essence of what John reveals to us in all of this is that God’s gaze does things within us that nothing else can do, and far beyond our own knowing. This is a treasure that I think we should not lose, even as we affirm both that this can be experienced in a variety of ways, and also that (as John himself recognizes) the external events and sufferings of life are also a part of this purification. After all, neither should we underestimate just how much God works in us and transforms us through the sacramentality of everyday life. The two remain together and enrich one another: the hidden interior work in the depths of prayer and the exterior work through life experiences and the particular journey we walk in this world. Everything comes together in God’s providence to lead the soul through the desert of atonement and into the promised land of intimacy, through the death of the Red Sea and into the glorious marriage of the heavenly Jerusalem. Hence neither extreme is entirely correct. Only when they are joined together can we discern the fullness of the teaching on the dark night as it applies uniquely to each one of us. God knows how to lead us in his love to the very depths of intimacy with himself, and to the sanctity that is born therein. And such is his benevolent intention, and the very reality that the seed of grace received in Baptism seeks as it grows, blossoms, and matures. As Saint Paul wrote so well in his letter to the Romans: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. (Rom 6:3-10) What John of the Cross writes about, when seen in its essence and not its particulars, is therefore nothing but the existential realization of this mystery, the lived unfolding of the grace we have received that adopts us into the life of the Trinity. For if this mystery is given “all at once” by God in the sacrament of Baptism, nonetheless it takes a lifetime to grow to maturity in us and to truly make us capable, in all that we are, of sharing in the life of God, of living as the Trinity lives, in pure and ceaseless love and relationship. John therefore just follows through, in the light of his own personal experience and the experience of the many whom he accompanied, the implications of this text of Saint Paul throughout the growth of baptismal grace from the tiniest seed to the mature tree that “stretches out its branches, and shelters the birds of the air therein” (Mt 13:32). And we will forever be grateful to him for that, for the way that he is able to give us light and support when so many others cannot. For he has walked through the very depths of darkest darkness and from this experience can tell us: it is light that assails you even here, and thus you have sure hope of resurrection. And indeed, he has also tasted the light to the full, tasted with a singular depth and clarity the inner substance of union with God, the spiritual marriage. He was granted to receive, in tangible mystical experience, a profound experience of the substance of holiness that is most often concealed (and revealed!) in the nakedness of faith, hope, and love. God pulled back the veil for John so that he could see and experience the innermost life of the Trinity—the eternal breathing of the Spirit by the Father and the Son, and our participation in this—already in this life. And John’s word to us from this experience is strong and true: “This is meant for each and every one of us. God desires this intimacy with all of us.” Its manifestations will be different in every person, but the inner truth is the same, and the plenitude of joy, the abundance of peace, the overflowing love and charity and freedom, shall well up within all who are united to God in this way. And the Trinity! Yes, and the Trinity is everything! Everything is centered in the knowledge and experience of his love, his mystery, and his life. This is the inner sanctum of holiness, the wellspring of sanctity, without which the true and total transformation of the human person in the likeness of God is simply not possible. This explains how and why both Teresa and John say (in their own ways) that in being admitted into the spiritual marriage, the fullness of sanctity and union with God, a person is granted an intellectual vision of the Trinity. In other words, a person is granted to see with their inner spirit the very eternal circumincession of the three divine Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. With the indissoluble unity of their heart, the human person experiences themselves taken up into the center of the mutual love and embrace of the Father and the Son in the one Spirit whom they share, who is their mutual kiss and breath. But this knowledge of the Trinity, too, this experience of being taken up into the heart of his own Triune life and cradled therein, can perhaps occur in various degrees of conscious awareness or intensity of “vision.” Indeed, how could it be otherwise in this life? God knows the best way for each one of us. We shall certainly know and experience the Trinity “with faces unveiled” in the next life, in the ecstatic joy of direct and unmediated vision and embrace. That is our destiny and the reality that alone can bring rest and fulfillment to the innate longings of our hearts, alone can fill the caverns of our souls with light and joy and fullness. But our ways differ, in our temporal journey, in how much the veil is pulled back while earthly life endures. Let us therefore not grasp for particular experiences or expressions of the mystical life, for these are not the essentials; but neither let us despair of experiencing God as we desire—yes, even in this life!—but rather have bold confidence and ardent trust that he will unveil himself to us and grant us to know him, and to know ourselves in him: to know even as we are known and to love even as we are loved, in the very shared intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which we truly anticipate in this life and which shall be our endless gladness in the life to come. ****** i . Quoted from: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html ii . Ibid. The quote from Teresa of Calcutta shared in the last reflection, and indeed the train of thought which inspired us to mention it in the first place, has led us somewhere both beautiful and profound. She speaks of living the “spirit of the Eucharistic sacrifice” in one’s own existence, so as to be broken and given for the sake of the poor in the likeness of Jesus. We can recognize in the Eucharistic act five moments, as expressed in Scripture, in which we, also, are invited to participate: taken, blessed, broken, given, and gathered.
These are to be realized in each one of us, in every disciple of Jesus, as the very “living locus” of our conformity to him in his love for the Father and for the world, and as the wellspring of the fruit that he desires to bear in us and through us for the salvation of all. Thus the Christian life in its entirety is Eucharistic—a sharing in the mystery of Christ’s Eucharistic gift of himself. But let us clarify: the Eucharist does not imply only the giving of oneself as bread and wine, the sacramental presence by which Jesus continues to live and perpetuate his incarnation in the Church throughout time and space. Further than this, the Eucharist itself contains and makes present always the entire Paschal Mystery of Christ, indeed of the Trinity, the “Passover” by which, “loving to the end” (Jn 13:1), he brought salvation to the whole world and opened up the space for it to find its everlasting home in the very heart of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus in the Eucharist is contained not only the Last Supper of Holy Thursday, the sacramental gift properly speaking, but also all the events from Thursday through Easter Sunday—through the agony in the garden to the arrest and the trial and the loneliness in the dungeon, to the condemnation and the scourging and the crowning with thorns, to the carrying of the Cross and the crucifixion, to the profound solidarity with our sinful darkness, to the death and the burial and the descent into the underworld to set prisoners free, to the silent moment of the Resurrection and its glorious yet sober revelation to the disciples. Indeed, from this central point of the Paschal Mystery, the Eucharist spreads out to encompass and to make present the whole of Jesus’ life from his conception and infancy—coming to dwell in his flesh in the body of his Mother, and born in the House of Bread and placed in a feeding trough—to his ascension to heaven and his eternal life in the bosom of the Father, where his humanity is glorified and made perpetually present to us on the altars of his Church and indeed mystically pervades the entire cosmos. The Eucharist thus contains everything, the entire mystery of our faith and, in a real way, the whole history of the world recapitulated in Christ, drawn up into him and consummated in his return to the Father. He came into our world for precisely this purpose, to take us up into himself and, passing through the very estrangement of our death, to go again to his Father—this time not alone but with a Body and a Bride who has been made inseparable from him, the great family of which each one of us is an essential part, a beloved bride in the Bride and a precious child in the Son. And Jesus spreads abroad this redeeming mystery of his love also in and through us, who have been grafted into him, made one flesh and one spirit with him in the Eucharist by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus as he himself was “taken, blessed, broken, and given” in order to “gather” together all of the children of God scattered abroad and to welcome them into the very life of God, into the heart of the Trinity—so too with us. Being “taken” is the very foundation of sanctity, of holiness: for this word literally means being “set apart,” set apart from a merely mundane or profane purpose and designated for one that is divine and sacred. As long as I live my life as if it is solely about myself, as if I am its central actor and agent, with goals tied to this world and to my own plans and agendas, I have not yet been “taken” by God. I have not yet allowed my life to be broken open and drawn by an impetus beyond myself, harnessed and magnetized toward God who is in truth the sole longing of my heart, expressed in every other longing and surpassing them all. In him alone my unquiet heart finds rest, and in him alone, too, lies fullness of love, that great value to which my heart is awakened to devote itself entirely, not only in heart, soul, mind, and body, but indeed with a strength beyond its own, which comes only from God himself loving in me and granting me to love with the very love which I have first received. This is being “blessed” by God: receiving the immensity of his unique and unrepeatable love for me, and coming to experience and live it as my true identity and the sole foundation of my life. It is embracing a life of being entirely and solely “beloved” and “lover,” apart from every secondary identity, and yet giving meaning to all else in my life with freedom and with joy. This is the beauty of God’s grace at work within me: from the experience of belovedness, from his tender and loving gaze ever directed upon me, I am set free to love in response. Therefore, not only is God the One in whom alone I find rest, but also the One in whose very thirst I am gradually granted to share, until it harnesses me entirely and sets me on fire, consuming me as a living sacrifice of love for all. For what is the ardent thirst of God? It is his desire for the salvation of all of his children—his thirst to love and to be loved, thus to draw each and every one of us from the place of estrangement and into intimacy with himself, an intimacy begun in this life and consummated eternally in heaven and the new creation. Thus we see how being “taken” and “blessed” by God leads organically to being “broken” and “given,” both as a gratuitous gift of love, praise, adoration, and surrender to our divine Beloved, the beautiful Three-in-One, and also as an oblation for the welfare and salvation of the entire world. And we can easily understand from our own experience what is implied in this being “broken” and “given,” even if no amount of words or explanations can catch up to its richness and profundity in the life of each one of us. Indeed, if being taken and blessed by God is the foundation of sanctity, then being broken and given is its great journey, the path of its maturation and blossoming. All that I have ever said about the journey of love, prayer, and holiness can indeed be summarized and contained within these words. It is the great mystery that is expressed to us by Jesus in the Beatitudes and modeled in his own life of ceaseless prayer, abiding filial intimacy with the Father, and ardent, sacrificial, tender, and intimate love for every person and for the whole of humanity. It is the reality that is expressed by the evangelical counsels of obedience, poverty, and chastity, and it is that great journey that unfolds both in silence and solitude as well as in our encounters with our brothers and sisters near and far, in the path of charity, care, and compassion. The heart is broken open from its sin and selfishness, its fear and isolation, its control and narrowness, and drawn instead into the vulnerability and nakedness of authentic love, a reciprocal gaze of mutual seeing in honest truth. And this naked encounter—between God and myself, and between myself and other persons—draws forth from within me the gift of myself, it harnesses me as a donation of love to cherish, affirm, and care for the beloved person. Love for the God who has first loved me is the foundation and wellspring of this gift of love, its center point and the only true source from which it can spring unceasingly for all of my brothers and sisters without drying up. Or rather, God’s love for me is the foundation and wellspring, not only of my reciprocal love for him, but also of my love, in his likeness, for all of those whom he wishes to love also in me and through me. Whether this gift harnesses me in the silence of my prayer, in the heartfelt compassion, solidarity, and intercession of my heart, or in the concrete acts of service by which I tend to the wounds of this world, it is a true participation in the all-encompassing Eucharist of Jesus, a “making gift” of not only my heart and spirit, but my body too. Everything, having been taken, blessed, broken, and given by God, is made holy, made a “living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1) for the praise of God and the salvation of all. My own flesh then becomes most fully what it was always meant to be, at every moment, a living sacrament of unity with God and with other persons, a participation in the great Sacrament which is the Body of Jesus Christ. Entering thus into the relationality that marks my whole being, and which is realized fully only in the radiant blossoming of mature sanctity, I come to share in God’s own way of living and love—of his being relationship in the eternal communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And thus, too, my own life, presence, prayer, and service becomes a locus point in which the Trinity is present in the world, and through which he magnetizes all things toward himself. Just as a magnet placed upon a table will draw all the scattered fragments of metal to itself, and, being lifted up, will raise them from their natural state and suspend them in one above themselves—so too with the mystery of my sanctified heart, life, and flesh. As Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:32), so too in me—for he lives in me, he lives in all of his children, in the one Body of his Church, and perpetuates his mystery in us until the end of time. In this great mystery spread abroad in the hearts of all, he is gathering together the children of God who are scattered abroad (Jn 11:52), as the fragments of loaves once multiplied and shared were gathered in abundance and placed anew in the hands of Jesus, so that he, in turn, may return all things to his Father, until God will be “All in all” (1 Cor 15:28), and all shall be filled and permeated with the everlasting bliss of his love. In the previous reflection on “why we need silence and solitude,” I tried to carve out, as it were, the contours of the deep presence that is made possible through the authentic experience of solitude and its accompanying silence. However, because of the limits of space, our reflections were cut short. We were only able to adequately cover the “psychological” aspect of silence and solitude, in other words, the inner existential experience that these allow to unfold within us. I spoke of the tendency of our world—and of humanity in all ages, though to a lesser degree—of always being “connected” externally while in the same moment losing the deeper connection: with the depth dimension of reality, with others, with oneself, and with God. Due to our wounded state in sin, we incline to be preoccupied with “things” rather than with persons, with goals and experiences and possessions rather than with the more profound and yet more intangible realities that truly give life its meaning and savor.
In this regard, on the basic level this union of silence and solitude—which for succinctness can be termed “recollection”—is a matter of coming home to oneself and to the fullness of one’s life, rather than living on the periphery and the surface. The words are very apt to describe the reality, even if the reality is spiritual and non-spatial. For “periphery” indicates precisely the fringes, the outer realms, what Jesus termed the “outer darkness” (Mt 22:13), where we are in exile from our deeper selves and from God, and thus made incapable also of any deep presence to or welcoming of others. The term “superficial” also indicates the same reality but with different nuance. The Latin etymology, super-facies, means basically “upon the face,” indicating that a superficial observer sees only the immediate impressions of things, their surface, and not their depth, and someone who lives superficially skims across the face-level of many experiences without plunging the depth of any of them. The world of meaning and value, of beauty and love, of personal profundity and relational richness—all of this remains more or less closed to him. In this respect recollection is a necessary precondition not only for those who are called to a contemplative form of life, for monastics or religious, but for all people. For it is the basis of all true and real presence, and in all situations. The person who is far from himself and from this level of depth cannot be present to anything or anyone as deeply as they deserve, whether he is alone or with others, in silence or in the midst of noise, in rest or in activity. Saint Augustine expressed the great tragedy of this way of living, and the joy of turning from it to God, when he wrote to God in his Confessions: You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you! In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The things you have made kept me from you—the things which would have no being unless they existed in you! You have called, you have cried, and you have pierced my deafness. You have radiated forth, you have shined out brightly, and you have dispelled my blindness. You have sent forth your fragrance, and I have breathed it in, and I long for you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst for you. You have touched me, and I ardently desire your peace.i Indeed, in the light of his vision we can see and understand the nature of reality itself in terms of depth and centrality (the opposite of the surface and the periphery): the place of depth lies in the center, in the innermost heart, where God dwells, the God who is interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, “more interior to me than I am to myself, and yet also higher than my highest being” (Confessions III, 6, 11). To turn away from God in sin, therefore, is to incline rather to the surface and the periphery, away from the center where true depth lies, and, as Augustine explains, to lean instead toward non-being, toward the outer darkness where all is but shadows. For God alone is fullness of Being, and all things adhere in being only in him and by his gift. To turn from God and to seek for something apart from him, therefore, is to diminish one’s being, to narrow and suffocate the innate dignity that he has given by loving as god (however subtly) what is less than God, even to the love of self to the contempt of God. This is the “city of man” of which Augustine speaks, which sets itself against the City of God, whose law of life instead is the love of God to the forgetfulness of self. This, the foretaste of the kingdom of God that awaits us in heaven, is the return to oneself through the return to God, and the movement beyond oneself to God for his own sake (which in fact elevates and fulfills the self), a movement which also harnesses one’s being as a gift for the welfare of all. And the crux upon which all of this hinges, the turning point, is the movement from the periphery to the center, from being lost in the “outer darkness” to return to the blazing and brilliant light that burns at the heart of reality, in the depths of one’s own heart, and in truth at the center of every thing that exists, rooted as it is in the creative and sustaining love of God and reflecting his own goodness. But let us try to go further into this mystery now, to penetrate into this inner sanctuary and to see what unfolds at the heart of authentic recollection, in the prayer that is its true goal and highest expression. For recollection--solitude and silence--does not exist for itself as if it were an absolute and all-sufficient goal (as we see for example in certain forms of Asiatic meditation techniques), but rather for the sake of unsealing a dialogue of loving relationship, a dialogue that is expressed in words and gestures, but also in the simple sharing of gazes. One may enter into solitude, may embrace silence, and yet bring within oneself countless different desires or expectations which, while not wrong in themselves, hinder the freedom with which God desires to reveal himself. One may, for example, have a certain idea of how prayer “ought” to unfold and what it should feel like; or one may have plans for one’s life about which one desires to seek confirmation and strength, or which one wants already to begin to put into effect; or one may desire a particular gift from God, whether that be a charismatic grace (prophecy, tongues, or a more subtle gift such as understanding) or a mystical feeling of God’s closeness (or his absence). But all of this is left at the door whenever one enters into the deepest sanctuary of silence, not primarily by one’s own efforts—for extreme asceticism and quietism are two corruptions of true silence, not authentic expressions of it—but rather by the purifying activity of God over a period of time. Thus silence may be filled with a lot of interior noise at first, with one’s own “interior conversation” like an incessant hum in the background (or the foreground) of the mind. Only through a deep and prolonged process of purification and transformation can we come to what a Carthusian describes in this way: This silence enables us to completely forget our interior conversation, our ideas and our selves, to enter into the silence of God who is fullness of life, of light and love, and where a single Word is spoken in Love, the Word who conducts us into the inaccessible light of the Father.ii The Word spoken in Love from the Father, and conducting us back, in this same Love, the Spirit, into the Father anew. This is our origin and our destination, and the great blessedness that awaits us in the authentic silence of prayer. It is the mysterious communion realized in the obscure light of faith, the sober ecstasy of hope, and the joyous surrender of love. The burden that we always carry that causes us to be preoccupied with ourselves, to struggle to lay aside our own internal narrative to be unconditionally and totally present to God who desire to come to us, to make his home within us, and to draw us into himself through love—this gradually comes to be quiet and at rest, and the heart becomes “pure attention” to the Love that approaches it, enfolds it, and pervades it. As John of the Cross expressed it so simply: “I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.” This profound openness of presence to God, however, is not a rejection of myself and my own personhood, but its full actualization. And it does not exclude the appropriate “presence to self” that is also a condition for all authentic love and welcoming. I cannot welcome another into myself unless I have a self, indeed unless I fully inhabit this self; and I cannot let this self be made a gift to another unless this self has been accepted, harmonized, and set free by love, to be what it truly is: “me” in relationship with “You.” There are therefore of course appropriate moments for self-reflection, for thinking upon oneself, one’s dispositions, desires, and actions, both good and bad (what is philosophically called “third intention”). There rightly exists, in fact, a deepening awareness of one’s true nature and capacities, one’s misery and one’s glory as a child of God, which becomes more and more a habitual awareness and abiding state. (We saw this in the reflection on self-knowledge and confidence in God.) But so too, none of this leads to preoccupation with the self, but rather to liberation from such preoccupation, so that the heart may be free for God, to live in a primarily “first intention” attitude, in other words, in the attitude in which “You” are central to my attention and I remain fixed upon you, not distracted by self-watching or my own grasping for control. I let my heart be taken, drawn out of itself by the Beauty that approaches me from the outside, and in this very process “my house is stilled,” my humanity is brought into quietude and rest. And this happens not because everything is brought into perfect order within me and I have it all figured out, but because I am entering into living relationship. I am allowing to be realized in myself the constitutive relationality of my being, which in its very essence is a participation in the filial relationship of the eternal Son with his Father, in his joyous poverty and dependence in which he has nothing, not even his own self, apart from the love of the Father with whom he is forever united, from whom he flows as a gift and to whom he is forever given back in reciprocal love. None of this means, therefore, that I reject my humanity or castrate parts of it in my approach to God; quite the opposite, I must bring everything into God’s presence to be irradiated by his love and evangelized by his truth (see my reflection “Baptizing the Jailer,” for example).1 And this occurs not in complex interior dialogues or feverish journaling or an inner cataloging of my every thought and experience—though again, at certain stages or moments a healthy expression of these things may be called for. It consists rather in the bold confidence of a child who simply brings all that he or she is, whenever it arises, to the Father in whose gaze of love the child ever lives. It is his love which, receiving me, gradually brings harmony within me, both by illumining and directing my activity and by doing a deeper, invisible work that, though intangible, bears fruit more profound and more expansive than any human activity alone can achieve. And this very bringing before God of all that I am also gradually leads to the falling away of the thousand different forms of self-protection by which I have “clothed” over the vulnerable state of my humanity, the nakedness of my simple truth as imago Dei, as a living image of God, a child of his love, unique and unrepeatable in my identity in belovedness, and yet called precisely in this place to exist in the ceaseless circulation of love and reciprocal belonging that permeates the whole family of humanity, and indeed is the very innermost life of God himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, gradually and little by little—and usually imperceptible to ourselves—the journey of prayer leads to the birth of an abiding reality. It is that which we mentioned earlier, but which we can hopefully understand more deeply now: the reciprocal gaze of love. “I look at the One who looks at me.” This is the expression of pure prayer, the prayer that John Cassian said, being perfect, “is no longer even aware of itself.” It simply looks in carefree abandonment and trust, in ardent love and tenderness, upon the face of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ by the presence of the Holy Spirit, and loves him, cherishes him, praises him, and adores him—even as in the same moment it receives his own gaze of cherishing love, the love that both creates and redeems, that bestows beauty and restores it and indeed carries it to consummation. As the Bride in John’s Spiritual Canticle expresses it: “Let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty.” Here there is both self-forgetfulness and self-discovery; here there is both the gift of self to the Beloved and the reception of the Beloved into oneself, indeed giving God to himself by God who lives within us; here there is adoration and praise of God’s glory, and here there is acceptance of God’s delight in oneself, so undeserved and yet so genuine and profound. For here all is God, all is transformed in God and rendered pure, placid, and radiant with his light. All is joy and glory and love, for all is a participation in the manner of living and loving proper to the Trinity, even as this same love blossoms in the beautiful flower and fruit of ardent intercession, humble compassion, and tender charity toward the least and the lost, the poor and the pitiful, the broken and the bleeding, that they, too, may know the light, love, and liberty of God here and now, and for all eternity. As “lofty” as this goal may appear to our eyes, and as elevated as the language that I have used to illustrate it, I by no means intend to say that mature prayer is—or looks like—a ceaseless ecstasy of joy and transports of happiness and a kind of oblivion regarding all the affairs of daily life and the burdens and sufferings of the world. As in all things, the paradox rings true in this as well: the deepest and widest of mysteries conceal themselves in the most humble and hidden of places. God is a God who loves to make himself present in the littlest of things, unseen to all except the eye that believes and loves, and even then only in the sober vision that is too deep for words and experience. For confirmation of this we need think only of the Eucharist, of Jesus’ full and bodily presence in the tiniest particle of bread or drop of wine—and indeed in him the presence of the entire Trinity. The same mystery of power hidden within powerlessness, of immensity concealed in littleness, of infinite majesty present in what is apparently ordinary and mundane, can be seen in all of the other sacraments as well, and indeed in the entirety of the life and teaching of the Church. The key, therefore, is not to strive for the supernatural to the neglect of everything natural, but to let nature be pervaded by the supernatural and made new, to let grace fill all things and make them participants, through love, in the life of God. The key is not to bloat oneself up like a frog as if somehow one could expand to the dimensions of God. It is rather to recognize one’s littleness and to live it with peace and with acceptance, and in this very acceptance to discover and abide in a radical and total openness to God who is ever present to us, though we see him not. Saint Peter expressed the same mystery, and even his words convey the paradox of immensity and littleness meeting and joining together: “Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet 1:8-9). Thus we can understand more deeply, too, how authentic prayer—and even the strictest of silence and solitude—does not beget in the heart a hardness or apathy toward the matters of earth, towards the concerns of our brothers and sisters, but rather sets the heart on fire with love and compassion and concern. Indeed, the deepest of charity is born not from human motives or natural initiatives, but from hearts that, through their proximity to the Furnace of Love that is the Heart of Jesus, are set all aflame. This is how the Church is both profoundly contemplative and ardently active, both the home of communion and the impulse of mission directed to all, both the gratuity of intimacy with the Trinity and the most involved of care and concern for the poor and suffering, for the littlest and the least, in whom Christ dwells. For God and the heart that belongs to God, these two dimensions are simply aspects of the same mystery, like inhale and exhale, or like left lung and right lung, or like the pulsation of blood from the heart to the body and from the body to the heart. To paraphrase the words of Teresa of Calcutta: “My life is one of ceaseless prayer. I go from loving Jesus in the Eucharist to loving Jesus in the poorest of the poor. It is one and the same Jesus.” While different elements of this unified mystery are entrusted to us to be realized uniquely according to our specific path and our place in the Body of Christ, both always exist inside of us: gratuitous intimacy and missionary zeal. Indeed, these beautiful words of Mother Teresa can be realized profoundly and totally in every one of us, regardless of the contours of our life, or rather precisely in the midst of them: To make our lives a true sacrifice of love, we will consciously and actively enter into the spirit of the Eucharistic sacrifice and offer ourselves with Christ to be broken and given to the poorest of the poor, so that they may have life and may have it in abundance.iii Each one of us has our unique way which we are called to discern in docility to the guidance of the Holy Spirit who breathes within us, from a vocation of ceaseless contemplation hidden in the shelter of the Lord’s presence with no external manifestations of missionary or charitable activity (though bearing fruit through the “eucharistic,” sacrificial charity that is exercised here in abundant measure) to the most intensely engaged of active lives that are nonetheless fueled by deep and abiding prayer, by drinking from the wellspring of Christ’s Heart, and letting existence, in him, become a living “eucharist” for the sake of all. Let us lean into him and he will lead us, with hearts open to his presence coming to us both in the depths of silence and solitude and in the faces and the cries of our brothers and sisters in need—two forms of presence that more and more coalesce into one face, one countenance: that of our Beloved who ever draws and attracts our hearts. ****** 1This can be found in Responding to the Thirst of God or From Glory Unto Glory. i . This is the Henry Chadwick translation, as quoted on the page: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/520812-late-have-i-loved-you-beauty-so-old-and-so ii . The Call of Silent Love, trans. An Anglican Solitary (Herefordshire, England: Gracewing, 2006), 97. iii . Quoted from: https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/eucharistic-life-of-mother-teresa |
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
February 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
