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In this meditation I would like to include another reflection from the book mentioned above, and to thus bring full circle our little excursus on the beauty of intimacy with God and the full blossoming of prayer. In the book Responding to the Thirst of God I have spoken of the spiritual marriage, the state of mature union with God, as the complete reciprocal “yes” of loving surrender between God and the human person, and as the intimacy born of this complete mutual gift. I have also tried to show, illustrated by the experience recounted by John of the Cross, how this union—achieved by the pure grace of God transfiguring all the faculties of the person—effects a complete permeation of the individual by divine love, such that in all things they are moved by love to love in the very likeness of God’s own love, “loving God in God through God with the love of God.” Here all the energies of soul and body, previously fractured, dissipated, and dulled by sin, are healed and set free by love, to flow in undimmed light and unhindered intensity back to God. And in God they flow also in response to the authentic voice of all created reality, speaking its word from God, and allowing the person to discover and love God in and through them, since now, indeed, it discovers and loves all things in God whom it loves beyond all things.
After this, I tried to illustrate how this “pure love,” this gratuitous exercise of love in God, is the source of all authentic fruitfulness, healing, and transformation in the world, since, in the last analysis, “God makes use of nothing else than love.” Whatever may be our vocation or the unique contours of our life, God looks and sees only love, naked before him to whose gaze all things are revealed. And so tapping into this boundless source of love, this abundant wellspring of charity, this font of intimacy, is the all-important gift and task of human life. Sanctity is the great mystery to which we are invited, sanctity as a return to the original state lost in Eden, and indeed a holiness transcending what was possible there, through the Redemption and Transfiguration wrought by Jesus Christ through his Paschal Mystery. By letting this Redemption unfold itself in our lives—through the reciprocal encounter of thirsts, through the growing movement of shared surrender, through a gaze of love that becomes love loving love, beloved loving lover and lover loving beloved, purifying the heart to its deepest wellsprings and ordering it wholly to God in God—by truly allowing Redemption to have its effect in us, we come to know, live, and experience what it means to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). And here we come to the most important, most central of the dimensions of sanctity, of transformation in and union with God. For as I have tried to emphasize again and again, sanctity is not merely a state of virtue or natural human wholeness, nor is it best understood as an ascetical achievement nor even, in fact, as the climax of human virtue. It is rather the manifestation and fruit of passionate love. Yes, in its inner core and throbbing heartbeat it is the Trinity. Sanctity is union with the Trinity, a living, vibrant, unreserved intimacy with the Trinity in faith, hope, and love, that permeates all of a person’s life and the entirety of their being. Let us take a look now more deeply at what this intimacy looks like, as a way of glimpsing—through the lens of mystical experience—the breathtaking destiny that awaits us in heaven: This breathing of the air is an ability that the soul states God will give her there in the communication of the Holy Spirit. By his divine breathlike spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father. This spiration of love is the Holy Spirit himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation in order to unite her to himself. There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity in an open and manifest degree. And this kind of spiration of the Holy Spirit in the soul, by which God transforms her into himself, is so sublime, delicate, and deep a delight that a mortal tongue finds it indescribable, nor can the human intellect, as such, in any way grasp it. Even what comes to pass in the communication given in this temporal transformation is unspeakable, for the soul united and transformed in God breathed out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her. In the transformation that the soul possesses in this life, the same spiration passes from God to the soul and from the soul to God with notable frequency and blissful love, although not in the open and manifest degree proper to the next life. Such I believe was St. Paul’s meaning when he said: Since you are children of God, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, calling to the Father [Gal. 4:6]. This is true of the Blessed in the next life and of the perfect in this life according to the ways described. One should not think it impossible that the soul be capable of so sublime an activity as this breathing in God through participation as God breathes in her. For, granted that God favors her by union with the Most Blessed Trinity, in which she becomes deiform and God through participation, how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself! Yet God accomplishes this in the soul through communication and participation. This is transformation in the three Persons in power and wisdom and love, and thus the soul is like God through this transformation. He created her in his image and likeness that she might attain such resemblance. No knowledge or power can describe how this happens, unless by explaining how the Son of God attained and merited such a high state for us, the power to be children of God, as St. John says [Jn. 1:12]. Thus the Son asked of the Father in St. John’s Gospel: Father, I desire that where I am those you have given me may also be with me, that they may see the glory you have given me [Jn. 17:24], that is, that they may perform in us by participation the same work that I do by nature; that is, breathe the Holy Spirit. And he adds: I do not ask, Father, only for those present, but for those also who will believe in me through their doctrine; that all of them may be one as you, Father, in me and I in you, that thus they be one in us. The glory which you have given me I have given them that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me; that they may be perfect in one; that the world may know that you have sent me and loved them as you have loved me [Jn. 17:20-23]. The Father loves them by communicating to them the same love he communicates to the Son, though not naturally as to the Son but, as we said, through unity and transformation of love. It should not be thought that the Son desires here to ask the Father that the saints be one with him essentially and naturally as the Son is with the Father, but that they may be so through the union of love, just as the Father and the Son are one in unity of love. Accordingly, souls possess the same goods by participation that the Son possesses by nature. As a result they are truly gods by participation, equals and companions of God. Wherefore St. Peter said: May grace and peace be accomplished and perfect in you in the knowledge of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, as all things of his divine power that pertain to life and piety are given us through the knowledge of him who called us with his own glory and power, by whom he has given us very great and precious promises, that by these we may be made partakers of the divine nature [2 Pet. 1:2-4]. These are words from St. Peter in which he clearly indicates that the soul will participate in God himself by performing in him, in company with him, the work of the Most Blessed Trinity because of the substantial union between the soul and God. Although this participation will be perfectly accomplished in the next life, still in this life when the soul has reached the state of perfection, as has the soul we are here discussing, she obtains a foretaste and noticeable trace of it in the way we are describing, although as we said it is indescribable. (The Spiritual Canticle, 39.3-6) “The soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her.” I remember quite vividly that, when I was in high school, I had printed out this sentence on a small slip of paper and put it on a poster board on the wall of my bedroom. I read it often, as the words burst with meaning, almost the like breath of God himself, the Holy Spirit shared by the Father and the Son, was reaching out to make himself known and felt. Such is God’s desire for us. He uses every means possible in order to draw near to us, to open our hearts to him, to make space in us for his gift, and, finally, to transform us and elevate to make us capable of participating in the very innermost mystery of his own divine life! And as we see in these words of John of the Cross, the innermost life of God is a most blessed embrace, a sweet and everlasting kiss, the union of the Father and the Son in the shared breath of their single Spirit. How should it be incredible, indeed, that these words deeply touch the heart, for they reach back to our most fundamental origin in God at the beginning of our lives—breathed forth through his creative Spirit—and towards our eternal destiny, in which we shall breathe with the Father and the Son the one Holy Spirit whom they share? But it is indeed incredible! Yet God wants us to believe, and not to doubt, for “how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself!” To understand, know, and love in the Trinity as the Trinity itself understands, knows, and loves. What greater union is there than this, to be so immersed in God, so permeated with God, so intimately joined to him that, as Saint Paul says, “I shall know even as I myself am known” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12). To see, know, and love all things as God himself does, since God’s own mind, his own heart, his own gaze of love, his own experience, has become my own, my birthright through adoption and my very life through nuptial union! Yes, this is my destiny, to know and love all things in God, through God, to know and love myself in the gaze of his own love for me, to know and love each person in his gaze upon them; but above all, it is to know and love God himself in God, to love the Father with the love of the Son, and the Son with the love of the Father, and the Spirit with the love of both and both Father and Son with the love of the Spirit! For the love of God is one, shared indivisibly among the three divine Persons, this love that is the very substance, the very essence, of the divinity. And through grace it too becomes the very substance and essence of my own life, joined as my own human nature is to it, elevated and transfigured by the mystery of Redemption and sanctification. What blessed beauty, what radiant joy, what perfect freedom! To be caught up by God’s sheer gift into the innermost embrace of the Trinity, to be right in the midst of their ecstatic intimacy! To be so close, to be so intimately given and received, and to receive them so deeply, to be so permeated by their love, that I breathe with the Father and the Son the breath of their Spirit, poured out ceaselessly into me with all the force and intensity of their love for me; and that my whole being thrills with joy as the Spirit vibrates through me, speaking a word of pure and perfect love back to the Son, my Bridegroom, and, with the Son, to the Father, who has become my Father too, and in whose delighted gaze I eternally rejoice. I cannot avoid giving expression here, in the context of prayer and the anointing of the Spirit, to the radiant expanse of beauty that opens out before our contemplating gaze. I cannot avoid giving at least some gesture toward the awesome depths to which intimacy with God leads, in order to stir up anew in our hearts a longing for the One who made us—a thirst corresponding to his thirst for us—and for the joy of consummate intimacy with him. And while the ways and degrees of explicitness with which such blossoming of union with God are experienced in this life are as various as there are persons in whom it is realized, the inner essence is the same for all, and truly transfigures both life, thought, and feeling such that they are as they have never been before, a true “new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24), yes “a new man, for “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). And the intimate knowledge of faith, the ardent longing and peaceful reaching-out of hope, and the tender surrender and kindly exodus of love—the mystery of God’s abiding in us and us in him—is realized in all of us if we allow it to be, even though it is the journey of a lifetime. And there, beyond the differences that mark us—and also within them—we meet and are united in the single truth that grips us all and draws us into the intimacy of the Trinity’s embrace.
Allow me, therefore, to share some words that I have written before in the book Responding to the Thirst of God, which seek to tap into the heart of the mystery of prayer and intimacy with God. Hopefully doing so in this context shall help to deepen and widen our meditations considerably, and, more primarily, shall help to make the love of God and the depth of the union he desire to have with us all the more tangible, that we may plunge into it without reserve in confident childlike trust and spousal ardor. And so we begin, in the remainder of this meditation and in the next: The reason of our existence is to quench the thirst of God. I don’t say even “Jesus” or “on the cross,” but “of God.” Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, “Thirst of God.” (Mother Teresa) i These few words indicate, I believe, a deep intuition and experience of the heart of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, which, in her simplicity, she saw no need to expound upon. And indeed it is best known by walking the path ourselves, the path of love-responding-to-love, the path that leads us ever deeper into the discovery of the thirst in the heart of God. We should indeed pray and contemplate deeply on these words: the thirst of God. This is not merely the thirst of the man Jesus; it is the thirst of the entire Trinity, the fullness of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it is not merely a momentary thirst either—“on the Cross”—but rather an eternal trait of the divinity itself, one of the attributes of the interpersonal relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit. It is, in fact, simply a God-given icon, an image, of the very nature of God’s own love, both in the ardor of its eternal movement—the never-ceasing dance of mutual delight and reciprocal self-giving between the three divine Persons—as well as in its condescending, compassionate, and pained longing for the redemption and salvation of each one of God’s children. Is not God’s desire for us to know the nature of his thirst an expression of the ardor, purity, and intimacy of his love? In other words, he wants us to experience his love so deeply that we know not only what it feels like to be loved by him but also what it feels like for him to love. This is indeed a trait, perhaps the essential trait, of a mature love, even on the natural human level. Whenever my heart is expanded to the point that I am able to feel with and for another person their own experience, and not merely to be preoccupied with my experience of them or with what they think of me, the true tenderness of love is born. And here a thirst is awakened that far surpasses what so often parades itself as true love, as eros, as desire for another. For it is a thirst born not only of my innate desire and capacity for relationship, for intimacy, my own desire to be loved, but equally and inseparably of my capacity to love in the act of going out of myself, to empathize with another, to care for them and enter into their own subjectivity. Here, indeed, eros and agape are already becoming one as they are inseparably one in God. John Paul II indeed understood sanctity and the new creation—that state of eternal consummation that awaits us and the entire cosmos at the end of time—in these terms: in terms of “intersubjectivity” through love. He writes: The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God’s gift of himself to man. In this reciprocal gift of self by man, a gift that will become completely and definitively beatifying as the response worthy of a personal subject to God’s gift of himself, the “virginity” or rather the virginal state of the body will manifest itself completely as the eschatological fulfillment of the “spousal” meaning of the body, as the specific sign and authentic expression of personal subjectivity as a whole. In this way, then, the eschatological situation in which “they will take neither wife nor husband” has its solid foundation in the future state of the personal subject, when, as a consequence of the vision of God “face to face,” a love of such depth and power of concentration on God himself will be born in the person that it completely absorbs the person’s whole psychosomatic subjectivity. This concentration of knowledge (“vision”) and love on God himself—a concentration that cannot be anything but full participation in God’s inner life, that is, in trinitarian Reality itself—will at the same time be the discovery in God of the whole “world” of relations that are constitutive of the world’s perennial order (“cosmos”). This concentration will above all be man’s rediscovery of himself, not only in the depths of his own person, but also in that union that is proper to the world of persons in their psychosomatic constitution. Certainly this is a union of communion. The concentration of knowledge and love on God himself in the trinitarian communion of Persons can find a beatifying response in those who will become sharers in the “other world” only through realizing reciprocal communion commensurate with created persons. … We should think of the reality of the “other world” in the categories of the rediscovery of a new, perfect subjectivity of each person and at the same time of the rediscovery of a new, perfect intersubjectivity of all. In this way this reality means the true and definitive fulfillment of human subjectivity and, on this basis, the definitive fulfillment of the “spousal” meaning of the body. The total concentration of created, redeemed, and glorified subjectivity on God himself will not take man away from this fulfillment, but—on the contrary—will introduce him into it and consolidate him in it. One can say, finally, that in this way the eschatological reality will become the source of the perfect realization of the “trinitarian order” in the created world of persons. (Theology of the Body, 68.3-4, 395-396) We see the radiant fruit of the total mutual surrender of love: permeating our consciousness completely with participation in the life of God, and indeed making the entire cosmos radiant with the light of the Trinity. In the new creation, all things, all relationships, will be perfectly fulfilled precisely through returning fully into God, not there to be submerged, lost, or made anonymous, but rather to be affirmed and consummated in their true meaning and beauty in the light of the love of the Trinity. To return now to the theme of this reflection. We see unfolded before us a central dimension of the Catholic faith and of true spirituality: it passes by way of Christ, in the Spirit, to the Father. It passes through the heart of the Paschal Mystery into the heart of the Blessed Trinity. For the Paschal Mystery is not defined merely on the basis of death and resurrection, of suffering and solidarity—being the passage of Christ’s loving gift of self from the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, through the Passion on Good Friday and the silence of Holy Saturday, to the glorious Resurrection on Easter Sunday. It also marks out our own path of healing and transformation, our own passage into the fullness of love: assimilating into ourselves the very life of Jesus, passing with him from death into life, from loneliness into communion, from the narrowness of sin into the expansiveness of love, in which, in fact, we are assimilated into him. Through this assimilation, we are made partakers of the divine nature, made capable of sharing, with Christ and in Christ, in the very eternal life of the Trinity. Yes, for in fact the Paschal Mystery seen in its deepest meaning is a window onto the heart of God. This is the impact of Mother Teresa’s words quoted at the beginning of this reflection. The thirst revealed to her through the Crucified Jesus, the thirst with which the Son of God cried out as he hung upon the Cross, was not a merely passing thirst, a desperate cry of pain or loneliness or suffering. No, it was a manifestation of the eternal thirst in the heart of the Trinity to give himself to us in love, and, through this love, to awaken and receive our reciprocal gift. It was the revelation of God’s infinite desire to love and to be loved. It was a marriage of God and humanity, wedded as one in the flesh of Jesus Christ, totally given and totally welcoming us. It was the exhalation of the very breath of the Holy Spirit into the suffocating lungs of humanity, and the inhalation of humanity into the heart of God himself: this is what the cry of love, and the final breath of Christ on the Cross, means! And this is the significance of his Resurrection! His Paschal Mystery, in other words, was the unveiling—and the gift!—of the essence of God as intimacy, as the perfect communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which even in the pain of the Passion was not torn asunder, not even lessened in intensity or subjective depth, but rather pervaded our entire universe, even into its darkest places, with the healing and consoling light of eternal love. For here Christ cries out: “I still love you and long for you, however broken you find yourself to be! I have come to you, touched you, and redeemed you, espousing you in this way to myself, that I may be one with you in this life and for all eternity. Yes, I want you to be with me forever, where I myself eternally am, in the bosom of the Father, that you may behold there my glory which he has given me before the foundation of the world. Yes, in beholding my glory you are made one with my glory, taken up like the log of wood into the burning flames, pervaded, healed, transfigured, and made a participant in the very Love that first created you. And now this Love has redeemed you, granting you the capacity—by responding to my thirst, my invitation, my gift—to share in this Love forever, with me, breathing before our Father the one Holy Spirit who eternally unites us.” The Paschal Mystery in its historical dimension, therefore—as suffering, solidarity, light breaking through darkness—begins to fade, even as its eternal significance comes to the fore and proves everlastingly significant, eternally present before and within the heart of the Trinity. For it is nothing but the mutual breathing of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit, nothing but their ecstatic mutual self-giving, penetrating into the entire cosmos and every human heart, in order to sweep us all up into the innermost embrace that is theirs. Through this gift we share with them, with utmost subjective intensity and totality, the joy of their own subjective life of love: in the gaze of mutual delight, the perfect gift of reciprocal self-donation, and the utter and endless joy of complete intimacy. *************** NOTES *************** i. Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire, 280. In exploring the mystery of the Spirit’s “abiding” within our hearts and his transfiguration of our inner being, we come inevitably to the reality of prayer. This connection between the Spirit’s “descent” and the prayer of the human heart is made quite explicitly in Luke’s Gospel in the case of Jesus’ baptism, for he writes: “When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Lk 3:20-22). Prayer is the locus point of the the Son’s communion with the Spirit and with the Father, and it is in our case too the center-point and highest expression of our entrance into the life of God. Indeed, when understood authentically, prayer is everything: it is the very life-blood of our entire existence, saturating all things with God’s goodness and love and transfiguring it into a ceaseless dialogue of love and intimacy between God and ourselves, as well as a constant holding of the world, both in its beauty and in its pain, within the heart of the God who ceaselessly holds us, secure in his embrace.
Prayer is thus the fullest actualization of what it means to be human. For just as in the Son’s own prayer the heavens are torn open and the inner life of the Trinity is revealed, so too in our prayer, this explicit expression of our relationship with the God who loves us, the mystery of God unveils itself ever more deeply in the heart of our being, and in this light also reveals the true contours of reality and of our own personal existence, all of which is in its authentic truth relationship with God. In his words introducing the Lord’s Prayer, Pope Benedict XVI has some beautiful things to say in this regard: If being human is essentially about relation to God, it is clear that speaking with, and listening to, God is an essential part of it. This is why the Sermon on the Mount also includes a teaching about prayer. The Lord tells us how we are to pray. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer is preceded by a short catechesis on prayer. Its main purpose is to warn against false forms of prayer. Prayer must not be an occasion for showing off before others; it requires the discretion that is essential to a relation of love. God addresses every individual by a name that no one else knows, as Scripture tells us (cf. Rev 2:17). God’s love for each individual is totally personal and includes this mystery of a uniqueness that cannot be divulged to other human beings. This discretion, which is of the very essence of prayer, does not exclude prayer in common. The Our Father is itself a prayer uttered in the first person plural, and it is only by becoming part of the “we” of God’s children that we can reach up to him beyond the limits of this world in the first place. And yet this “we” awakens the inmost core of the person; in the act of prayer the totally personal and the communal must always pervade each other, as we will see more closely in our exposition of the Our Father. Just as in the relationship between man and woman there is a totally personal dimension that requires a zone of discretion for its protection, though at the same time the relationship of the two in marriage and family by its very nature also includes public responsibility, so it is also in our relation to God: The “we” of the praying community and the utterly personal intimacy that can be shared only with God are closely interconnected. The other false form of prayer the Lord warns us against is the chatter, the verbiage, that smothers the spirit. We are all familiar with the danger of reciting habitual formulas while our mind is somewhere else entirely. We are at our most attentive when we are driven by inmost need to ask God for something or are prompted by a joyful heart to thank him for good things that have happened to us. Most importantly, though, our relationship to God should not be confined to such momentary situations, but should be present as the bedrock of our soul. In order for that to happen, this relation has to be constantly revived and the affairs of our everyday lives have to be constantly related back to it. The more the depths of our souls are directed toward God, the better we will be able to pray. The more prayer is the foundation that upholds our entire existence, the more we will become men of peace. The more we can bear pain, the more we will be able to understand others and open ourselves to them. This orientation pervasively shaping our whole consciousness, this silent presence of God at the heart of our thinking, our meditating, and our being, is what we mean by “prayer without ceasing.” This is ultimately what we mean by love of God, which is at the same time the condition and the driving force behind love of neighbor. This is what prayer really is—being in silent inward communion with God. (Jesus of Nazareth, 128-130) While Benedict goes on further to say some illuminating practical things, bits of wisdom regarding prayer, our purpose here is not to offer a commentary on his own text but to explore prayer directly at the heart of our own journey through the Gospel of John. Let it suffice to say that Benedict’s exploration reveals again his deep sense both of the primacy and importance of the word of God, which gives us the voice by which to pray to God, and also the sense that our whole relation to God is cradled and sustained in the “we” of the community of believers, the Church. Since “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” and out of his tender generosity, God himself gives us both the words by which to speak to him—in Scripture, in liturgy, and in the example of the saints—and also bestows upon us the very Spirit of his breath who “prays within us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:36). If the word of the Bible and of the Church is God’s exterior exegesis, his self-unveiling in the word of truth and love, the Spirit is his interior exegesis, the unveiling and communicating of this very same truth in the inner sanctuary of our minds and hearts, such that it remains not merely an external word, but becomes an inner conviction and sweetness in the soul, a certainty deeper and wider than any other certainty: a certainty born of love and intimacy with the very Author of reality, the very fulfillment of all things, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus says as much later in the Gospel of John when he remarks, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (Jn 14:26). The Holy Spirit is the interior teacher, the truest teacher, the real guide of every person on the paths of life and the true rock and safeguard of faith in a world beset by temptations and surrounded by worldly resistance. He is the one definitive spiritual director of every human heart, such that while we can and should seek guidance and counsel from other persons when appropriate, as well as with those whom God has given us as companions and helpers on the journey of life, it is the Holy Spirit alone who can give the deep inner conviction, the profound sense both of consolation and of calling, that sets us free for synergy with God’s own life and activity in our hearts and in the world. It is he who grants us to truly penetrate to the bridal heart of the Church, to taste the mystery of her essence as participation in the intimacy of the Trinity, and to know realized within ourselves the same breadth and depth that is hers: the catholic truth that reaches to the very depths and heights of reality, and its widest expanse, since it is the very truth of God revealed and operative in our world at the heart of his Bride and mystical Body. Here, indeed, as Benedict says, the totally personal and the communal pervade each other. And they do so not artificially but organically, because the mystery lived in both is the same, and the voice of prayer arises from one source: from the love of the Holy Spirit within us, that sweeps us up into the great impetus of his own prayer, into the prayer of the Son before the Father, that binds them together in abiding intimacy and also lifts up the world, broken but redeemed, into this space and, through healing grace, makes it new. Yes, in the deep inner union of the voice of the Spirit and of our own personal voice, cradled in the the heart of the Church, do our deepest wounds find healing, and is our heart set free and transfigured to become a “living prayer,” blossoming fully in all of its capacities and becoming a ceaseless praise of the glory of God, a witness of his goodness, and a sacrament for the conversion and salvation of all. In the light of what we explored in the last reflection, we can affirm that the words of John the Baptist are realized in our own life as well: “he who was before me is coming after me; indeed he is already here.” Christ has existed before us, both as God and as man, upholding the universe as God’s Word of truth and love active in history by the power of the Holy Spirit, and made incarnate “in the fullness of time” in the womb of the Virgin and giving his very life, in death and resurrection, for the salvation of the world; and yet he is also here even now, both as God and as man, in the life of the Church and her Sacraments, in the mystical communion of her being, in the truth of her teaching, and in the sacred activity of grace—indeed, in the intimate personal union that weds me to himself and perpetuates his incarnation within me; and yet even so he is still coming after me, such that my life too becomes a harbinger of his presence, mediating his closeness to others who do not yet know him and also anticipating in the world, preparing the world for his second coming, when he shall enter time again to bring it to its definitive consummation: admitting the entire cosmos into the very eternal life of God.
This historical and temporal dynamic of the life of faith illustrates many things, not the least being the incarnate and communal nature of Christianity. For the Christian faith is not a gnostic flight from the world and the body, from the positive content of history into a purely spiritual realm of ideas or a contentless contact with the divine (though the mystical impulse in its deepest and most authentic truth is not only safeguarded by Christianity but by it perfectly fulfilled). The grace of Christ is a permeation of the world and its history, of human life and all its parts, by the very life and love of God himself, and the purification and elevation of this life, of this history, to be made a partaker in God’s own innermost mystery. But this historical, incarnate dynamic also illustrates more deeply the nature of the “threefold office” of Christ, in which we too participate: his priesthood, kingship, and prophecy. For these are all relational realities rooted in the midst of world history and the profound interrelationship of human hearts with one another: the way that we bear one another compassionately before God and mediate grace into the hearts of others; the way that the reign of the law of love within one’s heart also allows one to have custodianship and care of others, and particularly to become a protector of the weak and the vulnerable; and finally the way that God’s word operates, spreading its voice into the world, to those who have not yet heard it, precisely through those who have, who have surrendered their lives to its saving and re-creating power. And what brings to realization within us these gifts of priesthood, kingship, and prophecy? The outpouring of the Holy Spirit. “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and abide, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit” (1:33). As is written by Francis Martin and William Wright in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, and I would heartily recommend pursuing the many verses contained in this quote in your own personal study and prayer: Many biblical prophets teach that when God works his definitive act of salvation at the end of time, he will pour out the Spirit (Isa 32:15; 44:3; Ezek 36:24-28; 39:29; Joel 3:1-2; Zech 12:10). Ezekiel says that God will put his own Spirit within his redeemed people when he makes a new covenant with them: “I will put my spirit within you so that you walk in my statutes” (Ezek 36:27). Similarly, God says through the prophet Joel, "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams. In those days, I will pour out my spirit." (Joel 3:1-2) The expression “pour out the spirit” is a way of referring to a future manifold blessing. Among the blessings connected to the outpouring of the Spirit are the following: reconciliation with God (Isa 44:3-5; Ezek 39:29); purification from sins and re-creation by God (Ezek 36:25-27; 37:9-10, 14); creation of obedient hearts that are receptive and capable of love and petitionary prayer (Ezek 36:26-27; Zech 12:10); profound inner knowledge of God and his teaching (Jer 31:31-34; Ezek 36:24-28); and charismatic gifts, such as prophecy (Joel 3:1-2). When this promise was fulfilled at Jesus’ death and resurrection, it was revealed to be the personal presence, within the faithful, of the Holy Spirit himself, who enlightens them, empowers them, and gives them joy.i The Spirit, who in his own intimate, personal presence anoints the hearts of believers and fills their minds, all of their faculties, and their very bodies with “the joy of the Lord” (Neh 8:10), brings to us in a felt way the nearness of the Father and of the Son. He is truly the anointing of God, the kiss of his divine sweetness upon our humanity, and the breath of his goodness into us such that our hearts thrill with delight and come to a profound, intuitive awareness of what is good, of the will of the Father, by the very impetus of the Spirit at work within us. It is through the Spirit that we learn to “walk from strength to strength” (Ps 84:7), for he himself acts within us and joins us to his own action in a profound and enduring synergy of life and being. Whatever the manifestations of his special gifts may be in a particular individual—whether teaching or witness or service, wisdom or discernment—his primary gift is to join the human person to God in all of his or her faculties. Yes, the primary gift of the Holy Spirit is faith, hope, and love, the very activity of God within us joining us to him and granting us to live, not merely on a human basis, but on the basis of the very life of God. His primary work within us is to shine the light of the Trinity in the sanctuary of our being and to open our eyes to the radiance of truth and our sensitivity to its savor, as the prophet Jeremiah says: This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD. (Jer 31:33-34) Thus the primary work of the Spirit is not the diverse gifts that manifest differently in each person, some in one and some in another, but the gift, rather, that is given to us all alike, and which provides the proper form and direction for all the secondary gifts: union with God. And this union with God, operating with us and harnessing us wholly in synergy with the Trinity’s very life and love, also brings to blossom within us the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord (cf. Is 11:2-3), and love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (cf. Gal 5:22). These are available to us all, alive within us all, as the very irradiation of God’s life—through faith, hope, and love—into all the different faculties of our humanity and all the rich contours of our life and relations in this world. Here the mystery of Christ, “yesterday, today, and forever” (cf. Heb 13:8) becomes incarnate deeply in the here-and-now of life lived according to the Spirit, and we come to abide in a daily companionship with the Trinity. We come to know his consolation and his light always, even if it is not always felt and even if we walk in what seems to be absolute darkness; for he holds us ceaselessly in faith, hope, and love, he holds us in his goodness and never ceases to breathe within us even if, through the solidarity that unites us to our brothers and sisters who still “sit in darkness and the shadow of death” (Lk 1:79), we too descend like Christ into the darkness of suffering and bear the pain and sin of the world before the Father. In fact, only the light within us, only the light, is capable of lifting up and bearing the darkness of this world, such that the atoning priesthood of Christ, and his victorious kingship, and his prophetic word of healing truth, may permeate even into the darkest places and bring newness of life, and joy in the Holy Spirit. ********* NOTE ********* i. Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2015), 47. In this reflection we take a small step back to reflect upon a couple verses that until now we passed over in silence. The impetus of our meditations—or rather the object of our meditations—carried us through the entirety of the account of John’s witness to the baptism of Jesus. However, in our focus upon the significance of this baptism, and our exploration of the mystery of compassion and bearing, there is something that we had to wait to reflect upon. And that is John’s statement: “I baptize with water; but among you stands one whom you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie. … This is he of whom I said: ‘After me comes a man who takes precedence over me, because he was before me’” (1:26, 30).
These words are mysterious and full of meaning, but what captures my attention at the moment and what I wish to expound upon is the way in which time is portrayed in these verses. The approach to time that John reveals here is one quite different from the humdrum everyday mundaneness to which so many of us are accustomed. And it is different in a manner as if to say to us: “You should not be accustomed to this! There is another way of understanding life and time which is so much richer and more beautiful!” What do I mean by this? First, let us look at the text and its treatment of time, and then the answer will become clearer. John says that “among you,” among the people, “stands one whom you do not know, even he who comes after me.” Here we see John indicating Christ’s presence, indeed his presence in the present. He is in the midst, he is among, he dwells within, even if in his very nearness he goes unseen. This hearkens back to the words of the Prologue that said, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, but the world knew him not” (1:10). Indeed, it makes us think also of the book of Proverbs, which says of the eternal Wisdom of God at the beginning of time, which also become a revelation of his presence at all times: The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a little child. (Pr 8:22-30) Here we behold the timelessness of the Son, who “upholds the universe by his word of power” (Heb 1:3), who indeed “plays always before” the Father, “plays on the surface of the world and delights in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). Indeed, the Word of God who is always present in the world as its true guiding principle and foundation, and yet who often goes unnoticed—the “Now” of God’s sustaining Love—is also made present in a special way in the midst of time through his Incarnation. For if he is always among us, nonetheless John speaks of an “among” that does not contradict this constant presence of the Word in his creation, but confirms and fulfills it, and makes it accessible to us: he is “among you,” among us, in a new way through his Incarnation, since he has taken flesh and come to dwell among men, in order to reveal to us the face of the Father. This connection between the timeless Word and the Incarnate Christ—who are one and the same—is what allows John to say, “among you stands one whom you do not know, even he who comes after me...because he was before me.” Here we see all three phases of time expressed side by side—past, present, and future—and yet all three understood only in the light of the timeless eternity. And by eternity we do not mean a state completely divorced from time and inaccessible to it—though certainly God’s own eternal joy is complete in itself far beyond creation, and nothing can change him or add to him (even the Incarnation), for he is utter fullness of Being. As his Trinitarian life has always been so it shall always be, even as creation, through his sheer benevolence and mercy, is being taken up into this life through its espousal to the Son and its permeation by the Spirit. By his taking us up into his life, it is not God who changes, but ourselves; he imparts to us a participation in his everlasting perfection and fullness, from whom the whole universe has been fashioned and in which alone it finds its consummation. And yet in saying that God is unchanging, we do not mean that God is apathetic, that he is like an immovable rock devoid of feeling, of thought, of care, of compassion, of energy. No, rather, the unchanging and eternal life of God is the opposite; it is perpetual movement, a ceaseless dance of love, an abundant and overflowing intensity of intimacy, which all of his activity in creation and salvation history only expresses, transposing the very life and love of the Trinity into time and space and thus granting us access to it, until it so totally permeates and transforms us that we become partakers in the very life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son and Word of the Father is eternally present to every moment of time even as he holds history in its entirety; but in his Incarnation and his saving ministry he “comes after” John the Baptist. “He comes after,” even though “he existed before,” from the bosom of the Father for eternity. And indeed, he is present even now, though we do not see him. As was the case for the people during the time of Jesus’ earthly life, so it is in fact true for us: for through the event of the Incarnation, brought to fulfillment in the Paschal Mystery, all the events of the life of Christ have been universalized, immortalized (eternalized) such that they endure, such that they permeate, being made present to every moment of time, both before and after his actual Incarnation. That is the great mystery. Though his earthly life was truly a temporal event, a historical reality that can be situated in the timeline of world history, it nonetheless—or precisely thus—bursts beyond the confines of mere history, since it has been lived by the very eternal Word of God. It has gathered up all of history in a single life, a single moment, in order both to permeate it with the life and love of God and to grant it access, in the ascended Son, into the heart of the Trinity. This reality of the eternal-application of the events of Christ’s earthly life is well expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and in particular our invitation to participate intimately in them: Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. “By his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man” (Gaudium et Spes, 22.2). We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model: “We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church… For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us.” (John Eudes) (par. 521) Here we see again, in a complementary fashion (and partly from the same author) the truth that Benedict XVI unveiled before us earlier when he quoted John Eudes’ essay on the sacred heart of Jesus: “Remember that our Lord Jesus Christ is your true head and that you are one of his members. He is to you as the head is to the members of the body; all that is his is yours. His spirit, his heart, his body, his soul, all his faculties, all are to be used by you as if they were yours. ... For your part, you are to him as a member to the head, and he earnestly desires to use all your faculties as if they were his own.” Christ is as present to me as he was to those among whom he lived during the thirty-three or so years of his earthly life; indeed, he can be even more so, since he wants not only to share life with me, but also to consummate this life in the intimacy of mutual belonging. Yes, he desires to continue his incarnation in and through my own life, inhabiting the sanctuary of my heart, living in the flesh of my body, feeling with my own emotions, thinking with my own mind, and acting at the heart of my own life in a union of lives and wills that extends and shares in the eternal union between the Father and the Son. Here eternity and time truly kiss; here God and the world are united; here the eternal Trinity and the human person are joined together through love and made one. “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, for he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John bore witness, “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” (1:30-34)
Such is the testimony of John the Baptist. In these words we can discern very clearly what is explicitly recounted by the other three Evangelists concerning the baptism of Jesus by John, as, for example, we find in the words of Matthew: Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and behold, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Mt 3:13-17) In fact, in the account of the baptism of Jesus, we see expressed symbolically the very reality that we have already explored in the previous few reflections, the mystery of Jesus’ “descent” into the sinful suffering of humanity in order to “ascend” from the waters of our death and, through the vulnerability of his own love, to tear open heaven for us. This is the significance of his being baptized in the likeness of sinners even when he himself has not sinned.* He, the Pure One of God, the Son ever in the bosom of the Father, does not draw distinctions between himself and us; rather, he embraces us, identifies with us, makes everything that is ours his own, so that everything that is his can also be ours. This is the admirabile commercium, the wonderful exchange, by which God receives all that is human, even sin, so that he can give us all that is divine, even consummate intimacy with the Trinity. This “fulfills all righteousness” because it alone, beyond any human effort and yet at work in the very recesses of human heart, activity, and life, restores right relationship between God and humanity, reconciling us in the redeeming heart of the beloved Son. This is the import of the biblical term for righteousness; it is not a matter of a self-enclosed, merely human perfection or performance, but beyond this while also enabling a truly virtuous and pure life of love, it is the restoration of true loving intimacy between God and the human person, between God and the human community. In this respect, only mercy makes a person righteous—the reception of mercy undeserved from God through the atoning work of Christ, and also being possessed by this mercy as its mediator and witness before others. Having been loved, we become love; having received mercy, we become incarnations of mercy. This, in fact, is the true meaning of the words of Christ that we are called to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”: You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt 5:43-48) This is a matter of surrendering to this great Love that is God so that he may tenderly take possession of us and live within us without reserve. And such is the great work that Christ commences in his baptism—a work that has been inaugurated in his Incarnation in the womb of his mother, Mary, and that shall find its fullest expression and consummation in his Passion and Resurrection, and which shall then spread throughout time and space until carrying the whole universe into the heart of God at the end of time. In this passage from John’s Gospel, we also see in the witness of John the Baptist the occurrence of a word that shall be paramount in the Gospel and indeed in the entire corpus of John the Evangelist: menein, meaning “to remain,” “to abide,” “to dwell.” We will speak much more of this later, so let us simply look at the text before us. John says that he was told that the One on whom he saw the Spirit “descend and remain,” that One would be he who was promised, who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. This “abiding” of the Spirit upon the man Jesus is a witness not only to his anointing for his saving mission, though this is certainly the case—a fulfillment of the anointings present in the Old Testament by which the Spirit anointed an individual for the office of priesthood, prophecy, or kingship. Here Christ steps into this line as its definitive fulfillment, and is anointed by the Spirit, filled through every pore “like precious oil upon the head, running down the beard, running down upon the collar of his robe” (cf. Ps 133:2). He is constituted as the true High Priest of the New Covenant, and “therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted” (Heb 2:18-19). Yes, here too we see a witness to the way in which God saves us: through loving kindness and tender compassion. This is also why it is so fitting that the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness immediately after his baptism, where he undergoes temptation on our behalf and in our name, and confirms, before the start of his ministry, his victory over the evil one. God’s compassion has torn the veil, a veil we see visibly rent at the moment of Jesus’ baptism, as the Son rises up from the waters of our world and looks up to heaven to see, in that awesome moment, the light of the Father shine forth and the Spirit descend and alight upon him. Yes indeed, how awesome this is! Here God has crossed over the distance, not only from heaven to earth, from God to humanity, but from the highest height to the lowest abyss, and by rising up again from this abyss, he has drawn the two together. This movement of descent and ascent, of crossing over and bringing together, is the “divine weaving” by which Christ takes the needle of the Cross and the thread of Love and twitches together the fabric of God and the fabric of humanity into unity and intimacy once again. So the tearing open of heaven is simultaneously the weaving together of heaven and earth. What a paradox. But so it is in life, is it not? In order to enter into communion with another person and to establish unity of life with them, it is necessary first that I open beyond the veils of fear and self-protection covering over my heart—and that the other person does likewise on their part—so that we may encounter in the place of reciprocal communication in authentic vulnerability. Thus in order for hearts and lives to be woven together by love, by love they must first be torn, torn so that the threads that were once used to weave about ourselves in sin and self-enclosure may instead be offered freely for the great weaving of God, united to him and to our brothers and sisters in the communion for which we were made. *************** NOTE *************** *“To be baptised by John was an act of penance; an act which began with a personal confession of sins (Mk 1,5; Mt 3,6). Thus to go down into the river and be washed was a gesture of humility, a humble prayer for pardon and grace. In other words, that descending is a symbolic dying of the old life to obtain the grace of a new life. If Jesus, the Lamb without sin, joins the file of sinners lining up for the confessional, so to speak, if with that public gesture he makes himself one with sinners, receiving the sacrament of sinners, at that moment begins his hour, the hour of the Cross. Jesus becomes our representative and carries the yoke with us.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Journey Towards Easter, tr. Dame Mary Groves OSB (New York: Crossroads, 1987), 13.) In the prior reflections we have come much nearer to being able to hear in all truth and honesty the “challenging” words of Christ, by which he invites us to “deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him,” to be as a living sacrifice dying and rising with him to new life, for “he who seeks to save his life will lose it, but he who loses it for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it” {.}. And by this “truth and honesty” I mean avoiding the two extremes: either minimizing these words’ authentic depth and the realism of love to which they call us, or, on the other hand, applying them in a falsely altruistic or overly ascetical manner than does harm to the integrity of our humanity, or is simply fueled by pride and the ego in the very process of supposedly combating the ego. How have our previous reflections aided us in this manner?
Despite all their imperfections, hopefully they have helped to dispel some of the fog that clings so tightly to us as modern men and women in a climate that is highly individualistic and even hedonistic, that is preoccupied with our “rights” and our “well-being,” and is—to be quite honest—in danger of getting bogged down with an excessively worldly way of viewing reality (even spiritual realities) that suffocates the spiritual impulse that God has placed within us in our creation, and which the word of Christ touches and stirs into flame. For we have looked deeply both upon the profound love of Christ by which he has drawn near to us and suffered to give us new life, wedding himself to our humanity so as to draw us into intimacy with himself and to live his life within us; and we have looked deeply at the solidarity and communion that unites us, in Christ, to our brothers and sisters near and far. We are hopefully much better situated to understand the authentic depth and beauty of what Benedict XVI terms the “exodus of love,” which is the great drama of life. When we abide deeply in the contemplation of Scripture for long enough and with a wide enough vision, specifically that granted to us by the Church and within the bosom of the Church—and with a heart open to the voice of God echoing in our depths—we surely come to the realization that the world portrayed to us therein is so much richer, fuller, and more expansive than the petty world in whose “status quo” we have been born. And by this world I mean both the milieu of post-modernism and secular individualism, which is tearing apart at the very seams since it has rejected the glue—faith and religion, and the deep sense of communal responsibility that this begets—that holds society together, and also the status quo of our own fallen hearts, which bear in them a kind of “gravity” that is both earth-bound, downward, as well as centripetal rather than centrifugal, turned in upon the self rather than opening out toward others. This is the “self” of which Christ speaks when he says that we must die to ourselves, must renounce and lose ourselves, in order to find ourselves. Here the classic teaching on the “three enemies” of the soul is very apt, as it was first expressed by Saint John in one of his letters: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever” (1 Jn 2:15-17). The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life: this is the gravitational pull that makes the self the center of the universe and approaches all things with a grasping and devouring attitude, seeking pleasure, possession, and power or praise. Born in a heart severed from the full knowledge and security of God’s paternal love and tenderness, severed too from the awareness that in him alone lies fullness of goodness and joy, these tendencies, when followed, cause a man to live as if God does not exist. He makes himself, at least practically speaking, his own god; and even if he idolizes (however subtly) some created reality, treating it as his ultimate, it is in fact his own “self” that he places upon the altar of the heart. But is not the “self” something intrinsically good, indeed the very core gift that God has given to each one of us, which conditions and makes possible every other gift we receive, both in this life and in the next? How, after all, can we love and enter into relationship if we do not have a self, if we are not a living self, an “I” open to receive and to give? Here, precisely, is where hopefully our meditations have opened up the way to a much deeper and more intimate understanding of the words and the call of Christ. Put simply: the call of Christ is a call for the deliverance and liberation of my true self—the unique personhood that is mine as his gift, as a child of the Father, a beloved of the Son, filled with the Spirit—my true self which is not the fear-filled and selfish facade to which I so easily cling to give myself a semblance of control, of worthiness, of comfort, etc., but the self that is in its essence and in its full blossoming a living relationship with the Three-Personed God and with all of my brothers and sisters, indeed with the whole of creation. In other words, my true self is a relational self; it is a self wide-open to reality and to other persons, living ceaselessly in the interchange of truth and love, in receiving and giving and mutual belonging, in contemplation of the real and in living of the real, in the commitment that is freedom and the freedom that is abiding fidelity to the gift of God manifested in reality and gripping, through the Holy Spirit, the very wellsprings of my heart and my humanity and turning them all to love. If Alexis de Tocqueville was able to say that the rise or fall of democracy depended upon the endurance or decay of authentic religion, this is because in truth a society of equality, of unity, and of representation is not a society in which individual rights are paramount—especially in which each individual is a world unto himself with every “right” to define his own reality against others—but rather a society in which the dignity of each individual is rooted in the creative love of God and in the profound sense of the communal nature of human personhood, of the human family. It is the conviction that, since we have all been fashioned uniquely and singly by the creative love of God, we all bear an absolute and inalienable dignity that nothing and no one has a right to take away; but it is also the conviction that this dignity bears within itself not only rights but duties, bears within it a “call” and an “impetus” that draws us out of individualism and into love and care for others, out of self-seeking and into seeking the face of the one Beloved in whom our restless hearts find rest, and in whom we find the freedom and the measure of our love of our brothers and sisters. When man is rightly ordered as a “seeker of God,” indeed as one who is sought by God, and who in this very seeking that is the core element of his life also learns to care ardently for others as ones who are also sought for by God and on the road to God, then the grounds for a more just society are set. But obviously such a just society can never be either created or safeguarded merely by political structures or communal reforms; this is why a human utopia is an impossibility, and why every effort to create it is doomed to fail. It is because man is created, not to fashion his own perfect society, but rather to yield himself up to the kingship of Christ, to his gentle and peaceful reign within his own soul and in all of his relationships, those that are political as well as those that are most intimate, so that the true King may reign within him. “Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” This is the foundation of healthy society as well as of individual life; for every society is ultimately as healthy as are the individuals of whom it is composed, even as individuals are hurt or harmed by the milieu in which they are born and bred. This is precisely how the word of God alive in the Church approaches us again and again, right in the midst of where we find ourselves, to offer us the truth that is “ever ancient, ever new,” the truth that marks out the right path through life, the path both to individual fulfillment and to healthy community. For in truth they are one and inseparable, rooted in the dignity of each person before God and in the person’s orientation toward love and communion. For each person is willed absolutely by God and called to find everlasting fulfillment in the heart of the Trinity’s embrace, and yet not to do so merely alone, but in a deep and intimate communion with all other created persons and indeed with the entire redeemed cosmos. Here again we come full circle to the realization, to the truth, that has been the refrain throughout these reflections: the fulfillment of man and of the world consists in a living participation in the very inmost life and love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Man and the world find fulfillment when they become capable of, when they experience, a life conformed to the love and truth of the Trinity itself, which is the model and the form, the Origin and the Consummation, of all that exists in creation, its true inscape, wherein it is set free to be most authentically what it has always been, and what by God it was so lovingly designed to be. We did not explore the quotes from Benedict XVI in the last reflection simply because of a matter of space: it seemed to us better to allow his own words to echo in the silence of the heart before, later, commenting on them, or rather contemplating the reality toward which they gesture and which they seek to explore. We seek to do that in this reflection. The central and most important part of all that Benedict said is the presence of Christ in human suffering. This is a presence that is both redeeming and consoling. Without the presence of Christ, suffering remains on the natural realm of human trial and maturity, in the dynamics of natural compassion and empathy and the service and care for others of which the human heart is capable. And this in itself is certainly something noble and beautiful. To withstand trial for the sake of what is right is an act of virtue in all the ages of the world, and something beautiful; so too to undergo suffering, of whatever kind, so as to be near to others and to be of service to them, manifests what is deepest and highest in the human spirit.
We can see such noble suffering manifested throughout history also in those who do not believe in Christ; and yet it always reaches up against a certain limit, a certain boundary. This boundary, one could say, is a question directed from the heart of God to the heart of man: What shall be your response to suffering, my creature and my child? Shall it defeat you and cause you to collapse in upon yourself, or shall it be a catalyst of love and a school of empathy? Suffering thus is not merely a result of sin and the brokenness of the world that it has caused—though without this suffering would never have been necessary—but it is also a task issued to the heart of man, a call both to his own maturity and growth as well as to the gift of himself for the good of his brothers and sisters. But in the same measure suffering is also a question to the heart of God from the suffering human heart: Why is there suffering in this world, and how can it be definitively overcome? Why is the path to goodness so beset with temptation and uncertainty, and my commitment to righteousness so often assailed with trials? Indeed, the deepest question that the human heart is led to ask of God in this place is as follows. I believe in absolute goodness, in the victory of light over darkness, and yet in my own life I do not witness it, for I know that I myself am not perfect goodness, pure light, but only a weak and imperfect representation. Where then is pure and victorious light, which no darkness, trial, or suffering can overcome? Suffering thus is a space of prayer, a dialogue of love, even on the natural level. Many noble hearts have found it to be thus throughout history. But we must also acknowledge that just as many, or more, have found suffering to be an unbearable contradiction and a place of absurdity and defeat. For it is true that the deepest questions of suffering, without the coming of Christ, remain unanswered. For even as it is a catalyst of growth and maturity, it is a space begging for encounter, encounter with the One who dwells mysteriously even in the darkness of pain and trial. The questions suffering raises are beyond man, and they cry out to heaven—and this cry is fully answered only by the co-suffering of Christ, who as God enters into human suffering and makes it his own, so as to make us his own and to unite us intimately to himself. Yes, in this way suffering becomes truly a meeting-place, a space of encounter, and we can authentically say a “sacrament” of the presence of Christ, and of our transformation in his likeness. The true “inscape” of suffering is revealed whenever the incarnate Son of God comes to inhabit it and take it all upon himself: first, it is a mysterious form of his own presence and his own drawing-near to us, the crucible of fire by which we are purified in his likeness; and second, this inscape is the universal solidarity of the human family, the great ocean of co-experience in which we all exist, past, present, and future, such that the experience of one is the experience of all, and the experience of all belongs also to one. And these two dimensions meet and are united in the union of the heart of Christ and the human heart in the midst of the fire of suffering. For this one to whom suffering belongs is you, is me, is every person, but above all this One is Jesus Christ. Only in him, through him, and with him—or rather him alive and operative in me—can I hope to receive and to bear the suffering of others, the experience of others, in a way that allows the divine light of redeeming love to penetrate into it, to transform it from the inside, and to liberate within it the human heart that bears its yoke. At the risk of quoting our dear Pope Benedict to excess, I would like to include here another (though short) quote of his, and to use it to push our reflections even further, and to come full circle in the mystery of bearing and vicarious atonement. If anything, I hope that the extent to which I am sharing his words helps to ground our own reflections in the thoughts of a mind which is perhaps one of the wisest and most mature in the entire history of the Church, in my opinion the mind and heart of a true Doctor of the Church. How then can I fail to lay his words before the reader when they have proved so illuminating in my own life, and indeed to seek to step even beyond the mere words into the embrace of the reality of which he speaks? For even if I am but a hidden and ordinary soul, one of the “little ones” of God, I too hope that my words—or rather his words in and through me—may prove a medicine for the Church and all of her children, to reach as widely and as deeply, and to abide as long, as our loving God may grant. Here are Benedict’s words: In order to mature, in order to make real progress on the path leading from a superficial piety into profound oneness with God’s will, man needs to be tried. Just as the juice of the grape has to ferment in order to become a fine wine, so too man needs purifications and transformations; they are dangerous for him, because they present an opportunity for him to fall, and yet they are indispensable as paths on which he comes to himself and to God. Love is always a process involving purifications, renunciations, and painful transformations of ourselves—and that is how it is a journey to maturity. If Francis Xavier was able to pray to God, saying, “I love you, not because you have the power to give heaven or hell, but simply because you are you—my king and my God,” then surely he had needed a long path of inner purifications to reach such ultimate freedom—a path through stages of maturity, a path beset with temptation and the danger of falling, but a necessary path nonetheless. … [S]hould it not put us in mind of the fact that God has placed a particularly heavy burden of temptation on the shoulders of those individuals who were especially close to him, the great saints, from Anthony in his desert to Thérèse of Lisieux in the pious world of her Carmelite monastery? They follow in the footsteps of Job, so to speak; they offer an apologia for man that is at the same time a defense of God. Even more, they enjoy a very special communion with Jesus Christ, who suffered our temptations to the bitter end. They are called to withstand the temptations of a particular time in their own skin, as it were, in their own souls. They are called to bear them through to the end for us ordinary souls and to help us persist on our way to the One who took upon himself the burden of us all. (Jesus of Nazareth, 162-164) At the heart of the crucible of suffering marvelous things in fact occur: the transformation of the human heart into the likeness of Christ. And also: the opening up of spaces, through the compassionate “bearing” of one heart, in the hidden depths of other hearts both near and far, so that the grace and love of God may flow more freely, bringing healing and new life. This is how present and operative God is in our lives, not only in the midst of light and tangible consolation, but also in the midst of trial and suffering and darkness. And this is how deeply united we are as children of a single Father, as members of a single mystical Body, grafted into Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and experiencing the mystery of redemption and atonement also in our own lives and our own flesh. Our own hidden joys and sufferings, our own slightest sighs of prayer and longing, or our cries of lament, and indeed even the suffering in which we feel that we can do nothing any longer but wait for God’s deliverance—in everything, the love at work at the heart of the Paschal Mystery is at work also in us. It is spreading is tendrils deep into us and through us into the hearts of our brothers and sisters, tendrils that graft us as living branches into the life-giving vine, and make us capable of sharing in the very life of God, which is our eternal destiny in the new creation, when all suffering and death shall pass away, and all shall be unending gladness in consummate intimacy and the security of abiding love. Indeed, if this is truly the case—and it certainly is—then we can find the courage to affirm again what has been a theme throughout these reflections: that even in the midst of the crucible of suffering, the light of childlike wonder and the spirit of play can be kindled, and can burn within us. For this is nothing but the fruit of trust in the Light that is deeper than every darkness and in the Love that conquers all evil and turns all to goodness and joy. And even if such lightness and playfulness is intangible to us, beyond our feeling or our conscious knowing, it holds us always, holds us in God’s own divine playfulness which is not contrary to his compassion and his suffering-with, but rather conditions it and makes it possible, just as the wisdom and love of a storyteller for his characters allows him to lovingly write their journey even through the trials and struggles of their journey, knowing that a true happily ever after awaits them. I would like to bring a bit more reflection to bear upon the mysterious reality that we explored in the previous reflection—a reality that, since it is almost entirely invisible, is little understood. It is also particularly hard for the ordinary person of today, because of our societal prejudices and blind-spots, to come to grips with the essential elements of the reality we have termed “bearing” (and which theologically has gone by the names “vicarious atonement,” and “substitution,” and “reparation”). These blind-spots in particular are due to our loss of the sense of sin and of the reality of guilt—our blindness to the profound fracture that every betrayal of truth and love, of the goodness of God and of reality, effects in the fabric of reality and relationship. In addition to this blindness to sin is also the individualistic conception of the human person that has been so elevated and pushed to the forefront in the modern era, replacing in common consciousness the much broader and richer conception of man as a creature born of love, held by love, and moving toward love—and all of this as a communal being, for love of its essence means relationship, means being “from” and “in” and “toward.”
The individual of today, by contrast, is understood largely as a world unto himself and for his own sake, and his life, thus, is defined more in terms of “personal rights” than of “communal responsibilities.” But this is in fact a false dichotomy, and one which deeply needs to be overcome and brought into unity once again. For personal rights and communal responsibilities are not opposed to one another; rather, they are both founded on a single creative love of God, which has created both the entire human family (as a family!) and each individual member of this family, to find fulfillment and happiness in the unity and reciprocity of love, tenderness, and care. Since both rights and responsibilities are founded on the will of God for the flourishing and fulfillment of his creation, and specifically of his children, who are both personal and communal in nature, we can affirm without reserve that a healthy human society is one that flourishes because “rights” are fulfilled for all by the responsibility that each person embraces, for the well-being of the whole and of each one of its members, particularly the weakest and most vulnerable. This contrasts greatly, we might add, with the “rights movements” of today, which are founded not on an authentically mature sense of communal responsibility (which to be such must believe in a truth beyond man to which the whole human family is held accountable). They are founded rather upon the very “atomic” idea of the isolated individual that is tearing apart our culture: on the right of every person to have his own self-made reality affirmed by all, regardless of whether it is true or not. This, too, is why all the richness of diversity and hierarchy in reality is being compressed down into nothingness: for if nothing is real, if there is no good and no evil, then clearly there is no better or worse, and the important thing is simply to affirm each person and to make them feel accepted. Much more could be said about this, but it is not necessary to do so here; indeed, all of this is an unintentional digression from the topic with which we began. Let us then return to where we started: to the mystery of bearing and of vicarious atonement. In order to do this, I would like to quote two different passages from Benedict XVI which illustrate this mystery, coming from different places and yet pointing in the same direction. Then (in the following reflection) we shall hopefully be able to enter deeper into the reality itself in the contemplation of our own hearts. In the first quote Benedict writes: What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place? Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring, of merely trying to forget. Guilt must be worked through, healed, and thus overcome. Forgiveness exacts a price—first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself. As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and evil, are made new. At this point, we encounter the mystery of Christ’s Cross. But the very first thing we encounter is the limit of our power to heal and to overcome evil. We encounter the superior power of evil, which we cannot master with our unaided powers. Reinhold Schneider says apropos of this that “evil lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power...it bubbles up from the abyss. Love has just one form—your Son” (Das Vaterunser, p. 68). The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord “has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,” that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities ,” and that “with his wounds we are healed” (Is 53:4-6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing. ... In the meantime, an idea of Cardinal John Henry Newman may suffice. Newman once said that while God could create the whole world out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender. The overcoming of guilt has a price: We must put our heart—or, better, our whole existence—on the line. And even this act is insufficient; it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all. The petition for forgiveness is more than a moral exhortation—though it is that as well, and as such it challenges anew every day. But, at its deepest core, it is—like the other petitions—a Christological prayer. It reminds us of he who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross. It calls us first and foremost to thankfulness for that, and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love. And while we must acknowledge day by day how little our capacities suffice for that task, and how often we ourselves keep falling into guilt, this petition gives us the great consolation that our prayer is held safe within the power of his love—with which, through which, and in which it can still become a power of healing.i There is so much that could be said about the above passage, but I leave it to your own personal contemplation for the moment. Let me only note what in particular has so moved me to include it in our meditations on the Gospel of John and the reflections on atonement and bearing that the Gospel has sparked. In particular, the power of the above passage lies in the utter realism with which Benedict approaches and tries to portray before us, to make tangible, the encounter between love and sin, between forgiveness and the destructive power of guilt. By beginning with the very personal experience of having someone “trespass against us,” (or our own trespasses) and how much love it requires to suffer through this offense, both in my own heart and in the heart of the other, and thus to bring reconciliation and new life, Benedict opens up broad vistas into the very heart of the Paschal Mystery. He opens up in a powerful way a path to the very heart of the mystery of redemption: of God’s own gift of his Son to reconcile us to himself even while we were yet sinners, so that, through his atoning love, we may become friends and children of God, and, indeed, may participate in mediating the saving grace of Christ to others through our own lives. And now for the next quote, one deeply related to the first in its inmost core: The true measure of humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer. This holds true both for the individual and for society. A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through “com-passion” is a cruel and inhuman society. Yet society cannot accept its suffering members and support them in their trials unless individuals are capable of doing so themselves; moreover, the individual cannot accept another’s suffering unless he personally is able to find meaning in suffering, a path of purification and growth in maturity, a journey of hope. Indeed, to accept the “other” who suffers, means that I take up his suffering in such a way that it becomes mine also. Because it has now become a shared suffering, though, in which another person is present, this suffering is penetrated by the light of love. The Latin word con-solatio, “consolation”, expresses this beautifully. It suggests being with the other in his solitude, so that it ceases to be solitude. Furthermore, the capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love. To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves—these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself. Yet once again the question arises: are we capable of this? Is the other important enough to warrant my becoming, on his account, a person who suffers? Does truth matter to me enough to make suffering worthwhile? Is the promise of love so great that it justifies the gift of myself? In the history of humanity, it was the Christian faith that had the particular merit of bringing forth within man a new and deeper capacity for these kinds of suffering that are decisive for his humanity. The Christian faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God—Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us. Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis—God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with. Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way—in flesh and blood—as is revealed to us in the account of Jesus’s Passion. Hence in all human suffering we are joined by one who experiences and carries that suffering with us; hence con-solatio is present in all suffering, the consolation of God’s compassionate love—and so the star of hope rises. (Spe Salvi, 38-39) i. Jesus of Nazareth, 158-160. The mystery of the Lamb of God reveals to us so much about the nature of reality. In Christ crucified and risen we see unveiled before us the depth of God and the depth of the world, and in the light of God’s vision cast upon us in this place, we too learn to see. Most importantly of all he reveals to us the depth of love in the heart of God, the ardent desire of the Trinity to save each one of his children and to draw us back into the intimacy of his embrace. But he also reveals to us the true beauty of created reality, which has so moved the heart of God and been so cherished by him that he desires it to live for all eternity, finding its ultimate fulfillment in him. And he also reveals to us the depth of beauty, of love, and of intimacy that God intends to blossom and flourish in the midst of humanity—an order of relationships that reflects and shares in the very eternal relations that unite the divine Persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit at the heart of the Trinity’s life.
And all three of these come together in the single mystery of love: that the whole cosmos, and humankind at its heart, may be fully permeated with the love of the Trinity and live according to this love, thus being granted access into the innermost heart of the Trinity and there finding everlasting consummation. This is the true drama of history from creation to fulfillment, and this alone explains everything that there is or shall ever be, from the slightest quark to the furthest star, from the subtlest stirring of human thought or emotion to the most noble acts of love, from the tiniest hair or pore on the skin to the profound sharing of life in true communion that blossoms between human persons in the likeness of God, to the profound filial and nuptial intimacy that God intends to consummate with each human person, taken up in his Son and cradled in his bosom, thrilling through and through with the Kiss of the Spirit by whom he breathes into us his very life and love—everything comes from God, is held by God, and is drawn by God to its fulfillment in his own embrace, in a living participation in his life. One of the things that is revealed to us in the mystery of the Lamb of God, one perhaps little seen but profoundly beautiful, is the depth of the invisible bonds that unite us to one another in the family of a single humanity, and especially in the Body of a single Church, of whom we are all members to one degree or another through the redeeming activity of Christ who in his Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection wedded humanity to himself. As he “bore” us lovingly in himself—and as he continues to bear us even now at the heart of his Risen Life in the bosom of the Father—so too we “bear” one another. As Saint Paul said: “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor 12:26). In fact this mutual bearing, this reciprocal belonging of all persons to one another—even beyond what we can see or experience consciously in the shadows of this life—is the throbbing heartbeat of reality that shall be fully unveiled to us at the end. Here we shall belong to one another, and be united to one another, as the Father belongs to the Son and the Son to the Father, as they are united intimately and totally in the bond of their shared Spirit. We are his and he is ours, and in this primal belonging to God, we also belong to one another, such that in regard to every single person in this world, in past, present, and future, I can say: “He belongs to me, and I belong to him. He is mine, and I am his.” This is the law of the life of God, and it is the law at work at the heart of humanity: “All that is mine is yours, and yours is mine” (Jn 17:10). In order to explore a bit more fully the reality of this profound and invisible communion—though it also certainly becomes visible—I would like to share an altered version of an email I wrote responding to this very question.* What, in other words, would I say about the mystery that can be called “bearing?” This is the reality whereby, joined to Christ as we are by grace, we are granted to share in his own “carrying” of the pain and sin of the world—but also its true beauty and goodness—in the presence of the Father, and thus to allow him to perpetuate and extend his redemptive work within us. The mystery of bearing is something so little talked about and so little understood, and yet I truly believe it is a current that flows through every life. It is the true locus point where the great drama of salvation history unfolds, the heart of the meeting between light and darkness, good and evil, grace and sin, the life of God and the life of humanity. It is, indeed, the space whence true fruitfulness springs and indeed where it occurs, where the hidden activity of grace weaves together all human hearts by the threads of Love, stitching up their wounds into wholeness and their isolation into communion. While there is the “normal” activity of the Church in evangelization, teaching, ministry to the poor and suffering, etc.—and this is greatly important—there is also the invisible activity which occurs in the sacred space where our hearts all flow together, inseparable from one another, in a single Ocean of Love, and where ripples ceaselessly pass between us for good and for ill. And an activity both deeper and wider occurs here even than that which occurs in the visible ministry of the Church. Bearing the pains and joys of others, carrying them and their experience within our hearts truly does something within the Body of Christ; it reaches out to mediate grace, it hollows out a space, through our own compassion joined to the Compassion of Christ, for God’s healing love and intimate life to flow into the hearts of others, particularly those who need it the most or who are beyond the direct reach of words or normal human action. This, in fact, was the primary insight, given to me long ago, which has lain always at the core of my vocation—that I was called to abide always at this “still point” or center-point, in the silence and hiddenness, renouncing external activity in the Church in order to devote myself wholly to allowing God’s own hidden activity to harness me for the good of others. I nonetheless yearned to live among the poor and to minister to them, and considered for example joining the Missionaries of Charity; I also taught for a time and accompanied people as a mentor, and yet here too God led me back, as he always does, to that place of littleness and ordinariness where I am and have nothing but myself in my utter poverty and belovedness before him. Even, in fact, the desire and hope to live any “legitimate” contemplative life, whether as a monk or a hermit, was taken away (and I am glad for it), so that I could abide simply at that place where I am both most unique—in the uniqueness beyond every vocation and mission—and yet also most deeply united to others: in the place where I am nothing but a beloved child of God, naked and poor with no claim to anything and yet with the full torrent of grace freely given to me by Christ, the Beloved, who has made me his own. Here all is made transparent to person and intimacy, in the likeness of the eternal life of God which is nothing but the gratuitous reciprocal relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All else in the Church and in the world, as real and important as it is, is ultimately traced back to these realities that fill them and give them meaning, and which constitute their true substance: this is the Trinitarian essence of reality that can be discerned under the surface of every thing as its true heartbeat and its ultimate goal. So all of this is to say, I suppose, that the mystery of “bearing,” or in theological terms, of “vicarious atonement,” is not primarily our activity but the activity of Christ who also draws us to participate in the great mystery that occurred on Calvary and which permeates every moment of time until the end of history, drawing all into the orbit of the Paschal Mystery where death is transformed into life and aloneness is drawn into intimacy. This is the deepest cooperation and synergy between the human person and the divine Persons, and yet it is also the most mysterious. And how much more beautiful this is than the various inadequate paradigms by which we have often tried to explain atonement and redemptive suffering throughout history (though most have their truth, partial but real, when inserted into the deeper and more complete vision). Atonement is not a matter of Christ bearing our punishment before an angry Father or being condemned because “somebody had to be.” No, rather, he simply comes to us in the name of his Father and on his behalf, loving us fully as the One who is first, and always, Beloved, and he extends to us the Father’s own mercy and compassion, lifting us up in his arms and in his Heart, to draw us thence back into the embrace of the Father and into the joy and peace of the Spirit’s Kiss. There is a mysterious exchange here where “God becomes a Son of man so that men may become sons of God,” and human things are borne by the incarnate Son in his own flesh, first, so that we may not be alone in bearing them, and second, so that they may be lifted from our shoulders and eradicated in the Love that breaks through every darkness, and light may pour in instead, to heal and to recreate. And it is truly an amazing thing that we are granted to participate in this great mystery that was already fully accomplished in Christ at the heart of his Paschal Mystery—that moment that transcends time and space in its fullness by making the mystery of eternity, of the life and love of the Trinity, fully present in historical time, while also lifting up all of time and granting it, in the Risen Body of Jesus, full participation in the very innermost heart of the eternal life of the Trinity. This has already been accomplished in Christ, and it is made present ever anew in every Holy Mass and indeed in all of the Sacraments; but so too it becomes present and active in every single human life, and in all of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, so that these, grafted by grace into the Paschal Christ and, through him, into the very life of the Trinity, may aid in extending this same life into the hearts of others who do not yet know and experience its abundant light and goodness. How beautifully all of this illuminates the lives of God’s children, and all the moments of our lives, even the littlest and most insignificant! Yes, it unveils the true depth and beauty of the mystery of suffering and compassion; it even makes clear that our own consciousness is open, receptive, permeable to the experience of others, and that perhaps much of what we experience in our lives, mysterious as it is, is but a ripple cast from the hearts of others to be borne lovingly by us in the presence of God, or better, to be borne by Christ in us, and thus to be a sacrament of his closeness to them. We can thus understand even the most apparently insignificant aspects of our lives, the hidden clinging of our heart to the Trinity and the slightest affection, care, and compassion we have for our brethren, as a participation in Christ’s redeeming love by which “he became sin who knew no sin, so that we might become, in him, the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). “For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross” (Eph 2:14-16). The word here is “identification”—becoming one with others in the unity we have in Christ—though “compassion” and “solidarity” are deeply fitting as well, and help the former to be understood in the right way. It is a matter of holding the suffering beloved so close to one’s heart, as Christ does each one of us, that what is theirs becomes my own, including their own pain and their own shame. However, my own belovedness and intimacy with God, my abiding in the arms of Abba, is not thereby eradicated or eclipsed (after all, only the light, undimmed and unconquered, redeems), but rather fills all of this experience with healing light. Of course, in the frailty of this life, we may not always be able to make conscious contact with such light and love, though the super-actual contact of faith, hope, and love always endures, held unceasingly by grace. But my conviction, in the certainty of God’s goodness and mercy that views not a single one of his children as a mere instrument, vessel, or victim, is that even the deepest and most prolonged experiences of darkness are but a crucible of deeper light—a light of the future, yes, but a light that dawns already also in the depths of the human heart in the very midst of the darkness. Here, in compassion and bearing coming to full maturity, the light holds even the greatest darkness such that the darkness does not eclipse God’s love in the human heart, even experientially, but rather holds it even as, in grace, it is granted to hold others. And God’s ultimate intention for each one of us, even in this life, is to live in the ceaseless wonder and lighthearted play that is the nature of his own eternal life, where delight is the very substance of love in the ecstasy of mutual beholding, and security is the atmosphere of play in the joy shared between persons in their enduring union. ********* NOTE ********* *This term has found its enunciation in the fantasy novel I have written, Dawnbringer, and it was the use of the term there that elicited the question, though of course the question and the answer are not about fantasy but about reality. After all, every true story, every authentic myth, endures precisely because it is true, true in the sight of God, a reflection and irradiation of his own life into our lives of his children as they journey through the drama of this life toward the “happily ever after” of eternity. |
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
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