The Center is the Gratuity of Playful Intimacy

At the end of this cycle of fragments, I would like to spend a moment reflecting upon this one final thing, taking a very deliberate turn back to the center. Or rather, I would like to consolidate and deepen, with prolonged and explicit attention, what the last handful of fragments have brought to the fore, and to solidify this re-centering movement that they have begun. I am humbly aware that an ill-spoken word, or inappropriately given advice, or a perspective too narrowly-written, can have agonizing consequences for an individual, leading them not deeper into the truth of God’s unique plan and specific call for them, but rather out of it, into a place of obscurity, confusion, and doubt. This is one of the difficulties and limitations of the written word, that advice that may be right for one person could be diametrically the opposite for another. In all that we read, we must therefore hold ourselves at a certain objective distance, not in order not to listen, no to be docile to the Spirit, but precisely in order to be authentically docile, to listen with true discernment. For what I read, in the plans of providence, may in fact become nothing but a foil for God to speak into me the direct opposite of what I have read. This happens often, I suspect. But often this confrontation doesn’t happen without conflict and pain, as the heart parses out what is true from what is false, what is wrongly applied from what is truly the voice of the Spirit. This, in fact, is one of the reasons why in all of my writings, I always try to speak from the centermost point where the lines of paradox intersect, and to speak in such a way that persons on both sides of the spectrum can benefit. I hope in some small measure I have succeeded in this, even in the prior fragments in which I have spoken of more secondary things.

But don’t take my word for it. Bishop Erik Varden himself writes:

Even as it is risky and irresponsible to cite verses of Scripture out of context as if they were absolute, self-sufficient utterances, we must beware of reading the sayings of the Fathers isolatedly. We may of course have recourse to anthologies of the sayings, or put together our own, which is rather what I am doing in this series. What we must guard against is the attempt to simplify a many-faceted tradition.

The very idea of a ‘systematic collection’ of teachings could lead us to assume that a single coherent line is being followed, with all component parts aligned to it. But no; there is immense variety in the Fathers’ approaches, for human experience is various, as are human needs, human vocations. The sayings, we must never forget, are almost always situational. They respond to specific questions arisen in specific circumstances. A counsel appropriate for one monk in a particular temptation might be disastrous for another monk going through something quite different.

The Fathers sought to be ‘all things to all people’. The foundation for their discernment was undisputed: Christ’s Gospel in all its radicality, with not an iota laid aside for convenience. They knew, though, that Christ, supremely free, ‘plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his’; and so that the task of a spiritual father or mother is not to impose a single one-size-fits-all model of putative perfection, but to assist the workings of a personal providence. As a result we find instances, in the collection, of apparent contradiction as, now and again, advice is given that seems to fly in the face of principles previously laid down as axiomatic.i

This reality of “personal providence,” and a profound sensitivity to the rich diversity of situations and calls, is very important. Indeed, without it, a balanced appraisal and implementation of the principles of the spiritual life, and of truth itself, is simply impossible. But for now let me turn to that center that I referenced in the beginning of this fragment. In all of my words until now, I have been passing back and forth across the distance between two extremes, as it were, in order to try to weave them together into a harmonious unity: letter and spirit, discipline and freedom, removal and rediscovery, tradition as both ressourcement and aggiornamento, the importance of striving for holiness and yet the utterly miniscule significance of such striving in comparison with the breathtaking love of God that saves us in the very midst of our frailty and weakness. One of the deepest lessons I have learned in my life is that the reality that encompasses all of these paradoxes is play.

Really, play? Yes, really. If the mystery of play is understood deeply and broadly enough, it is a doorway into the deepest and widest dimension of reality, indeed is our participation within it—namely, the manner of living and loving proper to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the heart of eternity. The purpose of man’s life is play, that is, the gratuitous beauty of sheer for-its-own-sake-ness, which also goes by the name love. All that I have written in my life can perhaps be contained in that one sentence. All the drama of life and growth, all the beauty of creation and of God, all the tension between longing for eternity and joy in the present, between longing in the present and the joy of eternity—everything is held and bound together with the golden cord of God’s own eternal playfulness. As the book of Proverbs expresses in the person of the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, the Son of the Father: “I was before him like a little child; I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). The Father created the world in his Son, in this single gaze of delight in which he ever looks upon his beloved Son, and upon us, and the Son pervades and fills the world with his own eternal life of delighted play, even to the point of entering into this world to redeem it and fulfill it—like an author writing himself into a story that he may share in its narrative and its drama, and thus in its unique beauty and its consummation—so that it may rediscover its true meaning and vocation once again, and be enabled to live it forever: and this vocation is to participate fully in the eternal play of the Father and the Son in the joy and intimacy of the Spirit whom they share. God holds the world forever in the gaze of his delight, playing upon its surface and insinuating himself into its every part, into every atom or quark, into every structure, into every life and relationship, every pain or loss, beauty or gift, every grief and every joy, writing through all of it a single beautiful story of redemption, a beautiful romance, a narrative of love for each and every one of us and for humanity as a whole, indeed for the entire cosmos, which is destined to find its everlasting consummation in the embrace of the Trinity.

​****************
i. https://coramfratribus.com/archive/desert-fathers-33/