Giving us his own Name…

We in the western world are a circumference people, with little access to the centre.  We live on the boundaries of our own lives, confusing edges with essence, too quickly claiming the superficial as substance.  The superficial level of things is largely useless and leads us to do evil without knowing it.  To plumb the depths and substance of things, even our sin, is to be led to God.  Perhaps the greatest sin of our time is superficiality itself.

Maybe there was an earlier age when people had easy and natural access to their souls and openness to transcendent Spirit.  If there was such an age, it must have consisted of people who were either loved very well at their centre or who suffered very much around the edges—probably both. 

The path of prayer and love and the path of suffering seem to be the two Great Paths of transformation.  Suffering seems to get our attention; love and prayer seem to get our heart and our passion.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Everything Belongs, pp. 13-15

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5)

Have you ever noticed the odd spiritual law that seems to govern us, that the more we are afflicted, the more honestly and (com)passionately we can pray for others—and its parallel, that the better things seem to be going for us, the harder it is to pray?

Perhaps this is why we have been given, in our various degrees, the gift of empathy, “the capacity to share the sadness or happiness of another sentient being through consciousness rather than physicality.” (Wikipedia) But we have to be prepared to be open: we have to be prepared to see others as they are for themselves, and not as they might potentially serve our own needs.

The Principles of the Third Order of St. Francis state: “Members of The Third Order fight against all injustice in the name of Christ, in whom there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for in him all are one. Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfilment…” We are called, as Christians, to battle in prayer, as Ephesians 6 in particular explains—but we can only do so as long as we are pure in heart (Matthew 5:8) and keep ourselves from the lust (and here I mean economic, social, political lust as much as sexual) that views others as means to our own ends, and thus blinds us to the empathy that God has placed in the heart of each of us.

We are all sinners. But Christ died for each one of us, and so far as we love him, he will heal us. We have just to turn to him concealing nothing, and by his Holy Spirit he will restore us, giving us his own pure heart for our stone one, opening our blind eyes to see the brokenness of our sisters and brothers, opening our ears to hear their crying, and giving us his own Name in which to pray…

Happy Christmas!

Every blessing for Christmas and the New Year to everyone!

Out of the ordinary…

One does not always have to wait for something out of the ordinary. The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God and to make way for it to come into being here on the earth. If you always try to be heavenly and spiritually minded, you won't understand the everyday work God has for you to do. But if you embrace what is to come from God, if you live for Christ's coming in practical life, you will learn that divine things can be experienced here and now, things quite different from what our human brains can ever imagine.

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Action in Waiting, with thanks to inward/outward

And wasn’t the birth of a son to a young Jewish girl, miles from home on a trip to register for the occupying power’s census, just the most ordinary event, devoid of dignity or ceremony, even of the distinction of marriage? Wasn’t the place all part of it, a cramped and smelly stable attached to an overcrowded inn? What could be less spiritual, less exalted or rarefied? And yet here, now, the Son of God was born on earth, Emmanuel, God with us, the promised Saviour…

The ancient prophecies were fulfilled, the great day come at last.

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
   who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
   one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
   from ancient days.

(Micah 5:2)

O Emmanuel…

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)

 

Emmanuel. God with us. Could one ever want anything better for Christmas? I mean ever, in all eternity?

O Rex Gentium…

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)

He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2:14)

O Oriens…

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

The people who walked in darkness
   have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
   on them light has shined.

(Isaiah 9:1)

O come, Lord Jesus, come and save your people, for we grieve for what we cannot remember, and our hearts are broken for what we have never seen. We are full of emptiness, and all our days are dark. Come Lord, for all we have loved is broken, and the night is so very cold.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
have mercy on me, a sinner…

O Clavis David…

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me…he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” (Isaiah 61:1)

In this reading from Isaiah, the prophet describes the coming Servant of Yahweh.  It is precisely this quote that Jesus first uses to announce the exact nature of his own ministry (Luke 4:18-19).  In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society:  the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.

Jesus’ ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom, those who are “last” to tell them they are, in fact, first!  That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of Jesus… and for that matter of us as bearers of Emmanuel, God with us!

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 36-37

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

(St. Teresa of Avila)

O Radix Jesse…

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender.  She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little state.  If we ourselves try to “manage” God, or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle whatsoever, we will never bring forth the Christ but only ourselves.

Mary does not manage, fix, control or “perform” in any way.  She just says “Yes!” and brings forth the abundance that Isaiah promises (Isaiah 48:17-19).  This is really quite awesome, and counters any economic notion of earning or performing.

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 32

I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless. How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power? I increasingly believe that our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need.

If the church has a future it is a future with the poor in whatever form. Each one of us is seriously searching to live and grow in this belief, and by friendship we can support each other. I realize that the only way for us to stay well in the midst of the many “worlds” is to stay close to the small, vulnerable child that lives in our hearts and in every other human being. Often we do not know that the Christ child is within us. When we discover him we can truly rejoice.

Henri Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey: The Diary of His Final Year (Sunday December 24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany). © Henri J.M. Nouwen. Published by The Crossroad Publishing Company.

I love these words—I am reminded of St. Bonaventure’s devotion to the poverty of the Blessed Virgin (see e.g. The Life of St. Francis, Ch.7) who brought nothing to her encounter with the angel, and asked for nothing, but simply surrendered. How can we respond, except in silence?

O Adonai…

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,

et ei in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Lord and ruler of the House of Israel,

who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush

and gave him the law on Sinai:

Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

Jesus said it to us quite clearly: “Why do you worry like the pagans do?  What shall I eat? What shall I drink?  What shall I wear?”  (Matthew 6:31).  But for some reason, the human mind feels most useful when it reprocesses the past and worries about the future.  

For some reason, the mind cannot just be present to the moment, where it could find delight in the “birds in the sky” and the “lilies of the field” that Jesus has just described as the simple antidote to all of our “worrying.” He says “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself” (6:34).

Jesus clearly lived in the now or he could not have talked so foolishly.  When we live in the present we tend to notice the natural world, when we live in our heads, we compare, worry, and judge.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 35

It is only in knowing Jesus’ Lordship, in knowing his great love for us, the endlessness of his mercy and his grace, that we can possibly find the faith to live within these words of his. Now, in the last days of Advent, he is all our hope, and all our longing…

O Sapientia…

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:

veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,

reaching from one end to the other mightily,

and sweetly ordering all things:

Come and teach us the way of prudence.

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Sitting here this snowy evening with the two cats, I keep thinking of this. I so long for that day described in Isaiah 11, and yet the only way there is through this present darkness, by the way of prayer, illuminated by the little lamp of God’s word, that sheds only enough light for the next step (Psalm 119:105) and yet is (v 89) eternal. After all, “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God…”

As Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:6,7)

Not Ashamed!

Regardless of your tastes/prejudices regarding modern Christian music, give this one a listen—carefully!

And while you’re about it, you can read about the Not Ashamed campaign here, and the Church Mouse’s intelligent comments on the campaign here.

Pax et bonum…

Jesus does not demand
great actions from us
but simply surrender
and gratitude.

(St. Therese of Lisieux)

Why does this just fill my heart with such joy and peace, as though I’d been waiting for I don’t know how long to hear just these words?

Our only hope…

“Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfilment.  Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now.  This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than us.  This is what it means to be “awake,” as the gospel urges us (Matthew 24:42)!

We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate!  Advent is above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness…

“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope.  The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

We are able to trust that the Lord will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.  Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope!

Richard Rohr, adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 4-5

This kind of Advent life is the only thing that makes any sense of my own Christian living. My heart is so continually torn by all that is broken in this world, by the death of friends—including my little cat Ruby—and the death of strangers, by the suffering of strangers, by all those to whom Advent means nothing, holds no promise, that I can never truly be content, full, at rest, until the Lord Jesus comes. And yet, somehow, somewhere, even that is all right. He is coming—he has promised. Our calling is simply to pray…

I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart;
   before the “gods” I will sing your praise.
I will bow down toward your holy temple
   and will praise your name
   for your love and your faithfulness,
for you have exalted above all things
   your name and your word.
When I called, you answered me;
   you made me bold and stout-hearted.

May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD,
   when they hear the words of your mouth.
May they sing of the ways of the LORD,
   for the glory of the LORD is great.

Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly,
   but the proud he knows from afar.
Though I walk in the midst of trouble,
   you preserve my life;
you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes,
   with your right hand you save me.
The LORD will fulfil his purpose for me;
   your love, O LORD, endures forever—
   do not abandon the works of your hands.

(Psalm 138)

Our hope is only in him…

The persistence of what we must still call faith…

The best metaphor for our world of today is astronauts speeding through the cosmos, but with their life-supporting capsule pierced by a meteorite fragment. But the Church resembles Mary and Joseph travelling from Egypt to Nazareth on a donkey, holding in their arms the weakness and poverty of the Child Jesus: God incarnate.

Carlo Caretto, The God Who Comes, with thanks to inward/outward

Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the Word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home, p.107, The Crossroad Publishing Company

Our waiting is what the world calls weakness. The world wants action, decisiveness, assertiveness, alacrity—these are the strengths it admires and nurtures, demands.

Our Lord was hidden in his mother’s womb for 9 long months, and then hidden, as Caretto tells us, in her arms all that long and vulnerable journey into exile in Egypt. His early life, back in Nazareth, was hidden among sawdust and stacked planks, down some dusty unrecorded narrow street.

Our life in Advent is hidden in the darkness of unknowing, our eyes turned to the pain in which we are, by our plain createdness, hopelessly implicated. Or it would be hopeless, were it not for the rumour of prophecy, the persistence of what we must still call faith…

Keep hoping…

More Kristene Mueller. I simply can’t stop listening to that woman’s voice:

There is a love hidden inside your borders
Just waiting to be free, just waiting to be free.
There is a hope hidden inside your borders
Just waiting to be realized, just waiting to be realized…

Sometimes the hope hurts more deeply than its absence.

Trust. Fear. Worship.

It’s a week now since I last saw Ruby, my little fluffy tortoiseshell cat. Hard to keep the balance between grief and hope, trust and imagination. I’ve done all that I know to do—asked around, put up posters, activated her microchip, and called and called, alone and with company…

And I’ve prayed, continually. Waking up in the night to pray often leads into long prayer for all the lost and wandering, for the hurt and bewildered of every race and species, for the seemingly endless pain of this broken world. Christ’s mercy is our only refuge, his making all things new the only light on our horizon (Romans 8:18-27).

Ruby’s sister Ftifa and uncle Griffin haven’t been looking for her, or obviously grieving, though they have both been spending rather more time indoors than they had, and both sleep on my bed most of the night.

A friend’s daughter posted a beautiful song by Kristene Mueller on Facebook this morning, and it brought together so much of God’s way with us in times like this. We cannot but worship, despite our fear. Listen, carefully, to the whole song:

Truth, freedom and gratitude…

Re-reading yesterday’s post, I was struck by a sentence from Victoria Boyson’s article: “Our thankful heart will produce an honest and accurate view of God.”

We I wonder how many others, like me, carry within us a curious little seed of doubt, that would have us sometimes wonder if all we know of God is not wishful thinking, so kind of illusion of the heart? Yet Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

This morning I attended, for the first time, the regular Saturday prayer meeting at my new church. Someone quoted these words of Jesus’ there, and they’ve been on the edge of my mind ever since.

It is God’s longing for us that we should know him, and that we should know his blessings as his, as in some way a glimpse of who he actually is. When Jesus healed ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19) on the border between Samaria and Galilee, only one turned back to give thanks to God, and Jesus said to him, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?… Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica, “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18) and to the Colossians he wrote, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:6-7)

It seems to be that as we live in Christ, as we try to follow him, and depend on him for healing and forgiveness when we fail, that we know who he really is. Every time I hear that remark of Jesus’ from John 8, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”, I can’t get over the fact that Jesus didn’t say, “Learn the truth, and the truth will set you free” or even, “Confess the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He said, “If you hold to my teachings… you will know the truth…”

“Our thankful heart will produce an honest and accurate view of God.” It does seem that way.

CS Lewis wrote somewhere, that “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

While we’re on the subject of Lewis, that great scholar and apologist of the last century whose life is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on Monday (though curiously not in our Church of England Calendar, when we remember St. Cecilia only) I can’t help but remember his book about the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, and of the process of his grieving. If I am tempted to be what a dear friend of mine calls “precious” about the potentially confessional side of this blog, I should remember that deeply personal, agonisingly raw piece of confessional literature from a man I admire, even love, as much as any writer I have read! Perhaps others may even be helped by what I may write here, in some small reflection, perhaps, of the way I have been helped by A Grief Observed.

What to do with blessings...

The other day I wrote that I was having difficulty knowing what to do with blessings, having grown so close to God during some of the most difficult times.

I keep remembering the children of Israel in the Old Testament, who learned (sort of) to trust God in the bad times, but who wandered away after false Gods and loose living when the good times came.

Thinking it over, I remembered reading a remarkable recent article by Victoria Boyson, where she discusses just this question.

"Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). A person with a thankful heart is a person of great power. A thankful heart is a victorious heart, which sees victory in the face of defeat.

In the course of battle, we can often get frustrated and find ourselves wrestling with God instead of contending the mountains in our lives. Through our frustration we end up rebuking God, instead of rebuking principalities and powers. We can get caught in the cycle of complaint with God concerning how long it is taking Him to meet our need; instead of thanking Him for all that He has already done for us. Our unhappiness can keep us continually seeking explanations from God, instead of thanking Him for the mountains He has already moved and the seas that He has parted to get us this far.

How soon we lose sight of all the miracles He has performed to bring us the victories we have already been given. While waiting for God to do the "big" thing for us, we forget to be thankful for the little victories along the way. I believe the small blessings we receive from God are a special test of our heart; He wants to know if we will be thankful even for the smallest gift.

On the other hand, Satan wants us to become dissatisfied with the victories God has given us, for a dissatisfied heart is easy for him to manipulate.  When we are frustrated, he can get us to do and say things we would not otherwise and attitudes can develop that hurt our faith. Jealousy and selfish ambition are both rooted in an ungrateful, dissatisfied heart. For a dissatisfied heart is like a hunger that is never filled, or a fire that never dies out. If we allow it, it will eat away at the enjoyment we find in this life...

Our thankful heart will produce an honest and accurate view of God. We will see that He alone holds the world in the palm of His hand, and that He alone is the creator of all things. As this awesome God blesses us everyday, we simply need to take the time to renew our minds by thinking of the blessings and victories He has given us. When we do this, we enlarge our capacity to believe in Him to do even greater things, and then we will trust Him more and lean more on the power and authority He has given us...

Victoria Boyson, 'A Heart of Thanksgiving'

If giving thanks to God even in the bad times opens the door to God's blessings, how much more will we be able to trust God if we can remains thankful in his blessings? After all, they are his blessings, not ours, and in offering them to him in our thankfulness, we are, in the words of the liturgy, giving him of his own.

My grace is sufficient for you…

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Prayer clarifies our hope and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget. It is an act of self-purification... It teaches us what to aspire to, implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let God’s will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to God in our will, an effort to make God the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to God's concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prayer simplifies things. When all around us, within and without, is desperately complicated, ambiguous and contradictory, prayer is one thing. Contemplative prayer, in whichever way, is very close to Jesus’ “one thing needed” (Luke 10:42). What is surprising, always, is how hard it is to remember this—to turn to prayer first, rather than as a last resort. We are so deeply marked by that original sin of wanting to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5) that we turn first to our own strength, cunning, experience, and to God last of all. Perhaps that’s why Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…” (Matthew 5:3) Only those whose internal resources are spent and drained—or who through long discipline have learned their own emptiness—are open enough to receive from God his limitless blessing, his endless strength. As the Lord said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

It’s quite remarkable, looking back over the past few years’ extraordinary difficulties, just how close God has been to me at those times when I have had nothing left. I have actually seen for myself what Paul meant when he wrote, “That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10)

We are called to “imitate Christ” as Thomas à Kempis put it. It is surely at the Cross that we see most clearly where this is likely to lead. Jesus did warn us (Matthew 16:24, among other references) and it is here that we come closest to him, as he drew close to us in that appalling act of redemption.

In all this God has blessed me in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined, and often these days I just don’t know what to do with all the blessings! That, as much as anything, has been the reason I’ve been so quiet here. Maybe I shall have to share some more of this, loath though I am to go in for “confessional blogging…” Because it really is strangest thing. Why is it so hard to learn that God is good, to learn to trust that, to learn that there is such a thing as plain, honest joy, at the end of it all?

There’s No One Like You…

Charismatic songwriters are often criticised by traditionalists, and by the more grimly reformed of worshippers, for writing “God is my girlfriend” songs: songs of intimacy and longing, like Eddie Espinosa’s There’s No One Like You:

There’s no one like you my Lord
No one could take your place
My heart beats to worship you
I live just to seek your face
There’s no one like you my Lord
No one can take your place
There’s no one like you my Lord, no one like you…

I can’t help but think that this criticism is based in a very short-sighted kind of mystical illiteracy. Richard Rohr writes:

Any true experience of the Holy gives one the experience of being secretly chosen, invited, and loved. Surely that is why bride and bridegroom, invitations, and wedding banquets are Jesus' most common metaphors for eternal life… This is religion at its best and highest and truest. The mystics know themselves to be completely safe and completely accepted at ever-deeper levels of trust, exposure, and embrace. It is a spiral that goes ever deeper and closer. How different than the normal fear of hell or punishment, which keeps us on the far edge of the only dance there is…

Mysticism begins when the totally transcendent image of God starts to recede; and there's a deepening sense of God as immanent, present, here, now, within me. Augustine's line was "God is more intimate to me than I am to myself” or “more me than I am myself." St. Catherine of Genoa shouted it in the streets, "My deepest me is God!"

So you must overcome the gap to know—and then Someone Else is doing the knowing through you. God is no longer "out there."  At this point, it's not like one has a new relationship with God; it's like one has a whole new God! “God himself is my counsellor, and at night my innermost being instructs me,” says the Psalmist (16:7).

The mystics are those who are let in on this secret mystery of God's love affair with all souls, and recognize the simultaneous love affair with the individual soul—as if it were the only one God loves. It's absolutely our unique affair, and that sets the whole thing on a different and deeper ground than mere organized religion can ever achieve by itself…

We have put our emphasis on trying to love God, which is probably a good way to start—although we do not have a clue how to do that.  What I consistently find in the mystics is an overwhelming experience of how God has loved them.  God is the initiator, God is the doer, God is the one who seduces us.  All we can do is respond in kind, and exactly as Meister Eckhart said, “The love by which we love God is the very same love with which God has first loved us.”

The mystics' overwhelming experience is this full body blow of the Divine loving them, the Divine radically accepting them.  And the rest of their life is trying to verbalize that, and invariably finding ways to give that love back through forms of service, compassion and non-stop worship.  But none of this is to earn God's love; it's always and only to return God's love.  Love is repaid by love alone.

This is neither selfish nor solipsistic. Francis of Assisi was simultaneously one of the greatest of mystics and one of the greatest of evangelists. His paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer illustrates perfectly the blend of prayer and action, contemplation and evangelism, that characterised the man throughout his short life:

Our Father: Creator, Redeemer, Saviour and Comforter.

In Heaven: In the angels and the saints. You give them light so that they may have knowledge, because You are light. You inflame them so that they may love, because You are love. You live continually in them so that they may be happy, because You are the supreme good, the eternal good, and it is from You all good comes and without You there is no good.

Hallowed be your name: May our knowledge of You become ever clearer, so that we may realise the breadth of Your blessings, the extent of Your promises, the height of Your majesty and the depth of Your judgements.

Your kingdom come: So that You may reign in us by Your grace and bring us to Your kingdom, where we shall see You clearly, love You perfectly, be happy in Your company and enjoy You for ever.

Your will be done, on Earth as in Heaven: That we may love You with our whole heart by always thinking of You; with our whole mind by directing our whole intention towards You and seeking Your glory in everything; and with all our strength by spending all our energies and affections of soul and body in the service of Your love alone. And may we love our neighbour as ourselves, encouraging them all to love You as best we can, rejoicing at the good fortune of others, just as if it were our own, and sympathising with their misfortunes, while giving offence to no one.

Give us today our daily bread: Your own beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to remind us of the love He showed for us and to help us to understand and appreciate it and everything that He did or said or suffered.

And forgive us our sins: In Your infinite mercy, and by the power of the passion of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, together with the merits and the intercession of the Blessèd Virgin Mary and all the saints.

As we forgive those who sin against us: And if we do not forgive perfectly, make us forgive perfectly, so that we may truly love our enemies for love of You and pray fervently to You for them, returning no one evil for evil, anxious only to serve everybody in you.

Lead us not into temptation: Hidden or obvious, sudden or unforeseen.

But deliver us from evil: Present, past or future. Amen.

God is love. John the Evangelist wrote to his people (1 John 4:7-18):

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

How can we know this love, and not sing of it? Eddie Espinosa’s beautiful lyric sums it up for me. Here it is in full:

        There’s no one like you my Lord
        No one could take your place
        My heart beats to worship you
        I live just to seek your face
        There’s no one like you my Lord
        No one can take your place
        There’s no one like you my Lord, no one like you

        You are my God, you’re everything to me
        There’s no one like you my Lord, no one like you
        You are my God, you’re everything to me
        There’s no one like you my Lord, no one like you

        There’s no one like you my Lord
        No one can take your place
        I long for your presence Lord
        To serve you is my reward
        There’s no one like you my Lord
        No one can take your place
        There’s no one like you my Lord, no one like you.

        (Copyright © 1987 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing. All rights reserved.)