Hear O Israel (...) You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength (Mk 12:29-30; 33; Dt. 6:4).
Our Lord would have recited this text, the Shema of Israel, three times every day. He must have loved this custom, which devout Jews still keep. Surely just saying these words would have filled him with joy every single time! In today’s Gospel anyway he identifies the command to love God as the first of all the commandments. He himself fulfilled it perfectly, sinlessly, at every moment of life in his sacred humanity. As he says in the Last Discourse according to St. John: I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father (14:31). Or again: I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love (15:10).
The same Sacred Heart that burned with both divine and human love for God the Father, also burned with love for us. Summing up the motivation and meaning of the Passion, St. John tells us: Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end (Jn 13:1) For his part St. Paul, gazing at the Cross, cries out: The Son of God loved me, and gave himself up for me (Gal 2:20).
This past week our community here has been enjoying a time of retreat. According to custom we have received daily spiritual conferences. These have spoken of our need to walk in God’s love, to grow in it, to be conformed to it, to rejoice in it, to yearn for it; to prefer nothing whatever to it. This is all life-enhancing doctrine! Our preacher Fr. Stuart illustrated his topics with many texts from the great Christian spiritual writers, and as we listened to these once again, we felt our hearts burn within us.
Holy Scripture commands us to respond to God in love, to walk in right relationship with him, to follow our maker’s instructions, because to do so is to live aright. Our God is not just an idea; certainly not just an ideology. Nor is he merely the God of the Philosophers: a remote and impersonal unmoved first mover. No: God revealed himself to Israel, and then above all through Jesus Christ our Lord, as a God of love. God’s love then is ultimate reality; it’s the underlying meaning of all things; it engulfs us, presses in on us, calls out to us. The mystics especially show us, as we need to be shown, that all of us are called to divine intimacy; to the adventure of a love affair with God; to the fullness of the Christian life; to the height of holiness. These Saints speak of delights in this love such as the world can never give, or even imagine. Of course the mystics are relatively few. Their vocation is special, and not all Christians need experience the supernatural phenomena we read of in the live of many Saints. Yet: all Christians are called to grow in the knowledge and love of God, according to His will, and call. We’re all called to make progress: and to attain at last to perfect union with our Beloved.
How can mere mortal creatures, and sinful ones at that, aspire to a loving union with God? Yet this astonishing invitation lies at the heart of our faith. Already in the early 3rd century the Church Father Origen pointed out that Scripture begins with a marriage, between Adam and Eve. It ends with the wedding of Christ and his Church. And in the middle it gives us the Song of Songs, which we read as a love song, a marriage hymn, between God and the Christian soul.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! So the Song of Songs begins. As the classical commentators explain: through the Incarnation, the embrace, the union between God and our human nature has already in principle taken place. In Christ, God is with us, and God has become one with us. But he calls each of us individually to make this union our own, to enter it, to live it out, and to rejoice in it forever. We are able to do this by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit above all through the life of prayer.
Our retreat was in large measure an invitation again to prayer; to persevering prayer; to the prayer of love; the prayer of contemplation and of union! St. Teresa exhorts us: “Do not abandon prayer! There is nothing here to fear, but only something to desire!” On the basis of much personal experience, she boldly asserts that “in prayer, God communicates himself to us, and he does so in a way that is impossible to doubt.” St. John of the Cross sang of the transforming effects of prayer in his matchless poetry.
En una noche oscura - One dark night
Fired with love’s urgent longings
- Ah the sheer grace! -
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled.
Through our prayer, as if secretly and silently, we grow in love of God and of our neighbour. We lose our vices, grow in virtue, become ever more conformed to Jesus Christ our Lord, and to his most Sacred Heart. Of ourselves we cannot attain any of this. So we come before God “as sinners, as poor, miserable beggars, as weak and needy, as subjects and slaves, yet also always as his children” (St. Albert the Great). Then, as St. Bernard testifies, “when we meet Christ in our prayer, he soothes and pierces our hearts, even though previously they had been hard as stone. He heals what was diseased; he warms what was cold, waters what was dry, illumines what was dark”. For St. Augustine, “the search for God is the same as the search for happiness; and finding God is finding at last perfect happiness.”
The Catholic Church is alive in so far as she keeps the great commandments: loving God and loving God’s people. She does this, often in a hidden way, through her holy ones, her Saints, her children. She also does it manifestly through her liturgy. In her ceaseless round of worship, she both expresses and nourishes her love for God. In her communion of faith and her works of active charity, she manifests the love of Jesus that she herself has received. But in the Holy Eucharist, and in Holy Communion, she has a pledge of actual union. Here, every time, God in Christ reaches out to each one, calls each one to himself, and unites himself to each one, in love.