Love of God

William of St-Thierry is wonderful in the Office of Readings today:

O Lord, salvation is your gift and your blessing is upon your people; what else is your salvation but receiving from you the gift of loving you or being loved by you?

The beginning of the love of God is the awareness of having been loved by God, loved into existence by the will of God and preserved in being from moment to moment by the love of God. In truth, God's love for us and our love of God end up being the same thing, for our love of God is the work of the Holy Spirit within us. The whole process is just that; the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as it comes to live in us by baptism and faith.

Loving God is the beginning of the awareness of the love God has for us. This awareness bears further fruit in the continuing realization that we ourselves and everybody else and indeed the whole of creation is, in a sense, made out of love, coming into existence as it all does through the Word that is the Beloved proceeding from the Love that is the Source of all that is.

Realizing this love as the innermost identity of every creature, we begin to see our neighbor and the creation around us as not only lovable, but as something that demands love if it is to be truly appreciated and understood. This is how the love of God turns into the love of neighbor; when we realize that our neighbor has a demand on our love--if we are to truly love the love with which God creates--especially our neighbor for whom the awareness of the love of God may be obscured by the suffering and poverty that are the fruit of human sin.

Midway in the Embrace

For class this week I'm reading William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle, which I really recommend for anyone who would like to take the spiritual life seriously. Check it out in this edition.

The soul in its happiness finds itself standing midway in the Embrace and the Kiss of Father and Son. In a manner which exceeds description and thought, the man of God is found worthy to become not God but what God is, that is to say man becomes through grace what God is by nature. (96. Trans. Theodore Berkeley, OCSO)

To me this gets at one of the most critical retrievals we need to make in our contemporary sense of Christianity. The Trinity is not just our doctrine of God; it is our doctrine of the spiritual life. In the most basic terms, our teaching is that God is not some kind of static 'supreme being,' but is constituted in an infinitely dynamic and creative set of relations. What we call our 'spiritual life' is our finding of ourselves drawn into and included in these relations, so that when we take about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, we aren't talking about some kind of abstract, divine logic, but about the place where we find our own spirits in prayer.

Jesus Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we say in the creed. He is the stretching forth of the divine relations of the Trinity to include within themselves our humanity. Christianity, then, is the life of being adopted into the eternal Embrace of Father and Son, the enjoyment by grace and adoption of the relationship to God which the human Jesus enjoys by hypostatic union. As William puts it, "man becomes by grace what God is by nature."

Trying to Bite a Smooth Stone

Ever wonder why the hardest part of writing your theology paper is just starting? William of St. Thierry sheds some light on the problem:

"Truly, the Catholic faith is a totally smooth, rounded stone and who wishes to gnaw at it does not find a place to sink his teeth into it." (The Enigma of Faith, 73 trans. John D. Anderson.)