| The Prior’s First Chapter Conference, Jan. 21, 2012 |
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Fr. Robert Hale, OSB Cam This remarkably unitive text is worth pondering. We are one with Christ and with each other. In the text, we read, "you are the branches". Jesus insists we are all in this together in Christ and three times he commands, invites, almost pleads, "abide in me, abide in me, abide in me". Each day as monks, we have the choice of how we will respond to this invitation to a relationship with God. Christianity is not primarily about ethical or moral laws, or regulations. It is not a series of techniques leading to spiritual self-improvement. Rather, it is about a personal relationship, in a very deep, mysterious way, that each one of us has with the risen Christ, and therefore with one another, in Christ. The Gospel certainly doesn't exclude ethics and morals, or even spiritual practices or techniques, but it primarily invites us to be in a very special personal relationship in the risen Christ and he in each of us. So each of us is a Christ-bearer, to be reverenced as such. Jesus goes on to conclude, "Abide in me, abide in my love." And we reflect on this: is this his love for us, or his love for God? How are we to understand this? In our world today, the word love has taken new and trivialized connotations. For example, we love a television program, or we love going to a movie. In reflection, Dorothy Day may have been correct. She stated that however painful it is to use the word love, we have to recover it for the Christian family. For the greatest and most expansive meaning of love, agape, is central to the Christian Gospel and to Jesus' teachings. The ethics and morality implied in abiding in Christ's love are all summed up in Christian agape: in our loving in Christ, God and neighbor, and self. When we are loving, in Christian agape loving, we are in Christ, we are in God. As Camaldolese monks, our highest communal and contemplative vocation is fulfilled as we reflect on 1 John 4:7.14. "Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God...God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God and God in them." So our vow of stability is ultimately to abide in Christ, abide in his love. Our vow of obedience is to obey Christ's great commandments, which sum up all the law and the prophets, The Rule, the Constitutions, and delibere, in agape love. We reflect on this knowing it is our deepest root, our deepest yearning. The paradox in the teaching of 1 John is that while it goes back way before time, into the eternal God who is love in the life of the Divine Trinity, it is also perennially new. It is the new commandment because authentic love of God, of neighbor, of self is always fresh, alive, and generative. The teaching is both elementary, representing our earliest childhood yearning, need and hope, and as St. Aelred affirms, certainly sweet, (nihil dulcius); and it is sometimes very, very difficult. Anyone who has really tried to love an enemy knows it is nigh on impossible without great amounts of grace. Sometimes love requires great sacrifice, and even suffering, when we empathizing with those we love who might be in pain or dying. And this love can require even the ultimate sacrifice as we see in Jesus' giving of himself for us, on the cross, "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for one's friends." This love is also resurrectional, "We know we that have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren." I John 3:14. This resurrection in love comes from God, as pure grace, as God's most essential self-giving to us. As Ephesians 2:4ff affirms, "God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our sins, made us alive together with Christ...and raised us up with him." This is the substance, the heart of the matter, of what heaven will be, forever and forever, our agape being loved and loving, with all the blessed. |
