To Let Oneself be Loved

“A time to give birth/to be born, and a time to die.” (Eccl 3:2)

Advent is a time to prepare for a birth.  Whose birth?  Christ’s and our own.

We have meditated during these Sundays of Advent on the dual role of being mother to the gestating Christ within us and developing infant in the womb of God’s encompassing love.  We have seen that this requires an “exponential yes” – to be stretched and to grow beyond oneself in the service of nurturing life, to die to one’s former reality and be born into a new reality, to enter a new developmental stage of our Christ-life.

With all the dynamism of the season of Advent bringing us to a fever pitch of expectation, perhaps you too experience a certain anticlimax when Christmas finally arrives.  All this waiting and longing for what…a baby?  How does this change my life, our world and its problems?  This year, I have found a new perspective.  Christmas, the birth of a child, is not an end, but a beginning.  The beginning of a relationship.

I noticed for the first time a common element in the opening chants for Christmas midnight Mass and Easter day Mass.  Both are spoken by Christ, the Son, to or about the Father, and express the intimacy between them.

Christmas chant: Domine dixit ad me
“The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.’” (Psalm 2:7)

Easter chant: Resurrexi
“I am risen and behold I am with you.
You have placed your hand on me.
How wonderful is your knowledge!” (Psalm 139:18, 5-6)

The genius of the chant is that it freely takes verses from the Psalms and other Scriptures and places them on the lips of Jesus in surprising yet satisfying ways.  After all, we know that the Psalms were Jesus’ own prayer book, and that he searched the Scriptures to find words for his relationship with the Father.  These two peak moments – his birth in the flesh, and his resurrection from the dead – are expressed in terms of intimate relationship.  Christ recognizes himself as claimed by the Father, belonging to him, basking in his love.  Yes, we may have known God for many years, perhaps our whole life.  But now we are invited to begin again, to come to know him and to be known by him as the Son knows the Father and the Father knows the Son.

Dom Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, OCist, in his Christmas Letter, gives a summary of the message of the recent encyclical Dilexit Nos:
“… the point is to let ourselves be loved by the Lord and to love him for this tenderness and mercy of his. … to cling to the Lord’s Heart in order to experience his ardent love for us and for all.  The Heart of Christ draws us to himself and at the same time encourages us in the mission of every baptized person, which is to share with all the fire of his love. …Do we live out this intense and deep friendship with the Lord?”

Dom Mauro takes as the title and focus of his letter two words of St Bernard which are characteristically concise and profound: Amati, amamus, that is: “Loved, we love.”  In other words, it is experiencing the human and divine love of Jesus for me personally, allowing him to love me and returning that love, which makes me capable of loving others, of sharing his love, of discovering the pure joy of Jesus in being given by God as a gift.

Advent prepares us for a birth: our own birth and Christ’s birth in us, which serves an invitation to go back to the beginning of our relationship with Jesus, if you will, to ask him the most basic question: “Do you love me?” and to receive his answer.

Caryll Houselander explores this in exquisite detail in her book, The Passion of the Infant Christ.  She begins her meditation on infancy with this observation:
“It is of absolute necessity for our peace that we surrender ourselves wholly to God. Most people want to do this, but they do not because they are afraid.”  (p. 44)

Like St Bernard, her message is that God’s coming as an infant serves to dispel our fear of entering into intimate relationship with God:
“He approaches not by catastrophes, but by gentleness; not demanding our surrender but winning it, if we put no obstacle, almost before we realize who it is that sues for our love.” (p. 45)

Caring for an infant teaches us about love, human and divine, because of the total defenselessness of this tiny creature who needs everything, but nothing more than the gift of our very self, expressed through the laying on of hands:
“Our hands are one medium of the communion that must come about between us and the infant.  They are fumbling and clumsy, yet they become acutely sensitive to every quiver of his body, to his dumb necessities.  He teaches them by being himself.  In continual contact with his defenseless sensitivity, our hands grow sensitive; they carry messages from the depths of his wordless consciousness through our fingertips to our brain.  Yet we remain aware of our clumsiness and the fallibility of our touch. …
In the service of the infant we are made whole.  Every detail of our life is set by it into a single pattern and ordered by a single purpose.  We are integrated by the singleness of one compelling love.  It is this wholeness which alone makes possible the complete surrender to God in which is the secret of our peace.” (pp. 49-50)

Infancy is a time for beginning to build relationship, for learning to love by being loved:
“…while he is an infant, the human creature works his own way from inside his own darkness and aloneness outward.  He comes out of a world of darkness and silence and warmth into a world of painful light and noise and cold, of sensation and of pain.
He is alone for a long time even in his mother's hands; the communion between them is not yet realized.  He cannot yet respond, and no skill of hers can reach his deepest being in its primal darkness. …
Gradually the uncertain hands that served the infant have brought him security; gradually the face that has so often leaned over him in the night has become known by him.  On that face there has been a smile, a smile which no anxiety, no awareness of the fierce, suffering quality of life could prevent, because it is the smile of joy that a man has been born into this world.
The child's first smile is a reflection.  It is his and yet not his; it is the reflection of the mother's joy in his life, given back to her.” (pp. 51-53)

This is the rebirth to which we are invited this Christmas – the rediscovery of an intimate relationship with God, who loves his Christ in us most tenderly:
“Now, most wonderfully, we can learn God's care for us, by searching our own hearts.
The father and mother within us is only the faint image of the Father and Mother in God.  He is the Father and Mother whose heart never sleeps, whose hands never lift from their works that they have made.  He is the One who has numbered the hairs on our heads.  In His humanity we are clothed as in a warm woolen garment.  In Him we live as in our home.  He is our food and our drink, our shade in the heat, our comfort in sorrow, our healing when we are wounded, our light in darkness.
The Christ-life in us, the infant Christ of our soul, is the only-begotten Son in the hands of God.” (p. 57)

Our jubilee book recounting the 75 years of our community’s life is now complete, and it is called: A House Built on Yes.  This Christmas, may we ask ourselves: have I said yes to God?  The exponential yes to dying, to being born, to being loved, to loving, to being given as a gift?

Sources:
Dom Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, OCist, Christmas Letter
Caryll Houselander, ​The Passion of the Infant Christ, The Infant

Image: janeatterphotography.co.uk