To Love What is Broken
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February 23, 2020“But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Mt 5:44-5)
This morning at Vigils, we heard St Therese comment on today’s gospel: “No doubt, we don’t have any enemies in Carmel, but there are feelings.” This woman of uncommon spiritual sensitivity understood from scrutinizing her own heart that avoidance of people we don’t like is a form of persecution.
What impresses me most about St Therese is her clear-sightedness about how much work Jesus had to do to bring her to maturity. I once heard someone comment upon reading The Story of a Soul for the first time: St Therese was really neurotic! The tendency is to imagine that monastic life, or a life oriented to holiness makes one neurotic. What we realize when we live a serious life of prayer under the deifying light of silence, solitude and close community living, is that we are all neurotic. That is, we all carry wounds that cause us to be immature emotionally, humanly. What may remain hidden in a life filled with distractions is made glaringly obvious under circumstances designed to foster self-knowledge and growth. St Therese’s greatness lay in her capacity to acknowledge the immaturity that was in her heart and to allow Jesus to work on her. Another tendency is to think that saints who died at a young age had it easy, that they didn’t have to live through decades of spiritual struggle and the ordinary encounters with life’s vicissitudes. Recently we heard in or Refectory reading that God always takes a lifetime to make a saint. This means that, whether the process takes seventy years, or a hundred, or just twenty-four, it is fully complete in itself. Packed into the twenty-four years of St Therese’s life was a lifetime of growth and struggle. As she wrote about her life, she identified moments in which she was enabled by grace to move beyond her immaturity – to leave behind her tendency to manipulate the affections of others with gifts, to transcend her need for constant emotional reassurance, to grow into the kind of non-preferential, non-possessive love that constitutes the perfection of the heavenly Father.
To love what is broken is surely a Godly talent. To allow myself to be weak and immature before the God who delights in lifting up the lowly: this is the high point of St Benedict’s account of human development. The twelfth step of humility is illustrated by the monk whose persistent awareness of his own poverty coexists with a persistent awareness that he dwells under the gaze of a loving and merciful Father. This is the perfection of the Father that we are called to grow into; this is maturity. I am reminded that St Bernard took this a step further by positing this highest rung of humility as the lowest of three stages of truth, or me might call them stages of maturity: to know one’s own immaturity; to accept other people’s immaturity; finally to enter into the perspective of God, who shines on the mature and the immature alike. You may remember that maturity was a focus of our January retreat last year, when St Joseph was proposed to us as a master of maturity. When St Francis said: “I am not asking to be loved – I want to love!” he manifested the highest degree of maturity. I am not ashamed to admit that this is not the case for me. I need to be loved in order to unlock that inner chest wherein my heart lies dormant until it is released by and for love. Our heavenly Father shines on us, and we can choose to live consciously under the deifying light of his love, so as to learn to shine on others in our turn. Let us know, then, like St Therese, like St Benedict and St Bernard, that our present immaturity is in process of being healed and transformed, under grace, by the very circumstances of our life.
Image: https://ashtondelane.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/broken/
