Lectio
“Yes, we should remember God’s kindness and love and praise him for our blessings, but it’s much better to think on his naked being and to love and praise him for himself.”
— The Cloud of Unknowing
Meditatio
There is a temptation to praise God for what He gives us, for what we receive in material, physical, and emotional treasures. This is a dangerous posture to take because it leads us to believe that God’s love is shown only in abundance — that our faith is rewarded only in our receiving, or that faith leads to reward at all.
But God’s gifts are not material, physical, or emotional. God’s gift is Godself. Likewise, the reward for faith is not some thing or some feeling, but faith is, itself, the reward. Faith is our response to that which we have already received and are always receiving, regardless of material, emotional, or spiritual abundance or poverty. For God is no nearer nor farther away in abundance than He is in poverty.
In fact, it is often in material, physical, and emotional poverty — in spiritual poverty, when He feels most absent — when we find the truth of God’s gift to us. When we have nothing left, or nothing left to look forward to, when we are at our most insatiable and inconsolable, that we realize that we are being sustained in spite of what we have or do not have, and what we feel or do not feel.
Perhaps not in the midst of our poverty, but because of it, we begin to understand that the crucifixion and the resurrection are not two separate events, but two faces of the same faceless Abundance, two tones of the same divine Utterance. And so it is that even the forsakenness of the cross carries within it the promise of the ascension. That, when we hang naked and wounded before Creator and creation, we begin to understand that we were never alone and that, in God and through Christ, we lack absolutely nothing, for the Spirit is in and with us.
And so, while the kindness and love of God are real and should be received with humility and gratitude, and while God uses all things to draw us nearer to Himself, including material, physical, emotional, and spiritual blessings — a coat when we are cold, a cup of cold water when we are thirsty, a good word when we are weary, or a divine whisper amid our unknowing — these things are of God, but they are not God. They are not His naked being, and it is His naked being alone that, in the emptiness of our abundance and the nakedness of our poverty, sustains us beyond what we can perceive or comprehend, even in our inability to perceive or comprehend Him.
Oratio
All That You Are
all that You give
and all that You take
is nothing
compared to
all that You are
but I latch on
to what I can see
to what I can feel
like a babe
with shaky legs
afraid to graze
in the unknown field
of Your glory
not knowing
that all I ever needed
unfolds all around me
Contemplatio
Where have you loved a gift of God in place of God Himself — and what would it cost you to set it down?
Related Scripture
“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
— Psalm 73:25-26 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Only Speak The Word: The Centurion’s Faith and the Gift of Sabbath Rest (Lectio Divina), which considers the same faith that asks for nothing but trusts everything — where this post finds God’s gift in refusing to mistake His blessings for Himself, that one finds it in refusing to grasp for anything but the word He speaks.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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