Lectio
“Oh Jesus, why am I not burned up with love for you? Why is it that my heart is not consumed with Love’s flame? Why is it that my love does not correspond to yours? Oh Jesus, how much time I have lost! How many years I could have loved you, and did not do so! But your bounty makes me hope that I may make up for lost time.”
— Saint Gemma Galgani, The Diary of St. Gemma Galgani
Meditatio
Sabbath is our opportunity to stop resisting God’s love, even if only for a day. And yet, even a day often feels like too much to ask within the context of all of our wants and worries. Like the hour when Jesus asked His disciples to keep watch with Him, but they could not, so often this day of rest, this day for us, this day for God, becomes a burden, a hindrance to our plans, and an obstacle in the way of what our idol-making hearts tell us to desire in the finiteness we can see, taste, smell, hear, and feel — anything, it seems, but the fire of Love we were made for.
But why is it so hard to give ourselves to the God who gives Himself to us? Why do our hearts long for that which cannot satisfy them while rebelling against the only thing that can? Why do our hearts not burn so strongly that we throw all that we have and all that we are upon the flames of Love to be consumed by the Source of that very love until we become love with Love?
Instead of giving ourselves over to the Flame that desires our willing surrender, we put off Heaven. We delay our reunion. We wander and want and worry over all that we might miss if we give ourselves away to the love that gives itself away to us. We fill our hours with all that is not God and yet in those hours, if we only stopped long enough to look, we would see that those hours and that with which they are filled are, in their own way, a gift from God, for nothing exists outside of God’s creation and nothing exists apart from God’s willing it into existence. But stopping long enough to see God is exactly that which we so deeply fear, for if we stopped long enough to notice Him, we fear that either He will not be there to be noticed or that He will not notice us back.
In our unwillingness to stop to notice Him — to rest in Him — we starve the flame inside us of its fuel until it dwindles down to a dim flicker. Then, in a graced moment of clarity, if we are willing to see it, we realize that the time we were afraid of losing by stopping was, in fact, lost by never doing so — that, in our incessant striving for worldly bounty, we missed the Lord’s Bounty freely given. The days spent running become years in the wilderness, years gone and never recovered, and we begin to long for the flame that once burned bright within us. Were it extinguished entirely — by the wound of the world or of our own hearts — we would have nothing left to recognize Him by; it is the flicker itself that still knows the Flame.
Our flame, we find, has a shape, and the shape is a cross. The tragedy, we find, in the mystery of God’s love, is that it is exactly by surrendering in our brokenness that we are brought into wholeness, and by the time we come to realize this, much of our time here may already be gone. But this, itself, is our cross. This is our own crucifixion. And as we hang in the light, naked, wounded, and bleeding, we must choose to either admit our folly and be consumed by Love, or to deny the very brokenness that has brought us to this cross and smolder into despair. God will not choose for us. As He hangs next to us, suffering with and for us, He has already invited us to let go, to rest, and to allow His suffering-with-us to be enough.
Oratio
What I Cannot See
You ask me to give my life
to what I cannot see
blessed are those
who have not seen
and yet have believed
but You did not leave me here
alone
blind to Your presence
for I have the eyes of the Spirit
in my heart
from sight to sight
wound to wound
flicker to Flame
love to Love
Contemplatio
You do not have to make up for lost time. The years you cannot recover are not what He asks you to return to Him — only this moment, only this stillness. Let the flicker in you rest long enough to be found by the Flame it has always known. Sit with this in silence, consenting to His presence, and let Him move in you however He wills.
Related Scripture
“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon 8:6 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Obediential Love: Eckhart, Christ’s Command, and the Cross We Are Asked to Bear, which meets the same cross from another angle — not the flame discovering its shape, but love itself, commanded and obeyed, becoming the shape we are asked to bear.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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