Lectio
“Thus these acts of love are most precious; one of them is more meritorious and valuable than all the deeds a person may have performed in the whole of life without this transformation, however great they may have been.”
— St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love
Meditatio
The more we work to try to get close to God, the more we realize that our efforts cannot accomplish the closeness we desire. While it is true that faith without works is dead, the work itself does not earn us intimacy with God. If it could, grace would not be a gift. It would be a transaction, and God’s love, already true and already freely given, cannot be bought through good behavior. Nor, in fact, does His love cease merely because we behave badly.
God’s love, and the work that love does in our souls through His indwelling Spirit, is the Spirit’s work, not ours — a flame overtaking the soul until the soul itself becomes that very flame. And what is born in us of that fire is no longer ours to claim or to measure because it becomes itself, no longer recognizable as what we once knew to be ourselves.
And so an act that rises from a soul already alight is not impressive because of that soul’s effort — it is precious because it is no longer, in the old sense, an act of ours at all. It is the flame producing flame — love producing love. This is why even a small motion of love, once the soul is so indwelt, can outweigh a lifetime of striving and seeking that came before: not because that striving and seeking was vanity, but because it was still the self believing that it could do that which only the living flame of love can do. This is not a reward for good deeds, but the self’s authorship quietly giving way to Another’s and taking us where we did not wish to go because we could have never anticipated the destination. No deed on our end can bring us closer to that which is already closer to us than we are to ourselves.
And though it is true that we cannot create or earn grace, and that our deeds, alone, cannot bring us nearer to God, this is not an excuse to behave in whatever way we want without threat of consequence. Nothing happens out of God’s sight, and there are always spiritual consequences for every choice we make, not in terms of reward and punishment, but in terms of joy and suffering.
God desires our closeness. He wants us to freely choose to accept the gift of His love and His grace. And He makes every effort to reach us where He resides within us and without. When we experience these acts of love — of God drawing us to Himself — for what they are, we recognize our powerlessness to create them, and God’s powerlessness not to. The only posture appropriate in these moments of recognition is humility, of acknowledging that all we have done up until this point is vanity in light of the abundance freely given us by the Source of all love.
Oratio
Become You
You stretched out your hand
touched my wounded heart
when I was untouchable
You showed me your heart
opened your loving arms to me
when I was unlovable
You called me home
to leave behind this pain
when I was not yet ready
but You were patient
Your love persistent
when I was unworthy
You healed my heart
You made me clean
when will I become You?
Contemplatio
Where has your heart hardened against the very flames of love trying to enkindle it?
Related Scripture
“and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
— Galatians 2:20 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Outmatched By Love: The Grace We Can Neither Earn Nor Repay, which sits with Teresa of Ávila’s own reckoning that we cannot even desire grace without grace first making that desire possible.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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