Remaining in His love

 With today's gospel (15: 9-17), we enter a little more deeply into the mystery of the love that God shares with us through His Son Jesus Christ. These words of Jesus at the Last Supper are echoed somehow in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

What is our Lord's love for us like then? How does He love us? He Himself gives the answer: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Yet this is utterly breath taking. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father breathes forth a third person - the Holy Spirit. In these days before Pentecost, we can only wonder at what this mystery of their mutual love means, and how it comes to us as a gift of them both. Now, to wonder is to contemplate, and to contemplate is at the heart of the Colwelian vocation. 

When we hear the Colwelian call to contemplation, we are listening to the music of this love. In our naivety, perhaps we sometimes think of it in terms of prayers and devotions; the quantifiable panoply of religiosity, as dignified and as honourable as they are. But, it is rather what fills the sails of our prayers and devotions with a divine wind. As the Father has loved the Son...just think of it. As the Father has loved the Son! We will never finish contemplating that mystery, and so, we will never finish contemplating the mystery of His love for us. 

My song is love unknown,

My Saviour's love to me,

Love to the loveless shown

That thy might lovely be.

To contemplate means to gaze attentively - literally as in a temple - where we behold the mysteries of our faith. Our temples are our churches of course, but they are also our own souls in which the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell.

And there He shares His joy with us so that our joy may be complete. But why should it not be complete after this? If He has loved us like the Father has loved Him, it only remains for us to become fully awake, fully alive, to the implications of that love. 

And to return it to Him with a strength only He can lend to us. 

Let us remain in this love and do everything it requires of us. Our lives can have no other meaning than this.

His joy!

We have been poorly and normal service has been interrupted. Nevertheless, I did not want to let today's gospel go by without making some remarks. Today's gospel (John 15: 9-11) is an essential COLW gospel. 

It begins in the love of the Father for the Son - As the Father has loved me - which is the origin of everything. It begins in the communion which, as this blog observed a few posts ago, is the origin of all forms of communion in this life or the next. Religion begins not in our action but in this outpouring of God's very self in love which needs must share its goodness with the world. As St Francis Xavier put it, " O Deus ego amo te, Ne prior tu amasti me ("My God, I love you, because you first loved me.")

Jesus then links that generative love to submission to the Father and the keeping of the commandments. People tend to speak of the commandments as moral injunctions, but only the second part of the Decalogue concerns the moral life. The first part concerns everything we owe to God before we have set foot outside our door or even acknowledged our life in society. Ultimately, Jesus' injunction here recalls His answer to the question about the greatest commandment: you shall the love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:30). The first act of religion is surrender and submission in the same way that Jesus' role of saviour is initiated in His self emptying. Just as He put aside His rightful dignity in order to bring us back to the love of the Father, so we must put aside our wrongful pride in order for that love of the Father to take us back home: If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love. To remain in His love is already to be home with God, for home is the stable place where things do not change, least of all the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Holy Spirit which they breathe forth.

And finally we come to the Colwelian heart of this gospel:

I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

We find our own joys fleeting and subject to change. They ebb and flow with our moods and often with the events of the day .We often sail three sheets to the wind and so are blown off course with every gale. 

But if we only realised this gift of Jesus' joy - that my own joy may be in you -  the stable joy of His eternal peace, the joy He radiates when He forgives the sinner, His joy in doing the will of the Father. His joy is present even in the midst of His sorrows and the midst of our sorrows; it is rooted in the endless torrent of love that flows from the communion of the Blessed Trinity in whom all loss can be understood and assuaged. As Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven put it: 

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost I have stored for thee at home

Rise clasp my hand and come! 

And now He teaches his disciples the love of the Father so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. We must pray that He open our hearts to receive this extraordinary gift. Of course we can no more contain that joy than a hole in the sand can capture all the sea. But if we were at least filled with it to the measure of our fulness, would it not radiate out to others and help reflect His light into their hearts too? 

Jesus, make us worthy vessels of your joy to share your love in the joyless darkness of our world.