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:
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, contemplation 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.
That is so beautiful, thank you. The love of the Father for the Son brings forth a 3rd person, the Holy Spirit, so does His love for us bring forth our soul. And that soul is striving and yearning for the Father and the Son until it finds its rest in Him and returns the love. Beautiful, so simple yet as you say so profound we can never finish contemplating or remaining (abidingI prefer) in it.
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