ÆVUM

† Meditations on contemplative prayer

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Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Letters to a Niece (1928).

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We may sacrifice the humanity of our neighbors upon unholy altars in the names of our many idols and disembodied ideologies. Or we may sacrifice ourselves in divine love to those same neighbors in the Name of the incarnate God. We cannot do both.

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Ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν — I John 4:16

Loue was his menyng. — Julian of Norwich

God is love. In I John 4:7, the Apostle initially states that “love is of God” — that is, love appears to be an attribute of God. But he then restates the matter more emphatically (in verse 8 and again in 14): “God is love.” As such, love is not a particular quality which belongs to God. Nor is it only a matter that God loves. It is also not a mere use of metonymy: the word ἐστίν indicates a metaphysical significance in the essence of who God is. To have a deeper understanding of God, one must seek a deeper understanding of the meaning of ἀγάπη, of love.

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Agape is not only unconditional love — it is unconditioned love.

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George Herbert.

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It isn’t so much that I enact love myself, but that I am drawn into relation with my neighbor, by way of participation in divine trinitarian love. Prayer is a way to real-ize love, not as willed effort, but as divine participation: divine eros toward God becomes, by grace, divine agape for our neighbor.

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Transfigurative love has its source in Christ, not in myself. I don’t give compassion out of myself — rather Christ does, in and through me. My essential task lies in selflessly stepping out of the way, in kenosis.

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Salvation is not only a state of the soul, but also an ongoing, lifelong process of transfiguration (theosis) through which God heals (salvus) through grace which unfolds from one moment to the next: “Give us this day our daily bread.” My task, then, is to attend to this process through prayer.

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In him we live and move and have our being: Through living faith, the relation between believer and God is rooted in the intimacy of Being-itelf. By way of prayer, God is addressed as “Father” (parent) and consequently we become “Son” (child), and so take on the same im-mediate relation in and through Christ. “No one comes to the Father except through me,” which is to also say: No one comes to the Father except by becoming His child.

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I must go beyond speaking about God in the third person. To address God as “Father” indicates a specific relation involving a wholehearted dedication of my life. A living faith must address God in the second person, i.e. in the form of prayer.

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I cannot encounter God by way of empirical certitude, but in a humility which includes the dimension of Being-itself, in the recognition of myself as a being in total dependence upon Him. Only from the depths of the heart may I become aware of His presence, insofar as I am present and attend to Him, saying Abba, “Father.”

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Even to just say the very name of God is itself prayer.

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“The last function of reason is to recognize there are an infinity of things which surpass it.” ~ Blaise Pascal

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Too often faith is confused with either rational argumentation or with emotional appeals. While it may be possible to produce and sustain an ideology in such a manner, this is not synonymous with a living faith: that which necessarily arises in the human heart, rooted in what is ontologically prior to the division of both intellect and feeling.

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"Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken." ~ Psalm 104:5

God’s omnipotence extends far beyond the limits of the empirical eye. True dependence upon God has roots much deeper than any temporally bound chain of causality. God offers Himself up at each and every moment as the source of Being-itself, not merely in a past event, but sustaining all beings in the present. In this way, God’s creation is not an artifact but is the unfolding of the creative process itself.