Theology is a Love Story
The title for this is “Theology is a Love Story” and it is not easy to read theology as a love story because so often in our experiences theology is not always that relevant to life.
Let me just mention how I came to this title – “Theology is a Love Story”. It was on Easter Bank Holiday of 2018 and I was struggling with this particular episode and this particular topic. How to write poetically about a doctrine – doctrine of Creation, doctrine of salvation and so on, and I was concerned and I was getting tired. It was this very episode that I was preparing and I just thought that I would rest for a while and on Catholic FM they were counting down the three hundred most important tunes in the UK, and towards the end one of the most popular was that German melody ‘Spiegel im Spiegel.’ It’s beautiful, it’s slow, it’s pleasant, it’s meditative, and so I just surrendered to it and then in some way hard to describe I felt the presence of my mother across the table, and she said: “Look Dan – don’t you know that theology is really a love story.”
And that somehow set me free and then I looked up a bit of history about Church development and so on and I came across quotations saying: “There are many theologies within the Catholic Church” – I should have known that of course and I did in a sense – but I didn’t know, say, that St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas who lived around the same time had quite different theologies and yet they are both famous for their love story of God. And then Pope John 23rd and Pope Paul 6th – they both had the very same phrase: “Faith is one but theologies are many.” So, then I thought in my own mind – OK, we are dealing with mystery here – the mystery of love – and so there will be many love stories, and that gave me great courage to begin and which brings me, I suppose, to Pope Francis’s words. He is clearly working out of a most beautiful theology of grace – theology of Creation – and we will be helping you with these distinctions in this very episode.
What he wrote was:
“God has written a precious book, no creature is excluded. Nature is a constant revelation of the Divine . The Divine glory is everyone. The sacred grandeur of God is in every human heart.”
When I read that, a phrase comes into my mind from St. Paul in Corinthians. He said:
“You are God’s love letters written not in ink but with the love called the Holy Spirit; written not in stone but on the pages of your human heart.”
And it seemed as if this struck me for the first time. This will happen to you when you open your heart. You will find lots of familiar moments in reading or in the Gospels and so on and it will strike you with great force and great impact as if for the first time. So, I was really thrilled to read that again and again, and I do. So, there is such a beautiful theological insight in all of that. It is lyrical like a love story. This is the real, traditional, and forgotten spirituality that makes our hearts sing. Look at those phrases again: “God has written a precious book . . .” That is nature; that is Creation; that is the first scripture; that is God’s first Incarnation. It is all quite overwhelming in many ways.
“No creature is excluded . . “ Every creature, everything is included in this precious book; everything tells us something about our loving Mother Creator. “Nature is a constant revelation of the divine.” Every day the light is different; every day is a different season; every day the weather is different; every day we meet somebody new and anything new, everything new, adds to our understanding of God. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of skill – skills and grace to be able to be constantly present or even a little of the time to be constantly present to that Real Presence of God.
He continues:
“The divine glory is everyone.” We all have the divine glory in us and then he says: “The sacred grandeur of God in every human heart.”
Any of these phrases will last you for weeks and weeks – to draw out the juice, the holy juice out of it; that we can somehow internalise it into our own hearts and bodies and leads to our abundant life.
( Transcript from video 2 Astonishing Secret video course visit https://astonishingsecret.org )