To Be Treasured and Transformed
He bears us on his shoulders…….With tenderness he restores our daily joy……..God loves us first, beyond each person’s faults and failings…… the attraction of his love. (EG 3, 44).
Pope Francis holds that you cannot change the way God is in love with you, that his love flows all around you, and through you, and in you, and as you. You cannot lessen the divine love that is already and always, no matter what, wrapped tightly around your heart. You might as well try to separate the water from the wine. ‘You cannot diminish God’s love for you,’ said Richard Rohr in one of his Daily Meditations. ‘What you can do, however, is learn how to believe it, receive it, trust it, allow it, go with it, and celebrate it, accepting the Trinity’s whirling invitation to join in the cosmic dance.’
We do not need to become more loving to make God love us more. It is because God first loves us that we become loving in response. It is not because we pray more, become more religious and celebrate more sacraments that God looks at us with greater love; nor is it because we go to confession that our sins are forgiven. Every single grace, every blessing of total love and forgiveness bestowed on us, no matter what efforts we make to earn it, deserve it, merit it, always and only spring from the unconditional divine love that created us in the first place. We have been loved from the beginning. Nobody was ever driven from a perfect garden. There was no primal ‘original sin’; nor was it ever mentioned in the Christian scriptures. We seem to have missed out on the initial blessing that we are now, and always have been, and always will be.
But, misunderstanding the meaning of myth, the Church became preoccupied and trapped in the notion of a historic original sin, a preoccupation that has deeply damaged, to this day, the true meaning of the creation of humanity, the humanness of Jesus, the redeeming love of God and the divinity of our own hearts. ‘We dug a pit so deep that most people and most spirituality could not get back out of it,’ writes Richard Rohr. We are carefully and wonderfully fashioned by a compassionate Mother-God who is captivated by us from our very first breath, and is utterly devoted to us in our struggles and sufferings now, and who fills our spirits with the greatest longing for that final home-coming into the heart of the world, the heart of God.
Pope Francis writes a great deal about the attraction of this divine love that is the energy, health and well-being of our minds, hearts, souls and bodies. It is what keeps the world turning, the universe expanding. It is the breath of everything created, the beating heart of great and small. God’s love attracts us to what is beautiful, what allures us to be beautiful ourselves, what keeps us believing in the dawn when our spirits are in darkness, what makes all creation breathe his presence. The Pope is so anxious that we would consciously
experience these sublime graces, that we would actually feel with our senses, the pulse of being infinitely loved, continually reassured by that love, and always empowered to wrestle with the strange counter-attraction that haunts our hearts, that tempts us to fear, doubt, guilt and despair. For him, our experience of divine love is what matters more than all the catechisms, creeds and religious rubrics in the world.
We are all created for this purpose, to love and to be loved, to know and to be known. We grow by attraction; we are transformed by the experience of human and divine tenderness. ‘Everyone longs for the comfort and attraction of God’s saving love,’ the Pope writes in Evangelii Gaudium, ‘above and beyond their faults and failings.’ He refers to the attraction of all that is ‘most beautiful, most free, most appealing.’
The Pope longs for us to actually feel the gift of being utterly loved even in the midst of our winter of self-doubt; of being touched by the dawn even when it is still midnight; of feeling comforted by the actual experience of our closeness to God. When describing the Eucharistic moment of receiving Holy Communion, Pope John Paul 11 speaks of a ‘physical embrace.’ At times we need more than words, he says. Our very human senses come into play even at this most sublimely divine moment. Notice Pope Francis’s repeated use of fleshy words such as ‘touched by,’ ‘the comfort and attraction of God’s saving love.’ Only then will we be his saving presence for others. God needs us to keep incarnating divine love.
An Astonishing Secret.