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On loving GodFriday, March 8, 2013
Mark 12:30 The very freedom I have to love and be loved rests on God's gift of himself to me. God is love and He has given himself to me, and it is only because of this that I can love. To the extent I have not known God's love, I can't really love myself, let alone love God. But on the other hand, I have known God, and so I know God's love, and I do love myself, and I do love God. Bernard says there are four ways we can love:
1. LOVE of myself for my own sake Over time I learn to love myself because God loves me. Even more, I love God because God loves me. That is to say, I often find myself in the first and second "stages" of Bernard's process. These are wonderful experiences for me. But there are also rare times when I discover myself in the third stage, loving God for God's sake. In those illuminated moments, joy fills my heart. Then I am not aware of myself in any way other than the true self God is, in me. This is not a moment of piety or religion, but it's a moment full of God. And then, as my self-awareness returns all too quickly, I settle back into loving God for my own sake. It is helpful for me to distinguish these loves from one another, but they flow into one another and overlap one another. Regarding Bernard's fourth and final stage, Bernard himself says it must depend on liberation from the body, when "in wondrous wise he will forget himself and as if delivered from self, he will grow wholly God's ... freed from the infirmities of the flesh." Perhaps mystics experience this long before their final deathbed relaxation, when every muscle gives up control to God. Just as God is love, so they become. My feet seem a bit more caught in the peanut butter, though, and I don't think I've known this place. Oh, that we would listen to you Lord, you would satisfy us with the finest wheat, and with honey from the rock. Open our ears to hear and our mouths, not to speak, but to taste the honey you are pouring down. |
In the first sentence of a letter Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to his cardinal in 1126, published ever since as On Loving God, St. Bernard says, "The reason for loving God is God Himself, and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love."