In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Mary's seed of wisdom. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So as I mentioned yesterday, one of the harder things to do is to define and get a very concrete concept of the most familiar and most universal ideas, words, and realities that we deal with every day. Time is one of those, perfection is another one. What's it mean to be adult, mature?

[01:02]

And we all have certain ideas on that, but it's very hard to come up with a definition that applies to all circumstances. Another word like that is love. Love is one of those words that's overused. and which has lost much of its original luster, where still all too often it is ill-employed, rendered dull and trite through being applied carelessly or even degenerately with reference, that has nothing to do with its pristine meaning, that a base coin contains only counterfeit metal. And so, let us examine it with more exacting attentiveness than is customarily brought to bear on it, and attempt to polish it up for more worthy usage. Plato had already noted that there is more than one kind of love, and that it makes a great deal of difference which one is being spoken of.

[02:12]

It's interesting and instructive to read the passage from the Symposium in which he makes this point. Sounds very modern to me. Phaedrus, the argument has not been set before us, I think, quite in the right form. We should not be called upon to praise love in such an indiscriminate manner. If there were only one love, then what you said would be well enough. But since there are more loves than one, You should have begun by determining which of them was to be the theme of our praises. I will amend this defect. And first of all, I will tell you which love is deserving of praise, and then try to hem the praiseworthy one in a manner worthy of him." So the setting of the symposium is a stag party. in which all the members are invited to sing the praises of love.

[03:18]

That's Phaedrus' response. It wasn't Phaedrus, it was Pausanias whose words I've just cited, and he addresses them to Phaedrus, who proposed this theme as a topic. So Pausanias goes on to distinguish two types of love, the one he calls common. It is that of meaner types of man and is rather of the body than of the soul. The other love is heavenly. It is free of wanton behavior, noble in its manner and purposes, and faithful throughout life. While this concept of heavenly love has certain other features that we can hardly agree with, yet he does us the service of showing the need to distinguish among loves before speaking of them. And it's also interesting, I think, that that problem is posed so sharply already, as far back as Plato.

[04:25]

The love of God is the first and greatest commandment. We have our Lord's own words for this truth. Preachers, popes, and theologians have taken this teaching seriously, beginning with St. Paul and continuing through the centuries. Formally, at least, it has been upheld as the fundamental principle of the moral and the spiritual life. Charity, divine love, whether directed by God to his creatures or by one of our race to God, is acknowledged to be the queen of all the virtues. All else is to be subject to her rule. Anything what escapes her influence is considered by that very fact to be disordered. It's a major function of this love of God to set all else in one's life in order. St.

[05:30]

Bernard has discoursed extensively on this theme, especially in two of his outstanding sermons on the verse of the canticle, Ordinabit in me caritata, he ordered charity in me, sermons 49 and 50. In these two conferences, he develops this point of doctrine that considerable length and an appreciable detail. If I understand him correctly, it would even be said that he views the whole of the spiritual work of a Christian to be summed up as the right-artering of charity. However, though this principle is universally accepted by believers, yet there have been relatively few who seem to have been comfortable speaking or writing in any great detail about the love of God, and even fewer about their own personal love for God.

[06:37]

Today's piece of St. Francis de Sales, he's one of the few who wrote a book on it. As far as I've been able to find out, the very first book written with the love of God as its theme was by Bernard de Clairvaux in the 12th century, Il Diligendo Deo. He doesn't say on the love of God, it's on loving God. It's an active gerund of form. How much meaning that has is not a question. That is a fact that, as I'll point out in a minute, there's nothing very astonishing about this fact when one gives it more thought, however. It's always been easier to describe action and objective realities than to handle interior states of soul, especially the more personal and intimate ones.

[07:41]

unless they're disordered. Tolstoy begins his book Anna Karenina that way. He said, all happy families are the same. It's the unhappy ones that are more interesting. So he proceeds to write a whole, you know, 800 page novel on an unhappy family. Out of all the pages of the Old Testament, for instance, how many deal in any specific detail with descriptions of love compared with those that treat of action, events, and ideas? Even those who are in touch with their deeper emotions and inner experiences rarely have any great facility of expression. If this seems to have been the case at all periods of history, even in apostolic times, it certainly became the prevailing situation in recent decades, and more especially at the present of my own observations and experience of any validity.

[08:58]

Quite recently, a professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Western, Father Edward Vasek, published an article in which he shares his own observations and reflections on this phenomenon. He entitles it, The Eclipse of Love of God. You probably have it here in your library in America, 1996. Here are his opening lines. When David Hare interviewed clergy as a part of his research for his play, Raising Demons, he ran into a problem. None of the priests wanted to talk about God. One of the disturbing questions his play raises is whether Christians, with the exception of a few fanatical fundamentalists, are concerned about loving God.

[10:00]

In my own conversations with Christians, I find that almost all of them talk approvingly of love for others. Some talk confidently about God's love for us, but few are willing to talk about their love for God. Of course, it's one thing to love God, quite another to talk about that love. As I indicated above, it's not necessarily those who love God most, who are best qualified to discuss or write about their relation to Him. Take, for example, the sayings of the Fathers, the Apoptegmata, which reflect the experience in the desert of Egypt at the very origins of monastic life. a time of notable sanctity of life.

[11:03]

In the numerous paragraphs that make up this collection, how few there are that speak of the love of God explicitly. In fact, I looked up the thematic collection, and I think there were 27 or so paragraphs there, and not one mentioned the love of God. And yet that love was the theme there. It's mostly taught directly. There might have been one or two, but it was very, very limited. These men felt great reticence before so exalted a topic, in spite of their obvious love for God, so that they spoke of it but rarely.

[12:08]

However, I believe it would not be too difficult to show how, in the background of their teaching, the theme of love for God is never far away. but motivates and inspires the great care these men took to purify their heart and prepare themselves for seeing God, for living with Him in glory. Still the fact remains that there are appropriate times and occasions for speaking about our love for God and for sharing our more personal experiences of that love. Probably it will always be the case that relatively few persons will ever be readily expressive in this domain of the heart and spirit, especially men. But it can prove to be a great gain if we learn to express ourselves with some ease and with a degree of confidence on this most elevated of all our inner states.

[13:09]

There's no doubt that realities that are never spoken of and shared have a way of disappearing, and that those which are communicated often by that very fact take on a more healthy and vigorous life. Father Vasek's observations, as should be noted, go beyond the question of speaking about the love of God with others. He raises the more basic issue as to whether believers still consider the love of God to be important. as a reality in their lives. It's not easy, though, to evaluate people's answers to the questions he posed them. In such a matter as this, many will not be able to reply offhand at any deeper level. Some, if helped, might come to recognize in themselves a hidden love for God which they had never become consciously aware of, to a point where they would name it as such

[14:13]

Still, the answers he got to the questions he put do reveal that more attention needs to be given in preaching, teaching, and in prayer to this theme of our own love for God. When people replied, for example, to the question, what do you mean by love for God? He would ask them that. All replied with answers like helping one's neighbor, caring for the poor, respecting your deepest self. The author points out, then, that many atheists do all these things and consider them responsibilities. Even some theologians give very unsatisfactory answers to this question, he notes, such as saying that God does not need our love. The author finds all this very unsatisfactory and gives it as his opinion that it's not enough to love creatures.

[15:19]

If we wish to develop as full human beings, we must love God himself. One of the questions he asked was, I think it was, it might have been such as with Mallory, who teaches down in New York. He would ask, when is the last time either of your parents, especially your father, spoke to you about the love of God. And that's why he wrote this article. My father certainly never did. I think, yeah. Although he was, you know, a faithful Catholic, but to speak to your son about the love of God, I don't think it ever occurred to him. And according to this survey, he's typical in that. I don't believe he found a single student whose father spoke about that.

[16:26]

I believe that Father Vasek is on to something important for all of us today, monks included. It's challenging to face the issue head on. Do I really love God? Perhaps the first thing many of us need to do before we try to answer that question is to clarify what we mean by love. There are different kinds of love, after all, as I said in the beginning, and distinguishing them can help us to discern more precisely our relationship with our Heavenly Father and with the other two Persons of the Trinity. We can love God for His own sake. We can love Him for our sake. We can love Him with the love of friendship, that is, for the happiness of sharing the things we treasure with God. This last contains some elements of the first two, but adds to them concept of mutuality.

[17:30]

It's relatively simple to define love and to distinguish its several kinds. Discerning its actual presence and ascertaining its genuineness, however, is not so easy at times. For one thing, love need not be fully conscious to exist. Indeed, I think it true to affirm that it often is hidden from us, whether it be love for God or some friend or other person. In fact, even when love is conscious, its extent and measure are perhaps never fully appreciated. It may be much more deeply rooted in our soul than we are aware, until that person dies or is lost to us. by separation of some permanent kind. I discovered that a couple of times in my life. One was as a novice, when after some months I became aware that the people I was deeply involved with had meant more to me than I realized, although I consciously renounced them.

[18:53]

associating with them, including my own family. I had a seven-year-old brother, sisters, another brother, all of them younger than I, and close friends and so on. And then I realized one day that they were not only part of my life, they were part of my very self. That I can't leave them behind. They're me. that I know myself only in my relation with those people, so that we become literally parts of one another. That's one of the functions of love, that we tend to identify and even know ourselves in a love relationship. But that is often hidden from us, whether it be the love of God or some friend or other person.

[20:00]

Another way we discover that is if somebody close to us suddenly dies. I had a brother-in-law who was a good friend of mine who was a Navy officer and one of the best jet pilots at the time. that they were developing jets on cross-deck carriers. So they made him this landing signal officer. He was a natural athlete, you know. He was also very dedicated, of course, to the service. And he was killed doing that. Never recovered his body and so on. So it just happened. Young, vigorous man, full of life, and then suddenly He's gone. You don't even see his body. He was killed at sea. And then you realize that the roots of relationship went deeper than you could have known at the time.

[21:02]

My sister was a widow at 21. Of course, they hadn't been married long enough for her to find out his faults. So, anyhow, she married again. But love is very subtle that way. And people who don't work at understanding what relations mean to them, especially the relation of God, can be quite unconscious, so they're not prepared to answer questions like that or to discuss them, even though they may have a vague sense that it's the most important thing in their life. On the spiritual level, this translates into an ever keener sense of the great evil of sin

[22:05]

To sin is to offend the one loved. To sin grievously is to lose that person. And so sin comes to be felt as the one great evil to be avoided at any cost. Such a heartfelt conviction about sin is certainly a sign of a deep love for God. Love is more than the affective emotional states that accompany it at times. At times, to love means to remain faithful even though suffering from a dryness of heart or when consumed by anxiety or fear. A person stands by the loved one without betraying the trust involved in their relationship. Love, nonetheless, is a kind of passionate drive, impelling the lover towards its object, striving until it obtains its goal. St. Gregory the Great, among any number of others, understood this well.

[23:11]

He comments to the effect that the soul that has begun to burn with the desire to follow the one she loves, liquefied under the fire of love, advances rapidly. Desire renders her restless. This urge, as Evelyn Underhill pointed out, gives it a force which tends to attract all the separate, dispersed acts of our soul to itself. In this way, it lends meaning to our whole existence in proportion as it dominates our choices. Growth in love then creates a stronger sense of unity and of direction in life. as this energy of love impels us to our final end. In fact, perfect love seeks only to give, not to receive, though it receives, in fact, through the purity of its self-giving, the surpassing happiness for which our heart is made.

[24:21]

Saint Bernard says the highest degree of love is to love ourself only for God's sake, The more we learn about our human nature and all its dimensions, the more complex we're understood to be, whether in body, psyche, or spirit. Finding out every week new complexities about the human body now. There's a whole huge book just on the cell. And the last I read about it, there were some 2,000 different chemicals in the human body. And probably most of those, there might be some that can be supplied in other ways, lead to an illness if they don't function properly. Or even if just one molecule is displaced.

[25:27]

In hemoglobin, for example, you've got like 500 atoms, and four of them are iron. If one of those iron is in the wrong position, it's present, but in the wrong position, you get sickle cell anemia, and you can die from that. A lot of Africans have that. So that kind of complexity is on just the level of the material body, on the level of the psyche and the spirit. We haven't even begun to establish what the proper operations and limits of each of those is, and I think by their very nature we never will. You're still writing about it, though, just yesterday here in one of your journals, I read an article on interpreting the real meaning of the fact that we can think.

[26:39]

So there are some questions that never die, and it looks like those will be one. Growth in love then creates a stronger sense of unity and of direction in life, as this energy of love impels us to be united with the object of our love. Teilhard de Chardin, in fact, made it one of the basic principles of his anthropology that the measure of interiority is proportionate to complexity. He spoke of the process of complexification of matter as a condition for consciousness. And in this material world, at any rate, this theory has a show of high plausibility.

[27:45]

The uniting force which draws to itself all the manifold drives and the disparate needs and desires arising from this characteristic of our nature is that of transcendent love. considers that those men and women who dedicate all their interior energy to the pursuit of union with God in love, especially those who engage themselves in the way of chastity, to be the spearhead of an evolution that is gradually elevating this cosmos to the sphere of the spiritual, where it will eventually meet its spouse and creator, Christ, at the Omega point. There have been, as we know, some rather strenuous objections to certain features of Thayar's conception as regards the linkage between this process of spiritualization and the Second Coming of our Lord.

[28:52]

Yet there is no doubt that charity provides the high wattage that warms the spirit and elevates it until it encounters the spouse for whom it longs. The concept of charity in the sense of love for God is a purifying and elevating energy, at any rate, did not originate with Teilhard by any means. That opinion is found widely disseminated among the fathers, both Greek and Latin, and was taken up in the Middle Ages. No one gave it greater force of expression than did St. Bernard, who is one of the few authors, along with William of St. Terry, to write a whole work explicitly on charity prior to 17th century when St. Francis de Sales wrote his. In patristic times, with the notable exception of St. Augustine, there were no treatises dedicated primarily to this subject.

[29:53]

Since the time of St. Bernard To be sure, there has been a more prominent attention given to reflection on the nature of love and the characteristics of its various states. Notably, pure love contrasts with the love for God that is marked by self-interest to some degree or other. As I indicated briefly above, Bernard thought of love as a power. whose energies serve to order all the other desires and affections of the soul, bringing them under its own benign and elevating direction. In this way it purified and prepared us for union with Christ. This way of describing love's function did not originate, however, with Bernard, but is found already in the writings of the Bishop of Hippo. Augustine writes, by charity therefore it happens that we are conformed to God.

[30:58]

What else is there that is best for man save that he clings to the one who is most blessed, that is certainly God, to whom we cannot adhere except by love, affection and charity. But if virtue leads to the happy life, I would affirm that there is no virtue save the highest love." He wrote that in De Moribus Ecclesiae, in the Morals of the Church. Augustine then completes his argument by pointing out that precisely because virtue leads to the happy life, it must be artered to the highest good, which is God himself, the Blessed Trinity. This is achieved through the operation of charity. On another occasion, he takes up this theme again in connection with the giving of the Holy Spirit only after the resurrection.

[32:05]

This is the case, he explains, so that in our resurrection, our charity should flame up and separate us from the love of the world. that it might run totally to God. For here we are born and we die. Let us not love this, rather let us migrate by charity. Let us dwell above by charity, the charity by which we love God. Let us meditate on nothing else in the pilgrimage of this, our present life, except that we shall not always be here, and we, by living well, shall prepare a place for ourselves there. There's much else that can be said about the love of God, of course, but perhaps the most pressing issue is the very practical point as to what can be done to cultivate this love of God so that it grows stronger in our hearts and in our lives.

[33:13]

Seems to me that by far the most efficacious means to deepen and intensify the love we have for the Lord is to allow ourselves to experience how much he loves us. Nothing is so calculated to produce and deepen love than the discovery that one is loved by another. Time and again we make this discovery in our lives. Someone who does not strike us as being particularly interesting or attractive does or says something which clearly shows that he or she has a real affection and regard for us. Upon learning this, it regularly happens that we feel immediately more engaged in the relationship. The person is perceived, and a new light can change a person's life. I remember a Jesuit professor I had took an interest in me as a young college student, and that's when I began to study.

[34:25]

Until then, I got by with as little as possible. And it was because he expected that from me, and he took that personal interest, as he did in any number of others, too. But that's true in general, I find, that to show genuine personal interest and affection and friendliness to another person immediately makes you part of that person's life. Faults that we had noticed in such a person no longer seemed so important. Habits that were annoying now appear, but peccadilloes. Defects of character evoke sympathy. In short, that person is appreciated and perceived in the best light possible. Indifference changes to sympathy.

[35:28]

Appreciation, admiration, and even love. There's an interesting article here in the Downside Review that I just picked up as I came in here. It's called, Love Songs and Lullabies, the Compassionate Crucified Savior in Late Middle English Lyrics. And it deals with the poems and songs that people wrote and sang out of appreciation for the love that Christ shows us in his passion especially. And then she refers to a book published recently, The Grief of God, Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England. And there the study deals with sermon literature, manuscript illumination, wall art, and drama, as well as the practices of certain holy women.

[36:46]

And all of those point to the fact that our Lord gave himself out of love for us. So that's a topic being dealt with. It might be one of the contributions that the women's liberation movement is making us more aware of. Although people like Saint Bernard did, and Francis Sisi did much already in the Middle Ages, their spirituality had become somewhat obscured. Jesus Christ became man for our sake. He was given to us because God so loved the world. He held back nothing of himself, and in the end, not only died on our behalf, but did what he alone could do. He rose from the dead to give us everlasting life with the Father. He did all those things in loving harmony with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

[37:50]

All this is what each of us believes. If I allow myself to believe that He continues to offer me His love, day by day, that it is truly myself whom He knows and accepts as His friend, surely I have a new depth of gratitude and in proportion as I can truly believe it, that it is my own person he knows and loves, I shall love him in return. Once we attain to this conviction, all the rest of the spiritual life flows quite naturally. We shall find it unthinkable deliberately to offend him by even the slightest deliberate sin. We shall strive to make ourselves more worthy of his trust, and His love. In short, we will do our best to love as we are loved, even though we know we can never match His gift of Himself in any way.

[38:56]

This is the greatest of all gifts, that truly to love God Himself for whom He is, and to spend our lives striving to prove worthy of Him who humbled Himself that we might always share his life and his joy. If our monastic observance takes us further along this way of divine love, it will prove to be a great blessing, not only for ourselves, but for all those with whom we live and whom we encounter in our life. For love gives of itself instinctively, generously, and creates love where before there was none. It's been very disappointing for me.

[40:06]

Hard to receive the awareness of ourselves. But also our faults, which then enables us to accept others. I have a disability with her, and then we love God because it's been beneficial for both of us, but we never quite get to that. Most of us never quite look at God for God's own sake. He starts with loving ourselves for our own sake. You know, if I know what's good for myself, I will do what God commands. And so, if I really look into myself, the first thing I discover is that I'm banned off. Miseria, he calls it, which the chief misery of man and all the rest, caused by the fact that he's mortal, he's going to die.

[41:13]

And that by accepting that, he becomes aware, in the presence of God, he becomes aware that everybody's in the same boat. No matter what their condition, they suffer from the same miseria, the same moving toward death. It's quite modern in that way. That's what people like Sartre dealt with. Heidegger, they put it in somewhat different terms. But God doesn't ask us if we want to live in this world. Once we come into it, we're destined to die. And then as we live with that, Berner says it's very important that we be patient and persevering, endure. And if we do in awareness of these realities, conscious of them,

[42:19]

Then we're gradually transformed by this sympathy for others. Love of neighbor grows out of that. And we realize that this transformation has taken place in us only because God is working with us, that he makes that possible. And as we become increasingly aware of God's role in this whole process, we pay more and more attention to God and our love then, for God is more permeating and enters into the love we have for our neighbor and for ourself. So in his work on the love of God, He adds that the final stage is when the only reason we love ourself is because of God.

[43:20]

But he also adds, whether that's possible in this life, I'm not sure. So those are the stages where, yes, the two works he deals with, it's on the degrees of humility and pride, and then on loving God. It's got three stages in the first book, but four in the second one. There's a strong tendency, of course, in modern life, this article I just read yesterday here, it's very much that way, to reduce love, to be reductionistic in the approach to love. Freud had that problem, but that explains nothing. And that's one of the weaknesses of that argument, that only the material is real.

[44:23]

But there is a good deal of that going around with these kinetic studies and the biologists that do a lot of work in that field, although there are others who refute that. But that really explains only on the surface of things. But it's interesting, I think, to note how few people are really comfortable talking about love, and especially men talking about love of God, even to their children, among themselves.

[45:27]

And I think that applies to monks, too. So that learning to do that, of course, you know, doing it in a way that doesn't make others uncomfortable, can... Well, reminding them of your faults. Yeah, that's right. But I thought that article by Father Vasek was a very stimulating one. The other Jesuit who does studies like that and publishes them also in America is this, oh Mallory, I think is his name, you've seen him there, no doubt. He interviews these kids, these high school boys. on different topics like that and then writes on it. He's very keen on bringing these ideas right down to concrete experience.

[46:28]

But as I say, for me, when you think about it, it's surprising how little the Desert Fathers talk about love, especially love of God. They do talk about, in this chapter that deals with the theme of charity, they talk a lot about love of neighbor. Humble being sympathetic, not judging, that's a big point they make. All of which are signs of love for God, but not about love of God himself. I think it was out of modesty and awareness of the need to be. very pure of heart before you speak about loving God, which I think is an embarrassment for all of us. But still, that's what our life is about. I hope to talk to you at the end about the transformations of love, which I think is the most interesting of perspectives in which to view the whole of the

[47:47]

Christian life and Gnostic life in particular. I know we're talking to people, people either who are married or who are That's right. Exactly. That's interesting. It does, yes, and I think that's very healthy, but going beyond that is the challenge, I think. I've had the same experience you did.

[48:49]

One of the more interesting series of confessions I ever heard was a mother who brought three of her children all to go to confession at the Abbey. And that was very interesting. It was similar to what you said. Of course, their faults were very minor. But the way they spoke, you know, when speaking, of course, it's always touching when children make a confession, because there's an act of trust there, a faith that is, you know, it's very touching. But you get such different slants on experience, how differently people can experience the same situations, that you can't be too glib in saying just what your experience is of others.

[49:54]

But life can go beyond that, and it does. I've met, surprisingly, some of the most innocent people in my life, just the last few years. And I don't want to keep you too long, but it's surprising how God can preserve some people. They don't know what sin is in any deliberate sense. There was a girl, a very attractive young woman, who was a graduate student, who asked to see me. And after our first talk, it was nothing special, I thought, but edifying in a general way. But then four months later, she came back. She had to travel quite a distance to come to the Abbey. Then we had the real conversation.

[50:58]

She had to see if she could trust me first, I think. And her question was, do you think I'm normal? And why would you ask that? Because she was very charming and a beautiful girl, and obviously quite intelligent doing graduate studies. And she said, well, I won't let any man kiss me unless I'm sure he's the one I'm going to marry. And that's in today's university climate, you know, where people are sleeping together and using drugs and so on. And she really meant it, but it was beginning to worry her because she didn't meet people like that. So maybe I'm not normal. But I've seen some others like that too in recent times. You realize that there is a love for God, a kind of love that really transcends emotions and the body, and that it's still motivating people.

[52:14]

But when you encounter it, it's a great grace, and you realize that That's one of the things that is a threatened species. I would say the phenomenon of man, yeah, but that sort of sums up his teaching there. De Lubac defends Desjardins, and he became a cardinal afterwards, in spite of that. But people like Maritain were critical of certain aspects, especially the fact that he related the Second Coming to an intramundane process, you know, the gradual transformation of the cosmos.

[53:18]

But that isn't well anchored in the Catholic tradition. But as far as I can see, Desjardins is probably the most interesting and certainly the boldest thinker. about this process of transformation that includes chemicals. He really basically was a geologist, not an anthropologist. He was forced to do anthropology when he was in exile in China. But even at that level, it certainly makes him very modern. You know, what's happening in biology now is on the level of atoms and molecules. All of this DNA and genetic studies depends on identifying proteins and amino acids and so on.

[54:26]

And that's where he was working. That idea of complexification, you know, that every Every object has a certain measure of interiority, and the degree of that interiority is a function of its complexity. Well, that seems to me there's something. He's on to something. Okay, so we meet again this evening.

[55:03]

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