The following is meditations on the readings for the Liturgy of Sunday. The citations are below. Please read them from your Bible or Missal. The comments are geared to the practice of contemplative prayer.

Sixth Sunday of Easter; Cycle B, May 13, 2012

Readings: Acts of the Apostles 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48;  1st John 4.7-10;  John 15.9-17

Summary of the Meditation:

• The Second Reading takes us into the mystery of God.  God is love.  This Scriptural description of God is to be taken into our hearts.  God is love.  It is God’s love that we must receive.  God is the definition of love.  In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

• God's love is not communicated in an abstract way.  God shows his love in the person of his incarnate Son.  We see the face of the Father's love in his Son.  God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.

• The grace of contemplative union is this loving knowledge of God.  This divine way of knowing through love is the fruit of the Gift of Wisdom. . Love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.

• As we draw nearer the consuming fire of God’s love, we become more conscious of our sinfulness.  Expiation is necessary; repair, recovery, regeneration are necessary.  The heart has to be made over; a heart of stone becomes a vibrant, feeling heart, reborn by water and the Holy Spirit.  There is no love unless it is received from the Crucified Lover upon the cross. .  God loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.

• The Gospel Reading brings out the personal love that is God.  Love is not a cosmic force.  It is infinitely, substantially personal.  Divine love is further manifested in the particularity of the Incarnate Son, Jesus of Nazareth.  The consciousness of knowing and loving the Father is shared with us.  Jesus said to his disciples: "As the Father loves me, so I also love you.  Remain in my love."

• Again, there is no annihilation of the person, an absorption into God causing one to lose individuality.  Divine union is presence: the one to the other, the “I” and the “Thou.”  We all become like the beloved disciple resting on the bosom of Christ.  I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.

Full Meditation:

A Public Television science program recently explored the constitution of the sun, using actual film from satellite telescopic cameras. There were amazing views of the intensity of the sun in all its power.  The sun is our star, the source of our light, energy and life.  But to come into its immediate orbit would mean complete consummation in its heat.

What a metaphor for God!  The brilliance and fire of the sun is a metaphor for the divine love at the very center of God.  And yet how poorly is the sun an analogy for God’s love because the sun is a force, a power, an energy-mass lacking in that one uniquely human dimension, the personal.  “The Force be with you” can never substitute for the Triune Relationship of divine Persons that is God.  Amazing gift—we have by grace the capacity to be person to person with God.  We have been created for this relationship.  The sun in all its immensity of power is as nothing when compared to the human heart filled with Christ’s grace in union with the Persons of the Holy Trinity in love.  St. Thomas Aquinas taught that one act of love from a human heart infused with the divine life given in grace is worth more than a million universes!

The Second Reading takes us into the mystery of God, into the epicenter of our sun.  God is love.  This Scriptural description of God is to be taken into our hearts.  God is love.  It is God’s love that we must receive.  The phrase is not "Love is God."  Not anything that we can call love is God.  Rather, it reads that God is love.  God defines love.  So the Reading teaches immediately that God is the source of true love.  Our attempts at love become God’s love only in the grace of Christ.  God is the definition of love.  In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

Once this truth is established that we must move into God's love or rather, we must open ourselves to receive the gift of God's love.  What does God' love accomplish in us?

First, we are born of God.  Everyone who loves is begotten by God.  God's love creates us and then re-creates us in grace.  We receive a share in the divine nature through the gift of grace.  We are not born with this sharing in the divine nature.  We must be reborn again.  The Holy Spirit births us through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Baptism is the Sacrament of this rebirth.  The Sacrament of Penance-Reconciliation restores us to the divine life when we have lost it through serious sin.

Second, that God is love also means that love begets life, the divine life in the Person of the Son.  God's love is not communicated in an abstract way.  God shows his love in the person of his incarnate Son.  We see the face of the Father's love in his Son.  God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.

Third, begotten into the divine life we share in the divine relationship of the Trinity.  This is the contemplative life.  We know God through love.  The poor sun in all its magnificence is not capable of knowing, therefore of loving.  The share in the divine consciousness of the Trinity is our knowing God in the sense of a loving knowledge.  The grace of contemplative union is this loving knowledge of God.  This divine way of knowing through love is the fruit of the Gift of Wisdom. . Love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.

Fourth, as we draw nearer the consuming fire of God’s love, we become more conscious of our sinfulness.  In Isaiah, chapter six, with the vision of God’s holiness, the prophet bemoans:  “Woe is me!  For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”  A saint wrote: that our sins are like a bucket of water poured into the sun.  What’s left after the Blood of Christ has washed us in his love?  Our sins are annihilated as water is consumed in the fires of the sun.

Jesus, the only begotten of God the Father, is the way into love through his cross and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Expiation is necessary; repair, recovery, regeneration are necessary.  The heart has to be made over; a heart of stone becomes a vibrant, feeling heart, reborn by water and the Holy Spirit.  There is no love unless it is received from the Crucified Lover upon the cross. .  God loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.

Finally, the end result, the practical consequence of sharing in the divine love is that we should love others as God has loved us.  Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God.

The Gospel Reading brings out the personal love that is God.  Love is not a cosmic force.  It is infinitely, substantially personal.  Divine love is further manifested in the particularity of the Incarnate Son, Jesus of Nazareth.  The consciousness of knowing and loving the Father is shared with us.  Jesus said to his disciples: "As the Father loves me, so I also love you.  Remain in my love."

The Buddhist teaching of the nothingness of the individual soul is incompatible with the Gospel message of the sacredness of the individual person and the divine destiny of each person.  The power of the Word made flesh revealing the Father and the Holy Spirit, and living in the Church as Revelation is contrary to the absoluteness of silence and unknowing as the essence of the divinity.  The first language of God is the Word and Love.  This joy is the abiding beatitude of God, His Glory shared with us by the Son in the Common Love that is the Holy Spirit.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.

Again, there is no annihilation of the person and an absorption into God causing one to lose individuality.  Divine union is presence: the one to the other, the “I” and the “Thou.”  We all become like the beloved disciple resting on the bosom of Christ.  I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.

In the First Reading, the Church by the guidance of the Holy Spirit opens up the embrace of God.  God's love goes beyond the Israelite vessel of revelation to all the Gentiles.

In the Holy Eucharist, the infinite immensity of the divine sun is with us under the signs of bread and wine.  Let our Holy Communion be a leap into the heart of the sun to be consumed in love, “My Beloved is to me and I am to my Beloved.”


--William C. Fredrickson, Obl.OSB, D.Min.