In the previous reflection we spoke about the innermost mystery of authentic fruitfulness as contemplative receptivity to the gift of God. This receptivity allows one’s heart and life to become “good soil” for the seed of the Word, which is ultimately Jesus Christ himself, who comes to us and pours his love into our hearts. Through his coming to us by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus brings with him the full mystery of the Father; therefore our contemplative openness to welcome this gift allows the entire Trinity to take up his abode within our hearts. Our being becomes, in a real and profound way, a “home” for the Most Holy Trinity, as Jesus himself said during the Last Supper: “If a man loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). The reality of “home” and the reality of “keeping the word” are deeply connected. The word to keep in this case means much more than mere obedience to an external commandment; rather, it also implies guarding, watching over, or sheltering. This is exactly what we saw in the previous reflection on being good soil, or even a womb, for the word and love of God. When we open our hearts in order to welcome Christ’s word, whenever we make our being a shelter for his gift and his will, then he can come, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and inhabit us in the most profound and intimate way. But indeed our very ability to open ourselves in this way is itself God’s gift, as his grace precedes, awakens, and sustains our own loving response. This is, in particular, the unique work of the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us and prays in us, teaching us how to pray by incorporating us into his own prayer. His grace alive in our hearts cradles and sustains our own response, so that our every prayer, our every encounter with God, is a matter of “grace encountering grace.” In other words, the grace-within-us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit makes us able to receive the grace-outside-of-us, which comes through the gift of God incarnate in Christ, and made present in all the circumstances of our life in which he makes himself known. We see in this intimate movement of prayer, therefore, our profoundly beautiful dynamic: in which the Spirit draws us to the Son and makes us able to welcome him, and the Son in turn draws us in himself to the Father and also allows us to welcome the Father. There is a twofold movement, two movements going in “opposite” directions which are actually the same: 1) we pass in the Spirit through the Son to the Father, so that we may abide in his bosom, 2) and we welcome the Father in the Son through the Spirit into the recesses of our own hearts, so they may make their home within us. This is the most breathtaking intimacy, which God ardently desires to have with each one of us. “May they all be one, Father; even as you are in me, and I in you, may they also be in us” (cf. John 17:21). We are invited to share in the mutual indwelling of the three divine Persons, who each “inhabit” one another in the most blissful intimacy of love. If we are willing to give our “yes,” then the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come to make their home in us, dwelling in our hearts and breathing forth in us the fragrance of their love and joy. And by doing this, they are simultaneously enfolding us in their own most intimate embrace, such that we find our home in them, in the eternal communion that they share. This, indeed, is not only the greatest gift we can possibly receive—the reality that encompasses all of life and gives it meaning—but it is also the greatest gift we can offer to our brothers and sisters. If we truly allow the Trinity to live within us, giving him a place of welcome and repose in our inmost heart and life, then the fragrance of his Love will necessarily spread through us to others. Indeed, the Trinity brings with him the ceaseless hymn of his own life of perfect love and joy, and the echoes of this sacred music, this song of jubilation, through sounding in our hearts, will be heard by others, attracting them to God. In welcoming the indwelling presence of God, indeed, we find that he is able to perpetuate within us his saving mysteries, his redeeming and healing activity in the world. Christ comes to live so deeply within us that he perpetuates in us his own life and the mysteries of his existence: his Incarnation, his prayer, his ministry, his compassion for humanity, his Transfiguration, his Passion, his Resurrection, his Ascension, and his gift of the Spirit. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. “By his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man” (Gaudium et Spes, 22.2). We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model: “We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church. … For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us” (St. John Eudes). Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity understood this so well when, in her Prayer to the Trinity, she wrote: O my God, Trinity whom I adore, let me entirely forget myself that I may abide in You, still and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity; let nothing disturb my peace nor separate me from You, O my unchanging God, but that each moment may take me further into the depths of Your mystery! Pacify my soul! Make it Your heaven, Your beloved home and place of Your repose; let me never leave You there alone, but may I be ever attentive, ever alert in my faith, ever adoring and all given up to Your creative action. O my beloved Christ, crucified for love, would that I might be for You a spouse of Your heart! I would anoint You with glory, I would love You – even unto death! Yet I sense my frailty and ask You to adorn me with Yourself; identify my soul with all the movements of Your soul, submerge me, overwhelm me, substitute Yourself in me that my life may become but a reflection of Your life. Come into me as Adorer, Redeemer and Saviour. O Eternal Word, Word of my God, would that I might spend my life listening to You, would that I might be fully receptive to learn all from You; in all darkness, all loneliness, all weakness, may I ever keep my eyes fixed on You and abide under Your great light; O my Beloved Star, fascinate me so that I may never be able to leave Your radiance. O Consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, descend into my soul and make all in me as an incarnation of the Word, that I may be to Him a super-added humanity wherein He renews His mystery; and You O Father, bestow Yourself and bend down to Your little creature, seeing in her only Your beloved Son in whom You are well pleased. O my “Three”, my All, my Beatitude, infinite Solitude, Immensity in whom I lose myself, I give myself to You as a prey to be consumed; enclose Yourself in me that I may be absorbed in You so as to contemplate in Your light the abyss of Your Splendour! We see in this prayer not only Elizabeth’s profound desire for God, but her awareness of God’s desire for her. She is, as it were, simply responding to an invitation, to the awareness that her beloved “Three” yearn to take up their abode within her, and in doing so to irradiate her whole being with their life, love, joy, and activity. So she offers herself happily and lovingly to the Trinity, welcoming him radically into her soul, knowing herself to be his beloved daughter and spouse. After saying all of this, there is a second element that we also want to speak about. We said that we are invited to open ourselves as a “home” for the Blessed Trinity, but we are also invited to be a “home” for each one of our brothers and sisters in this world. Indeed, the first reality allows the second one to blossom. As we welcome the love that God has for us and open our hearts to let him come and dwell in us, our whole being is dilated and expanded by his presence. As he makes his home in us it is even more true that he is welcoming us into the Home of his own Heart. Therefore, having found our Home in the Trinity, we are able to open our own hearts and lives for all of the thirsting hearts within this world. We can welcome them, love them, and accompany them—seeing and accepting them in the light of the same love that we have first received from God. In this way our love can become a space in which they glimpse the immensity of God’s own love, in which they can taste the shelter of his own enveloping embrace. The “home” of our own heart becomes a safe dwelling-place for them in this world, in which they truly find another person before whom they can share themselves, certain that they are reverenced, accepted, and authentically loved. And ultimately this concrete and intimate human love opens the way directly for others to encounter God and his own openness the welcome and to shelter them. In a way, our heart becomes a kind of “antechamber” through which they pass into the House of the Father, into the intimacy of his most gentle embrace. Here we all find ourselves, together, sheltered in the perfect unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, made one with our loving God and one, through him and in him, with one another. + + + How does all that we have said deepen our understanding of the contemplative vocation within the Church? Clearly, a recurring theme in all of our reflections, which we cannot seem to avoid, is the awesome truth that everyone is called to the contemplative life. This is because this life burns as a fire at the heart of every person’s existence, whatever its external contours. It is the most intimate and interior form that gives meaning to everything else and expresses itself in the particular richness and multiplicity of the different vocations and circumstances of daily life. We are all invited to repose within the enveloping embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…already in this life, and perfectly forever in the next. This movement into the embrace of God is the inner trajectory of our whole existence, since God has created us for precisely this purpose. On the other hand, this mystery of contemplative intimacy is also the center from which all spreads, like the ripples cast from a pebble thrown into still water. What then is distinct about the contemplative vocation itself, as a concrete form of life embraced explicitly as the very shape of one’s concrete existence in this world? It is quite simple. It simply aims … Continue reading To Make My Heart a Home for the Beloved