I would like to share something with all of you, both for my own sake as well as for yours. I know that this won’t be relevant for many of you, and others of you won’t quite understand what I’m getting at. I am also not going to give you a “soundbite” of my life, of something so deep to me. So I can only ask that you take the time to read and reflect on what I am saying, out of reverence for me as a person, and for God himself. But my hope is that, at least for some of you, this may be a gift for you, as it has been for me. It is also something vulnerable for me to share, as it comes from deep within my heart. And to speak it out in this way lays me open to being hurt, even as it is really an invitation to see me as I am in my littleness, as I have come to see myself more and more in the healing light of God’s love.
Simply put, this is an apology. It is an apology that has in fact been given many times already, but I give it now anew, and with all of my heart, in hopes of clearing the air definitively. And the awareness of it has been growing with a particular fullness in the last year or so, and the last couple months in particular. Perhaps I can express it most succinctly in the words of my spiritual director: “There is a distinction between the inspiration and the interpretation. God gives the inspiration, and it is his. But on the human side, there is always some interpretation. And there can be mistakes in the interpretation. Of course, as long as we move forward with good intentions, this is not a serious matter. God makes good of everything. But that doesn’t mean a mistake here doesn’t hurt people. It can.”
For me, one of the primary mistakes through which I have caused harm over the last few years is speaking too vividly about the interpretation in such a way that people were not able to make contact with the simple inspiration. I had tried to express the reality that had so deeply touched my heart, as I groped forward towards what it meant for my life. But for me these gropings were movements forward, little insights or flashes of light or figures emerging in the darkness. But I have found that most people clung to the secondary things, to external structures, etc., as definitive matters fixed indefinitely. For me these were always flexible things in the process of growing, molding more and more to fit the essence. But the mistake was that others couldn’t see the essence in the same way that I could. And I know that I am responsible for this, at least in part.
I spoke of a desire that God had placed within me for a community—a community devoted to prayer and contemplation. I spoke, at first, too clearly about what this community might be. But God had a lot of pruning to do, as there were many, many branches that had to be cut away so that the little tree could bear fruit. In particular, the last year and a half was a time of intense pruning, in which God lovingly removed everything but the bare essence, the naked heart. And how beautiful it is when the heart is laid bare!
Of course, from the outside it can look like everything has simply been perpetually changing, that we are changing our minds or going our own way. But don’t things always look that way when the essence is not seen? The only real question worth asking is this: Is God really speaking here, and, if so, what is he saying? And if he is speaking, are we authentically listening to him? Everything else is irrelevant.
I am sorry for all of the ways in which I have spoken or acted in the past that have given a false impression that has misled any of you. Please forgive me. Also, I want to thank all of you who have gotten close enough to join me in this path of receptivity and listening, and who have shared in the beautiful touch of God’s love in this space. From now on, with a clearer vision purified by prayer and suffering and love, I want to speak only of the essence of what has touched my heart and my life so deeply. It is, I trust, this, and this alone, which has also drawn my dear friends here to this little home with me.
After everything has been pruned away, what is left? What is the naked heart? Those of you who are close enough to see, you already know very well. There is no trouble for you, or very little. But here I want to clear the air for all. So let me try to speak very clearly.
There is in fact no “inspiration” in the sense that many people within the Church imagine it: that God has placed in me some great mission to create a new community in the Church. And further than that: there is no particular “charism” or “gift” that I want to see grow and be realized, as a particular “thing” or a specific emphasis on the Christian life. After the dust has settled, all that remains is this: I have been touched, profoundly, by the breathtakingly beautiful love of our God, a God who is a Trinity of Persons living in eternal intimacy. And I have been touched by being drawn to the foot of the Cross of Jesus, where he once suffered in bearing the darkness and sin of all of us, and yet, precisely in this place, has conquered death by Love and has brought us the gift of new life. And Jesus continues to suffer on his Cross to this day, in each one of God’s suffering children. I have been gripped by the desire to be here, close to Jesus in his suffering and his Resurrection, since I was young.
It was here, at the heart of deep solitude and prayer, that, six years ago, I first felt the touch of a desire for a home to be born from the womb of this solitude with the suffering Jesus. I did not know what it would look like, and there was certainly a lot of interpretation. But God is good, and loving, and patient, and he knows how to speak to his children’s hearts, as long as they are willing to continue listening. All of these interpretations have now fallen away, and what is left is simply a recognition of the truth. Of course, if one does not believe in truth, what I say makes no sense. It is simply another perspective on human life—“my” perspective, perhaps “our” perspective. But I do believe that there is only one truth. And this Truth is God. He has created all things, and he gives life and meaning to them. Thus he is the One we look to in order to understand the meaning and purpose of human life.
And the life-changing, earth-shattering reality that has touched and ravished my heart ever more deeply since I was young, is this: that the purpose of human life is nothing else but love and intimacy. We have been created for intimacy with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and for intimacy with one another in him. Nothing else has any meaning whatsoever outside of this. For at the end of our lives, what else will remain? Whatever we have achieved in this world, whatever money we have collected, whatever we have built, even whatever missions we have accomplished…all of this will fall away. Nothing will remain but the naked heart, the essence. Nothing will remain but persons and intimacy.
And so I knew, and I know now, that I cannot but live for this, with every beat of my heart until the end. I knew that I had to live for the sake of intimacy with God, and intimacy with my brothers and sisters. And this intimacy is a mutual gaze of love in which persons truly understand one another in deep reverence and reciprocal listening. It is an embrace in which the heart is shared in trust and vulnerability. This is how close God wants to be to us, and us to him! He wants intimacy with us more than we can possibly imagine!
And he also created us to be close to one another—authentically close. But we live in a world that has nearly despaired of the possibility of true human intimacy. Or it thinks that intimacy with God and intimacy with other human persons are mutually exclusive. But the opposite is the case: only total belonging to God can make true human intimacy possible. For only in God is any human love safe and secure.
So what does this mean concretely? I don’t want to offer any “interpretation.” Rather, I just want to cry out with all of my heart: “This, this is the truth! This is what God made us for! I want to live it with all that I am, and I want as many people to live it as possible! I want all of God’s children to know how deeply they are loved, and to surrender themselves into the intimacy of God’s welcoming embrace! And I want them to know how beautiful human relationships are when they blossom in this place!”
This, clearly, is not an “inspiration” in the usual sense. This is not a charism or a particular thing in the Church. This is simply the very meaning of human and Christian life. And here, precisely, we come to the only thing that I can say about it concretely. If nothing remains in the end but person and intimacy, then God has asked me to live this with all that I am. Nothing else.
I ache to witness to the fact that it is really enough to simply be a child of God. No more. I am not seeking to realize some mission, to create some community, to achieve some goal. No, I just want to be loved and to love, gratuitously, for its own sake. For love is beautiful, good, and true all for its own sake, just because it is. Just because it makes intimacy possible. And yet is not this gratuitous intimacy also the most beneficial thing that can be done for our hurting world, for it is a sharing in the very life of God who is love?
And in this space, I find that God is also welcoming people who are aching to experience the same love, to find their wounded hearts healing in order to be made capable of the fullness of love and intimacy. And the best way to do this, I have found, is simply to remain nothing else but a little child. Yes, the best way to witness to this fundamental identity of each person as God’s beloved child is to insist on remaining always nothing else but this myself. And it is enough! Yes, the best way to offer a home for wounded hearts aching for love is simply to live my own ache for love, and to love those whom God places in the orbit of my life. The Church herself is enough of a home for me; the Trinity is enough of a Home for me. I need not try to define or create any other home than that, but only to live the awesome gift that has been already given, with completely poor hands and heart, in each unique moment of life as God gives it to me.
This is my heart, and this is my only desire. And it is not something great, something heroic, something special. It is simply the common gift and task of every human life, of every one of us. The external contours of my individual life are not what is important. What is important is love. Or rather, the One who is important is God. Let us look at him. He is all that matters.
