POVERTY OF HEART – MK 6:7-13
You send us out into the world, Lord Jesus,
but you take the weapons from our hands.
You send us on a journey, fraught with danger,
where, in our vulnerability, we could be wounded,
and yet you say: take nothing for your journey.
Why do you say this Jesus, or, better,
why is this the path that you have chosen,
both for yourself and for us?
It is because we are like young David
who goes out to face a giant
on behalf of his people.
Yet when we cling to armor and a sword
we are weighed down, unable to move.
We close in upon ourselves in heaviness,
forgetting the liberating power of filial trust,
trust in your ever-present and undying love,
which, alone, is the shelter that can protect us,
and which will nestle us always in your embrace.
“The battle is the Lord’s.”
Yes, you are poor, Jesus, at every moment,
not only throughout your earthly life
but in the very womb of eternity,
in the bosom of your loving Father.
For you do not cling to anything in possessiveness,
but possess everything with empty hands.
In the gift flowing unceasingly from the Father
you find unceasingly your very life
as the Beloved Son, his Precious One.
And in unceasing acceptance you abide,
rejoicing in the Father, your Beloved,
while this acceptance blossoms eternally
in the reciprocity of your loving gift.
Your earthly poverty, Lord Jesus,
your littleness and your humility,
your holy homelessness, and, especially,
the vulnerability of your Sacred Heart
which refuses to put on armor or defenses,
but rather lays itself bare in loving compassion
to be wounded by both our beauty and our pain—
all of this, my Jesus, is but a temporal expression
of the passion of love lived by you and the Father,
eternally, in the embrace of your one Spirit.
Vulnerability, this is the most Godlike state of all,
this open self-expression which gives the very self.
And this vulnerability springs from interiority,
for what is shared is precisely the inner self,
and yet the very sharing draws me, magnetically,
deeper into the inner truth of the heart,
into that innate solitude where I exist in you.
For when I speak about the hidden things
they become known not only to the other,
but also, in a beautiful way, to me.
But this is not the only vulnerability
to which you, Lord, invite us in your love.
Nor is it, for that matter, the only which you lived.
You shared your inner Heart, indeed,
giving it to us in word, in act, in tenderness,
in the Eucharistic self-donation—
but you gave it to us also in welcoming acceptance,
and in the Passion of compassionate embrace.
Yes, you gave yourself to me
because of your desire to find acceptance,
to find a home in the shelter of my heart.
Yet you also gave yourself to me
because you know that I thirst to be loved,
because I thirst, for my part, to be accepted…
and, Jesus, because you find me lovable.
And so, Jesus, your vulnerability is twofold:
to give yourself unconditionally, seeking a home in me,
and to open yourself totally, to make your Heart my home.