Father:
My dear Son, my beloved Son!
You see the darkness into which they,
our precious and dear children, have fallen!
Son:
Yes, my Father, my Love, I see it…
I will do whatever is necessary,
whatever Love knows to be best,
to regain them for you.
Father:
They have closed themselves off from Love,
even though by Love they are still embraced.
Their hearts have turned in upon themselves
and they have lost their living contact with our gift.
And now there is nothing, of their own effort,
that they can do to restore what they have lost.
Son:
Ah, what an amazing thing it is to see:
that the hardest thing for the human heart
is simply to let go and to receive the gift!
Father:
This, precisely, is what they cannot do,
in their fallen, fear-filled, and sinful state.
They must receive from the outside
the gift of redemption that will set them free,
just as the can only receive from outside
the gift of their very existence from Us.
You, my Son, must go to them in love,
you must unite yourself to their pain and sorrow,
you must penetrate their loneliness in compassion
and hold them, in their anguish, close to your Heart.
Only from within their anguished narrowness,
through the expansiveness of your own filial love,
can you reopen them to the light of our Gift,
expanding their hearts again in childhood
and knitting them back together with our own.
Son:
Yes, Father, I willingly, I gladly go!
I embrace everything that comes from you,
for you are my Life and my Joy.
I embrace this gift, this task from you,
because it, my Father, is yours,
and because it is that for which I myself thirst,
my heart resounding with the compassion of your own.
I yearn, inflamed with your own love,
to descend into their neediness and pain,
making them my own in the most intimate way.
I cannot, will not see them suffering in loneliness,
without going, in your name, to rescue them,
at whatever cost to myself.
But what kind of “cost” can there be for Love,
for whom to lose is simply to find anew what can never be lost?
For to lose is simply the inner movement of poverty
which is simultaneously gift and acceptance,
having, therefore, with open hands and heart.
To give totally is to find totally: to find in reception
that which is both received and given, at once.
Indeed, dear Father, I understand,
from the heart of our eternal union,
that this union with you is a gift
that can only be received with open hands.
I do not count equality with you, Father,
as something to be grasped,
for it can only be received, and lived…
To grasp it is not to have it at all,
but simply to abide in it, as my deepest truth,
surging into me ceaselessly as your gift:
this, my Father, is all that is necessary.
And because of this
it is something that I can never lose,
for it is not something that I have,
but rather the truth of who I am.
There is no need for me to cling
to this gift I have from you, Father,
for it is the very foundation of my being
ceaselessly poured into me from you.
And as I welcome this as your gift,
I am also made in the likeness of your giving
such that I communicate myself in my turn:
first of all back to you, my Father, in our Spirit,
but also, in the temporality of the creation,
I can empty myself out of love for them.
Father, abide in me, and I in you,
throughout every moment of this movement,
this passage of Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection,
for not a single moment can I live
if I am not sustained always by you.
You are my Father, my Life, my All,
and in you alone is my power and strength.
Yes, for all is given to me by you, as mine,
but I receive it as yours, and yours I let it be,
surrendering all to you anew, eternally.
In this filial dependence is my freedom,
in this reception and reciprocal gift my joy.
So too, burning at the heart of my human existence,
at the core of my incarnate life in the world,
let there only be the flame of this mutual giving
and the intimacy that nothing can shatter,
that nothing can weaken or take away.