It was a moment that I knew He saw me. He knew me. He loved me.
It wasn’t in a chapel.
It wasn’t when I was praying.
It wasn’t when I was reading a spiritual book.
It was an unexpected moment that He found me and showed me His unconditional love in a way I could receive it and consciously make it mine.
Homework filled my days as I pursued graduate theological studies and I had volunteered to take care of the switchboard on a quiet Saturday afternoon. I was immersed in reading Augustine’s commentary on the Gospel of John.
This great disciple of Jesus, convert, and Doctor of the Church described his weakness. I suddenly knew mine. It was honest. It was raw. It was such a relief to finally name it and own it.
In a flash, I felt like there was someone else in the room. Looking up, I saw no one.
My eyes returned to the page and I continued reading. Once more the piercing sense of being seen with a gentle and compassionate gaze overwhelmed me. This time I knew the eyes, the presence, was deeply established within me, pouring out over my inner landscape.
And the words…
The voice…
“I don’t care if you ever beat this temptation. If you look at me and let me keep looking at you, that’s all I care about. I love you.”
Decades later I inserted this spiritually disruptive event—disruptive in a sacred and healing way—into a book I was writing. My editor still in her twenties or early thirties flagged it as “impossible” and “against Church teaching.” “We need to repent before we hear those words….”
Maybe so, I thought, but I can’t doubt—nothing could make me ever question—that I had heard His voice.
The Full Extent of Our Misery
Today I found a similar story in a book I’m reading for Advent, Do Not Judge Anyone: Desert Wisdom for a Polarized World: Desert Wisdom for a Polarized World, by Isaac Slater, OCSO. In his chapter on Mercy he recounts how the Japanese poet Ryokan had been asked by his sister to give advice to his nephew who was squandering the family’s money. Ryokan went to his sister’s home and stayed three days and said nothing. On the day he left he stood on the porch, called for his nephew, and asked him to tie the strings of his straw sandals. His sister, standing behind the screen, thought that finally he was going to give her son some stern advice. But there were no words. No reproaches. No pleading. Instead, as his nephew bent to tie his sandals he felt something wet on his neck. Surprised, he looked up and saw Ryokan’s eyes full of tears. “At that moment he felt repentance for his wrongdoings. Ryokan stood up and left without a word” (page 13-14).
Slater reflects on the interplay between repentance and mercy:
“Sin can only be known in the moment it’s forgiven. Otherwise we could never bear to face it squarely. It’s the awareness of the full extent of our misery in the same moment that we realize we are loved, unconditionally, just as we are. Knowing we are loved just as we are, while seeing keenly and with fresh eyes the nature of our fault, is what prompts us to want to change, from within and freely. Only when we know that we don’t need to change in order to be loved do we want to change…not to earn what’s already been freely given but from gratitude” (Slater, page 14).
The other day I witnessed a conversation. As a woman told a humorous story, she made a side comment to a priest sitting next to her. It was something about confession or an excuse around the event she was relaying. The priest didn’t miss a beat. He shrugged and said simply,
“There is nothing that we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”
Love Reached Down to Us
At Christmas we remember and ponder how Love reached down to us, leaping down, reaching down into the deep waters to draw us out and set us free. In the Resurrection we learn that this divine Love is stronger than death and that nothing in the humble obscurity of our existence can put out the fire in the heart of the Trinity. Nothing we could do, even crucify the Lord of Glory, could overpower what stands as the meaning of the world: relationship. We were created by God in relationship with him, we were pursued, even after we rejected this communion, by the God who wanted us still as his own. The purpose of Jesus’ life and of his death and resurrection was to reveal the unswervability of God being for us and pitching his tent among us in order to fulfill God’s ultimate desire to bring us and the whole creation into God’s communion of forever and unending love.
The Christmas story is about much more than a memory or a re-telling. Once grasped it becomes our story, the history of a Love that forms our identity, establishes our purpose, points us to our destiny, and fills us with joy.
This unconditional love Is the only reason for our existence. Period.
Touching the Sunrise 