The Lord always wants to
stir up our desire for him, and perhaps most of all to stir up our confidence in
his desire to share all that he is, all that he has with us. Our
confidence in his desire is so essential. The God who is at once totally available
and at the same time altogether beyond our reach, draws us into
the mystery that he is; draws us into himself. For God in Christ is
always moving toward us. "His desire gives rise to yours," says Saint
Bernard, "and if you are eager to receive him, it is he who is rushing
to enter your heart; for he first loved us, not we him." Jesus enfleshes
this towardness of God - going out of
himself, rushing toward us as he seeks to captivates us with the “spell of his
love and his desire.”1
Imagine then the awesome daring
of our prayer- we hope, we believe that we can be intimate with the
living God- we have built our lives around this. And we know that this desire,
this reaching out toward God, is possible only because of God’s desire in the
first place. Best of all God’s most tender desire for communion with us has
taken flesh in Christ Jesus our Lord. Jesus is God’s desire for us
coming toward us moment by moment across the depths of otherness. Jesus
is the Bridge, our Bridge to the Father. And to have the gumption to pray at
all we must, like Peter walking across the water, allow our foolish overreaching desire to trump the
imbalance of reality- our puny humanity vs. his sublime divinity. What prudence
would surely caution against, we do when we dare to pray. And it is awesome to
say the least.
Jesus' desire for communion with us teaches us confidence, fiducia for St. Bernard. For within our very bones, our guts,
planted there by the invisible, unfathomable, living God is our capacity, our
natural need and longing for God, indeed, for an intimacy and union that is our rightful
possession. We are built for it, built for Jesus, Jesus whose name means “God
saves, God frees."2
In Christ Jesus God is constantly giving us himself, his very life,
“that life that flows in abundance from his pierced side, from his empty tomb."3 If indeed God in Christ is
constantly coming toward us, constant in his desire for us, how shall we respond?
1 Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Divine Names, IV in Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 22.
2 Olivier Clément, The
Roots of Christian Mysticism, 238.