In Christ God
has become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is in the
wounded and risen Christ that friendship with God becomes real, for there we
can see and understand the depth of God’s desire to share everything with
us. For in the hour of his crucifixion God pours out his entire self for us,
desiring to unburden us, to free us from sin and death, wanting what is best
for us, as any friend would. True friendship with God is now accessible,
possible because in the brokenhearted Christ, God most high has become God
most low; God has opened his heart to us, longing for our friendship. It is the
wounded face of Christ that reveals the love of Father, Son and Spirit.
This everything of the Father’s love for us is most clearly expressed
in the self-offering of Jesus, in his disfigured humanity.
A God who is
love would be inconceivable without the reality of the incompleteness that is
love, the inner voice, the deep desire that says, “I cannot be me without you.
And you cannot be you without me.”* This is the truth of
who God is, a God who is relationship, a God whom Saint Aelred names as
friendship. In their mutual exchange, deferring to each other in love, Father,
Son and Spirit utter these words endlessly to one another and to each of us.
The Spirit invites us into this heavenly reciprocity, this exchange loving
friendship, empowering, encouraging us to say to God with every fiber of our
being: “I cannot be me without you,” as God repeats these same words back to
us. Our friendship with God in Christ through the Spirit is ultimately
fulfilled in our promise to love one another as we have been loved, to create
households and communities of friends, where we will try to love as God loves.
It is an impossible task, only the Spirit of Jesus can help us for alone we do
not know how to pray or love as God loves.
Photograph of
antique corpus in the Abbey hermitage by Brother Brian. Quotation by Jeremy Driscoll, OSB. Meditation by one of the
monks.
