Mindful
in faith and love, in wonder and thanksgiving, of our own being as gift we are
to be moved to a reciprocal gift of self to others. Moreover, giving to others
must hold as its pattern gift’s proper measure, which is totality. The total
gift of one’s own being from nothingness calls for a reciprocal gift of all of
oneself. Jesus himself alludes to this logic when responding to a scribe’s question about which was the first of
all the commandments, “Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
We
can get a better grasp of this total reciprocal gift of self, by looking at its
archetype, which is the “vow”. When a man and a woman exchange vows at their
wedding or a religious makes vows at his or her profession or a priest at his
ordination, in each case it is a gift of all of oneself. It is important to
recognize that this giving of self is made as a response in love and
thanksgiving to the mystery of being given to oneself, it is not a claim to
have the capacity to spend the rest of one’s life in a state of unremitting
total self-gift. What the vow does do is gather up all that has gone before and
all that is to follow in a person’s life into a unity with God; so that every
other giving of oneself is now an expression of this totality; which is meant
to unfold in the ordinary living out of our lives through our daily attempts to
give ourselves to others.
The
widow’s contribution of her two small coins is her attempt to live from within
the totality of self-gift. It is her way of abiding as a traveler in the land
of the gift, which is the realm of God. He is her dwelling place, where taking
risks in love opens up pathways of never-ending newness and discovery, he is
her joy, her place of the experience of fullness and peace, her home; and
resting there in union with him as the mystery of the divine source of life,
her eternal father, means reciprocating in her own way the totality of the gift
that she has received, confident that as for the widow of Zarephath, “The jar
of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry, until the day when the
Lord sends rain upon the earth."
What
gives Jesus such joy, is that in her action, he sees a unity with his own
action as only-begotten Son, making a total gift of self to the Father through
taking on our flesh, and now moving toward his suffering and death in order to
bring back to the Father all those the Father has given him. He summons his
disciples and points her out in the hope that they too will know this union
with him. May he enlighten us and strengthen us that we too may dwell with him,
united with him in the offering of self, without limit, calculation or reserve.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Reflection by Father Timothy.
