Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
I have to laugh a little when I hear Paul’s soaring language in today’s passage from Ephesians. It’s heady stuff and also one of the most beautiful passages in Scripture. “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
I would certainly love to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of the overpowering love of God. Most days, though, especially lately, I find myself muddling through instead. I feel much more like David, though without the kingly power: restless, yearning, dissatisfied, like a person with an itch just out of reach.
When these feelings of restlessness and listlessness arise, it’s all too easy to reach for the simple solution to a deeper hunger. It’s why I, as with so many others, have gained weight over the last eighteen months. The world around us is in collapse, and for many of us our inner worlds are collapsing, too. We want something to hold onto, something to help us feel safe, grounded, full.
That’s why I love this story of David. It’s salacious, in a way. But it’s so real. So true to our human experience. Most of us don’t have the worldly power David had. But we certainly can relate to the temptation. He’s stuck at home. He’s bored. He doesn’t have the stimulation or the feelings of power that he’s used to. You have to remember that he’s been Israel’s great warrior. Saul killed his thousands and David his tens of thousands.
Now, seemingly, he has all he’s ever wanted. He is king. He’s wealthy. He can have and do whatever he wants. That’s a long way to come from tending the sheep. And, like many of us, he finds that when he finally achieves all he’s ever wanted, he has nowhere else to run from the gnawing emptiness inside. The wanting has not stopped with the getting.
So, when he sees Bathsheba bathing, he’s like me with the ice cream. Oh, that’s what will make me feel better. His pleasure-seeking, though, leads him into a very dark place, indeed. Before the story ends, he will have sent an innocent and noble man to die rather than admitting to himself that his hunger has taken over his life. Like any addict, this dramatic fall is the hook that reels him in to a life of deeper and greater faithfulness.
We don’t hear this part of the story today, but David must fully comprehend his emptiness and all the ways that he has hurt himself and others in seeking to assuage his yearning before he can allow God to fill him with the fullness of God’s loving mercy.
We are, each of us in our own way, David. We cannot, despite Paul’s prayer, comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s mercy. To comprehend means to encompass, to surround, to take into oneself. How can we possibly surround and take inside us the fullness of God?
As with everything having to do with God, the answer lies in paradox.
Only by facing into, admitting, and embracing our utter emptiness can we allow God to fill us with God’s fullness.
The anonymous author of the 14th century guide to prayer, The Cloud of Unkowing, writes that “No one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with [their] knowledge; but each one, in a different way, can grasp [God] fully through love. Truly this is the unending miracle of love: that one loving person, through [their] love, can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation. And this marvelous work of love goes on forever, for [the one] whom we love is eternal.”
The way to enter this love is contrition, which the early monastics called “the grief that makes for joy.”
In the words of our Superior: “The dual experience of seeing oneself lacking in love and yet forgiven, is at the heart of what the ancient Church called compunction. One doesn’t hear it used much today. It arises from the knowledge that one is loved and forgiven without doing anything to deserve it. Compunction pierces our complacency and self-justification. When we contrast the all-embracing scope of God’s love, our own is exposed in its narrowness and selectivity. We recognize how far we are from extending the same loving generosity to others that God extends to us.”
He continues: “Compunction is different from remorse. There is no room in it for self-loathing or blame. It does not keep us raking over our past failures or being fascinated by our sins. It warms our desire for conversion. It turns us to hope in the future in which our hearts will be transformed to be as hospitable as the heart of God.”
In the odd and paradoxical ways of God, it is by erring that we learn to love as God loves. When we mess it all up, when we find our lives in shambles, inside and out, when we finally hit the wall of our own self-sufficiency, then we can finally throw ourselves into the arms of God’s mercy. Or, more accurately, we find that before we even know we are falling, those arms have already caught us.
We may never be able to comprehend—to encompass and take in—the fullness of God’s love, but by loving God, and, perhaps the greater miracle, allowing in God’s love for us, we find that God’s love comprehends us.
We cannot know or make sense of God or God’s love, because such love does not make any sense at all. It is profligate, free, and always, always flowing.
To live simultaneously as free and sinners, redeemed and broken—that is the new innocence of God’s Eden. The entrance to that paradise is the recognition of our own broken humanity and of our need for God’s mercy. As our Father Benedict reminds us, we must never despair of that mercy. It comprehends us every moment of every day. God is good, and that is everything.
Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.
Amen.
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