The Prayer of the Heart

By Joshua Elzner

In this book I have sought, as the bride in the Song of Songs, to "bring out both what is old and what is new, laid up for you, O my Beloved" (Sg 7:13), and as a gift, also, to the reader, so that you may hopefully find a greater space of confidence, understanding, and desire opening for you to draw near to the One who ceaselessly draws near to you. I seek to lay out the path of the prayer for which God created us, a prayer of love and vulnerability flowering in the joy of intimacy, a prayer that is born from the great gift of God given in Christ, Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen, and perpetuated in the bosom of our Mother, the Church. I hope that my words, however imperfect they may be, will help dispose you to encounter him who wants to espouse himself to you in the inner sanctuary of your heart, made the tabernacle of his presence, and indeed to sanctify and transfigure your entire being, body and spirit, and every moment of your existence, to be radiant and transparent with his own love and with the intimacy that he shares eternally with the Father in the kiss of the Holy Spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joshua Elzner
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201021504

Book preview

THE REDISCOVERY OF JOY

There is an immense hunger for prayer and spirituality in our contemporary world. And yet this is not merely some fad or passing phenomenon, stirred by a disquiet with the ever encroaching materialism and hedonism that suffocates human hearts and leaves them washed out and exhausted, exiled on the surface of their being far from a living contact with the depth dimension of reality, from contact with their authentic selves, and from contact with other persons and with God himself. All of this is true, but the reality goes much deeper. This hunger is, in its true depth, the surging to the surface of the deep longing for intimacy that has been impressed upon the human heart from the beginning of time. For we were created for communion, created for a vibrant contact with reality—a contact that pervades and permeates the whole of our consciousness, from the very exercise of our bodily senses to the highest apex of our spirit, harnessing and bringing fully to life everything in between: our mind and our imagination, our emotions and our affectivity, our feelings and thoughts and desires, and all of our interactions from moment to moment.

And yet, despite this desire that cannot but emerge throughout our lives, many if not most people in our culture live an existence that is in large part atheistic, if not in belief at least in practice. Due to the loss of God and of the wonder-filled light that his presence casts upon the whole of reality, we now live an existence which, for all practical purposes, is half-alive, skimming across the surface of reality in a life oriented towards external tasks or achievements or obligations, or inebriated by the pleasures of life and the stimulation of the new technologies that create an entirely mediated or even simulated contact with reality, which narrows the heart rather than liberates and expands it. We do not know how to rest, to sink down into the fullness of the present moment, and, thus relaxed and receptive, to allow being to communicate itself to us, to allow each unique created reality to speak to us its special word, a word that God designed it to speak from him and in his name. And indeed, God himself speaks to us in this way, unveiling his heart, his life, his love, through the very concreteness of our existence in time and space, if only we are still, silent, and open enough to hear and receive.

Yes, despite this innate hunger for God, this thirst for intimacy, for prayer, we also live in a society that is increasingly forgetful of God. This is due, primarily, to a profound though mostly subconscious despair of our ever being able to know God as he is and enter into a real and living relationship with him. Having forgotten the earth-transforming newness of the Incarnation of God in our world in Jesus Christ, we now doubt his closeness and his care, and our own ability to establish any kind of meaningful relation with the divine, who is now faceless and nameless (or receives any number of our own wounded projections), rather than taking the name and face of Love which he revealed to us when he came and walked among us, suffered and died for our liberation, and rose into the fullness of life for our sake and on our behalf. In this despair, we are removing ourselves more and more from the heritage of our past, from the Judaeo-Christian tradition which provided the soil in which authentic humanity and culture could flower so beautifully. For it is in fact in Christ, and only in Christ, that humanity itself receives anew the gift of its own beauty, the restoration of the full beauty and goodness and truth that God intended for us in the beginning, but which was so deeply fractured by original sin, and which is wounded by every sin committed since the beginning of time. God wants to restore to us this beauty, to give us anew the very gift of our humanity, and in this gift, to also give us the full and radiant beauty of the whole creation again. As opaque as our world seems, as hidden as God may appear, it is the deepest truth of God’s intentions that he desires to pull back the veil, to let our hearts glimpse the beauty that he wanted for us from the beginning of time, and, in this unveiling, to communicate to us the fullness of his own love. Yes, he wants to illumine our gaze so deeply that we begin to see all things, and our very selves, bathed in the light of his own inner life as Trinity. He wants to reveal to us that he is a God whose very Being is Love: the dance of eternal Intimacy between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from which he has created us and in which he has destined us to share, already in this life, and in utter fullness in the endless consummation of eternity.

Concerning this re-giving of the beauty and goodness of existence, of the full richness of our humanity called to share in the intimacy of the Trinity, Saint John Paul II wrote in the evening of his life:

The culmination of this history [of mankind] is the Resurrection of Christ, and the Resurrection is the revelation of the greatest beauty, a revelation foreshadowed at the Transfiguration. The Apostles’ eyes were awed by this beauty, and they wished to remain in its orbit. The beauty of the Transfiguration strengthened the Apostles so they could endure the humiliating Passion of the Transfigured Christ. For beauty is a source of strength for man. It is inspiration for work, a light that guides us through the darkness of human existence and allows us to overcome all evil, all suffering, with good, since hope in the Resurrection cannot be misplaced. All men know this—every man and woman knows this—for Christ is Risen!

The Resurrection of Christ initiates the renewal and rebirth of that beauty which man has lost through sin. St. Paul speaks of the new Adam (Rom 5:12–21). Elsewhere he speaks of creation’s great thirst for the revelation of the sons of God (Rom 8:19). It is true that in humankind there is a great yearning and thirst for the beauty with which God has endowed man in creating man and woman. There is also a quest for the form of this beauty that finds expression in all human creativity. If creativity is a special way in which man expresses himself, it is also an expression of that yearning of which Paul speaks. There is suffering connected with this yearning, since all of creation is groaning in the pangs of childbirth (Gn 8:22).

The yearning of the human heart after this primordial beauty with which the Creator has endowed man is also a desire for the communion in which the sincere gift of self is manifested. This beauty and this communion are not goods that have been lost irretrievably—they are goods to be redeemed, retrieved; and in this sense every human person is given to every other—every woman is given to every man, and every man is given to every woman.

These strivings of the human soul that are associated with longing for the beauty of the human person and the beauty of communion come up against a certain threshold. Man can stumble at this threshold. Instead of finding beauty, he loses it and begins to create only ersatz substitutes. Man can clutter up his civilization with these substitutes. It ceases to be a civilization of beauty because it is not born of that eternal love from which God brought man into being and made him beautiful, just as the communion of persons—of man and woman—has been created beautiful. Norwid, who had an immensely perceptive intuition of this truth, wrote that beauty is the form of love. Beauty cannot be created if one does not participate in that love. One cannot create beauty if one does not look with the eyes through which God embraces the world he created in the beginning and beholds man whom he created within that world.

All this is not to say that our era is devoid of people who strive for this with all their might. We have never been short of such people. That is why the overall balance sheet of human civilization, so to speak, is after all still positive. This balance is created by the few who are great geniuses and saints. They are all witnesses to how mediocrity can be overcome, and especially how evil can be overcome with good, how good and beauty can still be discovered despite all the deprivation and degradation to which human civilization succumbs. As we see, this threshold over which man stumbles is not insurmountable. We need to be aware that it exists, and we need to have the courage to cross it ever anew.

How are we to cross this threshold? I would say that we must cross it by following our conviction that God gives man to man, and in giving man, he gives him the whole of creation, the whole world. When man discovers the disinterested gift that the other human person is to him, it is as if he discovers the whole world in that other person. It is important to recognize that it can happen that this gift ceases to be disinterested and sincere in the realm of the human heart. One man can become the object of use to another. This is the utmost threat to our civilization, especially to the civilization of a materially affluent world. A disinterested, loving predilection is then supplanted by the urge to take possession of the other and use him. Such an urge is a great threat not only to the other, but especially to the person who succumbs to it. Such a person destroys within himself the capacity to be a gift, and thus destroys the capacity to live by the precept: be more a man; he succumbs rather to the temptation of living to: possess more and more—more pleasures, more experiences, more sensations, fewer real values, less creative suffering for good, less readiness to sacrifice self for the good and beauty of humanity, less participation in Redemption...

It is by dint of our Redemption that the other person—the woman for the man or the man for the woman—is such a great and inestimable gift. Redemption is rightly understood to be the settlement of the great debt that fell to mankind due to sin. Nevertheless, it is also, and perhaps mostly, a re-giving to man and to the whole of creation of that goodness and beauty which had first been given in the mystery of Creation. In Redemption, all becomes new (Rev 21:5). Man, as it were, is given his humanity anew in the Paschal Mystery, through Christ Crucified and Risen. Man receives anew his own maleness, femaleness, his capacity to be for the other, his capacity to be in mutual communion. This throws a new light on the words: God gave you to me. God gives man to man in a new way through Christ, in whom the full value of the human person, that value which he had in the beginning, which he received in the mystery of Creation, is made manifest and present once more.

Each person carries within himself an inestimable value. He receives this worth from God, who himself became man and revealed the divine life that he confided, as it were, to man. Thus, he created a new order of interpersonal relationships. In this new order, man is even more so the only creature on earth which God willed for itself (Gaudium et spes, 24) and a personal being revealing a likeness to God, a being who can only fully find himself through a sincere gift of self (ibid.). Redemption, therefore, is the opening of human eyes to the whole order of the world that is founded upon sincere, disinterested gift. It is an order that is deeply personal, and also sacramental. Redemption affirms the sacredness of the whole of creation. It affirms the sacredness of man created as man and woman. The source of this sacredness is in the holiness of God himself who became man. As the sacrament of God present in the world, Christ transforms this world into a sacrament for God.[1]

In the light shining from the face of the Crucified and Risen Jesus—who continues to live and love within the Church who was born from his Heart opened upon the Cross—we continually receive anew the gift of our own humanity. We continually receive anew the inestimable beauty of existence, flowing as a gift from the loving and creative hands of God. However wounded our existence is because of sin, it still bears the beauty of God’s original intentions. Yes, it has been fractured and wounded, broken and marred by suffering and death. And yet it has also been healed and restored by the inestimable power of God’s healing and re-creating grace, and we need only yield our hearts and lives up to the touch of this grace, to the breath of healing and renewing love that God exhales upon us through his incarnate Son and through the presence of his Holy Spirit, and we will experience the life of love and intimacy making all things new again.

But when we turn our gaze from the beautiful newness of the Gospel, from the radiant love of the Trinity made visible in the Crucified and Risen Christ, and when we direct our gaze instead upon our the state of our contemporary culture, we see a radical dis-junction, a radical rift. For we have forgotten the Gospel, forgotten the radiant and breathtaking newness that Christ’s coming brought into a world grown old in sin. Yes, made new once by the gratuitous gift of Redemption, we have grown old again, precisely in forgetting the newness that God brought in his Incarnation, the eternal newness that springs ever anew from the infinite wellspring of Love flowing in the Heart of the Redeemer, who has wedded himself, not only to our humanity, but to the singular existence of each one of us in its every moment and every experience. Yes, the whole of reality, every created thing, and every single moment of my life is utterly permeated by the loving presence of God—a God who is not distant, not apathetic, but who in the fullness of his life as Trinity presses intimately upon me at every instant, and who has come even closer by taking flesh and corporeality and materiality as his own, so at to permeate and fill it with his presence in an even more direct and tangible way.

And, wedding himself to our bodiliness in this way, he did not take something foreign to himself and make it his own. It is true that God is not a body, and yet all bodies have been created by him; matter itself has been created by him. And thus it manifests something that has existed in him from all eternity. Thus, in becoming man, in becoming flesh, he simply took what was already his own and united it to himself even more deeply, even more intimately, and in this way unsealed in it capacities and desires that were already latent within it by his original gift. This is what John Paul referred to above as the sacramentality that is restored through the grace of Redemption (a sacramentality about which I will speak much more in this book). A sacrament is a visible, tangible reality that communicates to me God’s presence and love, that allows him to touch me and to make known to me his goodness and his beauty. It is, as it were, a kiss of God impressed upon my heart—upon the union of my spirit and body—in which he exhales into me his sweetness, and, touching me in this way, unseals my heart in reciprocal surrender. A sacrament is thus intimacy—the intimacy of God communicated in his veiled-unveiling, in his hidden-closeness, in which indeed he does not hide himself, but rather gradually makes visible and apparent, ever more deeply, his ravishing beauty, until, after the shadows of this life have been dispelled by the final unveiling, I will see him and rejoice in him, and he in me, in the definitive, face to face consummation of eternity.

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And yet we have forgotten this great gift of Redemption, this eternal youthfulness that has been restored to us in Christ, the eternally beloved Son of the eternally playful Father. We have declaimed instead that God is dead, and that we have killed him. We exult and rejoice to be in a world that no longer needs God, a world grown up and fully mature. We have taken again the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the fruit of adulthood, just like our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. And yet this fruit doesn’t bring freedom and liberation, but rather slavery; it does not bring abundance of blessing and the fullness of goodness, either of creation or of God, but poverty and lack and painful need; it does not bring autonomy and maturity, but rather a loss of the playfulness and joy of childhood, and of the true maturity which is nothing but the flowering of the heart that knows how to dance and play and rejoice within the orbit of the Father’s perfect love.

But do we really allow ourselves to recognize and to feel this lack, to acknowledge the lie of sin for what it is? It seems, rather, that man now stands atop his own universe, victorious and free. He exults in his own self-liberation, and opens his mouth to inhale the air of victory. Except...when he breathes in, he realizes that he is inhaling the air of death and loss, the air of despair and aloneness and ultimate dissolution. As much as modern man has felt a surge of exhilaration in his supposed self-liberation, he begins to realize (if he allows himself to realize) that he has in fact created for himself a chamber of isolation and aloneness, of meaninglessness and dread. The epidemic of anxiety, depression, and suicide that is throttling our culture—particularly in the West—is a vivid sign of the ultimate result of this deadly fruit which we have so ardently torn from the tree of which God forbade us to eat. And now, perhaps, we can even begin to recognize that this prohibition was not intended to enslave us and keep us in subjection to a taskmaster-God, but rather to protect us, to cradle and uphold and shelter us in the orbit of the sweetest love and most blessed intimacy. For what, after all, could a loving God do for his precious children, except to warn them that only in the shelter of his embrace can they be safe, only in the embrace of his love can they find the happiness of true intimacy?

But our culture assumes that it can continue to flourish once it has been uprooted from the rich soil of God’s gift and embrace, from the love of God incarnate in Christ and at work in the midst of the world through the Church—through her life, teaching, and sacraments, which indeed have continually deepened humanity’s experience of life itself, sacramentalizing our whole existence by restoring to us, in some way, the very lighthearted joy that was God’s great gift to us before sin. And yet, divorcing ourselves from Christ, we also unwittingly divorce ourselves from joy, from wonder, from gratitude, and instead find ourselves increasingly bound to an attitude of possessiveness, grasping, and self-centered control.

And as much as people may declaim this as a culture of individualism, as a narcissistic selfishness, the truth is that such movements of grasping and self-centeredness are rooted, not so much in selfishness, but in fear. We are afraid. We are afraid of suffering, of meaningless, of aloneness, of death. We are afraid to find ourselves, in the last analysis, without another person to protect and shelter us. Indeed, for all too many people, this is their fundamental experience of life, at least on one level of their being. They feel alone and isolated, unloved and unwanted. They feel far from others, far from God (if they think he actually exists), and far also from their own selves. They live in exile from the inner truth of their being, from the sacred inner sanctuary of their heart where they are inestimably precious in God’s eyes—which seems to them instead to be an empty cavern haunted by darkness and evil and shame. They live in exile from other persons, and from the very visible and tangible reality that they encounter each day. Thus, what is left but to skim across the surface, to busy oneself with feverish activity that prevents the deep and painful movements of the heart to surge to the surface, or to numb oneself in whatever ways are most accessible, most ready to hand?

Afraid of being left alone and naked, defenseless before the mystery of reality, we try to control, to grasp for our own security and protection, even if the things to which we grasp are frail and tattered garments incapable of shielding, protecting, or reverencing our nakedness. Yes, and we can never control everything, we can never have everything, we can never experience and enjoy everything. Our appetite is insatiable, since no created reality was meant to satisfy it, but only the infinite and eternal Love who is present within every created reality, communicating himself ceaselessly to us, while also surpassing all things in a closeness that goes even deeper, into the inner sanctuary behind the veil. Here he makes his abode in the sacred recesses of my own heart, in that holy place where my body and spirit are united as one within the unique I that I am before the loving You of God, who holds me in existence in the tenderness of his love at every moment.

There is indeed quite a contrast between the joy unsealed by the great and inestimable gift of the Gospel and the so-called joy of the pagan world, whether the old pagan world yearning for truth (and ultimately finding it in the coming of Christ) or the new pagan world which has now forgotten about Christ. The first is the joy born by the awareness that I am uniquely loved by God from all eternity, loved so deeply that he not only created me, but came to be with me, to embrace me and heal me, in the very place of my suffering and exile, and to draw me back, already in this life and perfectly forever in heaven, into the innermost intimacy of his own divine embrace. The second is the joy of pleasure and enjoyment, the joy of a simulated playfulness and wonder that ultimately doesn’t have deep enough roots, the joy of being spiritual but not religious, the joy of a horizontal world in which even the gods are horizontal, bound to time and space. And thus it is a joy limited by time and space, and joy that, in the last analysis, is confronted with the terrible and unintelligible mystery of suffering and death. In the pagan world, joy is ultimately unable to overcome suffering, and happiness is unable to be victorious over the flow of sadness, loss, and grief. Our contemporary world, which prides itself to be post-Christian, even to be a kind of neo-Paganism in which the supposedly binding and suffocating yoke of the moral law and the commandments of a patriarchal God have been cast off, is beginning to taste this weakness of all horizontal joy, of all joy rooted merely in the earth, in the flow of time and the limits of space.

I think here of the tremendous words of G.K. Chesterton at the conclusion of his book, Orthodoxy, in which he expressed his own wondrous discovery of the beauty of the Gospel, of Christianity, as the rediscovery of the joy, wonder, and playfulness of childhood, and the abiding happiness that this allowed him to regain in the very fabric of his life, cradled in a world permeated by the loving presence of God and the all-enfolding light of Redemption. He wrote:

It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say enlightened they mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything—they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything—they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.[2]

This is the hidden mystery that lies at the heart of the Gospel, and which, from its very hiddenness, God desires to unveil to us. For this joy, this abiding mirth the eternally pulsates in the heart of God, is not his own prerogative, which he desires to keep for himself. Rather, he created us precisely to share in it, to experience it, to live it, as the throbbing heartbeat that fills and permeates every moment of our existence, in things both great and small. For the beautiful truth is that, for the Christian, this great and gigantic joy is not something far removed in the heavens, a mere intellectual conviction or an act of the will, but a truly intimate reality that enfolds every moment of life. It fills the very contours of time and space, made, not an obstacle separating the heart from God, but the very intersection-point with eternity, by which God kisses human heart and flesh with the tenderness of his love.

Yes, the Gospel, and all the reality of the Church’s life and teaching, is not a burdensome yoke intended by God to keep us in subjection. Rather, it is simply the great gift that communicates to us anew the joy of life! The beautiful reality that lives in the Body of the Church, through which Christ continues to communicate himself to us without ceasing, is indeed the restoration of the joy of childhood. It is the rediscovery of the happiness of the first beginnings, or indeed a second chance if our beginnings themselves were marred by wounds and sin. Truly, the Gospel is nothing but the gift of Love—the Love of a God who is an eternal Family intimately united, the eternal embrace and dance of playful wonder and mutual belonging of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! And this God comes to us, his heart overflowing with tenderness and compassion, and moved by delight in us and desire to unite us to himself. He draws near, draws near through every created thing, through every unique moment of life, and above all draws near through Christ who, becoming man, becoming flesh, has permeated and sanctified every created reality with the fullness of his presence, and unceasingly communicates himself in and through all things. Yes, he comes to enfold us in his tender embrace, cradling our wounded and fearful hearts in his arms, and thus easing our tension, relaxing our fear, and unsealing within us anew the longing for intimacy that we bear within us, as in the very same moment he fulfills this longing with the intimacy of his own most blessed embrace and the sweetness of his kiss.

ישוע

THE LONGING FOR BEAUTY

There is a ceaseless longing for beauty present deep within the human heart, a longing to reach out beyond the confines of superficiality, beyond the mere flow of appearances, and to make contact with enduring meaning. This is a longing to know the truth, but not only to know it with the mind, with a rational deduction or with ideas gained from a book, but rather to know it intimately, to become one with it, to be assimilated into it and, in turn, to allow it to live within one’s own heart and life. And yet in our longing for beauty, in our thirst for truth, we tend to fall into one extreme or another—extremes that each manifest the rupture that has occurred within our nature because of original and personal sin.

The first extreme is that of flight from the world, a distancing of ourselves from the materiality of creation, and from our own bodiliness. In this movement, we forcefully spiritualize ourselves and try to live an existence which—in the name of becoming more divine—actually becomes less divine, for it disregards the very space in which God desires to meet us: in the richness of our humanity. And this humanity exists in an inseparable union of body and spirit, which has been fashioned in the very image and likeness of the Trinity, oriented as it is towards love and intimacy. Thus we become estranged from our selves in the very effort to discover ourselves. For we distance ourselves from the real, from the incarnate and living contact with reality as we encounter it each day, and begin to live instead in an idealized world of concepts and standards and obligations, in continual striving or achievement or feverish activity, in which doing takes precedence over being, action over contemplation, activity over rest, things over persons, and tasks over intimacy—the intimacy which, in the end, alone gives meaning to all else.

The second extreme goes in the opposite direction: it is the movement by which we allow the spirit to be submerged in the flesh, and we become narrowed within the flow of time and space. Though it may appear that this is indeed very different than the first disorder, it ultimately has the same result. We cease to live in the real in its authentic fullness. We become forgetful of the true grandeur of our being, of the living breath of spirit that lives within and animates our body, and indeed of the true sacredness of our body itself which is never a mere thing or object, but always a living spiritual person even in its very corporeality. In this way we distance ourselves from a full and living contact with the real, for in this way the deepest meaning within ourselves and within every created reality is hidden, veiled over by an inability to see anything but the surface. We relate to time and space, not in a deep contemplative receptivity that allows them to speak their deep word, but rather in a kind of skimming across the surface, which assumes that they are merely flat, merely horizontal, to be related to only in a grasping possessiveness which is blind to everything but immediate appearances and sensual pleasure or satisfaction. When time and space submerge in this way, then, truly, they are no longer allowed speak the word that God originally intended them to speak, a word of transparency to eternity, a word by which each temporal moment manifests the Eternal Moment of God’s everlasting life of intimacy, which unceasingly seeks to communicate itself to us and to draw us into communion with itself.

How can we get beyond this great divide? How can we draw near to God without laying aside our humanity or the full living of our bodiliness? How can we draw near to creation and truly experience it to the full without leaving aside God or the true depth of our own spiritual being? The answer lies in the realization that, in fact, this very dilemma is a false dilemma, this divide does not exist in actual fact but rather in the woundedness of our minds and the fracture of our experience of reality. Yes, body and spirit have become estranged from one another, and the world, when clung to in possessiveness, can suffocate out our ability to perceive and receive the all-surpassing gift of God. But in truth the movement to God passes precisely by way of the world, by way of the rediscovery and living of our authentic humanity, in its full concreteness in the body and in the incarnate experience of time and space. On the other hand, the true approach to the world, the true affirmation of the goodness and beauty of every created thing, passes by way of God, in which we approach them, not from the bottom up but from the top down, from within the all-enfolding and all-permeating light of God. For it is only in the radiance of the Trinity—the God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ, in whom humanity and divinity are united, in whom God and creation are espoused—it is only in the radiance of the Trinity, who is pure Love and Intimacy itself, that all of creation can unseal its authentic beauty, goodness, and truth. And yet this is not something imposed from the outside as an abstract idea or an interpretive lens. It is rather simply the innermost