Transubstantiation / Consubstantiation / Real Presence: A Little Theology Lesson

Reference: Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Father Richard McBrien, General Editor

A little prequel: To understand this concept one needs the clarification of what being (ontos) really is. A little ontological definition from the University of Notre Dame: 93. Substance is being existing in itself; accident is being existing in another as its subject. -- Being is known either as something which subsists in itself without needing to be sustained by another, or as something which needs a subject in which and by which it may exist. In the former case, being is called substance; in the latter, it is called accident. Thus “Peter” is a substance, because he exists in himself; “white” is an accident, because it does not exist without a substance in which it inheres. Substance is also defined negatively as that which is not in another as its subject; or descriptively as that which sustains accidents. But from the fact that a substance exists in itself, we are not to infer that it excludes the idea of a cause which produces it, but only that of a subject in which it inheres. To define substance, with Descartes, as “that which exists in such a way as to need nothing else for its existence,” is to open the door to pantheism.

Transubstantiation:

Teaching of the Church that the substance of bread and wine offered at the Eucharist is changed into the substance of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The term emerged out of medieval attempts to resolve the conflict between seeing bread and wine as mere signs or asserting their change into the body and blood of

Christ even in their physical components. In the late eleventh century theologians described the change that occurs at the Eucharist in terms of the change of the substance of bread and wine, which undergoes transformation into the Lord’s body and blood. The term “transubstantiation” itself is only found in the twelfth century, and was subsequently used at Lateran IV (1215). Under the influence of Aristotelian thought, theologians gradually came to distinguish between the substance of the Eucharist (the body and blood of Jesus Christ) and the accidents of bread and wine (weight, texture, color. Etc). These remain even as the substance of bread and wine changes into Christ’s body and blood.

In response to opposition to transubstantiation from the Reformers of the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent in 1551 affirmed that the substance of bread and wine is changes onto that of Christ’s, adding that ”this change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly named transubstantiation. Trent’s use of the word was intended not to explain how the change takes place but to provide a term that describes what takes place. Theological attempts in the latter part of the twentieth century to define the substance (transignification and transfinalization) led Pope Paul VI to insist in Mysterium Fidei (1965) that the new meaning and finality of the consecrated bread and wine are grounded in the new ontological reality of the presence of the body and blood of the Lord.

Real Presence

This is a teaching of the Catholic Church that Jesus Christ is present at and in the ‘eucharist his body and blood, humanity and divinity, under the form of bread and wine. The NT attests to the faith of Catholics and other Christians that Christ is present in and tohis church in a variety of ways. As the risen Lord, he is no longer bound by the constraints of a particular time and place and thus can be present when his disciples gather together to pray, invoke his name for healing, proclaim his gospel, forgive sins, suffer for his sake, and assemble to remember his Last Supper with his disciples. Fundamental to the recognition of this presence was the church’s experience of the power of the Spirit of the Lord transforming it into the community of his body and empowering it to continue his mission.

(See accounts of the Last Supper: Mt 26:26-30; Mark 14 22-26; Luke 22 14-20; John 6:52-56; 1 Corinthians 11:23-25; John, Chapter 6. There is strong evidence of the belief of the first-century church in the presence of the body and blood of Christ.)

Throughout the first millennium, the faith of the Church in Christ’s real Presence went relatively undisturbed. But some controversy developed in the ninth century and developed further in the eleventh century between extreme positions that saw the bread and wine as merely signs or as totally changed, even in their physical elements. Out of these controversies came the Church’s teaching on Transubstantiation (see above). Contemporary Church teaching and theology has placed the doctrine of the Real Presence within the context of the many ways in which Christ is present in the church. Paul VI (1965 in Mysterium Fidei). He identifies them as prayer, works of mercy, preaching, governance, the Sacraments, and finally The Eucharist, a way the surpasses all others. Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy spoke of Christ’s presence not only in the consecrated bread and wine, but also in the proclaimed word, the person of the minister, and the worshipping assembly itself.

The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist flows from his total self-gift on the cross and his will to make that gift effective for all people throughout history.

(Adapted from articles by S.T.D. professor of Systematic Theology, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception)

Commentary on John 6:51–58

Adapted from David Ewart, at “Holy Textures”

Before we get into the more gory details of flesh and blood, let’s pause and ponder the first 5 words:

“I am the living bread”

What does this mean? How is bread “living?” How is Jesus “bread?” I have not met a single person who believes Jesus means he has become a loaf of bread; that he IS a loaf of bread, really, actually, substantially. (Though the outlines of a great Monty Python sketch come to mind when I consider the possibilities.)What Jesus does mean is that there is something about bread that he is – and something that he is not, since he is LIVING bread.

Jesus is speaking to a large crowd that sought him out; that came into the wilderness to find him; that made a pilgrimage to see him instead of going to the city of Jerusalem for the Passover; that were fed by him from only five fish and two loaves of bread; that have wanted to take him by force and make him their king.

In other words, Jesus is speaking to a crowd that have felt the pangs of some deep longing within themselves and glimpsed the possibilities of some true satisfaction in Jesus. But as so often happens, they have mis-placed their longing. They have placed their longing on “king.” Jesus wants them to see that their true longing is for “bread,” LIVING bread.

The crowd has looked at Jesus through the distorted lens of their longing and seen “king.” Jesus is asking us to reverse our gaze. To look through the lens of himself at our longing. And, to help bring our longing into clearer focus, he offers a second lens: LIVING bread. When we look at our longing through the lens of Jesus and the lens of LIVING bread, what do we see?

John wants us to SEE into Jesus, and through Jesus, that our real longing is not for kings, not for things that pass away. Our true longing is for things that endure, that are imperishable: Light, truth, life, love, loyalty, kinship, abiding in God, hearing and responding to God’s voice / God’s call.

The bread of this life – even the miraculous manna of the wilderness – makes possible only life that is perishable. Yes it feeds us for today, but one day, we will all die no matter how much of the bread of this life we have.

Does the bread of this life truly satisfy all that we long for?

If so, then we had better party hearty today – for tomorrow we die. But if not, then Jesus offers himself and LIVING bread as lenses to help us direct the gaze of our longing toward that which truly satisfies.

Aside: At a time when bread was 50% of the calories eaten each day by the peasant folk who were Jesus’ followers; and each day’s food was earned that day; and was just enough to survive for a day; bread was life. But that life was a struggle, and that life ended in death. This is not the bread nor the life that Jesus is.

So, however it is we understand Jesus to mean that he is LIVING bread, that is how we ought to understand what he means by eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

Which is to say, Jesus does NOT mean that we are to understand these as literal, actual, material, factual, and substantial. “Eat my flesh” and “drink my blood” are lenses through which we are to SEE the relationship Jesus wants us to have with him and the One who has sent him, the One who abides in him.

In John, the stress is on the life and death importance of SEEing Jesus, believing INTO him (not just believing ideas ABOUT him), and ABIDING in him (and he in us, and him in the Father, and the Father in Him). In John, ABIDING is the key, code word for describing the relationship Jesus wants us to have with him – and with the One who abides in him.

John wants us to hear the word, “abide,” as being as viscerally real as “flesh” and “blood.” And to hear the words, “flesh” and “blood,” as dynamically real as “abide.” Abide is a verb. It not a material substance. It is not an essence. It is a dynamic relationship.

“Who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in them.” (Verse 56)

Understood literally, these words are gory and shocking. And indeed, as we will see in next week’s lesson, caused many of Jesus’ followers to leave him.

Which ought to caution us: Those who try to understand these words literally, substantially, materially don’t get it, and are not following Jesus’ teaching. These words are lenses. They are meant to correct our vision so that we might truly see what it is that will feed / sustain / nourish / develop into maturity our deep longing.

Even today – as then - “flesh and blood” could be used to refer “this life,” “human beings,” “our bodies.”

But Jesus’ words, “eat my flesh and drink my blood” are shocking. If taken literally – which they should not be – they are cannibalistic. Yuck. But even if taken metaphorically as lenses, they are still shocking.

In Genesis 9:3-4, God explicitly forbids Noah and his family (and thereby all humans, because in the Biblical story they are the only human survivors of the flood, and all humans are descended from them) from eating blood.

In Leviticus both blood and the flesh of the kidney and its surrounding fat are ritually dedicated exclusively for God: the blood is thrown on the altar; the kidney and its fat are burnt. To ingest fat or blood is to claim to be God who is the source of life.

Thus, the crowd listening to Jesus would hear his words, “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” as blasphemy, as an abomination, as a violation of a core belief about the Holy, and our proper relationship with the Holy. These words of Jesus are akin to the words of the snake in the Garden tempting his listeners to eat a forbidden fruit; to violate a God-given commandment; to violate the sacred ordering of creation.

But Jesus is not the snake in the Garden. (Genesis 3) Rather he is the serpent lifted in the wilderness who brings healing of ancient wounds. (See John 3:14 referring to Numbers 21:8-9)

From time immemorial, we of human flesh and blood have lived with the wound of being cast out of the Garden; cast out of our natural, birth-right, created, easy intimacy with God who walked and talked with us as the evening breeze cooled the heat of the day.

But John wants us to SEE that God so loves this world of human flesh and blood that the Word, which created that Garden, became flesh and blood light, life, and truth in our flesh and blood reality.

When Jesus invites us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he is inviting us to ingest God’s Word, to feast on God’s light, God’s life, God’s truth, God’s love. To let them ABIDE in us, so that we might ABIDE in Jesus – and in the One who ABIDES in Jesus.

When Jesus invites us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he invites us to be healed of our ancient wound and to live once again in ways that truly satisfy our deepest longing – our longing to live in ways that truly reflect our love affair with God.

Trinity, June 4, 2023

Jesus is God’s love made visible

John 3: 16–18

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Music Meditations

• Pleni Sunt Coeli-Ola Gjeilo—Phoenix Chorale
• You Are My God—Tony Melendez (themaineman2001). Praise and Worship
• Ubi Caritas—Taize
• Holy God, We Praise thy Name—Robert E. Kreutz

Opening Prayer

From St Ignatius of Loyola:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.”

Companions for the Journey

Barbara Brown Taylor, a scripture scholar and preacher, quotes Robert Farrar Capon, who says that when we humans try to describe God it’s like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina.

By Jude Siciliano, O.P., from “First Impressions”, 2023, a service of the Southern Dominican Province:

How can God be one and three? How can God be three and one? How can Jesus operate on his own? Who is the Holy Spirit; is it the spirit of God? The spirit of Jesus? How can one come to us, leave and then send another, as Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit after he left? Don’t be discouraged by these questions. Since the beginning the greatest saints and scholars have tried to answer questions like these, and have come up short.

We are going to be disappointed if we think the Scripture readings chosen for this feast will help us “explain” the Trinity. The feast doesn’t pose a problem to be solved; but a mystery to be celebrated -- the mystery of God’s wonderful ways of interacting with us. Those ways are more numerous than even the Bible can describe, or enumerate. But that hasn’t kept the scriptural authors from trying! We may not be able to explain the Trinity today, but we get help from the Scriptures so we can be more aware who our God is, how God relates to us and how we are to respond in our daily lives.

We earthly creatures build barricades of one kind or another. We put “those people” on one side and ourselves and those like us, on the other. We keep “them” over there and, as evidenced by the local and international news today, we will distance ourselves from them, hate and even kill them. After all, the logic concludes, they deserve to be punished because they are so bad.

If it were up to me and I had God’s power, I would wreak vengeance on all the evildoers in the world. “Enough is enough!” I would come down hard with my divine hammer of justice. Martin Luther had a similar instinct. He said if he were God and knew what God knows about the world, he would just put an end to it all and submit it to hellfire. But he wasn’t God, nor am I. On this feast of the Trinity, we need to relearn who God is and how God operates. We do that by turning a believing ear to the Word of God. Contrary to our way of thinking God acts differently from us. The Word teaches us that we are made in the image and likeness of God and so, we are called to imitate that God whom the Bible reveals to us.

Earlier in the Exodus account Moses had asked God, “Show me your glory, I pray” (33:18). God responded, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and I will proclaim before you the name, ‘the Lord’….But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (3:19-20). God tucks Moses into the cleft of the rock and covers him until God passes by. Moses is allowed to only see God’s back (32:23). Then God speaks and it is necessary for us to hear the description of who our God is, “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.” Thus, along with Moses, we hear an oft-repeated biblical description of God. Is it not also how our gospel reading describes God for us today, “God so loved the world….?” God’s love has been constant and faithful, proven by the gift of the Son for us. This is a good time to ask how does our own image of God and our actions, measure up to the revelation of God the Scriptures present to us today and throughout both the Hebrew texts and the New Testament?

In 2 Corinthians Paul encourages the community, “to mend your ways.” He instructs them to live together in love and peace. His concern is for the unity of the church community. He knows well the dissension among those Corinthians, the barricades between rich and poor, old timers and newcomers. On their own they could never reflect the peace and unity he wants for the community of believers. But grace can make it possible and so he prays, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Our church today has the same human tensions Paul observed among the Christians in Corinth. So, as we hear his prayer, we pray it for ourselves. Who is this God Paul preachers and calls upon to bless the divided Corinthians? Paul clearly believes that our triune God loves us, freely graces us in Jesus and, through the Holy Spirit, is the source of our communion with each other.

The gospel today presents again the central message of the Bible: God loves the world. Instead of coming down on us humans for our sins, God loves us, frees us from our guilt and offers us eternal life. The opening verse (3:16) is a summary of the whole gospel message, “God so loved the world….” In a few words we come face-to-face with the mystery of who our God is and how God has acted towards us. If you can tell a tree by its fruit, then you can learn about God by what God has done for us: loved us and demonstrated that love by the concrete sign of Jesus’ life. Love is what moves God to get involved with us. And more, Jesus tells us, God wants to give us eternal life now.

Today’s gospel passage is from a conversation Jesus is having with Nicodemus. Jesus tells him that we can put faith in Jesus and what he reveals about God’s love for us -- or we can self-judge ourselves by rejecting Jesus. If we do put faith in Jesus we have eternal life. We usually think of “eternal life” as something that will begin for us at the moment of death and go on and on without end. But that’s not what eternal life is in John. Jesus says that believers can “have eternal life.” He is speaking in the present tense and is offering the gift of eternal life to us – beginning right now!

What might this gift of “eternal life” look like in our lives? First of all, it is union in the very life of God. We have that intimacy with God through our union with Christ and the Holy Spirit in Baptism. This union frees us from fear of judgment. In Jesus we can see the true nature of our God-- who already loves us. Now we are living in a new age and have passed from death to life. For John, Jesus is our saving gift in this present moment and through the Spirit, believers can recognize God’s gifts already present to us. Not on our own human efforts, but through our faith, we can have optimism, peace and gratitude to God. We can also accept the challenge faith puts before us -- to be instruments of the peace and reconciliation to others that Jesus has already given us.

Jesus did not wish to see anyone condemned. Today’s reading shows that once we acknowledge Jesus as the one who will determine our life’s orientation, then we judge ourselves by his life and teachings. In his own life he shows what faithfulness to God entails. If we reject him we bring on our own self-condemnation (“Whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”) Sent by God, Jesus unites time and eternity. In him our future is made present.

No image can capture the holiness and greatness of our God. What words can describe God? God is more present to us than we are to ourselves. God is at the very core of our being; the source of all we are and can do. The contradiction we must admit today on this feast of the Trinity is this: the closer we get to God, the more alien we feel from our world and its ways. The closer and more comfortable we feel with our world, the more distinctively alien we are from the God the Scriptures reveal to us.

Further reading:

• Another Way of Looking at John 3:16-18 >>
• Thomas Merton on the Mystery of God’s Love >>

Weekly Memorization

Taken from the gospel for today’s session…

God so loved the world…

Living the Good News

What action can you take in the next week as a response to today’s reading and discussion?

Keep a private journal of your prayer/actions responses this week. Feel free to use the personal reflection questions or the meditations which follow:

Reflection Questions

Do I treat the Trinity as an unsolvable theological puzzle or as a model for personal relationships? When I pray, to which person of the Blessed Trinity do I most often do so? Why? From Daniel J Harrington, S.J.: Who is God for you? How do you explain this to someone? How does your experience fo God correlate with the approach found in the Bible? Do you often invite God to "come along in your company"? Why or why not? Through Him and with Him and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours Almighty Father. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each unique. Can there be unity in diversity? Can I praise the uniqueness of those in my life, or do I want them to think, believe and act as I do? Can I, upon reflection, share in the rhythm of God’s own life? How? Adapted from Sacred Space: a service of the Irish Jesuits” It has been said that if we lost all of the four gospels except John 3:16, that would be enough for us. Pope Francis put it this way: “When everything is Said and done, we are infinitely loved”. Do I believe this in my heart? John’s entire gospel is “God is Love”. What does this passage say to you about God’s love for you? What is the most common Christian interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross? Do you think of The Cross as punishment/reparation or as love/self-donation? Do you believe that "whoever does not believe has been condemned"? How do you interpret this sentence? What do I give God (obedience, prayer, Mass attendance, good works, personal sacrifice)? St Augustine said: “Are you looking for something to give God? Give him yourself.” So to love is to give oneself. To whom or what do I give myself? Is there something I am withholding? Father William Bausch wrote: We are at our best, most human, most moral, most divine, when we are in loving relationships. I think of some of my relationships: Do I give love or merely receive it? Do I act lovingly towards even the most annoying people in my lie? Do I believe my loving relationships are a mirror of the loving relationship that is the Trinity?

Meditations

A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions:

How do you explain the sentence: "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life"?

One theory, resurrected every now and then is called Divine Retribution, which posits that God’s anger at sinful humanity could only be appeased by God becoming human and dying to assuage that anger. Otherwise, God, in his righteous sense of true justice, would keep all of us from union with himself because we, as heirs of Adam and Eve and sinful people ourselves, do not deserve salvation. Jesus purchased our salvation with His life.

Another possibility is that God “gave his only son” to show us how to live. If so, His death was a fully expected outcome of being human; in addition, his kind of death was not wholly unexpected, given what he was preaching. The death of an innocent Son of God proclaims solidarity with all those in the world who have suffered abuse, who have been wrongly accused, who have died violently in their innocence. Which theory do you prefer?

A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions:

I read the following hymn from Philippians 2:5-8.

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross

Do I see in Jesus a reflection of my own humanity? Do I seek to emulate Jesus in not desiring rank and power for myself? Am I, like Jesus, motivated by love to act as I do? What am I willing to endure for the sake of someone in my life whom I love? What am I willing to endure for the sake of God whom I love?

A Meditation in the Franciscan Style/Action:

This was taken from Praying with Julian of Norwich, by Gloria Durka:

I saw and understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord; all these things we have in nature and in our substantial creation. Thus in our Father, God almighty, we have our being, and in our Mother of mercy we have our reforming and restoring, in whom our parts are united and all made perfect man, and through the rewards of Grace of the Holy Spirit we are fulfilled (excerpted from Julian of Norwich, Showings pp. 293, 295)

Reflect for a time on the image of God as our Mother with wisdom and mercy, reforming and restoring us. Does this image offer you a new way of experiencing God’s love?

How have you shared your wisdom and mercy lately? Bring to mind some of the ways in which you have been a wise counselor and merciful mother to people in the last week or so.

Think about some ways in which you have increased in your own love of God. Compare your love for God with what it was when you were a child. Thank God now for this increasing in your life.

Pray for awareness of how you can help someone else think of God’s love as being like a mother’s love—someone in your family, a friend who is distressed, or someone else who is in need of love and loving.

A Meditation on the Franciscan Style/ Action:

Read 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13. Imagine God saying these things to you: Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace……How do you see yourself concretely living out these exhortations? Where do you need some extra help from the Spirit? Pick one circumstance in your life which needs to change, or one relationship which could use improvement and talk to God about ways in which you need to change. Do it.

A Meditation in the Augustinian Style/Relationship:

Think of someone you love. How often does she come to mind? Do you have a pet name for him, or do you have several? Does thinking about her make you smile? What do you do that you know makes him happy? How do you picture God (Do you pick one person of the Blessed Trinity, or do you pick all three symbolized by two men (one old, one young) and a bird? How often during the day do you think of God?? What do you call God? (Anne Lamott says she has a friend who calls God ‘Howard”, as in, “our Father Howard in heaven.) If you don’t have a pet name for God, try to think of one—it tells you something about your relationship to God. What do you think would make God happy? Do you do it? St. Peter, when asked by Jesus if he loved him, responded in the affirmative, but used the Greek word philia instead of the Greek word agape—a more self-rewarding kind of love, which prompted Jesus to tell him that love for Jesus meant feeding Jesus’ sheep—caring for others. How often does your love for God (or for only one of the Trinity) motivate you to care for others?

Poetic Reflection:

Thomas Merton, monk and poet, enters a mystical realm as he contemplates the Trinity:

For the sound of my beloved,
The voice of the sound of my Three-Beloved
(One of my Three of my One Beloved)
Comes down out of the heavenly depths
And hits my heart like thunder;
And lo! I am alive and dead
With heart held fast in the Three-Personed love.
And lo! God! My God!
Look! Look! I travel in Thy Strength
I swing in the grasp of Thy Love, They great Love’s
One strength,
I run Thy swift ways, Thy straightest rails
Until my life becomes Thy Life and sails or rides
Like an express!

—from Collected Poems

Poetic Reflection:

How does this poem help us see different “persona” of God as reflected in the Trinity?

“From Narrow Places”

From narrow places
the strength of our voice
rises:

our every breath
is prayer,
the great poem of need,
a constant scattering
of praise.

Early
we reach to God
in the claim of our hearts,
while he,
our father,
mothers us
in his

—Ed Ingebretsen, S.J.

Poetic Reflection:

Read the following poem. Do you see in this an affirmation of God’s love for us?

"Gather the People"

What return can we make
for all the Lord has done in our lives?
We bring bread, wine, our clay dishes
and our clay feet
to this altar
and we pray that we may here
make a beginning—
that somehow in our days
we can begin to see the promises
the Lord has made us.

The promises do not always
glow with obvious light, or
overwhelm us by their obvious truth.
No matter what anyone says,
it is difficult to understand an invisible God
and belief is not always
the easy way out.

So we gather the people
and we tell the story again
and we break the bread
and in the memory of the one
who saves us,
we eat and drink
and we pray and we believe.

We gather, we pray, we eat.
These things are for human beings.
God has no need of them.
Yet he himself gathered the people,
prayed, broke bread
and gave it to his friends.

And so the invisible God became
visible
and lives with us.

—Ed Ingebretzen, S.J., from Psalms of the Still Country

Closing Prayer

The first sentence is from Thomas Merton.

How far I have to go to find you in whom I have already arrived!

God, You are puzzle to me in so many ways. Keep me from distracting myself with endless theological questions, and keep me from giving up on knowing you better. For you know me, with all my faults, and love me utterly. That is all I need to know.

Thomas Merton on the Mystery of God's Love

The contemplative life is then the search for peace no I an abstract exclusion of all outside reality, not in a barren negative closing of the senses upon the world, but in the openness of love. It begins with the acceptance of my own self in my poverty and my nearness to despair in order to recognize that where God is there can be no despair, and God is in me, even if I despair. That nothing can change God’s love for me, since my very existence is the sign that

God loves me and the presence of his love creates and sustains me. Nor is there any need to understand how this can be or to explain it or to solve the problems it seems to raise. For there is in our hearts and in the very ground of our being a natural certainty which co-exists with our very existence: a certainty that so insofar as we exist, we are penetrated through and through with the sense and reality of God even though we may be utterly unable to believe or experience this in philosophic or even religious terms.

O my [brother/sister], the contemplative is the person not who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, by simply [one] who risks one’s mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you then, [sister/brother], is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you have found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God though you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained; it is the ultimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are all truth in One Spirit. I love you, In Christ.

From Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, pp157-158

nb:The brackets [ ] are editorial adjustments for inclusive language

Another Way of Looking at John 3:16-18

From Father William Bausch:

Let me put what I’m saying in the form of a story. After the usual Sunday evening hymns, the church’s pastor slowly stood up, walked to the pulpit, and before he gave his sermon briefly introduced a guest minister who was in the service that evening. The pastor told the congregation that the guest minister was one of his dearest childhood friends, and he wanted him to have a few minutes to greet the church and share whatever he felt would be appropriate for the service.

With that, an elderly man stepped up to the pulpit and began to speak: “Once upon a time, a father, his son, and a friend of his son were sailing off the Pacific coast,” he began, “when a fast approaching storm blocked any attempt to get back to the shore. The waves were so high that, even though the father was an experienced sailor, he could not keep the boat upright, and the three were swept into the ocean as the boat capsized.”

The old man hesitated for a moment, making eye contact with two teenagers who were, for the first time since the service began, looking somewhat interested in his story. The minister continued: “ Grabbing a rescue line, the father had to make the most excruciating decision of his life: to which boy would he throw the other end of the lifeline? He only had seconds to make that decision. The father knew that his son was a believer in Jesus, a good Christian; he also knew that his son’s friend was living a sinful life. The agony of his decision could not be matched by the torment of the waves. Finally, as the father yelled out, ‘I love you, son,’ he threw out the lifeline to his son’s friend. By the time the father had pulled his son’s friend back to the capsized boat, his son had disappeared beneath the raging swells into the black of the night. His body was never recovered.”

By this time, the two teenagers were sitting up straight in the pew, anxiously waiting for the next words to come out of the old minister’s mouth. “The father”, he continued, “knew his son would step into eternity with Jesus. Therefore, he sacrificed his son to save his son’s friend.” The aged minister then paused and said with fervor, “How great is the love of God that He should do the same for us. Our heavenly Father sacrificed his only begotten Son that we could be saved. I urge you to accept His offer to rescue you and take a hold of the lifeline He is throwing out to you at this service.”

With that, the old man turned and sat back down in his chair as silence filled the room. Well, within minutes after the service ended, the two teenagers were at the old man’s side. “That was a nice story,” politely stated one of the boys, “but I don’t think it was very realistic for a father to give up his only son’s life in hopes that the other boy would become a Christian.”

“Well, you’ve got a point there”, the old man replied lancing down at his worn bible. As a soft smile broadened his narrow face, he looked up at the boys and said, “It sure isn’t very realistic, is it? But standing here today to tell you that story gives me a glimpse of what it must have been like for God to give up His Son for me. You see, I was that father, and your pastor over there--he is my son’s friend.”