Into the Dark Night

By David Torkington

By Marie Ellenreider Kneides (Wikimedia Commons)

For many of us the first brief glimpses of God came through His creation. It might have been through a beautiful sunset, a breathtaking stretch of countryside. It might have come through gazing upon a single blade of grass, an insect crawling through the undergrowth, or a caterpillar climbing up a rose bush. When your contemplation of creation enabled you to experience the Creator, you found yourself drawn inward. It was as if some soothing sedative stilled your mind and heart and made you mourn for your Maker, as for a lost friend. And yet this strange melancholy was as sweet as it was sad and you wanted it to go on and on to envelop you more and more completely. Once this had happened, you no longer needed to gaze at the scene before you, you could close your eyes and still savour the mysterious presence. The physical senses and the feelings and emotions that depend upon them have no part in what now becomes a predominantly spiritual experience.

When the experience vanishes, as it always will, the heart mourns for what has been lost. The restless heart that yearns for love unlimited is a commonplace experience for the young, who have been ‘touched’ in this way. When, like St Augustine they eventually begin to realise, or are taught, that the fullness of God’s love on earth is ultimately to be found in His Masterwork Jesus Christ, it is the beginning of a new departure in their spiritual journey.

St Jerome said that, “to be ignorant of the scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ,” so it is now the time to turn to the sacred scriptures, and follow the practice of the Desert Fathers and the most ancient and hallowed traditions of our faith, reading and re-reading everything that Jesus said and did in the Gospels. This is the only way to come to know and love the Father, made flesh and blood, in the Son, for as William of Thierry said, “You cannot love someone unless you know them”, but he adds, “You will never really know them unless you love them.”

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From mystical premonition to contemplation

By David Torkington

 

Sometime ago I was speaking about what I called Mystical premonition or touches of God when one of the audience asked “Are we talking about something that is a particularly Christian experience, or does everyone experience God’s touch?”

“It’s for everyone,” I replied emphatically. “God loves everyone, not just Christians, but Christians do respond in a unique way.” Let me explain what I mean. Long before he became a saint, when he was still a pagan, St Augustine experienced those ‘touches of God’. In writing about the way he reacted to them in his Confessions he gives us a perfect example of how we should react too, in order to deepen our spiritual life.

From his Confessions: -

“When first I knew you, you lifted me up so that I might see that there was something to see, but that I was not yet the man to see it. And you beat back the weakness of my gaze, blazing upon me too strongly, and I was shaken with love and with dread. You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath, and do now pant for you. I tasted you, and now hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I have burned for your peace. So I set about finding a way to gain the strength that was necessary for enjoying you. And I could not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who was calling unto me and saying, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’.”

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The meaning of the Immaculate Conception

By David Torkington

Byzantine Madonna and Child

Of course I can’t remember being conceived nor growing into a baby in my mother’s womb. Nor for that matter do I remember being baptised a week later. I was totally dependent on my mother for everything, not just in those first weeks of my life, but for many months to come. I, not only depended on my mother, for my physical growth and development, but for my spiritual development too.

I received my first experience of God’s love from her love of me. Exactly the same happened to Jesus. St Paul said that he was ‘like us in every way but sin’, that’s how God had planned things from the beginning. That’s why at the very moment that he decided that his Son would be made flesh, that decision included having a human mother. As Blessed John Duns Scouts put it: - ‘if God willed the end he must have willed the means’. If he chose to enter into this world as a human being he must have a human mother, for without a human mother he could not be a true human being, the incarnation simply could not happen.

The hermit, Sister Wendy Beckett, said that she had a profound and vivid experience of God, which determined the rest of her life, when she was only four years of age. Before that her experience of God came primarily through her mother. She was unusual, because it usually takes much longer before an inner spiritual capacity develops sufficiently to enable a person to have a direct and independent experience of the love of God.

In my case it took years. I have no doubt that Jesus had such an experience at an even earlier age than Sister Wendy, but nor do I doubt that before that he was dependent on his mother for the experience of God’s love. That’s why from the very beginning, Blessed John Duns Scotus insisted there must be no barrier in her that could possibly prevent the love of God from being transmitted through her to her son, Jesus. That’s why he was so emphatic in demanding that she must therefore have been immaculately conceived, so that neither nature nor nurture would prevent God’s love ensuring that her son would be born and grow up as a perfect human being, and the perfect person to draw another human being into the perfect communion that he had with his Father.


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The coming of the kingdom

By David Torkington

Pentecost  by El Greco

Throughout his life on earth Jesus made it clear that the Kingdom he promised had not  yet come . The question is then, when would this kingdom come? St John gives us the answer, as an aside when Jesus was celebrating the feast of the Tabernacles. It was the final day called ‘The Day of Hosannas’. A priest had carried a large bowl of water from the temple precincts to the pool of Siloam followed by a long procession. Once there, the water from the bowl was poured out into the pool to ‘commemorate’ the rock that Moses had struck in the desert to save his people from dying from thirst. Whilst he was doing this a prophetic text was read out from Isaiah. It looked forward to the living waters that would be poured out when the Messiah would inaugurate the new world order promised by God through the Prophets. This was the moment that Jesus chose to speak out in a loud voice so that all could hear him, claiming to be the new and living rock prefigured by the rock struck by Moses in the desert. His words speak for themselves:-

“If any man is thirsty let him come to me! Let the man come and drink, who believes in me. As the scripture says: From his breast shall flow fountains of living water.”



Then, after describing the event and quoting what Jesus had said, John added, so that there would be no misunderstanding:-


“He was speaking of the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for there was no Spirit as yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified”.( Jn. 7:37-39).


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The first prayer that Jesus learned

By David Torkington

Interior with Woman Teaching a Child to Pray
by Frere (Wikimedia Commons)

The first prayer that Jesus would have learnt from his mother, like all other Jewish children, was called the ‘Shema Israel, part act of faith, part prayer. Its first words proclaimed belief in the One God who should be loved ‘with the whole heart and mind and with one’s whole strength’. This embodied the essence of Jewish wisdom that Jesus had come to bring to perfection.

The ‘Shema’ was the first prayer to be said on the Sabbath in the synagogue where it was also said three times a day to coincide with the sacrifices made in the Temple. For those who were unable to go to the Synagogue, it was said at work, in the fields, or at home, so that the whole day would be dedicated to the love of God.

Although this was the linchpin of daily prayer for the Jews it was surrounded with other prayers, like the prayers said on rising in the morning and before going to bed at night, before, during, and after eating, making the whole day into one long and enduring prayer to God, that sanctified everything that was said and done.


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Repentance

By David Torkington

Pentecost (Painting from an altarpiece,
Wikimedia Commons)

On the  feast of Pentecost the Jews celebrated the day on which God had given the Law to Moses. However the first Pentecost after the Resurrection was the day on which God gave his new law – the law of love. This law was not primarily a  list of rules and regulations  like the laws that were given to Moses, but the same personal  love that God had showered on Jesus. It was this love that enabled Jesus to practise to perfection the New Commandments that he taught his disciples. Namely, to Love God with their whole hearts and minds, and with their whole being, as he did, and to love others as he did too, and still does. 

What had been given to Jesus throughout his life on earth, had been given in full measure after his Resurrection, and in such a way, that he would be able to give it to others to inaugurate a new era – the Kingdom of Love. After the Resurrection the unique and transcendental love that Jesus had received from God enabled him to love not just one person, or even a group of persons, as he had done before, but every person alive at that time and in time to come, who would believe in his love and who would freely chose to receive it. So when the crowds who had gathered on the first Pentecost, demanded to know how they could receive the love of the Holy Spirit, St Peter told them that they should repent.

Justice and Peace, Goodness and  Truth. 

When he told them to repent, he was telling them, in language that they understood, how to turn to receive this love that had already begun to change him and his friends, as they could see for themselves. In other words they had to turn away from the adolescent world in which they had been living, where self-seeking, self- indulgence and self-absorption was the norm, in order to turn to be filled with the love of Jesus, his Holy Spirit.

This love would take them out of themselves and into the new world order that Jesus had come to inaugurate. In this world, love would transform them, by enabling them to enter into the risen Christ to experience the fullness of love that deep down every human being yearns for more than anything else, because it is  this that they were born for in the first place. The fruits of this love – justice and peace, goodness and  truth, and the flowering of all the virtues, would be seen embodied in his followers, as they had been embodied in his life on earth.


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Only you have been keeping me out

By David Torkington

St. Francis of Assisi (Wikimedia Commons)

 
An Examination of Conscience

When we begin to experience God making his home within us, we are beginning to experience the most  momentous and the most moving moments  possible on earth. They are not just moments of blissful happiness, but moments when we enable the love of God to surcharge our weak human loving, so that we can be more and more like Jesus, enabling his loving to be alive and active again in the world through us, through all we say and do. This is how God’s sway, his sacred sovereignty  is spread, how his secret plan or  his Mysterion can finally be brought to completion here on earth, as it is in heaven.

 ‘Only You Have Been Keeping Me Out’

There is only one thing that can prevent the implementation of this plan and that is the sickness  of selfishness that  does to the mystical body of Christ what  high cholesterol does to the physical body.  It must ultimately be controlled, if not totally rooted out. This is a long process and can never be fully achieved without God’s help, and the acceptance of the suffering that this will mean.


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Finding our supernatural home

 By David Torkington

The Triumph of Religion by Overbeck (Wikimedia Commons)

As a  person tries to observe the  new commandments by making acts of love through all they say and do, they are  gradually able to rise step by step towards journey’s end. Their progress is made possible, because it is made in, with, and through Christ who claimed to be the vital living embodiment of Jacob’s mystical ladder (John1:51). He is The Way, The Truth, and The Life (Jn 14:6). He is  the way to our destination, the Truth who both reveals and  embodies that destination, and the eternal life that constitutes that destination.

The journey stretches from here to eternity where the traveler finally enters into  a profound and ongoing Holy Communion with the One who dwells in the eternal ecstatic joy, that flows from the  mystical  vortex of loving that constitutes God’s very being. Faith in what is to come, is fortified by hope that is derived from the tangible experience of the  love enjoyed  in the profound intimate Holy Communion, that has already begun here and now. These gifts are given as  the new commandments are put into practice day by day:-

No More Homeless, No More  Orphans!

 That is why Jesus promised that we would not be left orphans, because through the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son would make their home within us here and now:-

I will not leave you orphans I will come back to you. (Jn 14 :18)  

“If anyone loves me he will keep my commandments and my Father will love him and we shall come to him and make our home within him.”(John 14:23-24)

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Praying the our Father: Thanksgiving

By David Torkington

Jacob's Ladder in the Via Latina Catacombs (Wikimedia Commons).

My earliest and happiest memories  are of going to visit my grandfather. It wasn’t because he played games with me, gave me  my favourite chocolate or even money to buy myself an ice cream on the way home, it was just because I  loved him. He  was such a lovable kindly man  that it was more than enough just to be with him and feel myself enveloped by his  love. This was before I even went to prep school. By the time I did he was dead  ‘though by today’s standards he was still a young man barely old enough to  draw his pension.

However he left me a legacy of love in his eldest daughter who was my mother.  She was the most loving mother one could wish for, who in spite of the dyslexia that blighted my early life enabled me to grow up with confidence and imbued with a security that only love can give.

I can still see  my grandfather in my imagination with a mop of  white hair and a moustache to match. I saw him over a year ago in my bathroom looking at me through the mirror. I was just raising my hand to shave the soap suds from under my nose that had left me with a white moustache and there he was looking back at me. I had never thought I looked like him before, never given it a second thought, but there he was looking back at me.  It  was undoubtedly him. The only trouble was the face that looked back at me wasn’t the kindly loving face that I remembered with such love, would that it were.


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A mystical maelstrom

By David Torkington

The Ecstacy of St. Francis by El Greco
(Wikimedia Commons).

 When Christ came, it was to announce something that no other religion had ever  taught, nor any other religion taught since. Namely that the ultimate power, the ultimate energy the  infinite source of all creation, is not some impersonal super-power, but infinite love, no,  infinite loving.

Love cannot exist without a lover. Before time began, Christ was the recipient of his Father’s love. He was inextricably caught up in a mystical maelstrom of loving that flowed to and fro between him and his Father  from all eternity.

When human beings love, their love is both physical and spiritual, but God has no body, so he loves with his spirit alone. As a mark of respect therefore, tradition has taught us to call his loving,  The Holy Spirit. Jesus not only came to tell us this, but to enable us to receive this loving for ourselves. So when, after the Ascension he returned to where he had enjoyed his Father’s love before,  he returned not just as a divine being, but as a human being too.


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