Mt 16:13-20
I read
somewhere that the two most important questions Jesus asks us are “Who do you
say I am?” and “Do you love me?” Both
these questions were asked of Peter and they are asked of each of us today. How we answer these two questions becomes the
foundation from which we build our whole life.
How I answer will determine how I live, who I am, and what I can
become. Or to use our Cistercian
Father’s vocabulary: it will determine my capacity for God, my participation in God, and my potential for God’s likeness. In the first question Jesus is inviting us to
know Him and in the second question He is inviting us to love Him…it is about
knowledge and love. It is about mind and heart.
William of
St Thierry teaches us that these two questions are really one – they are
inseparable when it comes to Christ. He
repeats throughout his works that: to
know God is to love Him and to love God is to know Him. Love and reason are seen as the eyes of the
soul. To fully participate in God we
cannot walk with a patch over one eye or be myopic! W/o love, reason moves towards pride; w/o
reason love is only fluctuating emotions and unstable devotion. Obviously we cannot love what we don’t know
and if we love what is false then it is a kind of idolatry. William says it well: “Reason instructs love and love enlightens
reason” – they cannot be separated if we are to have clear vision. From this we can conclude that if our images,
ideas, and concepts of God do not bring us to love Him more, than they are not
of Truth for the more we know God the more we love Him.
I think the
same thing can be said about ourselves as we ask the question, “Who am I”? If our images, ideas, and concepts of our
self do not bring us to love our self
more (and I mean love in a healthy, positive way),
than we are not seeing our “true self” - for we are not seeing our self in
God. So why is this important? Basil Pennington wrote that to live from the
false self is “to exist” but to live from our true self is to ‘be alive’. We want to live from our true center where
the divine comes alive - so much so that we can say “the life I live is not my
own but Christ living in me”! It is not
enough to know this but it has to be actualized. How is this done? I think we got a good answer and analogy from
our reading this past week in Ezekiel.
He is in a valley of dry bones but once the Word of God is heard, the
Spirit of Truth and Love awaken the bones.
They come “alive”. Our lectio
divina, spiritual reading, listening to the Word make us alive in truth and
love – in the Spirit. Again, it is when
knowledge and love are one! It is when
our experiences of love are recognized or inseparable with knowing God. Self-realization, then, is less an awareness
of our self than it is an awareness of God.
The question “who am I?” and Jesus’ “Who do you say I am?” become
one! We fully realize our self when we
cease to be conscious of ourselves as separate from God.
This can
all seem so dense, hard to grasp in day to day living, so here are some more
concrete questions to help us unravel a tiny piece of this mystery. When I experience love do I associate it as
God revealing HIS love to me? When I
show charity to another do I recognize it as GOD’S love moving within me? To recognize our true self, in the divine
image, is to recognize the fact that we are known and loved by God. It is subtle but even in the monastery I can
still cling to a false self - by what I have (such as a position), by what I
do, by what others think of me, by what I
want others to think of me, the list goes on... We see how the ego can bind
us to slavery.
As we heard
in the Vigil reading this week from St Bernard:
Love’s natural tendency is to return to its source. Sin re-channels this flow to focus on other
things or self. This is why when we
focus on ourselves or externals, we are unhappy deep inside even if surrounded
by ‘that ole fame and fortune’. It is
also why people who live poorly and in want can still be joyful.
In the
gospel today, Peter is learning to know Christ and we know in the verses after
this gospel interchange, he still doesn’t have it right yet. The vision is muddled by Peter’s own
concepts, images and ideas. But by the
end of John’s gospel, the question is not “Who do you say I am?” but “Do you
love me?” As Peter gains more knowledge, his love
grows. We know how the stories ends -
Peter will die on a cross for Christ, his love is so great. Knowing and loving God became inseparable;
however, it was a life-time process. A
good question to ask our self today is “am I growing in my love for Christ?” If not, am I spending my time in prayer and spiritual
reading to further my knowing of Jesus?
Am I trying to know Christ in my daily experiences and interactions? Am I trying to grow in love by going the
extra mile in charity for my sisters? Am
I mindful of opportunities to be
charity to those around me?
I will end
with the second half of today’s gospel reading. Peter is told:
“I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” One of the themes we talked about for our
Jubilee year was the unbinding or “loosening” from slavery. We spoke of our desire this year to let go of
those things that bind our self and that we use to bind others. Stereotyping is a way we can bind others but
we can also stereotype our self, limiting
our vow of conversion, and thus binding our own potentials. Loosening or unbinding from slavery requires mercy
and forgiveness. How appropriate that
in Leviticus it says that the Jubilee begins on the Day of Atonement (10th day
of the 7 month). It is also interesting
that the words “amnesia” and “amnesty” come from the same root word! If we want to give a person freedom we need to
let go of the offense or debt but also to have “amnesia” in a way – to forgive and
forget. Jubilee is a time of renouncing
– letting go both of things we acquired and debts incurred. This takes trust but through both we gain
liberty. It is a time to renounce wounds
and hurts of the past…a lack of forgiveness is another form of enslaving our self – binding what should be
loosened!
So what
needs “loosening”? Who do I need to
forgive?...Whose debts to release? Let
us forgive and letting go of things that drag us or others down – let us make mercy the rock on which our church
and community are built! If so “the gates of the netherworld shall not
prevail against it” but rather we will have found “the keys to the kingdom of heaven!”
No comments:
Post a Comment