Deuteronomy 6:2-6
Psalm 18:2-51
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 12:28-34

An Impossible
Lightness of Being

The Shema, the Hebrew word, Hear, denoting a prayer to follow — the greatest of all prayers: "Hear, O hear Israel. The Lord thy God is One. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength. God is One. He is the unity of all things. All things can only come to completeness and fullness and wholeness when they cohere in Him. And what is this cohering stuff, this glue? What is the physics that holds everything together? It is love. To borrow the words of the fifth-century philosopher, Boethius,

We know today that the Scriptures were right all along. Our universe is constructed upon a "foundation" (so to speak) of chaos, and it is always tending back to it. Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics holds that every spontaneous action contributes to the disorder of the universe. Everything we do causes greater disorder in the universe. (Arise from you chair, Sister. You have just contributed to more disorder in the universe.) Ancient humans saw this, and they believed that love was the only thing that saves us from utter chaos and dissolution.

This is the view set out in Genesis. God looked over an uncreate void, pure chaos, and wrested it into a perfectly harmonious, perfectly beautiful universe. The great symbol of chaos for the ancient world and prehistoric worlds was Rahab (I don't mean the woman in the Old Testaent). Rahab is the Hebrew word for rage and the name of an ancient Jewish monster associated with the sea. When the people of God leave Egypt, whose other name in Hebrew was Rahab, God wrestled with the Red Sea and prevailed upon it to safeguard His people. That this element should be included in the Exodus story is to remind us all of God's signature act at the Creation: His triumph over chaos, whose greatest instance on the earth is the mighty and ungovernable sea. Who might rule the sea?!

The greatest prayer of our faith begins the declaration: "Hear, O hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is One." He stands alone in His power and triumph. And, yes, He is the great unity. His lesser antagonist, the fallen angel Satan, is the Deuce, the Double, Division and Deceit itself, constantly unstable and destabilizing, while God alone is simply constant. He is changeless. He is One.

We may think it quaint that the ancients and medievals proposed love to be a kind of law of gravity. But perhaps we should pause and consider this more carefully. What is the most powerful force in common experience? Turn on the radio: what is very song about? Peer into the dark tunnel of the television ... what is the highest ideal held aloft to be reverenced again and again? What is able to turn a hardened, homeless man on the streets into a tender and tearful friend and in nearly an instant? What can transform a lonely, bitter woman into a hopeful school girl overbrimming with joy and expectation? What will cause a man to lay down his life for another, for his children, for his beloved wife? What causes armies of men to go off to far lands and face the hell of war, day after day, month after month, for years if need be? Only love, and love alone, can do this. Neither threat nor promise of gain nor compulsion of any kind is able to prevail. Only love. And it is love that showers us with supernatural graces every day to live as saints, ... my beloved Sisters. For without love, without our daily, intimate relationship of love with God, we would die in our loneliness and even fall into grave sin, in acts of self-destructive desolation, thence declining into a vicious, self-begetting circle of darkness.

You know, many years ago during the period of my call to the priesthood, I wondered, and perhaps asked God aloud, "Why have You shown me these divine things, this supernatural world? I already believe! It is other people who need to see these things!" But as time passed, wisdom slowly came to me, and I realized God shows Himself to us in ever greater revelation as we enter into intimate relationships of love with Him. And then a picture from my childhood appeared. I remembered as a young boy looking for the men's room in an Anglican pro-cathedral. Over an archway as I walked down a flight of granite stairs, I saw carved in the stone in an arch: "The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God." I had thought everyone occupied that safe place. You know, "He's got the whole world in His hands." But, no. They can hold everyone. His hands will hold everyone. They can hold everyone. The Lord Jesus longs to hold everyone. But it is only those who share this special love who are actually in His hands.

As I grew older and I saw people in love, I realized another very great difference. A young woman I might see everyday, perhaps as often an anyone else did. She might be my neighbor or a girl in my high school class. She has tender things to say, professions of love to make, poems and fragrant letters to write. She has the power to cause the eyes reading that letter to dwell on each word, even to extort tears from the eyes that look upon these little letters and words ... and then to take that letter and store it in a safe place as if it were the most sacred thing on earth. But she alots this power to one boy, only one. She might alot it to anyone. But, no, it is for one. Looking at it from the other direction, how foolish, even indecent, if she should send such a letter to every boy in the class. In that case, what was holy and delicate and fine suddenly becomes desecrated and gross and common.

Why should our holiest love with the One Who is the highest love be any different? How could we believe that simply going to Church once a week to attend a gathering whose culmination is a line of indifferent people receiving a wafer hearing the equivalent of "Next. Next. Next." be somehow a holy meeting of hearts? Over time, such relationship becomes cold .... if it ever were relationship in the first place.

After I was priested and then served the Anglican Communion and later in the Roman Communion, I met my share of indifferent priests. I stood in the sacristy, I will share with you, and the priest rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh. "Okay. Let's go out and do the hocus-pocus," he said ... desecrating some of the holiest words that might be spoken on earth: Hoc est Corpus meum, This is my Body. You see this priest and fellows saw their work as being objective, not subject, nor heart to heart: you say these words at these times, giving the people the sacraments and telling them to say certain words at certain times, running down checklists day after day, week after week and then teaching children to pray "checklist prayers." Even the most sincere priest — and let me be clear: I have met many, many beautiful and sincere and devout priests — I suppose even the most tenderhearted priest, can suffer burnout in his desire to speak to God and to his congregation, heart to heart. Then how much more likely is it for the priest or faithful to float along in a distracted distance if this love were never planted and watered and nourished in the first place?

Our God sometimes looks on helplessly at our sovereign freedom. After all our lives are our choice. How does He manage to help us? How does He manage to intervene? He cannot take over history? Nor will He take over our power and freedom of choice. What is God to do?

C. S. Lewis has written that he rouses us from a stony and deadly trance through suffering. The great Sculpter, Lewis writes, takes up his hammer and chisel and strikes the stone, freeing the divine form trapped within in it. Yes, the process is difficult and in many cases painful, painful for years, but the alternative, which is eternal separation from God, is more horrible by far. Without question, Lewis is right. As a hospital chaplain, I have seen this transformation of self-confident, stony distance turn rapidly into tender openness and immediacy — gruff men who took my hand and said, "Father I always wanted to talk about ...." .... something that had weighed on them for years, and then wept in saying it. And it came to me as I stood at the Altar later performing the priest's most holy obligation, that He broke the bread before He consecrated it. Moment by moment, all over the world upon Orthodox Altars, on Roman Catholic Altars, on some Anglican Altars, he breaks the bread before He consecrates it.

I asked a Roman Catholic bishop years ago (not prudently perhaps), "Do you know what the great lie is? The greatest lie is commensurate with the greatest commandment. The great lie among clergy and religious and the faithful? It is that we claim to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our strength .... that our lives are one long, devout seeking after God's will." Now, I do not say that many priests and vowed religious and devout people don't strive to do this. But to call this the great commandment and to be facile about it is a disservice. For the priest's first and last responsibility is to guide his people to Heaven, and no one advances to the Heavenly state without embracing and sincerely living the First Great Commandment.

When I went to Haiti, my heart broke. It was not only the dead and dying I saw everywhere. It was not only the children who cried to be fed. It was not only the miles and miles of rubble with naked toddlers wandering through pig manure and garbage. It was not only the heroic men and women I met, the living saints. It was all of these things and one thing more: I met with God. I met with the living God as I never had before. And my heart, so calloused as I had not realized that it was calloused, split apart and opened with its tender, pink flesh being seen for the first time in decades, maybe since I was a boy. And the Lord filled my heart with love and more love and more .... until I literally felt that I would burst. But then He filled it with even more and more and I felt overflowing with floods giving way to more floods. I literally feared the my body could not hold it. I furiously tried to capture this divine experience, writing and writing. Sins that I had mastered but still had to govern suddenly disappeared, effortlessly. Desires that came to me unbidden, which were wrong, I never had again. The world around me was present in every vivid detail as I had not remembered it since .... I don't remember. And I experienced an impossible lightness of being. Some people here will attest that I lost nearly one-fourth of my body weight. And I began to wonder if might not fly to Heaven.

I can talk about this rationally — about the relief I felt to be among the poor, for the great lie that I had lived inside my bubble of affluence had ended, how I felt purposeful again, how I now made a difference. — but in all candor, that is not what happened. Something else had happened. I had met with God — in a soaring flight of the purest love I could imagine .... beyond imagining. And then I did these other things, these corporal works of mercy, as a natural outcome of that love ... as little thoughtful things you do for the One you love most.

You know, it will not work the other way. A life of service does not lead to God. Let me be clear about this because I have counseled vowed religious and priests .... who offered themselves because they wanted to serve. No one had told them that it doesn't work that way. The life of service does not lead to God. The Second Great Commandment does not lead to the First. First, we fall in love. And then we live into that relationship. Do you know how long that will sustain you? Well, I have met people doing it for fifty years, perfect in their prayers, perfect in their charity, perfect in their patience, enduring every privation, and still radiant and expectant, still powerful as they walked into room and other people felt their energy, their dunamis, their virtue. How long will it sustain you? It will sustain you all the way to the Gate of Heaven and then ... you discover that there is no gate, for you have become Heavenly. You are Heaven. This is God's love!

You can imagine how I feel still when I hear of priests telling people that "It's okay to doubt the existence of God. It's only natural." This is like your wife or fiancee telling you that she does not know if she really loves you as if saying this will take everyone to a higher place of truth. It is love, not pop psychology and therapy, that heals the world.

Love alone holds this world in its beautful order. For the God of love had made it. And He has set His love in your heart. He will break that heart if He must. And people around you might say, "See how God has disrupted this man's life, even destroyed it!" But do not distract this man or send him sympathy cards, for he will not read them. He is in Heaven now though he might walk on the earth. He is too busy with the most important things to take up conversation that will not edify anyone. But say, instead, this:

You say that you do not feel it, though. Say it. Say it every morning and every night. Teach your children these words. And write them on your doorposts. He will take care of the rest.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.