Pierced by Love (eBook)

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Transfiguration

STABAT MATER

Love is the face of God. We see him face-to-face—Jesus, hanging on the cross. When the old man Simeon saw Mary with the child, he burst out in prophecy: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce (pertransibit), that, out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed” (Luke 2:35). The thirteenth-century hymn Stabat Mater* ponders the fulfillment of Simeon’s words as the Savior’s “mother stands weeping” (stabat mater dolorosa) by the cross. The second stanza describes the piercing of her soul:

Singing this hymn, we do not objectively recount Mary’s grief from a distance. Instead, we identify with her as she looks on her son being crucified:

The song beseeches the Holy Mother to nail or drive the wounds of the crucified into our hearts. We ask that we may weep with her and join her in mourning our crucified Lord.

Stabat Mater takes Simeon’s words as a prophecy of Mary uniting with her son in his suffering, and the song invites us to identify with him as well. The painful transfixing (pertransire) of Mary’s soul produces pain within the hearts of those who appropriate Christ’s sufferings by meditating on them. The hymn is the outcome of meditative reading—lectio divina—both of Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29–32) and of John’s reference to Mary’s presence at the foot of the cross. Throughout the centuries, interpreters have linked Luke 2:35 with John 19:25–27, despite the obvious difficulty that Luke’s Gospel does not actually mention Mary’s presence at the cross. But for attentive readers, such as the composer of Stabat Mater, the language of Mary being pierced inescapably echoes Jesus’s being pierced on the cross.

The souls of both Mary and the chanter of this song are pierced with grief. In chapter 7, I will discuss in greater detail how compunction—puncturing or piercing of the soul—functions in lectio divina. For now, it is enough to note that it is this type of personal meditation that evokes compunction in Stabat Mater. Lectio divina is a form of reflective or meditative reading of Scripture that brings us face-to-face with the subject matter of the text. The subject matter of the Song of Simeon is, at least according to Stabat Mater, the crucified son of the Virgin. With Mary, we see him face-to-face. It is the love of God in the face of Christ that both transfixes and transfigures us.

FLESH ON THE CROSS, WORDS ON THE PAGE

We reach the goal of the God who is love only through the pain of the cross. Similarly—and that will be the main point of this chapter—we reach the goal of lectio (contemplation) only through patient reading, meditation, and prayer. The initial stages of lectio divina (the lower rungs of the ladder) are indispensable. Why? Because flesh on the cross and words on the page are God’s love in act. Saint Paul extols this love when he speaks of “the breadth and length and height and depth” of the charity of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge (Eph 3:18–19). These four dimensions cannot but remind us of the cross, where we see God’s love in action. In John’s Gospel, Jesus mentions only one of these four dimensions. He speaks of the height of the cross: “When you shall have lifted up (hypsōsēte), the Son of man, then shall you know that I am he (egō eimi)” (John 8:28). With these last words, Jesus identifies himself with the God who once revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush as “I am” (Exod 3:14). It is in the height of the cross that we see Jesus as God because it is there that he shows redemptive love.

Jesus uses the language of being lifted up twice more. First, in his nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, he explains that he will be “lifted up” (hypsōsen) like Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert (John 3:14). Jesus links faith in the crucified Son of Man to eternal life (3:15–16). We join this eternal life of God by accepting the love of God displayed on the cross. Second, Jesus explains that it is when he is “lifted up (hypsōthō) from the earth” that he is victorious over the ruler of the world and will draw all things to himself (12:31–32). The cross is God’s throne. Nothing on earth reaches quite as high as the cross of Christ, for nothing is as high or sublime as the love of God.

Lectio divina starts where God himself begins. Since God manifests himself primarily on the cross, lectio divina also takes this as its starting point. In the human Jesus, lifted up from the earth, we recognize the God whose identity is love. We find God in the words of Scripture—the Nunc Dimittis, the “I am” sayings of John’s Gospel, the crucifixion scene. The eternal Word is revealed in temporal words—flesh on the cross, words on the page. We don’t get to the capital-W Word without small-w words. We cannot bypass either the incarnate and crucified Jesus or the biblical account that speaks about him. Jesus is God’s sacrament. Scripture too is God’s sacrament, since both make present the reality or the truth of the love of God.

This chapter offers a word of caution against bypassing either the cross or biblical words. Both are sacraments of God’s love for us. Sacraments are indispensable means of salvation. As we will see, the twelfth-century monastic writers Aelred of Rievaulx and William of Saint-Thierry, each in his own way, refused to ignore the sacramental cast of our journey back to the eternal Word of God’s love. Friendship, for Aelred, is important because heaven itself is a place of friendship transfigured. In other words, temporal friendship on earth functions as a sacrament of eternal friendship in heaven. Similarly, for William, pictures of Christ’s suffering are indispensable because they are sacraments in which we encounter the truth of the love of God. Heaven transfigures suffering into the glorious reality of love. The sacramental reality (res) for which we long, therefore, is a transfiguration of the sacramental means (sacramenta) that we encounter on our earthly pilgrimage. And perhaps the most amazing truth is this: we ourselves are transfigured as we learn to see the transfiguration of sacraments into the reality of God’s love.

We can make the same point by turning to the four steps of lectio divina. The last step is contemplation of the reality (res) or the truth (veritas) of God’s love. But we are temporal, earthly creatures, and so we dare not bypass the initial three steps. We must first turn to the outward sacraments (sacramenta): we need to do the reading (lectio), the meditation (meditatio), the prayer (oratio). In these first three steps, we busy ourselves with ordinary words—reading them, thinking on them, and praying over them. Only after much patient exploration of the sacramenta do we get a glimpse of the res of God’s love as he takes us beyond our words into contemplation of the eternal Word. It is typically only after much practice that, with Saint Paul, some are caught up into Paradise itself (2 Cor 12:4).

Lectio divina, therefore, is not a method or technique, which gives us guaranteed, easy access to psychological well-being. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger cautions against such a mistaken view of contemplation in his 1989 Orationis Formas, a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation.” Ratzinger directs us back to the cross: “The love of God, the sole object of Christian contemplation, is a reality which cannot be ‘mastered’ by any method or technique. On the contrary, we must always have our sights fixed on Jesus Christ, in whom God’s love went to the cross for us and there assumed even the condition of estrangement from the Father (cf. Mk 13:34).”* This is wise counsel, for it is on the cross that we recognize the face of God.

So, lectio divina is an exercise in patience. It resists the temptation of jumping straight into contemplation. As this book unfolds, it will become clear that lectio divina is a slow and often painful process that takes seriously the sacramental character of God’s revelation. Of course, God can reveal himself however, whenever, and to whomever he wants, no matter the path we ourselves have taken. But our job is to turn back, time and again, to the regular practices...