In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost.
If so hard, so absolutely exacting are the claims of
the Gospel, who then can be saved? This is the question which the
Apostles asked from the Lord, and His reply was both encouraging and
also so disheartening, for those who wish to achieve things with
their own strength. He said, this is impossible for men, but all
things are possible for God. There is a breach of continuity as it
were between things heavenly and things earthly; things earthly
never grow to become heavenly; heaven must come down to us for us to
be filled with what heaven is. The Spirit is not the highest point
of our soul, the life of eternity is not simply the fullness of the
life of time. Things of God are divine and we can only receive them,
possess them as a gift, not reach out to them or conquer them simply
by growing heavenwards; when we try do so, we build a new Tower of
Babel and we go astray and we do not reach to heaven.
But how then can we become capable of receiving what
God is ready to give? In the Epistle of St Paul, we are told that it
is grace Divine that wrote all that the Apostles wrote, that it is
the power and the action of God Himself and not human sagacity and
strength and cleverness, so that the only way in which we can fulfil
our vocation and become what we are meant to be, citizen of heaven,
sons of God by adoption, is to become capable of receiving the grace
of God which is given us so freely, so generously, but which we
receive with such scarcity because our hearts are narrow, and we are
closed. We must learn to open up, to become receptive and this is
what St Paul meant when He said, in the words, spoken to him by the
Lord Himself. "My power is made manifest in weakness". It is only
when we become receptive that the divine power can become active,
otherwise we block the way to God's actions. But it is not only
weakness. We all are weak, but we are not at all receptive; there is
a special way in which we must become weak in order to be receptive
and I will try to explain it or to hint at it by three examples.
The first is not far as it may seem from concrete,
strict reality. If you remember that in Scripture, the word which we
read “The Spirit” means the blowing of the wind, the blowing of God,
the action of God, then this example will perhaps make sense: when
we sail a boat, we become capable of directing it thanks to the wind
that blows; if we display a sail, this sail is capable of catching
the wind because it is frail, because it is supple, because it can
be directed into any direction by the wind himself. We must only
learn so to dispose it as to catch the wind. This is a first type of
frailty which is helpful for us in our search of God, be supple and
yet learn to be perceptive where the wind blows, where the spirit
breeze and open wide so as to be filled with it, so as to allow to
be filled with it, so as to allow the Spirit Himself to direct the
course of our boat. But very often our weakness is still there and
yet we try to be strung and wise and active and it prevents God from
doing what He could easily do if only we did not help in an untimely
way. You have certainly seen how a little child is given his first
lessons in writing: a pencil is put into his hand, the mother takes
both the little hand and the pencil into hers and moves. And so long
as the child does not know what the mother intends to do, as long
the hand is limped in the mother’s hand how beautiful are the lines!
Straight, free. But a moment comes when the child imagines that he
knows what the mother intends to do and then the child becomes
helpful, it pushes and it pulls and the lines go wrong. This is also
what we do continuously: the Lord is trying to direct our hand, to
make us write the right story of our life in the Book of Life, but
we imagine that we know better, that we know exactly what He intends
and we are so helpful! And so ugly is the writ in this Book of Life.
If only we can learn to have our hand directed until we truly
understand what God means to do, until we truly understand what the
lines are and what the writ is! But we do not and our imaginary, our
very frail strength appears to be strong enough to blur what God is
writing with His hand. These two examples show that we must be frail
with intelligence, frail with open mind, frail with all the
suppleness we are capable of, watchful; and then we will learn first
and become creative afterwards. Strength and limitation, strength
and deadness always go together; life and frailty are always
associated to each other.
An old writer gave an example of this when he said:
look at an oak, how strong and powerful, and yet, how little life
there is in the trunk and how protected, and yet imprisoned this
life is by the trunk; and look at the vine: how frail the little
branches and the terminal twigs are, and they are full of life...
This is what we must learn, to acquire this wide, this intelligent
understanding, weakness and frailty, to discern the pattern of the
divine writ and then, the salvation comes because salvation lies in
the perfect harmony there is between the will of God and the will of
man, the full harmony between Him who is all things, and us, who are
called to become partakers of the divine nature, partakers of the
life divine.
May God grant us to overgrow our weakness and our
illusory strength, to unlearn the false creativeness that has made
the world in which we live so frightening, and to learn that alert,
vigilant suppleness and frailty through which God can work freely
and build the Kingdom of God, beginning and within the city of man.
Amen.
