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God’s Passionate Love
Father Richard writes about God’s desire for loving intimacy with us:
Saint Bonaventure taught that we are each “loved by God in a particular and incomparable manner, as in the case of a bride and groom.” [1] Francis and Clare of Assisi knew that the love God has for each soul is unique and made to order, which is why any “saved” person feels beloved, chosen, and even “God’s favorite.” Many people in the Bible also knew and experienced this specialness. Divine intimacy is always and precisely particular and made to order—and thus “intimate.” [2]
The inner knowledge of God’s love is itself the Indwelling Presence, and it is also described as joy (John 15:11). Which comes first? Does feeling safe and held by God allow us to deal with others in the same way? Or does human tenderness allow us to imagine that God must be the same, but infinitely so? I do not suppose it really matters where we start; the important thing is that we get in on the big secret from one side or the other.
Yes, “secret,” or even “hidden secret,” is what writers like David (Psalm 25:14), Paul, Rumi, Hafiz, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and many mystics called it. And for some sad reason, it seems to be a well-kept secret. Jesus praises God for “hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them only to the little ones” (Matthew 11:25). Well, what is it that the learned and the clever often cannot see?
The big and hidden secret is this: an infinite God seeks and desires intimacy with the human soul. Once we experience such intimacy, only the intimate language of lovers describes the experience for us: mystery, tenderness, singularity, specialness, changing the rules “for me,” nakedness, risk, ecstasy, incessant longing, and also, of course, necessary suffering. This is the mystical vocabulary of the saints. [3]
The beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282) wrote about her experience of God’s passionate love and desire. She records a dialogue between her soul and God:
The soul begins:
Ah, Lord, love me passionately, love me often, love me long. For the more continuously You love me, the purer I will be; the more fervently You love me, the more beautiful I will be; the longer You love me, the holier I will become here on earth.
God responds:
Because I Myself am Love, I will love you continuously.
Because I long to be loved passionately, My desire is to love you fervently.
Because I am everlasting and eternal, I will love you long…. [4]
When I shine, you will reflect my radiance,
When I flow, you will flow swiftly,
When you breathe, you draw into yourself My Divine Heart.
When you cry for Me, I take you into My arms.
When you love Me, we are united as one.
Nothing can separate us, for we abide together joyfully. [5]
God Is Hopelessly in Love
In season eight of Turning to the Mystics, James Finley points to the guidance Mechthild of Magdeburg offers to people in relationship with God:
We turn to the guidance that Mechthild of Magdeburg offers in The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Through what we know about her life, she’s mentoring us and modeling for us this Christlike life. Mystics such as Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing all share their way as mystically awakened Christians. They try to offer guidance to help us discern our awakening, with instructions such as how to recognize our awakening starting, how to conduct ourselves, and so on. Mechthild doesn’t do that….
Mechthild shares this deepening love between herself and God, but she doesn’t share it by talking about it. She lets us in on it with the language of intimacy and bears witness to it. As we read her book, insofar as we’re touched by the beauty of what she’s saying about the deepening of this love, we’re being guided by her. The very fact that we’re touched by it and its beauty reveals that we’re also being drawn into this love—or we wouldn’t be touched by it. That’s how she guides us. That’s the intimacy of her teaching.
Finley describes how we might connect with Mechthild’s emphasis on love:
In a way, Mechthild is playing a violin with just one string on it, which is love. But the more we listen to it, it’s the beauty of the whole orchestra. It’s the beauty that permeates the reverberations of all the various aspects of this. Even though she just stays on point, never leaving this love, she makes stunning statements about love. We wonder, “Where did that come from, seriously?” When we sit with her, we learn these endless variations are unfolding in us. It’s endlessly evocative and she helps us to be sensitized to surrendering ourselves over to that flow of love….
God says to her that he’s so freely chosen to be so hopelessly in love with her, that he quite honestly doesn’t know if he could handle being God without her. And she says back to God, “Take me home with you. I’ll be your physician forever!” [1] The power of these words is that, as we’re reading them, we know they are true of us. We know that God has freely chosen to be so hopelessly in love with us, and that God doesn’t know if God can handle being God without us in our brokenness…. It circulates back around, and we give back to God the gift that God longs for, which is us!…
To sit with Mechthild and to read her is to be taken by the beauty of what she says. It is to sit in silence and ask God to deepen our capacity to realize how the love of which she speaks is already unfolding within us, and how to be faithful to that, and to carry it through the day.
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