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The Gift of FatherhoodOn the night watch, hurrying by, I pushed open the door of the novice's scriptorium and flashed the light over all the empty desks. It was as if the empty room was wholly full of their hearts and their love, as if their goodness had made the place wholly good and rich in love. The loveliness of humanity which God has taken to Himself in love, and the wonder of each individual person among them. This is of final and eternal significance. To have been appointed by God to be their father, to have received them from God as my children, to have loved them and been loved by them with such simplicity and sincerity, without nonsense or flattery or sentimentality: this is completely wonderful and is a revelation, a parousia of the Lord of History.From this kind of love necessarily springs hope, hope even for political action, for here, paradoxically, hope is most necessary. Hope is always most necessary precisely when everything, spiritually, seems hopeless. And this is precisely in the confusion of politics. Hope against hope that man can gradually disarm and cease preparing for destruction and learn at last that he must live at peace with his brother. Never have we been less disposed to do this. It must be learned, it must be done, and everything else is secondary to this supremely urgent need of man.November 27, 1961, IV.183
Love Is Our Measure
The measure of our identity, of our being (the two are the same), is the amount of our love for God. The more we love earthly things, reputation, importance, pleasures, ease, and success, the less we love God. Our identity is dissipated among things that have no value, and we are drowned and die in trying to live in the material things we would like to possess, or in the projects we would like to complete to objectify the work of our own wills. Then, when we come to die, we find we have squandered all our love (that is, our being) on things of nothingness, and that we are nothing, we are death. But if we have loved Him, and lost ourselves in Him, we find ourselves in Him, and live forever in joy.
But tribulation detaches us from the things of nothingness in which we spend ourselves and die. Therefore, tribulation gives us life, and we love it, not out of love for death, but out of love for life.
Let me then withdraw all my love from scattered, vain things--the desire to be read and praised as a writer, or to be a successful teacher, praised by my students, or to live in ease in some beautiful place--and place it all in Thee, where it will take root and live, instead of being spent in barrenness.
My life is measured by my love of God, and that, in turn, is measured by my love for the least of His children. And that love is not an abstract benevolence: it must mean sharing their tribulation.
September 3, 1941, I.398-99
The Interminable Beauty of Human Beings
In the pile of things I have lying around waiting to be read, I picked out today the mimeographed conference by Jacques Maritain (in December 1964) to the Little Brothers of Jesus on their vocation. Jacques emphasizes the microsignes--the microsigns--of a Christian love that acts without awareness and is received without special or detailed awareness--the human and unconscious "aura" of a contemplative love that is simply there. How does one dare to undertake this? This idea of presence in and to the world is fundamental: "There are no longer walls, but the demands of a constantly purified love for one's fellow being which protects and shelters their contemplation of love." The importance of a purely immanent activity (the contemplative does not do nothing). This can be a basis for an incomparably deep understanding of another's suffering. "The human being down here in the darkness of his fleshly state is as mysterious as the saints in heaven in the light of their glory. There are in him inexhaustible treasures, constellations without end of sweetness and beauty which ask to be recognized and which usually escape completely the futility of our regard. Love brings a remedy for that. One must vanquish this futility and undertake seriously to recognize the innumerable universes that one's fellow being carries within him. This is the business of contemplative love and the sweetness of its regard." September 20, 1966, VI.137-38
