Sunday's Gospel (Jesus said) "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them." -John 14:15-21
Self-Guided Retreat
About the Meditation Prompts
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. I will send the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
With the Sixth Sunday of Easter the Church enters the most liminal time of the Christian Year as spiritual practice. Jesus tells you that he must go away. He will leave the form in which you now know him. Nevertheless he will come to you in the Spirit of Truth, who, in union with you will “abide with you” and “be in you.” Already linked through love, you will abide where he abides, although he is hidden.
So be in love (Meditation One). Follow love's way (Meditation Two). Turn everything into love (Meditation Three).
Thursday (the week after Easter 6) the church celebrates the Ascension. The Resurrected Jesus takes his friends to the Mount of Olives one last time. A cloud appears and Jesus departs within it (Acts 1:1-11). The church gives us ten days to contemplate this mystery of separation and deep connection. “Do not leave us comfortless” we pray, “but send us your Holy Spirit, the Comforter.” But we have to wait within this liminal time order to grow in exquisite ambiguity - to grow toward a maturity able to accept the gift and responsibilities of the Holy Spirit.
Love, Suzanne
Meditation One (Introit) Fall In Love, Stay In Love Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
attributed to Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ 1907-1991
Miscellany
I have sought how to make souls love God better. How to bring them to him, persuade them that he is above any good, how to illuminate for them this sweetness, this wondrous peace, this mystery, this all which reveals itself to the soul without the soul being able to say how; how to obey the Holy Spirit, this fire that I feel in my soul and which wishes to give of itself, to extend itself. How to communicate this to all those souls that touch my soul; and I have found no other means more powerful than kindness.
-Mathilde Boutle (“Lucie Christine”) 1844-1908
I sought you... in all things beautiful, and in all things I found you. I sought you at the hands of all creatures, and they all replied: Behold, he is here.
-Mathilde Boutle (“Lucie Christine”) 1844-1908
There are ... all the delights of relationship we have ever known or hoped for and something more besides – the conviction, based on experience, that it will last. Everything else, everyone else we love is part of this love, too. The Lord our God may be, in the language of the Old Testament, a jealous God, but not jealous in this way. All love that is love, that is not merely a tickling and an appeasement of an appetite, is welcome in the love of God. And all love endures alongside and within this love, for the presence that witnesses and secures this love offers its fullness and understanding in support and extension of everything we have known or can know of love.
-Ann and Barry Ulanov Primary Speech: A Psycology of Prayer
At the transfiguring height of union, we are well beyond words, yet not outsdie either thought or feeling. We try, if only to sort out some of the wonders of this moment for ourselves, to translate it into something we can hold onto, rather like a list or a quick comment on the side of a passage in a book that has caught something of importance for us or some other mnemonic that will make the ineffable hold still. Like the mystics who turn to the images of the Song of Songs, we frequently find that narrative of wooing and sexual union satisfactory. We understand again why it must stand where it does in the Biblical canon. And yet even its exalted measures may be too much, too complicated, to multifaceted and overladen with too many movements away from the central fact: love.
-Ann and Barry Ulanov Primary Speech: A Psycology of Prayer
The Ascension, Gherarducci, Gradual 2, c.1395
Meditation Two (Insight) Whatever Way Love's Camel Takes
My heart has become capable of every form: It is a pasture for gazelles And a monastery for Christian monks, And a temple for idols, And the pilgrim's Ka'ba, And the tablets of the Torah, And the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way love's camel takes, that is my religion, my faith.
-Ibn Arabi 1165-1240
Meditation Three (Integration) What Has Turned To Love
If there is anything in which this life, this way, can be expressed, in which God has revealed Himself most clearly, it is the reality of love. You are someone only in as far as you are love, and only what has turned to love in your life will be preserved.
-Rule for a New Brother, 1973
The Last Word
Come, mine elect one: and I will set my throne within you.
-Antiphon at Lauds Saints Days
Suzanne's Meditation
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. I will send the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
In a way, Jesus’ abandonment of the disciples upon the Mount of Olives is more profound than their abandonment on Calvary. After all, the disciples themselves predicted he would die. “Let us go and die with him” says a resigned Thomas when Jesus chooses to risk going to Judea to console his friends in Bethany. As grevious as it was, the crucifixion was no surprise.
But no one could have imagined the Resurrection and the extraordinary forty days during which Jesus dwelled again with his friends. Forty days with the resurrected Jesus - appearing in the upper room, along the way to Emmaus, upon the beach at Galilee! Imagine their despair when this, the Jesus present to them in such an astonishing way, enters the Cloud. He had said,“If I do not go, the Comforter will not come.” Again, imagination fails.
The Church gives us ten days to practice dwelling in the ambiguous time of the Resurrected Christ vanished, and the Holy Spirit not-yet-come. In the mystical life, Ascensiontide is the Dark Night of the Soul, the anguished sense of abandonment after a solid period of union. The soul can not cling even to this union. The last threads of attachment must be broken in the darkness of unknowing before the completion of the Christian transformation – being “sent” into the world as bearers of Love.
But the mystics testify to a stunning paradox. The abandonment IS the union. It is in the Dark Night of the Soul that Lover meets Beloved and transforming union takes place. “He will be IN you.”
As we sing in the Divine Office, “ Come, mine elect one: and I will set my throne within you.” (-Antiphon at Lauds, Saints Days)
-Suzanne
Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife, which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself, "What else is the world interested in?" What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships? God is love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved. And not just in the family but to look upon all as our mothers, sisters, brothers, children. It is when we love the most intensely and most humanly that we can recognize how tepid is our love for others. The keenness and intensity of love brings with it suffering, of course, but joy too, because it is a foretaste of heaven.
