Enfleshed Love

There are many dimensions to the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ who is “Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.” (Quincunque Vult: The Creed of St. Athanasius). One of those dimensions is the enfleshment of Divine Love, first in Mary, and then in us.

Love enfleshed in human hearts, by necessity is coloured by each heart in which it is enfleshed. Some hearts are silver, some are gold, some a dross that never should be told. Even impure loves, twisted and misshapen, have an echo of God’s love, albeit barely recognizable. The closer one comes to the source of love in glad surrender, the purer flows His love within our hearts. The farther away from Him we are, the more bent, perhaps even perilously broken, is the love of God within that heart. But always remember that the God of love was broken for us, and that this pitiable breaking is nothing new to Him with whom we have to do. The miracle of the love of God is this, that his love, flowing from His being, is so often revealed in our affection, brotherly love, eros and romantic love, a living parable of the love of Christ Jesus.

There is an astounding grace in enfleshed love, but it is not just love that is enfleshed in us, but Love Himself is enfleshed not only in Mary Theotokos, but also through the agency of the Holy Spirit of God that same Love is enfleshed in us. He is the Vine, we are the branches. John 15:3. He has no illusions about our nature for nothing is, or ever has been, hidden from Him with Whom we have to do. We are quite frankly sinful human beings; that is our condition, and He knows that better than we ourselves.

One of the miracles of His grace extended to us in His indwelling in our human flesh is that our repentance is of necessity imperfect. It is impossible for us to confess all our sins. The deeper we dig the dirtier it gets. No sooner do we think we have reached the bottom of our bottomless pit of iniquity and consider that we have thankfully made a good confession, than some other thing we have missed in our confession creeps into consciousness. This is not always a work of the Holy Spirit. One cannot be saved by the good work of repentance and confession, one is saved by grace through faith, and there is an accuser of the brethren who seeks to heap guilt upon us and rob our joy. That is why Teresa of Avila says, “He gilds my faults.” The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. One, “The Book of Her Life”, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriquez, (Washington: ICS Publications, 1987), 68-69.

After a long season of Christian living one often discovers that some thought pattern or habit of action, or inaction, is not really acceptable to God and never has been. The miracle of His love is this: Even though we have a store of undiscovered stuff He loves us and extends His grace to us. Not only that; He allows us to walk joyfully in His presence with all this undiscovered stuff and doesn’t seek to bring it to our attention until we are strong enough to discover more about ourselves. That is probably why the Dominican Mystic Henry Suso says somewhere, “No matter how much one abandons oneself, one repeatedly finds more of oneself to abandon.”

There is a truth hidden in Chaucer’s description of the Prioress whose nose was straight, her eyes green as glass, her mouth full small, and thereto soft and red, . . . about her arm she bore small coral prayer beads, beads all green and thereon hung a brooch of shining gold on which there was engraved a crowned A, and Amor Vincit Omnia, Love Conquers All. Chaucer Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 152-162, trans. Robin P. Smith. Despite the ambivalent purity of the Prioress, it is still true, that through the grace and gift of Christ, that Amor Vincit Omnia, Love conquers all; that we ourselves are gifted by virtue of that love with an amazing grace in God’s acceptance of us and His enfleshed love.

When Love is enfleshed in us; Love incarnate in us works His work through all our relationships and all our loving. St. Paul’s lofty description of the marriage relationship of one man and one woman starts with the mutual submission of each to the other. That by the way is a condition of being filled with the Holy Spirit of God. Ephesians 5:17-22. This description ends with correlation of the union of husband and wife with the great theme of Christ and the Church. Ephesians 5:32-33.

In this mutual submission all pretence of the perfection of either husband or wife is abandoned, which is why Charles Williams says that the lover is the cross on which the beloved is crucified. Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology, ed. Alice Mary Hatfield, (Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphile Press, 2005), p. 23. We accept one another even as God the Father through Christ Jesus accepts us, with eyes-wide-open forgiveness, knowing that neither husband or wife are perfect; indeed abandoning the unrealistic and ungodly expectation the other be perfect when we know full well that we ourselves are not perfect. Of course if you are character disordered that won’t make any sense. In that generous acceptance of flawed lover and flawed beloved, each for the other, we allow grace to work its abundance in glad tolerance gilding the faults of one another. Amor Vincit Omnia!

This enfleshed Love works His way down through all of our relationships, parent and child, brother and sister, dear friends, and even the dogs under the kitchen table. Love that cannot be loved in the mundane and flawed is not Love at all but only abstract sterility. Love, to be Love in the flesh must love as He loved, enfleshed in very human flesh with all its sins and foibles. Amor Vincit Omnia.