The Soul’s Surrender to the Intimacy of Christ Jesus

1. The following poem is from Padre Fray Juan de la Cruz. Juan de la Cruz lived in the latter half of the 16th century. To put that in historical context, this was around the same time that the English reformation was in full flower. The first English Book of Common Prayer was published in 1549. As a friend and confessor of St. Teresa of Avila he was arrested, imprisoned in the Carmelite Friary in Toledo where he was treated with incredible cruelty. In his imprisonment he composed a number of poems which have become classics in contemplative theology. His poetry shows the influence both of secular love poetry and the Song of Songs. “A nun asked him whether God ‘gave him these words which were so comprehensive and so lovely.’ John replied: ‘Sometimes God gave them and at other times I sought them.’”[1]

2. It would be a mistake to attempt to expound the meaning of his poems, after all he didn’t really do that very well himself.[2] That is perhaps a characteristic of much of poetry. The language and imagery transcend simple analysis. Rather than attempt the impossible I offer these reflections and share with you what this wonderful poem by Padre Fray Juan de la Cruz stirs in me.

3. Love’s fire is a common theme of many spiritual writers. Richard Rolle, the 14th century English author of The Fire of Love, wrote the following:

Good Jesus, scourge me, wound me, slay me, burn me;
do with me here and now whatever in your goodness you decide;
that in the days to come I may know and feel
not evil but your love--and that, for ever!
To be despised, rejected, insulted by all,
for your sake, is sweeter to me
than to be called the brother of any earthly monarch,
honoured among men, and praised by all.... [3]

4. Similarly George MacDonald (1824-1904), in his very Scottish way, writes,

The fire of God, which is his essential being, His love, His creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns—that the further from Him, it burns the worse.[4]

And again,

He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakeable may remain: he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship.[5]

In the poem by Padre Fray Juan de la Cruz I have interwoven the commentary below the verses. The original translation by Roy Campbell, a South African, in 1951; the words in blue are my substitutions to make the poem more accessible to American readers. The titles in blue, are my titles, and not part of the original poem.

Song of the soul in intimate communication and union with the God who is love [6]

[The Song of Responsive Desire]

5. Oh flame of love so living,
How tenderly you force
To my soul’s inmost core your fiery probe!
Since now you’ve no misgiving,
End it, pursue your course
And for our sweet encounter tear the robe.

The fiery song of desire and fulfillment, in the context of Juan de la Cruz’s other poems, is a love cry from the bride to the Bridegroom. It is Jesus, the Anointed One, who is the Bridegroom! He is Flame of Love!

At the very beginning Juan acknowledges that the initiative comes entirely from the Divine Lover and our desire is a responsive desire. The Lover knows that His love will burn away our dross, and he knows that such burning is a death. He comes tenderly, forcing his way into the receptive heart, piercing to the very center of our being. He sees our responsiveness and desire and in that knowledge he has no misgiving. We cry out in invitation, “End it, pursue your course,” Oh, don’t hesitate come my Lord, enter in, and with sweet encounter tear the robe of my defensiveness.

6. [Entry and Purification]

Oh burning most tender!
Oh wound that is my reward!
Oh gentle hand! Oh touch how softly thrilling!
Eternal life you render,
Raise of all my sins, the burden,
And change my death to life, even while killing!

7. The word “burning” in the original English translation, is “cautery,” which conveys not only a burning wound but sealing of the wound. It is a burning, a cautery, most tender, “for He does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men."[7] The very wound His piercing love creates is in itself a reward. So also Teresa of Avila felt when the angel pierced her heart, “I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God.”[8] Paradoxically that burning touch is gentle, softly thrilling. Eternal life He brings, He raises from our shoulders the burden of our sins and changes our death to life, even while He kills all that is dross in us.

8. [The Union]

Of Light of fiery blaze
To whose radiant fuel
The deepest caverns of my soul grow bright,
Lately blind with gloom and haze,
But in this strange renewal
Giving to the belov’d both heat and light.

The Light of fiery blaze is Himself the radiance, the refulgence of God’s glory bright, and the exact imprint of his nature.”[9] Even as we surrender to the Bridegroom, we open our hearts to the Father as well, in the power of the Spirit, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”[10] Oh, tremendous, unspeakable privilege to become the home of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The radiant fuel, the very power of the Spirit of Jesus makes the deepest, darkest, even the most feared caverns or our souls bright with brilliant light. Before, within, we were filled with gloom and haze, but now in this strange, almost alien renewal of life and light[11] he warms the very depths of our being.

9. [The Result]

What peace, with love enwreathing,
You conjure to my breast
Which only you your dwelling place may call:
While with delicious breathings
In glory, grace, and rest,
So delicately in love you make me fall!

What follows is a tremendous sense of enveloping peace, we are, to borrow a word from Richard Rolle, “rapt” in love, wrapped and enraptured. Campbell’s translation uses the word “conjure.” What has happened is something “magical.” There is no other way to express it. We now belong fully to him, fully surrendered to His love and fiery Presence. So fully do we belong to Him, He alone, has the right of calling our inmost being his dwelling place. The expression “delicious breathings” conveys a sense of a living, breathing, even delicious Presence within. We are in glory. We are in grace and rest, so delicately He has made us fall in love.
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[1] St John of the Cross: The Poems, Translated from the Spanish by Roy Campbell, (London: The Harvill Press, 1951), p. 25-27,. p. 13
[2] Ibid. p. 17, “He can instruct, but he cannot really explain. He does not in the end know what he means, he only knows that he means what he says.”
[3] Clifton Wolters trans. Penguin, 1972
[4] George MacDonald, An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis, (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1947), p. 63
[5] Ibid. p. 2
[6] St John of the Cross: The Poems, Translated from the Spanish by Roy Campbell, (London: The Harvill Press, 1951), p. 25-27, [Text in blue has been modified to meet contemporary English standards by Robin P. Smith].
[7] Lamentations 3:33
[8] The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. One, “The Book of Her Life”, (Washington: ICS Publications) 1987. P. 42
[9] Hebrews 1:3
[10] John 14:23
[11] “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4).

Bored by the Rule of St. Benedict?

Do you at times find reading the Rule just a little obscure and boring? Apart from giving instructions for a monastic community on how to read the Psalter, what relevance does it have for Oblates and Companions of St. Benedict? Take for instance the reading for today:

Chapter 18 ~ Feb. 22 - June 23 - Oct. 23

At Terce, Sext and None on Monday
let the nine remaining sections of Psalm 118 be said,
three at each of these Hours.
Psalm 118 having been completed, therefore,
on two days, Sunday and Monday,
let the nine Psalms from Psalm 119 to Psalm 127
be said at Terce, Sext and None,
three at each Hour,
beginning with Tuesday.

And let these same Psalms be repeated every day until Sunday
at the same Hours,
while the arrangement of hymns, lessons and verses
is kept the same on all days;
and thus Prime on Sunday will always begin with Psalm 118.

Let me explain:

Always pay attention to context. The previous section says in part:

Then at Prime on Sunday
four sections of Psalm 118 are to be said;
and at each of the remaining Hours,
that is Terce, Sext and None,
three sections of the same Psalm 118.

Psalm 118 in the Roman Catholic division of Psalms is actually Psalm 119. A key verse giving the theme is “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (RSV Psalm 119:105).

For both Monks, Oblates and Companions Holy Scripture is the voice of God speaking to our souls. Souls? Our inner being, our person, who we are apart from the shell of the body. Psalm 119 reminds us that if we hide His word in our hearts, we will not sin against Him, or against each other for that matter (Psalm 119:11). In this section from the Rule St. Benedict instructs us to keep the love of the Word of God central in our hearts and minds every day of the week.

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.

Prayers for the Common Man

In “The Introduction to the Devout Life” by Saint Francis de Sales he talks about a principle that is important for all Oblates and Companions of St. Benedict:

“Tell me, please, my Philothea, whether it is proper for a bishop to want to lead a solitary life like a Carthusian; or for married people to be no more concerned than a Capuchin about increasing their income; or for a working man to spend his whole day in church like a religious; or on the other hand for a religious to be constantly exposed like a bishop to all the events and circumstances that bear on the needs of our neighbour. Is not this sort of devotion ridiculous, unorganised and intolerable? Yet this absurd error occurs very frequently, but in no way does true devotion, my Philothea, destroy anything at all. On the contrary, it perfects and fulfils all things. In fact if it ever works against, or is inimical to, anyone’s legitimate station and calling, then it is very definitely false devotion. . . .”

We live in God’s world in a wide variety of callings and our spiritual disciplines must of necessity reflect the limitations and graces of those callings. The very backbone of our discipline is the Daily Office. “Which one?” You may ask. “Morning Prayer, or Evening Prayer, or both, or seven Offices and one in the middle of the night?” Godly common sense is a grace, but you will find that the discipline of praying even one Office every day will bring balance and depth to your spiritual life. What is important is that you both listen to God in Holy Scripture and talk to Him every day. Christian life is life lived in the Presence of Christ.

The Ploughman

There are times when prayer is as exciting as a ploughman plodding across a field that has been ploughed many times before. The ploughman reflects a simple reality; no ploughing, no sowing of seed; no sowing of seed, no harvest of the abundant fruits of the field. Ploughing is hard necessary work, and so is prayer. Most prayer is ploughing, turning up the subsoil of our reality so that the creative and regenerative power of the Word can be sown in the varied fields of the world around us. Hard rocky soil needs hard ploughing to receive the Seed.

The foundation of prayer is relationship; our relationship with our Lord; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Prayer is an ongoing relationship with the Father who delights to hear our prayer, with the Son Who intercedes for us, and with the Holy Spirit who is the very energy that carries our prayer to the heart of the Father. Prayer is only secondarily an emotional experience. On the first level prayer is a responsibility, an act of obedience, a duty that we perform in the company of the Holy Spirit. In going to prayer one might even say, “I am going to do my duty and pray with the help of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is something that the Holy Spirit and I do together.” Like ploughing, prayer is hard work, but not work that we have to do alone.

Obedience, duty, and honour are related concepts that are not popular among modern Western Christians; but these antique virtues are the bedrock of prayer. Prayer does not need to be exciting, or emotionally rewarding; it is just something we are supposed to do. While Benedictines balance Ora et Labora, prayer and work, a simple truth is that often prayer is simply work. This is why St. Benedict says, “Our prayers, therefore, ought to be short and pure, except it be perchance prolonged by the inspiration of Divine Grace: (RB Ch. XX).

Christians live their lives pointed towards the coming of Christ and the full realization of the Kingdom of God when “Death is swallowed up in victory” (I Cor. 15:54b). While we wait, usually plodding along the furrows of our spiritual lives, we would do well to remember St. Paul’s exhortation, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain” (I Cor. 15:58). The command is, “be steadfast, be immovable.” Paul is not here talking about flashy Christian experience. The Greek word for “steadfast” means “sitting, sedentary, firm, immovable.” The Greek word for “immovable” means “not to be moved, firmly persistent.”

That exhortation sets the tone for our spiritual lives, and particularly for prayer. We are to do our duty; to honour God with our obedient response to His call to pray. Such prayer rests on the bedrock of our relationship with Him. We are loved, and we love in return. Out of that love we take up the concerns of the Holy Spirit as He moves us to pray for ourselves and others. I do not mean to imply that there are no joys, no moments of high elevation, even exuberance in prayer. Of course there are! It is just that the plain bread and butter of prayer is faithful obedient plodding up and down the fields of God; ploughing with the Holy Spirit, God’s Ploughman at our side.

Honey and Hemlock

“There is something of benefit to be had even from the profane philosophers—but somewhat as in a mixture of honey and hemlock. So it is most needful that those who wish to separate the honey from the mixture should beware that they do not take the deadly residue by mistake.”1

There was no naiveté in Christ when He came to earth to be born of the flesh of the Virgin Mary His mother. The Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, a devout Anglican High Church woman, tells us of the infant Christ Child with great tenderness.

Lord God of Mary,
Whom His lips caress
While He rocks to rest
On her milky breast
In helplessness.2

He is born as a real child, wholly dependent on his mother; the Living Word of God uttering inarticulate baby sounds. All our understanding of the ways of God with man is governed by the paradigm, “God initiates, man responds” There is in such limitation and dependency a tremendous gift of love given for you and for me. God, the Living God, accommodates himself to the limitations of humankind, as the Psalmist says, “He stooped to me and heard my cry.”3 All of our praying is a response to His great gift of love already given.

The Act of Incarnation, the co-inherence of God the Word in the womb of Mary, provides a redemptive answer to Fall and the resulting predicament of humankind. The Fall and Original Sin reveal the inner posture of the human heart, the preference for doing things our own way instead of glad surrender to the God who created us. However rather than being solely the answer to the fallen state of humankind, that Act of Incarnation was predetermined by the joyful choice of God from before the serpent, from before the beginning of time itself. His intention in creating us was to become one with us, “not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the Manhood into God.”4 He created us to become one with us, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, uniting us with him forever and drawing us up to be with Him in the eternal realms. Already as a Christian you have one foot in Paradise.

When God declared His intention to create humankind he said, “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness”5 Having completed His work, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold,” he said, “it was very good.”6 What was it that he proclaimed, “very good?” It was humankind, in the flesh, in the Garden of Eden. It was the pleasure of God to walk with Adam and Eve in the garden. Note that the flesh is only fallen by virtue of its relationship with the soul; not because it is evil in itself. What was the purpose of creation? We were created that He might walk with us, and we with Him.

Lo, how far we have fallen, and how far all creation has fallen with us. We have a world of mixed honey and hemlock so mingled that it is hard for us to separate out the honey from the hemlock and not take the hemlock by mistake. If the truth be told we have developed a perverse taste for the bitter tang of hemlock. I grieve that I am so sinful, not that I am any different from you. I grieve that we are corporately so sinful; that we share the heritage of Adam and Eve for good and for ill.

Take seriously the extent of the Fall. Self-knowledge is a necessary precondition for the restoration of our relationship with the God who loves us; self-knowledge of the depth of our fall on a personal and corporate level. To encounter the love of God, one must first discover that God is holy, and that humankind at best is a mixture of honey and hemlock. When the Son of Righteousness, the outraying of the glory of God, arises in our souls, His brilliant light throws all of our darkness into clear relief. That is painful, and I often find it so. We are dangerous people who live in a dangerous world, and only by grace received through faith will we come through to safety.

That is the flip side of the coin. The other side is that we were created for fellowship with God and that He has provided the way for our restoration. We have no righteousness of our own, but Christ has become for us our “righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”7 Our baptism as individuals into Christ initiates the process of restoration in us, but it is a process that must be affirmed and accepted by us. Only the ability to say “No!” to the offer of grace guarantees our freedom of choice.

We are baptized not only into Christ, we are also baptized into the Body of Christ, we are baptized into community, we are baptized into the household of God. As we draw closer to Him we draw closer to each other. As deep as the depth of our fall, so great and greater is the power and glory of our redemption through the redemptive work of Christ upon the Cross. One cannot separate the Persons of the Trinity. It is not that God sent his Son as a surrogate; no, God Himself is born one of us and dies upon the cross. God dies to vanquish the death in us and bring us to life. “God has died in the flesh, and hell trembles with fear.”8 O Lord God intra tua vulnera absconde me, in your wounds hide me. Ne permittas me separari a te, do not permit be to be separated from Thee.9

You will hear Eastern writers like Gregory Palamas and others tell us that the purpose of the Incarnation is what they called theosis, that is that we become partakers of the divine nature, but I think the purpose is simpler than that. The purpose of the Incarnation is intimacy with God, that we might be with him; theosis, transformation, is a result of our growing intimacy with God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

When we say that Christ is our righteousness we own that God gives His righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, to sinners if we trust in Him, and that by acceptance of Him and His righteousness, in lieu of our own, we are restored to right relationship with Him. That is to say, in more theological terms, we are made just, we are justified by grace through faith. One of the wonders of this state in which we find ourselves is that even though we are from time to time keenly aware of the things that we have done, and the things that we have left undone, nonetheless He loves us and keeps company with us out of His mercy, His steadfast and active love towards us. When He has won our hearts, when we surrender our hearts to Him, everything else will follow. Faith in His redemptive work takes a surrender of the heart. Faith in His redemptive work takes the courage to acknowledge that we cannot redeem ourselves, and the humility to accept His labour on our behalf.

The way is not one of passivity, but of active acceptance and co-operation with the grace of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In the Prologue to the Rule, St. Benedict of Nursia writes, “In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. Never swerving from God’s instruction, then, but faithfully observing God’s teaching … until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in the eternal presence.”10

However as children of the Anglican Reformation, let us remember that the basis on which we deserve to share in the eternal presence is not our own efforts, but the grace of Christ who is made for us “righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” and that as we lift our souls aloft to God, He delights for the sake of Christ to pour that free gift of grace upon us.

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1 Gregory Palamas, The Triads, I i. 20
2 Christina Rossetti, “A Christmas Carol”, Christina Rossetti:
The Complete Poems,(London: Penguin, 2005), p. 383
3 Psalm 40:1 BCP
4 Quincunque Vult, BCP, p. 865, (The Creed of St. Athanasius).
5 Genesis 1:26 ESV
6 Genesis 1:31
7 Romans I Corinthians 1:10
8 An Early Christian sermon
9 The Anima Christi
10 The Rule of St. Benedict, The Prologue

The Bottomless Well

Some of us by nature are caregivers; it is in our blood, in the very fibre, muscle and bone of our being. It is not just that there are those who need our care. We ourselves need to care, to mend and heal, to rescue and restore. I suspect that trait in one degree of another is found in most people. Natural care givers often hold suspect those who have no apparent need to give care, and recognize as pathological those who instead of giving care, victimize those who either need care or give care. That proclivity is not just pathological, it is wicked.

There is only One who is a bottomless well. Through the Christ flows the water of the Spirit, the gift of the Father’s love. All the rest of us lesser caregivers fall into one of two major categories; the shallow well that taps ground water, and the well spring that has tapped a source deeper than itself.

The caregiver that functions as a shallow well is soon drained of inner resources and only slowly filled by fresh rain water seeping through the soil. The shallow well, giving of its own fleshly strength and human power, gladly gives all it has but then sits depleted, empty and tired, very tired of caring. Some shallow wells are slowly repleted, others once depleted sit as dry holes for times upon times; their care giving days are over.

The caregiver that functions as a wellspring has tapped into the deeper artesian spring of God’s love and presence and even if depleted is quickly filled. Contrasting the earthly and heavenly well there is One who said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13,14).

There are some limits to caregiving that must be recognized. Even Christ the Caregiver is limited by the freedom of will that is an intrinsic right of those for whom He cares. He allows us to say “No!” We ourselves are bound by the same reality in our offers to care for others. On another level there is no comparison of His ability as a caregiver with our lesser ability. It is not for nothing that He is called the Redeemer, and we the redeemed. His caregiving becomes incarnate in our caregiving but subject to our humanity and limitations, but by the grace of God we are what we are and His grace in us is not in vain. Caregivers give care only by virtue of their connection with the Christ in the power of the Spirit.

Being filled with this amazing water of the Holy Spirit requires both inflow and outflow. Without the inflow that comes through worship, praise, prayer and reflection on God’s word the well soon dries up. It is necessary to drink daily and drink deeply. Without outflow, without giving care the water becomes stagnant and the well itself becomes dank and drear. The one who actively leans upon Him is like a tree planted the water that sends out its roots by the stream. The one who drinks deeply of His Presence is like a deep well of water springing forth and giving life to those who need care.



A Response to a Query:

There is a fine line between giving care and trying to fix the problems of others. In our family we have discovered the Crusader Rabbit syndrome. Crusader Rabbit is large, white, fluffy bunny that takes his sword, his shield and his lance, mounts his white stallion and charges down on a problem situation (or person) and attempts to fix things. The problem is that fixing things is not our responsibility, but loving and giving care is. Generally when Crusader Rabbit mounts his white horse and charges down he is about to get knocked off his horse.

I think it is a good thing to volunteer, unlike the shrunken soul who said that the best advice he ever received was to never volunteer. You have remarked that “As a child I was told not to speak unless spoken to and to wait until I was asked to do something.” As a child I remember the dictum, "children should be seen and not heard", (and I might, add “and preferably not seen either!”). That kind of attitude was a vestige of those halcyon days when the governess presented the children to the parents after dinner for inspection, but for little else. Children should be respectful, but so should adults, even of children. On a simple level even respectful children would bless their parents by volunteering to wash the dishes or walk the dog.

As for your living arrangement. There are so many mixed motives and emotions in any family living arrangement. What's done is done. However there is here a matter for some serious and persistent prayer. The question is not "What should I have done?", but, "What should I do now?" The mind of man plans his way but the Lord directs his step.

Canon Rob+