El Arzobispo Niederauer instalado en San Francisco

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In an earlier column I mentioned that my Lenten reading included “Bridges to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton  for Lent and Easter.” This booklet contains not only selected excerpts from Merton’s writings but also sections labeled “Another Voice,” which are by various people, including Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Paul and several theologians I’d never heard of before.

One passage from Merton that gave me much food for contemplation was this one: “When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God’s love for you and your love for God and God’s love for Himself in you and in me would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and no others.”

I interpret this to mean that if I have God’s love in me, then I spread that love in a way unique in all the world. No one else expresses this love of God in quite the same way, and if I close myself off from this love, then the world is the poorer for it. And not just the world in general, but each individual I encounter, because then none of them would receive God’s love through me, nor could they express God’s love through me.

Pondering this, I had an image of myself as an almost infinitesimal prism in a light show comprised of all of us reflecting God’s infinite love. Each of us has the ability to turn ourselves so that we reflect that love to the world; we also can turn away, becoming a spot of darkness.

I often feel that my actions are too small to express God’s love, but the words of many saints contradict this. Thérèse of Lisieux says, “Remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all that you do with love,” while her namesake Mother Teresa says, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” Perhaps my favorite, though, is from St. André Bessette: “It is with the smallest brushes that the artist paints the most exquisitely beautiful pictures.”

Merton’s assertion that God can love others through me makes sense: By my actions I can express that love to others. Harder for me to understand is how others “are able to love God through me,” as he says. This isn’t just leading others to God by example. I think it also means accepting God’s love from others – letting them help me in material ways as well as serving as examples that draw me closer to God.

“Because God’s love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because His love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come,” Merton writes.

Opening more fully to God’s love is the purpose of our Lenten journey, which will see its fulfillment at Easter; Merton describes the grace of this day as “… an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul.”

How to receive this grace? By prayer, fasting and almsgiving, of course, but also on pondering the Word of God. Among the advice in the “Bridges” booklet is this from a theologian new to me: Oliver Clément, a French Eastern Orthodox professor and author, who  writes that God’s Word can “clear the silt away in the depth of the soul.” He has a lovely image of the Word restoring “to its original brightness the tarnished image of God in us,” but, he warns, “we have to cooperate with him, not so much by exertion of willpower as by loving attentiveness.”

That loving attentiveness must be renewed each day so that worldly cares don’t once again discolor our souls. For the next 50 days we will celebrate the Easter season with shouts of “Alleluia” and joy that our Lord has risen; I pray this jubilation will spur us to continue always to be an untarnished mirror reflecting God’s infinite love.  

Marie Mischel is editor of the “Intermountain Catholic.” Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.