ORDER LOVE IN ME!

As you will have noticed, I've been finding voices lately that say things in ways I admire and could not equal. I take the liberty of presenting one more: a meditation by Sister Emmanuelle Billoteau, a Benedictine hermit from Provence. She is a fine example of treating our intelligence as an integral part of God's creation. The translation is mine.

“ordinavit in me caritatem” (SS 2:4 Vulgate)

“He ordered love in me”: this remark by the Bride in the Song of Songs, which could become ours, may serve as the guideline for this meditation. The verse has been commented on often, inter alia by St Bernard and by a less well-known author, Richard Rolle. Rolle, who lived as a hermit in turbulent 14^th-century England, experienced God as “warmth, sweetness, song”. It is in one of his many works, The Song of Love, that he examines at some length the ordering of love – a theme already emphasized by St Augustine.

The point is that “God is love” and “All that is of God is ordered”. What is at stake is the proper use of the desire to love that lives in us: a vestige of our creation in the image and the likeness of God. For without charity “no one can attain the supreme joy, no one can be saved”. Indeed, as we know from experience, we are often overwhelmed and, in this area, faced with our limits, our wounds, with our sin, with a kind of chaos that comes from desires dominated by passions. How shall we escape from possessivity, from fusion, from selfishness, so that our capacity for loving can blossom fully to the glory of God, to our own happiness and to that of our peers?  A huge question, which impels us not only to seize all human means that may help us but above all to turn to God and to pray Him to ‘order love in me’. For what is needed is not just a simple psychological change or a moral issue, but the transformation of our being by the presence of the Risen One.

            For Rolle, who unceasingly read and meditated on Scripture, “love well ordered, then, consists of always and everywhere preferring the Creator to every creature”. It is also “loving only God and for God” and “bringing to God all the love we are shown”. This approach, of course, is embodied in concrete choices: a sensitivity in our relation to the Lord which will not let us turn away from Him for what we want ourselves, which will impel us to invest our energy and our time in prayer, and to resist the temptation of getting our own back upon our enemies but rather to call down upon them the blessing of God – to give just a few examples.

            Richard Rolle, who has a living relation to the Word, at once expresses an objection that may already have suggested itself to us. How can one speak of order in love? Should love not be without measure? Rolle distinguishes between love of God and love of men. The former is called to be without limit and to function “at every moment”,  for we can never love Him “as He deserves”; the latter is limited only by this, “never to let the created compete with the Creator”, i.e. never to put the creature in the place of God.

            Let us then, learn to find in the Church’s tradition what we need to support our own quest to let God be, as Rolle puts it so beautifully, ‘the joy of my silence, the balm of my repentance, the force of my prayer, the sweetness of my meditation, the food of my contemplation.’ True, our sensibility is not that of the Middle Ages: the contribution of the human sciences has changed our relation to ourselves and to others. But some truths transcend time.