“...for God is love.”
and God himself will have a hand in patching up the cracks with veins of gold
John says “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” Atheists, who reject the existence of God, will have a difficult time seeing how this can be true because a prejudice they maintain will interpose itself between their understanding and its meaning. But dogmatic assent to these concepts can also foreclose the possibility to apprehend their truth. Many people, for instance, conceive of God as something disjunctive and also commensurable—what is not commensurable cannot truly be disjunctive—with other beings. Heaven, in this view, is imagined as some “other place” from here. Of course, the doctrines of the Incarnation, Trinity, and Dual-nature of Christ are intended to preempt this mistake, but since they are often promulgated and assimilated by wrote, they have little effect on the general conception of these relations.
In reality, God is incommensurable with any created thing, and hence the presence of any created thing can never really be disjunctive with the presence of their Creator.
But how to understand the immanence of God in Creation? Earthly logic dictates that quantities are decreased through subtraction and division. But as the Apostle sayeth, “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” God creates by drawing from his well of inexhaustible being and giving of himself, his own substance. But the more he draws from that well, the more that well runneth over. The more the heavenly bread is shared, the more abundantly it multiplies.1 This is most easily grasped through a sincere phenomenological study of our lives, but once it is grasped, it can be seen wherever it is present. In Nature, for instance, living things enclose a divine element within their corporeal matter—as evidenced by, among other things, their ability propagate their kind out of their own substance—and the former cannot be grasped by material logic alone because matter doesn’t reproduce itself.
Similarly, Earthly logic dictates that distance is a function of space. To understand the logic of Heaven, however, is only possible through the “reversal” or “turning” so often here described.
As Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Nearness to God is not a question of spatial proximity because God has no spatial situation.
Instead, nearness to God is accomplished through likeness. The more we give of ourselves, the more we receive from God because we are becoming more like him in thus giving of ourselves, and therefore more near to him and more immediate in his favor. God despises fearful people, and adulterers, and liars, and sorcerers. Statements like this always risk being misunderstood because people are hard of heart and slow to understand, like Nicodemus who says, “How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?” and because people attempt to apply divine logic to material affairs. From this confusion arises all questions of theodicy, and infernalism, and the subsequent slippery-slope into the pits of unbelief. But as long as Heavenly logic is appropriately applied, it is inviolable. The more love we give away, the more love we get from God. God favors the bold, and the impetuous in this respect.
When we fall in love with some particular person or creature, the love in which we partake is also a participation in the substance of God. This particular beloved being becomes a sort of touchpoint and symbol to what is both within and beyond us.2 In the same way one might gather together fuel to start a fire, and the resulting blaze may come to warm a whole room, so we may draw together and concentrate our experience of love to achieve something that would not have been possible without that concentration. As another metaphor, we can imagine gleaning and then decanting the purest extract and chrism of the soul—which bears the eternal image of its Creator—into the vessel of our hearts and then giving this vessel away. Then, every time that we behold her face, its glow incites in us divine recollection. What before existed in a mixed and impure state, once refined and concentrated, we give into another’s keeping. The impure soul reflected God’s image only as through a glass, darkly. But the pure soul is the perfect mirror: we now discover God’s image in her.
But, of course, a vessel can be shattered. Similarly, a well-composed fire can be scattered as little embers thrown to the four winds. It is inevitable that it should plunge us into a moment of darkness and despair for this to happen, for the only way to protect oneself against it is to close up within oneself and thereby not to love this way at all. We may feel like the psalmist:
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted within me.
But if we gird up our loin against self-pity and resolve to eradicate any seeds of fear that have implanted themselves in the dark earth of our souls, then we can again find favor in the eyes of God. By degrees, the smoldering remnants that were first strewn about in the outer darkness can catch anew. Then the whole world will be set alight with divine fire which does not consume anything except that which veils the face of God. Similarly, the scattered drops of chrism can bless every leaf on which they land, and glisten as they reflect the light of heaven. The broken vessel can, by degrees, be restored to form, and God himself will have a hand in patching up the cracks with veins of gold.3
Jesus multiplies loaves on a number of occasions in the Gospels. And obviously, the Eucharist can’t run out through people partaking of it.
Two of my favorite quotes of all, illustrate this phenomenon. First from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations:
Suppose a curious and fair woman. Some have seen the beauties of Heaven in such a person. It is a vain thing to say they loved too much. I dare say there are ten thousand beauties in that creature which they have not seen. They loved it not too much, but upon false causes. Nor so much upon false ones, as only upon some little ones. They love a creature for sparkling eyes and curled hair, lily breasts and ruddy cheeks: which they should love moreover for being God’s image, Queen of the Universe, beloved by Angels, redeemed by Jesus Christ, an heiress of Heaven, and temple of the Holy Ghost: a mine and fountain of all virtues, a treasury of graces, and a child of God. But these excellencies are unknown.
They love her perhaps, but do not love God more: nor men as much: nor Heaven and Earth at all. And so, being defective to other things, perish by a seeming excess to that. We should be all Life and Mettle and Vigour and Love to everything; and that would poise us. I dare confidently say that every person in the whole world ought to be beloved as much as this: And she if there be any cause of difference more than she is. But God being beloved infinitely more, will be infinitely more our joy, and our heart will be more with Him, so that no man can be in danger by loving others too much, that loveth God as he ought.
and next from Vladimir Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love:
The matter of true love is above all based on faith. The root meaning of love, as has already been shown, consists in the acknowledgment of absolute significance for another being. But this being in its empirical being, as the subject of real sensuous perception, does not have absolute significance: it is imperfect in its worth and transient as to its existence. Consequently, we can assert absolute significance for it only by faith, which is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. But to what does faith relate in the present instance? What does it strictly mean to believe in the absolute, and, what is the same thing, everlasting significance of this individual person? To assert that he himself, as such, in his particularity and separateness, possesses absolute significance would be as absurd as it is blasphemous. Of course the word “worship” is very generally used in the sphere of amorous relations, but then the word “madness” likewise possesses its legitimate application in this domain. So then, observing the law of logic, which does not allow us to admit contradictory definitions, and likewise obeying the command of true religion, which forbids the worship of idols, we must, by faith in the object of our love, understand the affirmation of this object as it exists in God, and as in this sense possessing everlasting significance. It must be understood that this transcendental relation to one's other, this mental transference of it into the sphere of the Divine, presupposes the same relation to oneself, the same transference and affirmation of oneself in the sphere of the absolute. I can only acknowledge the absolute significance of a given person, or believe in him (without which true love is impossible), by affirming him in God, and consequently by belief in God Himself, and in myself, as possessing in God the center and root of my own existence. This triune faith is already a certain internal act, and by this act is laid the first basis of a true union of the man with his other and the restoration in it (or in them) of the image of the triune God. The act of faith, under the real conditions of time and place, is a prayer (in the basic, not in the technical sense of the “word). The indivisible union of oneself and another in this relation is the first step towards a real union. In itself this step is small, but without it nothing more advanced or greater is possible.
Seeing that for God, the eternal and indivisible, all is together and at once, all is in one, then to affirm any individual being whatsoever in God signifies to affirm him not in his separateness but in the all, or more accurately—in the unity of the all. But seeing that this individual being, in his given reality, does not enter into the unity of the all, but exists separately as an individualized material phenomenon, then the object of our believing love is necessarily to be distingished from the empirical object of our instinctive love, though it is also inseparably bound up with it. It is one and the same person in two distinguishable aspects, or in two different spheres of being—the ideal and the real. The first is as yet only an idea. By steadfast, believing and insightful love, however, we know that this idea is not an arbitrary fiction of our own, but that it expresses the truth of the object, only a truth as yet not realized in the sphere of external, real phenomena.
This true idea of the beloved object, though it shines through the real phenomenon in the instant of love's intense emotion, is at first manifested in a clearer aspect only as the object of imagination. The concrete form of this imagination, the ideal image in which I clothe the beloved person at the given moment, is of course created by me, but it is not created out of nothing. And the subjectivity of this image as such, i.e., as it manifests itself here and now before the eyes of my soul, by no means proves that it is subjective, i.e., a characteristic of an imaginary object which exists for me alone. If for me, who am myself on this side of the transcendental world, a certain ideal object appears to be only the product of my own imagination, this does not interfere with its full reality in another higher sphere of being. And though our real life is outside this higher sphere, yet our mind is not wholly alien to it, and we can possess a certain abstract comprehension of the laws of its being. And here is the first and basic law: If in our world separate and isolated existence is a fact and an actuality, while unity is only a concept and an idea, then in the higher sphere, on the contrary, reality appertains to the unity, or more accurately, to the unity-of-the-all, while separateness and individualization exist only potentially and subjectively.
But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.
Isaiah 6:48
Miracle at Cana
2 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; 2 and both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.” 6 Now there were six stone waterpots set there for the Jewish custom of purification, containing twenty or thirty gallons each. 7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” So they filled them up to the brim. 8 And He said to them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it to him. 9 When the headwaiter tasted the water which had become wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom, 10 and said to him, “Every man serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then he serves the poorer wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.
12 After this He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother and His brothers and His disciples; and they stayed there a few days. John 2