How to “Know More Than All the Secrets of the Universe”

The Professor’s Bookshelf #7: Abiding in love

One contemporary monastic author I especially enjoy reading is Fr. Luke Bell, a Benedictine monk of Quarr Abbey. He has published a number of richly meditative books with Angelico Press: The Meaning of Blue; Staying Tender; The Mystery of Identity; and Truth in Person. While I don’t agree with all his views, I find his books to be intellectually and spiritually rewarding. Below are favorite passages from Staying Tender. Enjoy! —PAK

Stability vs. itinerancy

The contemplative tradition is about abiding in this Absolute and finding life therein, a life that is in an open-hearted communion with others in the depth of their being. It is about abiding and it abides. Its practice is characterized by abiding. One of the vows a Benedictine monk takes is that of stability: that he will abide in the monastic life, and normally in one place, for his whole life. It is perseverance in this, not learning or practical skills, that determines if someone can become a Benedictine. …

All of this is a practical expression of a spiritual truth: that God abides and by abiding in Him we find life and love. As the monastery is the place of worship of God and of prayer—both because of how it is ordered and because of who is there—it represents the New Jerusalem where God is all in all. Abiding there in the right spirit (which is basically not a complaining spirit) is a means of abiding in God.

The spiritual truth that has its expression in perseverance in the monastery can also be expressed by not abiding anywhere in this world. Mendicant friars are always moving to a new place, always on a pilgrimage, because nothing in this world abides as God abides. While a monk will allow abiding in one place to point beyond itself to abiding in God, a friar will let abiding in God alone teach that “here have we no continuing city, but seek one to come.” Spiritually they are identical in their rootedness in God, the one signifying this by being in one place, the other by not being in one place. The created world both shows and conceals the divine and so can speak of it both positively and negatively. It images abiding in God in a settled place of residence; it shows, through those whose lifestyle is itinerant just as their Lord’s was, that it cannot offer the absolute abode which is God alone. (12-13)

Contemplatives are not cut off

A sister in a Carmelite monastery who in her daily two hours of personal prayer has left behind all concern for things that are below, whose life is “hid with Christ in God,” who is for that time no longer wrapped in the words and concepts that we use for “things on the earth” opens the world to an infinite blessing. A Carthusian monk, whose conversations with those outside the monastery have all but ceased, who speaks with his own fellow monks only once a week, who abides for life in the silence of the cloister is, through the Spirit that unites, as close in the depth of his heart to every person on the planet as anyone whoever. (16)

The contemplative spirit can never die. It is not that this world (the form of which is passing away) sustains it: rather the contemplative spirit is the reason this world is not dead. Souls open to the Divine Artificer, the Creator of all, open the world to its life. (17)

Right and wrong abodes

To be of no fixed abode here on earth would, it seems, to be more liable to vicissitudes, even to be disreputable, yet everything under the changing moon is subject to variation and decay. To invest one’s heart “where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal” is to walk into heartbreak. Rather, says the Apostle, “Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” The heart so set is “hid with Christ in God” and so steadfast—even steadfastly tender—amongst this world’s changes. (25)

Activism’s diminishing returns

What all the talk of “evangelizing” and “being dynamic” etc. misses:

Peter promulgates the abiding, John receives and rests in what abides. Peter shows the eternal to this world; John beholds the eternal in the next. The emphasis is: Peter loves; John is loved. Loving the Lord is what equips the Christian to care for others—that is why the Lord asks Peter about this three times—but it is “the disciple whom Jesus loved” who models a Christian’s essential identity. Love for the Lord begins with His love of us. St Teresa of Ávila pointed to the heart of Christian life when she spoke of “taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” That knowing we are loved is the beginning of everything and the reason that retreats—frequent short retreats and regular longer ones—matter so much. The Christian disciple can and should sometimes take a break from the Petrine-style active proclamation of Christian truth, but his or her believing heart needs always to know the Lord’s love. (29)

What science misses

To come to the Lord Jesus with openness and trust, willing to receive all that He wants to give, is to know more than all the secrets of the universe. (30)

We receive our history

It is the Holy Spirit who unites us to Peter and John, and indeed to the whole Church. The Holy Spirit brings about the Church, gathers its members into one living body, is the soul of the Church. Monday, the day of the Holy Spirit, is the day to remember this. The contemporary tendency is to think of our belonging to each other as something negotiated by independent individuals. Yet it is not like that at all. We do not come on the scene as fully formed human actors. We enter as Monday’s creatures, little children. We do not have words; we receive them from other people. We do not have food; we receive it from others. We little by little learn to take part in a conversation that began long before we were there, like people turning up late at a party when most people have gone and those left have started washing the glasses. We can only contribute what we are given and if we are thanked for it that is in the spirit of courtesy of a hostess who thanks her guest for handing her the plate on which are the cheese straws she made herself. We do not have a history; we receive it from those who are older than us. (32)

Old but vital

When Jesus says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches” He gives us a symbol full of implications. A vine can be very old, with thick gnarled branches; at the same time it bears fresh grapes, young and vital. Such is God: ever ancient, ever new; venerable and vital. (38)

Recurring patterns stabilize

It is not only the daily and the weekly patterns of worship that help us to abide in what does not pass: it is also the yearly cycle of praise. This is so above all because it is patterned after Christ’s life, so that it leads us to abide in the One who abides. His birth, His showing to the nations (the Epiphany), His baptism, His transfiguration, His entry into Jerusalem, His death, His resurrection, His ascension into heaven are all marked liturgically so that the year becomes His life and the repetition of the year’s liturgy brings us into that abiding life. (45)

The ever-present quality of the cycle of the liturgy is a stepping out of time. Liturgy is essentially about stepping out of time to be present to eternity and in particular to the One who is eternal, Jesus Christ. (45)

Battle needs to be undertaken to contemplate the abiding: we need to struggle against the passions which lock our hearts onto the passing things of this world instead of eternal goods. (51)

Loving creation in God

This is spiritual love; its intimacy is closer than that of love of other sorts, though it can be within other sorts of love. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and so in God we have that sort of intimacy with others. We see with the eyes of the Spirit those we pray for. We touch dear ones in prayer.

Consecrated celibacy has a special reach here. John Milton wrote of “the sun-clad power of chastity.” Its love is like the sun because the sun’s light and warmth reach everywhere: its love is in God and God is everywhere present. And it changes everything. In loving Christ we love God. And as love of a particular person makes special the city in which that person lives, so love of God changes the whole of creation for it all speaks of Him: the lion of His majesty, the dove of His peacefulness, the peacock of His beauty and so on. Most particularly, people speak of Him. Each person holds the whole of creation in his or her thoughts. Each person is an image of the Creator’s presence in His creation. To love God is to love that presence; it is to love those people and their apprehension of the Creation; it is to love creation afresh. (72)

The ultimate Presence

This best gift is offered to us wherever we are: God becomes present in humanity’s isolation so that His communion reaches even there. The cross gives us the Eucharist. This is a physical spiritual communion, for the Lord has promised: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth (μένει/menei) in me and I in him.” This is a “hard saying.” Yet it is no more hard than saying the Word was made flesh, that the Son of God walked among us. Heaven comes to us where we are, in all the desolation of that place, so that we may go to heaven. We are offered a dwelling, an abiding that goes beyond this world, and invited to “labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth (μένουσαν/menousan) unto everlasting life.” (76)

He is really and abidingly present in both His humanity and His divinity to the end, giving Himself to us in unreserved love. (77)

When we talk about the Eucharist and the Blessed Sacrament, we are also talking about Mary who is as it were the tabernacle. The “yes” of Mary to the Angel Gabriel is a yes that echoes through eternity. Therefore she is spiritually present when Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament. It is her openness to God that makes possible the yes, the nothing but yes, that we have in Christ.16 His yes to us blossoms in our yes to life and what it sends us, in our yes to others, and to Him. His presence affirming us and the affirmation we give comes through Mary. Jesus incarnate through her is in the Blessed Sacrament. The feast of Corpus Christi, when we celebrate that presence, is like having Christmas in the summer.¹ (79)

We know how to put limits on what we say out of love: God in His Word is the same. Jesus as a baby is wrapped in swaddling clothes; the Lord is with us as a prisoner of the tabernacle as, more terribly, he was a prisoner when He was condemned to death. That limitation is accepted by God. This is a perfection in God, just as the pianist, cook or conversationalist have something extra in the holding of their tongues: not more skill, but more love. (80-81)

How limit and infinity go together

The infinite can be given something by the finite. Limitation adds something to unlimitedness. If you think about an infinite series of numbers you come to a halt when you try to imagine whether the final number is odd or even because of course if it is odd there could be an even one after it and vice versa. So in truth the infinite is an order of reality different from that of the finite and if there is this difference, then the finite adds something to the infinite, the limited adds something to the unlimited: particularity.

That is what the presence of the Lord in His earthly life and in the Blessed Sacrament is doing: it is adding something. God comes to us as a particular person and in a particular way. This is a comfort. To compare the sublime to the mundane: however efficient a company’s online dealings are, it really helps if there is someone you can talk to if things go wrong. This is a plus, not a failure to construct the perfect algorithm.

Pursuing this line of thought, we can say God is not limited by His unlimitedness or we can say with Nicholas of Cusa that God is the coincidence of opposites, the infinite and the finite. God transcends the infinite by accepting limitation. He lives in eternity in which the limitations— essentially separations—of time and space are absent. Nonetheless He accepts these limitations with the concomitant loss and sorrow of separation in order to walk among us. (81)

The vulnerability of Christ

What is going on here—in the Incarnation— is that Our Lord is putting Himself in a position where He relates to people. There is the possibility of reciprocity, of His receiving as well as giving, of love and friendship. As when He walked the earth, so in His presence in the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord is wanting friendship…. So He invites a relationship with us by putting Himself in a position in which He can truly receive from us…. In order to enter into that friendship with us, He has to be vulnerable. (82)

In the Blessed Sacrament His tender vulnerability is prolonged: He waits for someone who may never come, offering friendship that may not be accepted…. The Lord in the Blessed Sacrament enters into such a vulnerability: that of being there for us in a way which we can ignore, the vulnerability of being able to receive from us that which we are able to deny giving, a true human vulnerability. (83)

God is omnipotent as we say in the creed but God is also the coincidence of opposites, so God is the most vulnerable as well as the most powerful. He transcends omnipotence, choosing to be vulnerable for the sake of love. That vulnerable presence is with us in the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord suffers as He suffered on the cross because He is not accepted and He is not allowed to heal. The suffering is ongoing. The physical agony of the cross is an instantiation of that deeper pain of not being accepted and allowed to care for the one who is loved. (84)

Both the vulnerability and the victory are truly present in the Blessed Sacrament…. it is a real ongoing presence of His awesome personal love both vulnerable and victorious. (85)

Suffering softens or hardens

One way or another we all know the heat of affliction, but it can cook us different ways: like a potato that becomes soft in the center the more it is baked or like an egg that becomes hard in the center the more it is boiled. How we accept what happens to us determines which way it is. We do not have to undertake this acceptance alone. It has in one sense even been done for us; certainly, the grace of acceptance has been won for us. (99)

Faith overcomes the tendency to invest in “things on the earth” as though they offered an abiding home. (111)

Scientism = death

The notion that what can be established by measurement and calculation about this sublunary world is somehow an absolute is a diabolical lie. Making the foundation of life “evidence based” is the attempt to live from death, for the measured is what is not moving on and the recorded is fixed, like the duchess’ portrait on the wall. That is not to say that science as we know it cannot give useful insights, simply that the true absolute transcends what we know through our senses. The error is to suppose that what we know in space and time is a closed system which can be explained in terms of itself. Anything built on this supposition is subject to the fire of the apocalypse as the divine truth subsumes it. We are called to live from the stable, but now largely forgotten, perspective that understands that everything is sustained by the divine, instead of from the aberrant instability of a this-worldly view. We have to lose the life that leads to decay and death because it is rooted in what is passing to find life that is true and eternal because it rests on the rock who is Christ. (117-18)

The above quotations are from Fr. Luke Bell’s Staying Tender (Angelico Press, 2020).

1. Something emphasized all the more by the pre-55 practice of using the Preface of the Nativity for it!