Tuesday, December 29, 2009

"The Logic of Love"

Today is the fifth day of Christmas.

Some food for thought:

"Jesus' identification with the poor remains one of the greatest and most incomprehensible mysteries of the Gospels. How can God who is all powerful, all beautiful and all glorious become so powerless, so little, so weak?

The logic of love is different from the logic of reason and power.

When you love someone, you use her language to be close to her. When you love a child, you speak and play with him as a child. That is how God relates to us. God becomes little so that we will not be frightened of him, so that we can enter into a heart-to-heart relationship of love and communion.

The Word became flesh to reveal what is most precious in each one of us: our hearts; our thirst to be loved; and our capacity to love, be kind and compassionate and give life to others.

What is most important is not our knowledge or influence, but the love hidden in our hearts, which permits us to use our knowledge and gifts to serve others, to give life and build covenant relationships. ...

... Our God is not a God of rules, regulations, and obligations or a master teacher who wants to impose a path to salvation. Our God is a God of love and communion, a heart yearning to communicate to another heart the joy and ecstasy of love and communion that exist between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."


-- Jean Vanier, a founder of L'Arche, an international network of communities centered around people who have developmental disabilities.

This passage is from "The Heart of L'Arche: A Spirituality for Every Day." (I added some of the paragraph breaks.)

The image above is from the Parish Blog of St. Edward the Confessor.


2 comments:

St Edwards Blog said...

Oh Paul - I love Jean Vanier and I love what this says.

And I got the image from here, where I work, I don't think it is up there any more though!

breadgirl said...

Hi Paul
This is lovely. Jean Vanier is quite a man, isn't he? Did you know that his father was once Governor General of Canada? The picture in this post is beautiful as well. Thanks for another good post! God bless you.