Category: Arminjon, Fr. Blaise

“Where are you?”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved4 Comments

“See where he stands behind our wall.  He looks in at the window, he peers through the lattice.”  (Song of Songs 2.9)

This is the point of Lent: to open up to our Beloved who is looking in at us through the window.  Fr. Blaise Arminjon writes:  “For if God is love, there can only be in the final analysis a single sin: not to love, to refuse to open oneself to the waiting love.”  After Adam and Eve sinned, the first words of God to them were “Where are you?” (Gen 3.9)  God is all about relationship.  He experienced the loss of relationship with Adam and Eve.  His first words to them were not: “What did you do?” but “Where are you?”  And that is what Lent is supposed to be all about for us: our relationship with Him, not what we have done.  (If we concentrate on relationship, the other will fall in  line.) So listen to Him saying to you: “Where are you?”  Hear His desire to coax you out from wherever you may be hiding from Him.  Take a moment, even now, to gaze at Him gazing at you through the lattice and listen to what He speaks to your heart . . .

The Christian life is not a beauty pageant

God “did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.” (Augustine)

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but most of my life growing up I never considered myself as beautiful.  None of my girl friends really were either.  We weren’t part of the homecoming court or a cheerleader.  So what to do with all that I’ve been sharing about beauty?  Hopefully, most of us have made the important transition in our thinking to the realization that beauty is more than skin deep, as they say.  It’s the beauty of the soul, of the spirit that is most important.
      Unfortunately, too many of us who “know that in our heads” still feel like we fall short.  We don’t feel all that beautiful in our souls.  But the Christian life is not a beauty pageant.  Our beauty comes from within, from God who dwells within us.  St. Augustine says in one of his commentaries:

What then is this love that makes the loving soul beautiful?  God, who is always beautiful, who never loses his beauty, who never changes: he loved us first, he who is always beautiful.  And what were we when he loved us if not ugly and disfigured?  But he did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.

It’s almost like sunbathing. We turn ourselves toward Him, and it is He who makes us beautiful.  We just need to be there in His presence.  It’s the sun that makes us tan; it’s the Son who makes us beautiful.  It’s not what we do, but what He does.  Fr. Blaise Arminjon in his Cantata of Love addresses this very point in his commentary on Song of Songs 4.1 “How beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are”:

This is why the Bride [and we are each His bride] would be quite wrong in worrying whether she is truly lovable or not or worthy or not of love since all her beauty is made of her resemblance to her Bridegroom, whole holy face was engraved in her since the very first day and wants to be more and more deeply engraved in her.  Thérèse of Lisieux understands this very well when she reads this verse of the Song: ‘Adorable face of Jesus, only beauty ravishing my heart, deign to imprint on me your divine resemblance so that you may not be able to look into my soul without seeing yourself.’

To be continued tomorrow . . .