I am looking over some notes I took on a book I read quite awhile ago that struck me as very profound, Only Love Creates, by Father Fabio Rosini. (I believe it’s the only book of his that is translated into English.) I had it checked out from our library for so, so long but finally returned it so someone else might have the opportunity to read it. As I said, today I was looking over the notes that I had taken while reading it. Here is just a snippet from the introduction.
“Why does Jesus know how to love? Because he’s loved. He is, and he lives in, a gift—namely, that the Father begot him, gave him being, gave him all of himself.”
“In John 13:23-25 there is a person called ‘the beloved disciple’ who at the Last Supper makes a gesture and reclines his head on Jesus’s chest. At that moment he has an intimate dialogue with Jesus concerning Judas’s betrayal:
One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’
“In that moment he feels Jesus’s heart beat with love for Judas. It’s from that moment that he’s called the ‘beloved disciple,’ not before, because he encountered love. ‘He reclined his head on the chest’ of Jesus: that expression has already appeared at the end of the prologue at the beginning of John’s Gospel, where there is an extraordinary hymn that, toward the end, says, ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (John 1:18). This is the same image, that of a little boy curled up against his daddy. Jesus is always attached to, turned toward, and aimed at the Father, and the beloved disciple does the same thing with Jesus, listening to his heart.”
Witnesses to Hope 