The eternal and joyful greeting: "May the Lord be with you." (3/3)

Published on May 19 2020 by F. Florin Callerand

To end this meditation, all that remains is to bring it to the maximum splendour of evangelical revelation and to properly understand that God is not Creator as an act of charity but because of a need within his eternal heart. He can but create. Because, He is love.

Daring to speak of an “eternal determinism” which would stifle God from creating seems excessive or even heretical. However, if “God is Love” how can we imagine him living even for a single instant, over or outside of time, where he would not communicate, by “giving himself in participation,” as the church teaches.

Could we not also, welcome the parabol which comes to us from some of God’s rather wonderful creations?

Take the sun or the stars, for example, could they keep the burning heat that makes up their core shut inside of them, aren’t they under “obligation” to shine? Would the rays’ happiness - supposing they become aware- not be to experience the incredible generosity of their permanent and plentiful source at their core. But would the happiness of the plentiful source not be to contemplate from within, the happiness of the rays in its own intimate light?

We cannot separate the happiness of one, from the happiness of the other. If we are at least aware of this inconceivable separation, we could ask ourselves less tragic questions with regards to the impossibility of an external God who was not sensitive to the sufferings of his creation! If we knew that he is always with us in the most total sense of the word, and that He is not the false Blessing we believe in the philosophies and some theologies who take inspiration from him! Nothing that happens in the World is not fully felt by God!

How can we not consider the reciprocal joy that God and Mary share as they love one another without shadows nor attenuation, but how can we not think of the pain of God’s solitude when this Love is not shared by those who sin or act as if they love him, that is what the Gospel calls hypocrites.

The incarnation of God at the center of mankind allows us to capture the happiness of a beloved Love and the misfortune of an unloved Love! Francis of Assis travelled to villages and the countryside moaning that, “Love was not loved.” When we speak of Virgin Mary’s “Seven Sorrows,” we must consider that the number “Seven” designates the incredible intensity and variety of this same pain. But we must also speak of, Mary’s “Seven Joys” to translate both her Happiness at being with God and God’s happiness of being with Her and those who, like Her, respond to the Secret call! According to the name that the Eternal gives himself and Angel Gabriel passes on: “And you shall call his name Emmanuel, ‘God with us!’” We can clearly see that the liturgical greeting on

which we meditate comes from the highest point of the revelation. In fact, God does not have double standards, He is “Love.” So, we must carefully scrutinize the word with. God, the Emmanuel, is with each of us in our own unique way that is special to us!

Let us look at a final illustration of the shared Love between the creator and the creation in a scene from the Gospel, called “The Samaritan Woman”

We have the habit, and rightly so, of stopping first at the comfort and spiritual freedom that Jesus gave this woman, a heretic to orthodox Jews, and doubtless rejected as impure, dirty in the eyes of God, by the people of her Samaritan village who led a puritan way of life. Just imagine, five successive spouses and the sixth could not even be a legal spouse! Five times divorced and five times remarried lawyers would say today! She is in a situation with no way of finding a solution. We are dealing with a “socially excluded woman” (which explains why she comes to the well, alone, at a time when the women in the village do not come to fetch their water). But we must also dare to consider what Jesus received from this woman, what she gave him that was so infinitely precious as she stayed close to him, during their long conversation!...

Certainly, some will highlight that she first received the humble request of a favor from Jesus very badly: “Give me something to drink!” She refuses haughtily to tip her jug towards the face of this thirsty man: “Jews do not usually drink from the cup of Samaritans!” But in that, Jesus, feeling sorry for her, understands that there is nothing more in her behaviour than the response of a Samaritan belonging to an injured people who are cruelly scorned by the highly insular, racist Jews that she may have met.

Very quickly, the tone changes. The Samaritan notices that she is dealing with an honest, noble man. Sympathy is born between them. He speaks to her of the secret that she carries deep within her, that appears on her disheartened face: the great misfortune of the failure of her attempts at love. She has been used, exploited and here before her is a being that does not condemn but would like to speak to her about “Godly things” ... “I can see you are a prophet” she says to him. The conversation has begun, even though it starts out one sided. Jesus leads it. As for the Samaritan, as aggressive as she was, she now listens, becomes a disciple. The time Jesus spends talking to her must have been quite long, given the distance, to and from, the wells of Jacob and the village where the disciples had gone in search of food. We must add that the “Things from above” that Jesus talks to her about is actually the Whole of the Revelation: “It is neither in Jerusalem, nor Gerizim that God wants to be worshipped, it is in the Truth and in the Spirit. Outside of that, there are no true worshippers, as the Father would want them. There is only a religion of rites and dried out formulas!” So, if we remake this scene from the Gospel according to the data of its texts, as many great artists have done, we see Jesus sitting on the curbstone or the edge of the wells, reduced to a small size, while the woman stands, as if she were tall. There is here, in a symbolic way, the expression of the whole Message!

The transcendence of God the creator and savior consists of being humble, a requester. The transcendence of the human freedom created is the object of infinite respect on God’s part offering himself to her!

“You who are looking for God,” writes Saint John of the Cross,

know that God is looking for you with even more fervour!”

We can only make a precise reconciliation in the kneeling position that God takes, on the eve of Maundy Thursday in front of his disciples. The incredible, the impossible appears: the Almighty becomes the requester or even the beggar! In this way, the Gospel introduces the truth of the God who is just Love! The Virgin Mary was very certainly the most shaken and stunned of all creatures, as on the day of the Annunciation, the Word of God asked her permission to make flesh within her and to live among us! Shortly after this event, She sings: “The Almighty has done great things for me, holy is his name!” That is what is being talked about...

Kneeling from the Almighty is not a gesture of moral parade, but the very expression of his secret Being. Divine people do not only sit together side-by-side, they also kneel face-to-face! They do not change position to create and offer themselves to the world one after the other. In fact, the “washing of feet” evokes the request made during the Annunciation of Mary, but also announces the sacrament of the eternal Mystery which focuses on the Gift of the Consecration: “Take this and eat it!”

“Oh God, you are a hidden God” exclaimed the prophet Isaiah, meaning you surprise us, you are nothing like a potentate, an emperor, a conquering general, a dominating pharaoh. We were not expecting this attitude of modesty on your part. From the swaddling in Bethlehem where Mary gives birth to him in a manger, to the shroud of Calvary where Joseph and Nicodemus and John and Mary laid him in the tomb, we must now learn to recognise God, delivered by his own nature to the mercy of his creation. “Look,” said the Curé of Ars in ecstasy, lifting and lowering the consecrated Host which he offered for his followers to worship, “I can do whatever I want with it!”

If we raise an authentic awareness of the basis of Christian revelation, we could say that this is a terrible, “tremenda!” Terrifying even, not because we risk being crushed by God, but because we understand the demanding lesson given by Jesus, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Therefore, as you say I am your Master and Lord, Love one another in this way; this is how you will be recognised as my disciples!” (John 16,17) In fact that can be frightening!

We could say, truly, that Eternal God cannot live unless it is in dialogue with the creatures that have become his peers. This is why, without a doubt, Father Lucien Laberthonnière spoke these words which seemed so scandalous at the time (1930),

“In creating us, God made us his brothers!”

So it is not only during liturgy that we should greet each other with the words of the Revelation, “May the Lord be with you.” but at every meeting, every exchange, at every undertaking! We should also reciprocate with the appropriate reply, “And also with you!”

The liberating Truth of all evil promotes all good to take root, grow, flourish and bear fruit already in the universal fact that we constantly need one another, but even more so for the fact that we must reveal to ourselves and to each other, the Great, the Secret ALL-OTHER He Himself, the God-Love who we call the Transcendent, the Eternal, Incarnated forever thanks to the Virgin Mary, Risen from the dead, our Creator and Saviour, FATHER, SON, HOLY SPIRIT, always kneeling in front of us and telling us that he needs each one of our faces, to make HIS appear!

“May the Lord be with you.”

Florin Callerand

La Roche d'Or, 2nd and 4th October 1995

On the celebration of Theresa the Child of Jesus

and of Francis of Assisi

Part 3/3

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simon