The Wise Men travelled a long way and nobody knows the difficulties they had to overcome. Each of us also travels as they did. They were loaded with gifts, gold for the king, frankincense for the God, myrrh for the man who was to suffer death. Where can we get gold, frankincense and myrrh, we who are indebted for everything to God? We know that everything we possess has been given us by God and is not even ours forever or with certainty. Everything can be taken away from us except love, and this is what makes love unique and something we can give. Everything else, our limbs, our intelligence, our possessions can be taken by force from us, but with regard to love, there is no means of getting it, unless we give it. In that sense we are free with regard to loving, in a way in which we are not free in other activities of soul or body. Although fundamentally even love is a gift of God, because we cannot produce it out of ourselves, yet, once we possess it, it is the only thing that we can withhold or offer.
Bemanos says in the Diary of a Country Priest that we can also offer our pride to God, ‘Give your pride with all the rest, give everything.’ Pride offered in that context becomes a gift of love, and everything which is a gift of love is well pleasing to God.
‘Love your enemies, bless them that hate you’ (Mt 5: 44), is a command that may be more or less easy to follow; but to forgive those who inflict suffering on one’s beloved is altogether different, and it makes people feel as if taken in disloyalty. Yet, the greater our love for the one who suffers, the greater our ability to share and to forgive, and in that sense the greatest love is achieved when one can say with Rabbi Yehel Mikhael ‘I am my beloved’. As long as we say ‘I’ and ‘he’ we do not share the suffering and we cannot accept it. The mother of God at the foot of the cross was not in tears, as shown so often in western paintings; she was so completely in communion with her son that she had nothing to protest against. She was going through the crucifixion, together with Christ; she was going through her own death. The mother was fulfilling now what she had begun on the day of the presentation of Christ to the temple, when she had given her son. Alone of all the children of Israel he had been accepted as a sacrifice of blood. And she, who had brought him then, was now accepting the consequence of her ritual gesture which was finding fulfilment in reality. As he was then in communion with her, she was completely in communion with him now and she had nothing to protest against.
It is love that makes us one with the object of our love and makes it possible for us to share unreservedly, not only the suffering but also the attitude towards suffering and the executioner. We cannot imagine the mother of God or John the disciple protesting against what was the explicit will of the son of God crucified. ‘No one is taking my life from me, I lay it down of myself’ (Jn 10:18). He was dying willingly, of his own accord for the salvation of the world; his death was this salvation and therefore those who believed in him and wanted to be at one with him could share the suffering of his death, could undergo the passion together with him; but they could not reject it, they could not tum against the crowd that had crucified Christ, because this crucifixion was the will of Christ himself.
We can protest against someone’s suffering, we can protest against someone’s death, either when he himself, rightly or wrongly, takes a stand against it, or else when we do not share his intention and his attitude towards death and suffering; but then our love for that person is an incomplete love and creates separation. It is the kind of love shown by Peter when Christ, on the way to Jerusalem, told his disciples that he was going to his death; Peter ‘took him and began to rebuke him’, but Christ answered: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men’ (Mk 8: 33). We can imagine that the wife of the thief on the left of Christ was full of the same protest against her husband’s death as he himself was; in this respect there was complete communion between them, but they were sharing a wrong attitude.
But to share with Christ his passion, his crucifixion, his death, means to accept unreservedly all these events, in the same spirit as he did, that is, to accept them in an act of free will, to suffer together with the man of sorrows, to be there in silence, the very silence of Christ, interrupted only by a few decisive words; the silence of real communion; not just the silence of pity, but of compassion, which allows us to grow into complete oneness with the other so that there is no longer one and the other, but only one life and one death.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
