(1 John 4: 7-10; Psalm 72: 1-4, 7-8, Mark 6: 34-44)
Perhaps you are familiar with Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s devotion to Jesus’ words from the cross, “I thirst.” It was part of her “call within a call” on the train to Darjeeling in 1946 and central to all her work. Joseph Langford concludes his book Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire with a beautiful meditation written from Jesus’ point of view that both summarizes her spirituality and illuminates today’s readings. Here are some selections from that meditation:
I know what is in your heart. I know your loneliness and all your hurts: the rejections, the judgments, the humiliations. I carried it all before you. And I carried all for you so that you might share my strength and my victory. I know especially your need for love, how you thirst to be accepted and appreciated, loved and cherished.
Don’t you realize that your thirst for love is a thirst for me, I who am Love? I am myself the answer to your deepest desires…..
I thirst for you—just as you are. You don’t need to change to believe in my love, for it will be your belief in my love that will change you. You forget me, and yet I am seeking you every moment of the day, standing at the door of your heart and knocking. All your life I have been looking for your love—I have never stopped seeking to love you and to be loved by you. You have tried many other things in your search for happiness. Why not try opening your heart to me, right now, more than you ever have before?
(From Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire: The Encounter that Changed Her Life and Can Transform Your Own, Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2008, p 297-300)
We live in a culture that speaks much of love. But does our image of love match what love truly is?
It is good to consider what love is, for, as our first reading says today, “love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.” So when we see love, we see God.
John goes on to be specific about this love, “In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we might have life through him.” Yes, the child Jesus in the manger was born to bring us to life with him, through him.
Then comes the magnet sentence: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”
Remember St. Thomas Aquinas definition of love: “to will the good of the other.” Jesus came for our good.
As the Church journeys quickly from the infancy narratives that concluded on Sunday to Jesus’ baptism next Sunday, all this week in the first readings we hear 1 John give us core components of agape, of Christian love. We hear the theory—the big picture. Today the nugget is that God loved us first so that we might be transformed to love as God loves, to live within the Trinity which is God.
In the Gospel readings all week we see examples of what this love looks like in practical terms. Today we hear the story of Jesus’ feeding the 5000. Yesterday we heard Jesus proclaim, “Repent.” Tomorrow the example is Jesus calming the disciples fears when he came walking to them on the water in the storm. All these Gospel examples are familiar stories we also hear at other times. Here they provide snapshots of God’s love IN ACTION: Each is a Corporal or Spiritual Work of Mercy by God aimed at us. Each says “God loves first.” “God loves in practical ways.” “God seeks your good.”
Or, as the Mother Teresa meditation puts it, “God thirsts for you.”
God thirsts for you…God then must thirst for me. For me? Some years ago I had a long, awful, dark time—many personal and family troubles, and God seemed profoundly absent. For seven very long years.
I remember screaming at God one very dark night: “The only reason I believe you love me is because it says you love everyone. I am included in everyone. So you must love me, too, but I cannot see this love. Where are you God?”
Some time after that night I went on a retreat under the direction of a nun whom I had known from work. She knew my sense of alienation from God and assigned me to use the therapy dialogue method I use with families to have a dialogue with God about it. We were at our diocesan retreat center. Earlier that day I had been out walking in the woods.
The conversation between God and me was very intense on my part. As I reached the climax,“Why did you abandon me, God?” I looked down. Out of my blouse crawled a wood tick—which I must have picked up earlier in the day on my walk. It had done me no harm. I had not known it was there. I cupped it in my hands as the sacred object it truly was to me at that moment and tenderly carried it outside.
The meaning was suddenly very clear: The wood tick was God saying, “I was there all along. I meant and did you no harm, though you saw me as harmful.” That epiphany was the beginning of my realizing how much God had thirsted for me, how much he loved me to come as a baby, to teach and feed my mind and heart as a man, and to die—that I might have life. It was the beginning of my return to him.
It was not until years later that I fully understood the part my sinfulness had played in those long, awful years.
Jesus loved me anyway. Just as I was. Lost and wandering as I was. He loved me first. He thirsted for me. He thirsted until he found a way to reach me—through a co-worker and a wood tick. What great love!
God thirsts for you. His love is first for you, too. How do you know? What has he sent into your life to be your wood tick? If you can name it, spend time in Adoration and gratitude today—in church, before a manger scene, or in the quiet of your heart as you walk through your day.
If you are thirsting for God, cry out. By and by he will send you a wood tick to let you know he thirsts for you.
Prayer:
Put yourself in the presence of God and read the last lines of Fr. Langford’s Mother Teresa meditation as Jesus speaking to you—right now:
“No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake. Come to me with your misery and your sins, with your troubles and needs, and with all your longing to be loved. I stand at the door of your heart and knock. Open to me, for I thirst for you.”
Let your heart pour out whatever it speaks. Give yourself up to the conversation.
