What are the steps for falling in love? There is an attraction. Then some social connection—conversation, shared activity, maybe casual dating. Then, at some point, you begin to reveal yourself to each other. You go beyond your “most presentable self” to matters deep in your heart. As you express yourself to attentive eyes and ears, you grow brave, beautiful, and deep—as does the other. As you reveal more and more of yourself to each other, suddenly or over considerable time, a committed bond begins to form—a bond of love.
Love requires revelation. For love is “seeking the good of the other as other,” as St. Thomas Aquinas said. That seeking the good must find the good—and the good must be revealed. Otherwise, it would be foolish to make a commitment. Yet, it also seems, revelation requires vulnerability. When anyone reveals what is true, deep, and important—the stuff below the layers of sociability—their whole self is on the line. That makes revelation a risky behavior. The other can always turn away or turn against, instead of turning toward.
And, indeed, that is probably why there is so very much drama to falling in love. Including falling in love with God.
It is also said: “God has no grandchildren,” meaning we each must come to form our own personal bond with God. We must fall in love with God to form a committed bond with him. We cannot depend on the love and faith of our parents or grandparents. Nor can God. And personal bonds with God also depend on revelation—God to us and us to God.
Jacob’s Ladder
Today’s first reading is the story of Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob is Abraham’s grandchild. God had revealed himself to Abraham multiple times. They were friends. He had revealed himself to Abraham’s son Isaac several key times. Now Abraham has died, Isaac is very old, and Jacob has tricked both his twin brother Esau and his father Isaac to get Isaac’s blessing. Esau is angry and seeks Jacob’s life. Jacob escapes and begins a journey all the way back to Haran to get a wife from among his mother Rebekah’s people. This is a journey of about 500 miles. When he has traveled about 50 miles, he has a dream. In the dream God reveals himself.
Jacob sees a ladder reaching from the ground to the heavens. God’s messengers are going up and down on it. God stands beside it and tells him, “I, the Lord, am the God of your forefather Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. These shall be as plentiful as the dust of the earth, and through them you shall spread out east and west, north and south. In you and your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing. Know that I am with you; I will protect your wherever you go, and bring you back to this land. I will never leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
The Meaning of the Ladder
For Jacob, the meaning of the ladder was simple: he had truly received Isaac’s blessing, the God of Isaac and Abraham was to be trusted. He needed to commit to worship, trust, and follow him. And so he did.
Monks of the early centuries in both the Egyptian desert and European monasteries took the image of Jacob’s ladder to mean the path to develop holiness. They especially connected the ladder with the path of the beatitudes. To reach holiness, begin with poverty of spirit and proceed through developing habits of meekness, mourning for sin, mercy, and doing what God asks, to eventually become pure of heart and able to live in peace. Their perspective is the picture you see at the beginning of this reflection. It is conceptualized in the Rule of St. Benedict, which, as a Benedictine Oblate, I read every day.
Paragraph by paragraph, day by day, reflecting on how to live by those Beatitudes and climb that ladder has an influence on me and creates a loving bond with God. It isn’t the extraordinary revelation God gave Isaac in his dream—yet, living in the shadow of that ladder brings the same effect: again and again, morning offering by morning offering, I commit to worship, trust, and follow the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God reveals himself to me. I reveal myself to Him. We are bonded. We have fallen in love.
Why God Creates a Ladder
The Catholic catechism begins, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church.” (CCC 1)
What has become true for me is meant to be true for everyone. It is offered to everyone.
Our Catechetical Directory study groups are reading “Chapter One: Revelation” this month. I have been struggling with putting its beautiful words into some cohesive pattern I can follow—a Jacob’s ladder. Finally, last Friday, an understanding of the key role of Revelation came to me. Our efforts to teach and evangelize are attendants to God’s revelation. AND GOD’s REVELATION IS TRUE, GRADUAL, AND PERSONAL.
I’ve said for several years: “Follow Jesus, who had dinner with scandalous sinners, healed the sick, taught the multitudes, argued with the Pharisees, and patiently lived with the disciples.”
What I didn’t see until now is that God comes at the foot of the ladder, wherever that ladder is–50 miles into a 500 mile journey, in a dinner conversation, with a terminal illness, in a homily, or through a painful argument. And whenever God comes at the foot of the ladder, God reveals Himself. We, too, are invited to reveal ourselves. Vulnerable to vulnerable, dream to dream, promise to promise.
God started by revealing himself to Abram and making promises. Eventually, God and Abraham, now bonded friends, had conversations to solve problems together. God repeated that process with Isaac. God revealed himself (beginning with the ram caught in the bush that saved Isaac’s life), then later helped him solve some political problems. Now God reveals himself to Jacob. As we will see through the next few weeks, they, too, bond from this beginning.
Abram seems to have been a righteous man when God began the relationship. By our standards, Jacob at the time of his dream was less so. Nonetheless, God revealed himself. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob responded with beginning a bonded, loving relationship. In time, God required of Abraham and Isaac, and will require of Jacob, acquiescence to God’s ways that don’t always make sense by human judgement. But in the beginning, GOD REVEALED HIMSELF. Period.
God does not require that a person ALREADY be on the ladder to heaven. God created all of us with a hunger to be with the One whose pattern of being is written on our soul at conception. When some event intensifies our hunger enough there is some kind of openness, God comes…AT THE FOOT OF THE LADDER.
Yes, in time we have to climb the virtues. But God starts at the foot of the ladder, no matter where the foot of the ladder is.
Prayer:
Lord, thank you for Jacob’s ladder. Thank you for seeking relationship—with us sinners whom you can love enough to become saints. Keep me on the ladder, Lord, and show me how to encourage others to climb, too. To paraphrase an old poem, “Let me live in a house by the side of the ladder, and be a friend to man.”
