"A New Season"
"The Fire of Love"
In the previous teaching we began to
mention the "ferocious flames" of God's love. The God of love is the God of
fire; for, love's "flames are a blazing fire", and "stern as death is love,
relentless as the nether world is devotion" (Songs 8:6B). True love is
both unyielding and uncompromising. God is an extreme lover. He calls me to
"the conflagration of consummation". I am to become fire as I am
drawn more and more into His life and as I am transformed by His divine love.
For, the fire of God's love seeks the inmost depths of my heart. This is to be
the dwelling place of His divine flames. Do I dare allow myself to be seized
and carried away by the force of His love, overwhelmed by His all-consuming
fire, devoured by His deep, driven devotion?! Why not become an "incandescent"
intercessor?!
God wants my desire and longing for
Him to increase, so He draws my heart through "flames of tender touches" (St.
John of the Cross. Living Flame of Love, st.
I, no. 8, p. 582). In a saying attributed to Jesus, cited by Origen, Jesus
says, "He who is close to me is close to fire" (cited by Origen in Dictionary
of Biblical Theology, p. 183). Has not Jesus said, "I have come to
set the earth on fire" (Luke 12:49); and does not St. John describe Jesus in The
Book of Revelation: "His eyes were [like] a fiery flame" (Rev.
1:14;19:12)?! Where there are flaming eyes, there is a flaming heart as well!
How close will I allow God to draw to me?! Do I risk an all-consuming
closeness, an "incinerating" oneness?!
St. Paul reminds me that as I get
closer and closer to God--drawn into His "irresistible embrace"--I am changed
from 'glory to glory', and I "become more and more like the one [I] love"
(Thomas Dubay, S.M., Prayer Primer: Igniting a
Fire Within, p. 33). The more I am drawn into the "fierce furnace" of God's
love, the more I am changed into a "living torch" of love. Fire consumes what
it encounters. St. Teresa of Avila tells us that God "makes it [my soul] desire
Him vehemently" (Teresa of Avila. The Interior Castle,
sect. VI, chap. 2, no. 1-3, pp. 366-367). The word, vehement, means 'intense,
full of vigor or energy'. Does not St. Peter exhort, "Love one another intensely
from a pure heart" (1 Pet. 1:22). I can only love humanity intensely and purely
as an intercessor if I first encounter and surrender to the God of devouring
intensity! One can speak, in fact, of the "burning of yearning", "the fire of
desire", "the forge of fierce familiarity" with the God Who "does not
conquer our hearts except through the excess of love" (The Cantata of
Love. Blaise Arminjon S.J., p. 153).
Questions:
1) Any
of the questions found in the text
2) How
fierce is my friendship with God?
Scriptures:
Any scripture from the text; Jr. 23:29; Luke 24:32
