Vigils Reading

THE GREAT DISCOVERY

By Fr Louis Bouyer5

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The discovery of grace, the discovery of love which loves us without

looking for any return, which loves us although we are sinners, which loves us

in our sin, but which alone will lead us, by obscure ways known to God alone,

from sin to sanctity, that is, in the last analysis, the great discovery. Then it is

that God reveals Himself to us as One who speaks to us, as One whose Word for

the second time draws us out of nothingness to being, as One whom we have

not so much to seek as to discover seeking us. It is He, the Shepherd who left

the ninety-nine sheep in safety to seek and save that which was lost. It is He, the

Father of the prodigal who goes along the road to welcome his son when he has

scarcely started out to meet his father, and takes him in his arms.

“To seek God”, to seek Him as a person, as the Person par excellence, and

not only as the “Thou” to whom all our love should be addressed, but as the “I”

who has first approached us, whose word of love, addressed to the primeval

chaos, drew us forth from it in the first place, and, spoken to us in our sin, draws

us forth from it again: to be a monk is nothing else than this. To be a monk,

then, is simply to be an integral Christian. And regarded in this light, the

Christian is simply the person restored by the Word of the Gospel to the

vocation which the creative Word destined for each: to respond to the Word of

Agape by the word of faith, in order eventually to meet God face to face.

Commenting on Canticle of Canticles, Origen tells us that the Church,

under the old dispensation, only heard the Bridegroom’s voice, whereas in the

new, she is offered the sight of his countenance. And he adds that the

development of the Christian life is made up solely of this transition. The monk

is the one who does not limit him or herself to accepting it in some measure

passively, by yielding to grace slothfully and reluctantly. The monk is one who

responds with the whole heart to the call which comes from the very heart of

God. Monks are of the number of the violent who will not allow the divine

Kingdom to fall upon them as it were unawares, but who take it by storm in

advance. For that the monks have staked their all, they have burned their boats.

To the one who believes that life consists in what is possessed, the monk

seems to be consenting to, even to be deliberately seeking, a fatal renunciation.

To the one who knows that being is of greater value than having, and that being

which is of value is not that which passes but that which endures, the monk will

seem to be the only true humanist. For the human person is born only as subject

to the divine Word and will only be fully that person the day when, freed from

the nothingness which holds one prisoner, fully surrendered to the Word which

calls, the person will at last come to discover the Face which promised us being

in promising us His own image.

5 The Meaning of the Monastic Life, Louis Bouyer, New York, 1955, p.19 & 22.11