Tuesday of Holy Week

THE GREAT DISCOVERY
By Fr Louis Bouyer 3
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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.

3 The Life of Our Lord. Daniel-Rops. Hawthorn Books Inc. NY, 1965, p. 140.