The Infinite Perfection of Love

October 9, Yom Kippur

The day of atonement in Judaism.

Last night it occurred to me that I come to many situations in my life—for example, a Gurdjieff meeting—believing that I have something to offer. 

Behind what I actually am, the objective things that might be offered, stands an individual who believes in their own self importance: that “I” am worthy, that “I” am important, that somehow I have an authority others ought to pay attention to and would benefit from. This belief is ingrained and insidious; it lives deep within the texture of what I am in my ego-self, and no amount of objective counterbalance within Being can completely eliminate it.

There comes a moment, however, when instead of offering my deviously plastic ego, I suddenly receive. That action turns everything of ego on its head.

This receiving is born of Mercy and transmitted through Grace; and in the instant of receiving I see that “I” have nothing to offer. 

I am made nothing; and in nothing I become whole in the Lord.

There’s a truth, mind you, to the fact that within the context of objects, events, circumstances and conditions, I do offer and even must offer. It’s my bounden duty to offer goodness, thanks and praise not just to God, but also my fellow human beings. 

Yet even that offering is limited to the finite world and finite things. In this context I remember what St. Catherine of Siena hears from the Lord during The Dialogue:

…some time ago, if you remember, when you were desirous of doing great penance for My sake, asking, 'What can I do to endure suffering for You, oh Lord?' I replied to you, speaking in your mind, 'I take delight in few words and many works.' I wished to show you that he who merely calls on me with the sound of words, saying: 'Lord, Lord, I would do something for You,' and he, who desires for My sake to mortify his body with many penances, and not his own will, did not give Me much pleasure; but that I desired the manifold works of manly endurance with patience, together with the other virtues, which I have mentioned to you above, intrinsic to the soul, all of which must be in activity in order to obtain fruits worthy of grace. All other works, founded on any other principle than this, I judge to be a mere calling with words, because they are finite works, and I, who am Infinite, seek infinite works, that is an infinite perfection of love. 

—Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, Joseph Pich, 2013.

Within this context of receiving I see how everything I offer within the finite world of objects, events, circumstances and conditions is not enough; and does not even correspond to what my duty towards God calls for. 

Received Grace reveals all in an inner moment of intelligible silence. 

Within this silence, feeling.

In this way Catherine’s calling with words —my ordinary self—is supplanted by an intelligence without any words; and within this intelligence I begin to form a relationship with what Catherine calls an infinite perfection of Love.

If I don’t work towards this infinite perfection of Love, I don’t work.

To be infinite means to be without limit, boundless; it comes from the Latin in- and finitus, meaning unfinished. So this infinite perfection of Love is both unlimited and unfinished; an endless work in progress, formed through relationship.

We have, as organisms, the inner capacity to sense and feel the action of this infinite perfection of Love. Within it I become nothing relative to myself; and I am indeed nothing of myself. 

I see, instead, how I am of God; and within this nothingness of self I discover a new relationship of Being.

Perhaps, one could argue, these are private matters; yet unless I witness God’s Love, attest to it, invest (clothe myself inwardly) in it (invest ever more deeply in sensation), and try as best I can to offer it to another (move from within to without from a center of gravity rooted firmly in feeling) —not from myself, but as God’s vicegerent—I fail to fulfill God’s two great commandments: 

Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; and thou shalt Love thy neighbor as thyself.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.