Transfigured Love

“I must learn in this life to accept the fact that hunger and restlessness are part of what I am made for.  To love God is not to acquire the biggest and best gratification of all but to have my whole experience of love transfigured.

Instead of the manic struggle to fill the gap in my heart, which leads to the exploitation and domination others and of my whole world, I acknowledge that I am never going to feel cosily at one with myself, all desires gratified; my longing opens out on to the horizon of the infinite God….

….[I can] however, walk with Jesus Christ in the risky territory of this world, trusting his gift and not my effort, to keep me faithful.  And instead of the urge to fill the gap in my heart, that gap becomes the way in which God’s love comes alive in me:  I start wanting what God wants, I come to share his will to give himself.

And so I begin to see other human beings in the light of God, to love them a bit more as he does, to long for their good as if it were mine.  This, says Augustine, is how the passion for justice grows out of love for God:  I stop taking it for granted that how I define what’s good for me sets the agenda for everyone else, and I learn to see that there is no good for me that doesn’t involve good for others.”

[italics mine]

Rowan William, on St. Augustine of Hippo, in ‘Luminaries: Twenty Lives that illuminate the Christian way’ pg. 17-18

Luminaries

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