Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Graft in our hearts the love of your Name….

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

People like me, who expect others to listen while they tell them about God had better watch out. They are like the Pharisee’s guests, who took places of honor at the banquet. We may be in for an unpleasant surprise! I had better not delude myself about how much I know. I may find myself embarrassed as I creep down to the lowest place. To speak is folly; yet silence is impossible.

Today, we pray to god: graft in our hearts the love of your Name. What is that ~ the “love of the Name of God”? We do not know the Name. How can we love it? The word, God is without content. It is not god’s Name. How can we love what we do not know? Unless, by Name we mean public reputation ~ God’s Name meaning what we think about God. But in that case, God’s Name is not one thing. Very diverse and contradictory things are thought about God; and if I love what I think about God, I run the risk of idolatry.

To know the Name of God would be to know God’s very being. That is beyond us. When Moses asked God to tell him the Name, God tried, I think, for Moses was God’s friend. God told the Name and Moses heard something incomprehensible about Being. The best he could do to put it into words was I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE, which Greek-speaking Jews later translated as I AM WHO I AM. God confided the Name to humanity, but we can’t really understand it. Human consciousness, by definition, can’t contain Infinity. Even Almighty God can’t change that, any more than God could draw a triangle with four sides.

Later, the Name was believed to be known to the High Priest, passed down from Moses through Aaron, and pronounced once a year in the Holy of Holies in secret. It is said that was why they sewed little bells on the hem of the High Priest’s robe, so that when he disappeared behind the veil into the Presence, standing before the Ark and the empty space between the carved cherubim on top of it, where the Unnamable dwelt, those outside could tell by the tinkling if the High Priest was surviving the encounter.

Nowadays, scholars are pretty sure we know the Name, and we say it all the time: YAHWEH. But that tells us almost nothing. Better to fear the Name as those ancient priests did, so that the Mystery of God remained a living reality, rather than a dead word. They loved the Name, I guess, precisely because they did not know it. Or rather, they knew it only partially. That is the genius of Hebrew religion. There is some self-disclosure, some revelation of God, but it needs to be apprehended with utmost care, and with the humility of the timid guest, who sits down at the lowest place. The Chinese say, the way that can be told of is not the true Way. I am told this is a play on the various meanings of the word, Tao: path, traveling the path, truth, knowledge. The tao that can be tao-ed is not the tao Tao. And Buddha taught of an infinite Void. At about the same time, the ancient Hebrews had found that God could not be named, even though God has a Name.

God has a Name, and we pray that we may love it, even though we don’t know it. This love is not a feeling or an emotion, but an act of our will, as love always is: a decision to open ourselves to the Other in benevolence and vulnerability. The heart that we open is not the metaphorical center of our emotional life, but the mystical center of our whole being, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical alike. That is the meaning of the human heart in the biblical tradition. In our prayer, we ask God to make this open-heartedness a permanent condition. That the love of God’s Name may take root in the soil of our human flesh, transforming the compost of this mortal life into magnificent fruit, fit for the King’s table.

The transfiguring Love of your Name, in its mystical meaning is not only our openness to the Unnamable, it is also God’s love for us and for all creation. The Love of the Name is both at once, they are the same thing: our love of God and God’s love for us. And if we CANNOT utter the personal Name of God, we can and do proclaim the Name of God’s relationship to us, the personal Name of the Love that liberates us and brings us to the fullness of life and health, in a word the Name that means salvation: Yeshua, God saves, Jesus. God revealed the Name to Moses, insofar as he could understand it. And in the fullness of time, God revealed more of the Divine Identity in Jesus, the only-begotten Son. The Son, Whose incarnate Name means salvation for us, but Whose Identity is further revealed to us as One of Three Divine Persons, Whose inner life of love God wills to share with us and with all creation. That is the salvation ~ the wholeness of life ~ that Jesus brings as Savior.

The Passion and Death of the Godman was not a sacrifice necessary to appease God, but to appease US. To begin to show us the meaning of the Name¸God saves. God is not a stern father, whose infinite justice requires an infinite sacrifice. The prophets of Israel already knew that centuries before Christ: “incense is an abomination to me. The smoke of your burnt offerings a stench in my nostrils.” The Godman had to die in the most horrible possible way in order to break through our unwillingness to believe that God loves us with a love perfect and ultimate, unconditionally and independent of any sacrifice. But even though we behold this perfect Love in the Cross of Christ, it is still but a partial revelation ~ a symbol for something we cannot comprehend, because we are still finite and God is still infinite, and God still will be who God will be.

Paul says ~ and we believe ~ that salvation is in the Name of Jesus. In one sense, that is merely a truism, because the Name of Jesus MEANS God saves. But it also means that all those willing to open themselves to ultimate Reality in benevolence and vulnerability are believers in Jesus ~ believers that God saves. I think that is what is meant when, again and again, Jesus told people, “your faith has saved you.” Today we pray that God may cause this willingness to take root in our deepest selves: graft in our hearts the love of your Name. Orthodox monks and nuns take this prayer with utmost realism, repeating the Holy Name constantly, while focusing on the heart and breathing in the Spirit ~ a practice intended to graft the love of the Name in their hearts. This is the subject of an extended retreat. For now, this observation is enough: some practice is necessary, some effort on our part to keep the door open.

The result is the increase of true religion, genuine and permanent opening to the infinite, as opposed to any form of false religion that would shut up our hearts. And as this true religion increases, the open heart, in which the Love of God’s Name is grafted, will provide ever more opportunity for the transfiguring Love of God to enter the real world here and now ~ our world ~ as God brings forth in us the fruit of good works.

AMEN

MARANATHA

BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD

FROM THIS TIME FORTH AND FOREVER MORE!