Cor Unum Abbey

            We have looked briefly into the life of Thèrése of Lisieux, the French Carmelite.

            She entered the monastery at a very young age, having appealed directly to the Pope for special permission to transgress the age restrictions.   Once inside, she received a wonderful grace to make her vocation not one of holiness, devotion, or learning for her own sake, but for the sake of the love of God. She resolved to do all things for love, as her demonstration of her love for the Father and His Son.

            She died at a very tender age, of tuberculosis, but not before her “Little Way,” her way of love, had been so influential that her superiors insisted she write an exposé concerning her life and the development of her thought and purpose.

Thèrése wrote of a most happy childhood and of early sentiment and resolve toward God, which were not amazing in consideration of the tender love and honor she was given at home.

She wrote, too, of her own feelings of irritation and impatience with others, her fears and her perceptions inside the monastery.  These she determined to commend to the love of God.  She would do all things for love. 

What does our Lord indicate when He admonishes us, “Take My Yoke upon you and learn of Me . . .”?

The burden that Jesus Christ bore all the way to His crucifixion was the yoke of love; He loved the Father, and the Father loves us.  Jesus did all things for love, as we are enjoined to do.  He knew that the will of His Father emanated from love; by Him we have come to know, “God is love.”

As Jesus spoke, perhaps His hearers could have lifted up their eyes and looked over His shoulder to see the farmer in the distance, leading a team of oxen.  Two strong burden bearers in harness, yoked together, getting the job done.

If we, like Thèrése, will fit our will into the yoke of the love of Jesus Christ, we will find rest for our souls.

            We spent yesterday in the Abbey in consideration of this point:

            Can we in Cor Unum, can those whose lives are redeemed in the Lord Jesus Christ, live “perfectly” before God?  More to the point, we stated the conditions: we are faulty, fearful, frail people, and we are commanded to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.

            The Scripture itself gives us the answer to the mystery.  When a wild olive tree begins to grow cultivated produce, grafting has taken place.  When a host fruit tree begins to grow a variety not its own, look to the grafted branch!

            In Cor Unum, today, we will love with a love we cannot manufacture.

            We will hope with hope that we cannot sustain, and we will live by a reality that, apart from engrafting, would be less intelligible to us than the call of the wind over the prairie.  That reality is stated simply, “the just shall live by faith.”

            God extends the entire justice of life from the dead to those who will believe that He loves them.   He states clearly that He will abide with them . . . in them . . . that they may love and hope and believe, continually, by the love and hope and faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

            We are planted in Him, and His life is flowing through us.

            The doors of Cor Unum open day by day to those who hear the call of the Husbandman:  “Have it! Have the life of the Son in exchange for doubt and fear, selfishness and death!  Have it!  He is the Vine, and you are the branches!”

            The door opens, and we step into the monastery of the heart where we will have what the wounds of Jesus Christ have opened to us.

by permission,

Uwe Barghaan, Wikipedia

  One of the primary adjustments that Cor Unum will make upon our hearts is a right perspective on perfection.

            The One Who told us, “Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48,) also helped us understand that we are sometimes blind, unhearing, and of little faith. He addressed our fears, our unbelief, and our stiff necks!  He commands perfection and shows us our wretchedness!

            Yet those who knock upon the Abbey doors, must not take “No one is perfect!” as their monastic mantra.

            Let us sanctify this day by denying neither our iniquity nor His commandment, and see what we see before the sun rises tomorrow.

photo by di

            When our Lord tells us that “perfect love casts out fear,” does He mean the existence or the operation of perfection of love?

            Let’s take a look.

            The Scripture tells us . . . God is love.  His love His perfect.  He is perfect.  Here in Cor Unum, His perfect love will cast out fear. 

            Jesus was so entirely acquainted with Perfect Love that He went fearlessly to Calvary to bear our cross unto death and into hell and on to heaven.  We can trust the perfect-ness of God’s love.  Perfect love exists.

            When perfect love is brought to bear in any situation, fear cannot abide.  When children are out of line, for instance, and correction comes, when a child trembles for the wrong he has done and the consequences he must face, perfect love can discipline in such a way that love increases.  The child begins to take comfort in the operation of perfect love.  He comes to know that his parents will not allow him to become reprobate in any degree.  The boundaries and the conditioning of parental authority are protection and security. 

            Corrie ten Boom tells the story of Thomas in Africa, a Christian man whose neighbor began setting fire to the thatch of Thomas’ hut in the night hours, endangering Thomas’ wife and small children as well.  The villagers helped put the blazes out, but one night, the sparks blew over to the home of Thomas’ enemy.  His roof was in flames, and Thomas ran across to help douse the fire, severely burning his hands. 

            The villagers were incensed and sent the bad neighbor to the courts and to jail.  Thomas wept for him, that he too might come to know the love of Jesus Christ.

            Perfect love.  It exists, and it works!

            Thomas’ neighbor did find, through Thomas’ perfect love, the salvation that Jesus had purchased for both of them through His perfect love.

 public domain

Wikipedia

            “ . . . I do not know what to lament more: those who have been slain, or those whom they have taken captive, or those whom the devil has mightily ensnared.  Together with him, they will be slaves in hell . . .”

Patrick knew the danger he faced from the barbarian Picts who hated his message and sought his ruin.

He knew the horror of tribal wickedness, of leaders that took raiding parties into villages where new believers were gathering in growing numbers, showing no mercy to women or children, as none had been shown to him.

He never discounted the scope of their godlessness, but Patrick knew one thing more.  He knew that he had been a slave among those who had been taken captive to the will of the devil, and without sickly sentiment, he never stopped holding out to them the Word of Life.  (2 Timothy 2:26)

Patrick knew the danger, and he knew his adversaries, and Patrick knew that perfect love casts out fear.

We in Cor Unum have suffered some of the dangers of life and have been face to face at times with those who have truck with wickedness and are slaves to it.  Whenever and wherever the devil has made minions of those whom God knit together in a mother’s womb, perfect love for them, redeeming, delivering love for them, will deliver us from fear.

Just as it was for us, God knows how to love the most vile, the most depraved, the most bitter, the most fearsome among men, and He will love them while they hate and revile Him.  All those appointed unto eternal life will be won to the mercy and the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

This, Patrick knew.  Patrick chased the “snakes” out of Ireland, the biting, poisonous barbarians, so utterly without compassion or conscience.  Many of them left by way of faith in the Lord Patrick loved.

It is said in legend that Patrick used a shamrock to portray the Holy Trinity, and it does rather sound like him!  Let us in Cor Unum wear in our souls the “shamrock” of those three elements that abide forever: FAITH, HOPE and LOVE, the greatest of which is LOVE.

Shamrock

by Supportstorm, by permission

Wikipedia

            When Patrick returned to Ireland, he knew that he was stepping into a lair of evil, where his enemies had fallen prey to the wiles of darkness. 

            He knew that a nation was being terrorized and pillaged by barbarisms and butchery unimaginable but to those who experienced them.

            Patrick had experienced them, torn from his family home when he was, in his own words, a “beardless boy.”

            Patrick was taken in chains into slavery.  No thought for the grief of his family.  No concern for the devastation left behind.  Not a glimmer of hope for a boy, almost a child, who one day had his future stretching before him and who the next, became fodder for the greed and debauchery of a people, themselves sold to evil.

            The Picts had overrun Ireland, but there were others living there, as Patrick saw in his vision, countless others, who hungered for holiness and yearned to walk with God.  Many of those may not themselves have known what their hearts sought, but God knew, and God knew Patrick.

            The single greatest thing that we in Cor Unum can do for those around us is to walk with God.  When we do, those who have lived in hiding all their lives will cry out in their hearts, “Holy sir, holy lady, we beg you, come and walk among us!” for our holiness will not be that which exalts our plastic perfections but that which brings the mercy and truth, the righteousness and peace of God into the caves of the human heart.

            If we in Cor Unum will walk with God, others will come trembling into the light of His love.

 Trim Castle, Ireland

 Andrew Parnell

by permission, Wikipedia

            Patrick went in wonderful compassion and courage back to the land of his captivity, but he went not without wisdom.

            He knew the adversary.  Do we?

            He knew the danger.  We must.

            He loved more than he feared.  We shall, for perfect love casts out fear.

            Here in Cor Unum, we will take the next two days to consider these matters.

            Do we know the adversary?

            Do we know the danger?

            Do we love more than we fear?

            Let us remember the words that came to Patrick.  He received not a direct “call to the mission field.”  God favored him with a plea from the souls he had left behind.

            “Holy boy, we beg you to come and walk among us once more.”

            Do not our hearts yearn to so walk in the wondrous love and welcoming wisdom of Jesus Christ that others may come out of their hiding places and their tremblings to walk with us as we walk with Him?

Shamrock, Rose, Thistle motif at Buckingham Palace

Man vyi, by permission, Wikipedia

            There lived, about 16 centuries ago, a man who knew what it was to resist evil in all its insinuating forms. In his lifetime, this man escaped the tyranny of bitterness, faced down despair, conquered fear and captivity, and took the truth of the love of God into the enemy’s camp.

            His name was Patricius, and he was a Roman Briton.  His family was wealthy and he seemed to be destined to prosperity until, at the age of sixteen, he was captured in a raid on his villa and taken to Ireland, there to be kept as a slave to the age of twenty.

            He had become a man of prayer in servitude, although he confessed to having no religious heritage beyond the most superficial.  He wrote of hearing a voice speaking to him in this sixth year of captivity.  “Your ship is ready,” and Patricius left his captors and began walking to find his way to port and home.

            His education was sadly in arrears, but he set out to study and to acquaint himself with the Word of God.  He never lost a sense of his own littleness in education and prestige, but he did become well-versed in Scripture and he overcame a reluctance to speak, fearful as he was that his speech was sub-standard having been so long away from his own people.

            One day, in a vision, he saw an acquaintance of his from Ireland holding out to him a quantity of letters.  He took one, and it read, “Holy boy, we beg you to come and walk among us once more.”  He had made himself ready, and he had resisted the temptation to hate the Irish, even in remembrance of the barbaric treatment he had received.

            Patricius returned to Ireland as PATRICK, who founded dozens of monasteries, where the light of the Gospel continued to shine when the Dark Ages enveloped Europe.  Patrick faced down the wicked godlessness of the Picts, who captured and sold Christian women and brutalized God’s people.  Most scholars believe that the “snakes” from which Patrick delivered Ireland were actually these heartless tribal leaders, whom he never gave up on, that they, too, might know the love and forgiveness of God.   The slave trade and human sacrifice came to an end in Ireland, through the former slave boy’s resistance of evil. 

            In Cor Unum, we are “one-hearted” with this brave and generous man. 

St. Patrick Window

Cathedral of Christ the Light

Sicarr/Wikipedia/by permission