Making Sense of the Bible
God isn't simple. God is complicated. He is above our understanding.
Yet God became man so that He could reveal to Man what was required to live a life worth living. He brought us out of darkness into His wonderful light, as Peter says in his first epistle.
Sometimes complicated realities have to be communicated to us with complicated words. We have to struggle to understand what he is trying to tell us. And that is a good thing. After all, who needs a simple, tame God.
written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael
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I have to admit, when St. John starts writing like he did today, it drives me crazy. Those are the hardest things for me to read. I feel like it's a Beatles song: "Love, love, love, all you need..." You know, things that don't make a bit of sense. That's just me.
St. Bernard was a great man, great thinker, great leader, bringing everything together. And he provided to the Church what it needed. He preached. Remember the Albigensian heresy, he preached against that.
During the period of time that he was active in the Church and was prominent, the Pope died, so they had their usual Sistine chapel thing. They ended up basically with a tie. And so we have an anti-Pope at that period of time and they came to Bernard of Clairvaux and some others and said, "Okay, who should be Pope?" And they all agreed upon Innocent, and that took care of the issue. So he had a great deal of respect within the Church.
He was chosen to preach the second crusade. They wanted to go into the Holy Land again and kick out all the Moors, the [followers of] Islam. Get them out of the Holy Land so that the Western Europeans could control the Holy Land.
He was a very, very strong figure. Like I said, the Cistercian order became a very important order on him.
But the things is that he really preached, and it is fundamental to the Cistercians, that knowledge can bring you to God. He wasn't a, someone who, you know... as I understand it... he didn't preach and you would have people in the aisles going, "Alleluia! Alleluia!" dancing.
He brought to them the Truth through the words to make them think about what they were believing - make them think about what it is that Our Lord Jesus Christ was wholly human, wholly divine, died on the cross for us. What do all of these things mean?
And again, this is a failing not of St. John, but of me, that is what these readings that we have in the gospel today, particularly are geared to do. They are geared to make you think.
If Jesus is in God and we're in God and we are in Jesus, and it is through the joinder [legal term meaning that things are brought together to be treated as one thing] of all of us in love, what is the ramification of that?
St. Bernard did it very interestingly. One of the things, in fact probably the writing that he is best know for, is a series of sermons that he gave on the Canticles of Canticles. The Songs of Solomon which are probably the most human things that you will find in the Bible. They are very, very human. They are very, very sexual.
They are human in every respect and in those word of humanity, when you hear about love and you get this imagery of a young man talking about a young woman in terms that you look at and you go, "At best those are ambiguous"... but they're really not that ambiguous. They really are talking about the reality of the beauty of a woman in a physical sense.
It is those that Bernard of Clairvaux chose to write about. Because again, as Jesus is talking about here, it is through the reality of His existence, and our existence, that we have the opportunity to be brought before God.
And how do we do it? In the responsorial it says, "Teach us your statutes." Teach us so that we can know what the statutes are.
And it isn't a matter of teaching... I always remember this because this is about the only way you can do it... you remember when you were in the fifth or sixth grade and you had to recite the entire times table [multiplication table]? You had to understand it because if you didn't understand the times table you could not take the next step to understand mathematics.
Without understanding the statutes, the teachings of Christ, you can't get to the next statute. You cannot get to the next level which is coming to a true understanding of God and incorporating in our lives the teachings of Christ which revolve around the one word of love. Love of God. Love between Jesus and His Father. Love between Jesus and His Father that is so great that it brings into reality of the Holy Spirit the very definition of "God is love" The very definition of what God's relationship with us is love.
Jesus' coming to Earth, becoming wholly human, is the definition of love. His human existence, His death on the cross and his resurrection are all a definition of love. And coming to a greater understanding in our lives of what love really is, is an opportunity to understand more clearly what God had done for us through the Lord Jesus Christ.
And this again is why St. Bernard would choose to preach about the Canticle of Canticles, because it is about love.
And St. Paul has one of the greatest things, I think, it is chapter 5 in the Ephesians where you see the very controversial statement of women being obedient to men, but that's not the important part. The important part is, and I'm going to pick on you two because you happen to be right there, the important part of the marriage is that the relationship between a man and a woman, sixty-seven years now, is in all of its aspects, is, as St. Paul says, "a great foreshadowing." A sacrament. A variety of other words that are used to translate what he is talking about, but it comes down to that we see in the love between a man and a woman of 67 years or of one year, the family circumstances, we don't just merely see two people who were able to put up with each other for 67 years, but what we see is a reflection of God in their love. And that love that we see there is simply a foreshadowing, a glimpse, of the magnitude of the love that God has for us.
And so in St. Bernard, what we see are his preachings of love. What we see in the reality of our existence, its a wisdom. The wisdom that we get is the wisdom of love.
He says, "He who fears the Lord will do this. He who is practiced in the law will come to wisdom. Because by knowing God you come to love."
And the wisdom of God that Jesus is talking about in words that I have a hard time reading, is love. And so one of the things that we are always called to do, and that St. Bernard called people to do is love.
It isn't a matter of hierarchy, of "I'm Catholic and there I am better than you are." It is, "I am Catholic and I love the world. I love God. I love neighbor. And I take my life and live that as part of what I am." And I allow the presence of God, and my love for God, and love for Jesus, and love for neighbor, to change me so that I can become something different with the ultimate goal being to live with God in Heaven in the relationship that is defined multiple times when you read the gospels, and especially when you read St. Paul, is defined by a single word. The single word of love.
August 13, 2019