I love you,Yahweh!
With you, I’m strong.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 18, page 33)
To be human is to be loved. This is our starting point.
Most of us started our lives with parents who had loved us long before we even developed the capacity to love them in return. But above and beyond that love, imperfect as it always is, lies a love that is perfect, undiluted by sin or ego or hurt or manipulation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, perfect in love within the Trinity, have surrounded us, inviting us into the community of love at the heart of God. Yes, there is mystery to the Trinity, but there is simplicity as well: a mutuality of undiluted love that we get in on in Jesus.
However thin or misshapen the love we share in our families and other relationships, we start with perfection in love from God. It is the security of this love which enables us to risk the vulnerability of loving others. The Scriptures put it like this: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Prayer gives us the opportunity to not just live out of God’s love for us, but to return it. Prayer gives us the ability to turn ourselves toward God, to turn our faces toward the one who is always turned toward us.
Prayer enables us to adore the one who has always adored us. Yes, we are adored. If I as an imperfect father have held my children in my hands and bonded with them in the deepest adoration I’ve ever experienced, then I expect no less of the Father toward us. We are his great joy. We are his most tender spot, his greatest vulnerability, the reason our Lord would even consider the cross.
Again, the truest truth in my life is this: I am loved. What else can I do but say, “I love you, too”?
Prayer is where I adore the truly adorable, where I return the gaze of the one who has looked so long and so kindly on me.
This is the place where prayers are both spoken and unspoken.
Uttering the words, “I love you,” out loud changes the nature of a relationship. New couples often go months before speaking those three words, knowing the weight and commitment carried by them. To say them is to walk through a door that can’t be unwalked through. And to say them again is to walk further into the room. This is true of our relationship with our Lord as well. And so we speak these words aloud in our prayers, binding and rebinding ourselves to our God.
But this is also the place of silent prayer, of simply soaking in a relationship for which no words are useful. As important as the words “I love you” can be, they are too flimsy to bear the weight of what we mean by them. And repeated too often, they can become thin. And so we become like the elderly couple, holding hands as they walk in silence along the riverside. Their lack of words isn’t from a lack of love but from a love too complex and subtle and mature to be conveyed in mere language.
Prayer gives me the ability to do both: to speak the necessary words and to simply be in the presence of the Beloved, knowing that I myself am the beloved as well.
Prayer: I love you.
For further reading: Sermons on the Song of Songs by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Cistercian Publications, 1971.