Ruminations of an Irascible Hermit.: Learning to Fall in love with God again

Monday, June 22, 2015

Learning to Fall in love with God again

One of the hardest things to do after stopping practicing the faith for many years, is learning to fall in love with God again.

I have always thought I still loved God, but it was more of an intellectual acknowledgement that yes He exists and yes I have a duty to love Him and worship Him. However for many years it was a cold love. I never realised before just how hurt and rejected I felt by God and the Church for these past 6 years after I was denied entrance to a religious order in Croatia because I had depression 2 years beforehand while in the local Diocesan Seminary.

It was only at my retreat while in New Norcia, that I realised how much I had stopped trusting and loving God because of that experience. I got to reflecting on how leading an unchaste life, being actively homosexual and getting into relationships that I had been deliberately pushing God out of my life - but all I had done was hurt myself. I had denied myself sanctifying grace available to me in the sacraments. I had tried to push God so far out of my life apart from on an intellectual level because I felt like a jolted lover. I felt that God had let me down, rejected me and hurt me when I wanted so bad to be a monk and a priest.

Now I have realised just how childish it was. I am starting to see how in the bigger picture, God uses all things for His greater Glory - even though it may appear painful at the time. If I had've entered religious life at that stage in life then, I probably would not have lasted due to personality issues, or even worse, I may have become a very bad religious. I was very arrogant, self righteous and thought I had to change everything in the world but myself.

Now I am older I have mellowed out a lot. I have had to grow through my sorrows and trials in love. Also being in a relationship with someone 11 years younger than me has taught me a lot about patience, as well as unconditional love. A lot of the issues we had together of trust, and the patience I needed everyday to love someone who without meaning to would hurt me a lot or not be able to reciprocate my love equally, made me reflect on how it is analogous to my relationship with God. It reminded me how God told the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute to make him understand about unfaithful relationships.

For many years now I have been the harlot, quite literally. I have not lived my baptismal promises and I was using lust to replace the love of God that I had when I first converted to the faith as a teenager. But now God has gentle called me back to Him, taken me back through the Sacrament of Confession and washed away my sins. God has called me to fall in love with him again, but this time with a more mature love.

When I was in novitiate with the Salvatorian Fathers I remember reading Mechtilde of Magdeburg and falling in love with her poetry and being introduced to Bridegroom Mysticism. Before then, I had never thought of God as the Bridegroom of the soul - but it was a concept I fell in love with instantly. My favourite quote from her that has always stuck with me has always been "'Whoever has been wounded by love, cannot be healed unless kissed by the same mouth that wounded them"'. This is very similar to what St John of the Cross also says about the wound of Love.

So now that I am able to receive Communion again and am coming back to praying and being in union with God - I am also learning to fall in love with Him again everyday. Falling in love with my Creator, my King - the lover of my soul. Receiving Him in the Eucharist so that through the resurrected humanity of Jesus I become the dwelling place for the Blessed Trinity.

May the Holy Trinity always dwell in the Bridal chamber of my heart. Amen

No comments:

Disclaimer

Please note. I am a Catholic layman, not a qualified theologian or philosopher. What I say and write here are my own personal thoughts and ideas, although I always try to conform my writings to the Magisterium of the Church.

I- with firm faith believe and profess everything that is contained in the symbol of faith: namely,

I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: By the power of the Holy Spirit, he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. I believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

With firm faith I believe as well everything contained in God's word, written or handed down in tradition and proposed by the church--whether in solemn judgment or in the ordinary and universal Magisterium--as divinely revealed and called for faith.

I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is proposed by that same church definitively with regard to teaching concerning faith or morals.

What is more, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic Magisterium even if they proclaim those teachings in an act that is not definitive.