Maria Sermersheim
Meditatione Ignis
Dear reader: let me love you. Let me inconvenience myself for your sake. Have the humility to receive and not to count the cost.
Sometimes, the burden of love is accepting the inconvenience of others; allowing others to inconvenience us, and allowing ourselves to inconvenience others. This summer, I have found that some of my family possess a serious aversion to the latter. They do not lack love in terms of serving and hosting and giving to others. They could not dream of life without providing for loved ones and strangers alike. But as soon as one turns to do them a service, to offer some hospitality in return – to inconvenience oneself for love – it is impossible for them to accept.
The situation reminds me of page 254 of “Introduction to Christianity,” where Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) wrote,
“He who only wants to give and is not ready to receive, he who only wants to exist for others and is unwilling to recognize that he for his part, too, lives on the unexpected, unprovokable gift of others’ ‘for,’ fails to recognize the basic mode of human existence and is thus bound to destroy the true meaning of living ‘for one another.’ To be fruitful, all self-sacrifices demand acceptance by others….”
We must be willing to receive gifts offered by others, if only as a rehearsal for accepting the gifts given to us by the Lord. Indeed, our existence and all that we are is a gift; and to deny every gift would be to deny our own unmerited existence.
I understand the difficulty of receiving without cost; perhaps it’s in my blood. A professor showed me some lovely hospitality this past semester, and his graciousness and the beauty of his witness moved me so much that I was broken-hearted for a week afterwards; broken-hearted because I knew that I was unable to repay him in any proportional measure for the immense gift he had given to me. My insufficiency as a guest hounded me until a friend admonished me to grow in humility. Pure gift is the beauty of hospitality, she said, and I should have the humility to allow that beauty to be.
I was wounded by goodness; and as Christians, we should all experience this compunction. The gift is so good, and we are so undeserving. The abundance of God’s mercy should pierce our hearts and prompt us to convert to ever-greater holiness. Before we can convert, though, we must receive. If we reject the Lord’s grace in a pretense of humility or unworthiness (a true fact we simply must accept: we are only made worthy by His grace), we forsake the opportunity to grow in faith, hope and love.
With God, it is uncomplicated. He gives, we receive; and following His commandments and His model in Christ, we seek to develop and return the many gifts for His glory. “We love because He first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19).
With respect to people, too, I yearn for uncomplicated love; whole-hearted, self-sacrificial love that follows the way of the cross; love that stretches and stings because I choose to deny my own desires for the good of the other in imitation of Christ. But it should be uncomplicated by questionings of whether the love will be accepted or permitted by the other party. The Lord calls me to pour myself out for others, so let me give myself away. Don’t obstruct my service; receive it, and return it in relationship.
For some – perhaps many of us – the burden of love is accepting it.