lovers

Can you love God with the symptoms of falling in love? Agostino, Giovanni Climaco, Diadoco have no doubts: of course it can. May physical eros be a model for you for your desire for God, says Climacus.

The delight, the enjoyment of God saturates the spirit and penetrates the body, and the incandescence is so strong that one feels the need to cry out, overcome by joy, says Isaac the Syrian.
Indeed, its strength is so ardent that the "feeling of God" in the heart reaches the point of attacking the hardest, mineral part of man, says Diadocus of Photica, and becomes a sensation of God in the bones: so irresistible that tears man away from himself. We find these reflections in writings entitled Stairway to Heaven, Ascetic Discourses, One Hundred Gnostic Chapters: ascesis is therefore not mortification and fasting, it is the fire of love. Possible?

Possible, yes, because we love only if we were loved first and God loved us first. He gave us everything and then he gave us himself.
From whom does God's love come in us? From the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, says Saint Paul. And God's love is not just any love, lukewarm as human love is often. It's a crazy love, like a crazy lover.

And U.S? What should we do? Let's take a practical example, says Augustine. Let's say a man who loves a woman for her physical beauty. He feels a strong attraction, but inevitably seeks, in addition to the body, also its tenderness. Instead he learns that the woman hates him. All his excitement is deflated, the object of his desire inspires hatred. But is the physical attraction over? No. "Even if he burned for something he saw, he expected a feeling he didn't see." But what if he understands that he is loved? The temperature of his passion doubles. Augustine concludes: «You do not see God: love him and possess him… God offers himself in the same instant that we open ourselves to him. Love me, he cries to us, and you will possess me. You cannot love me without possessing me ».

And that "possession" has nothing abstract: it is eating and drinking bread and wine at God's table itself.
It is to unite with him physically and finally, in abandonment, the body that is internal to the body opens and the eternal wedding is celebrated, says Isaac. So, blessed are those who drink this wine!

The sinners drank of it and left the way they got bogged down, the drunkards and became fasting lovers, the rich and wished for poverty, the poor and they became rich in hope, the sick and healed, the ignorant and they have become wise. The body of death dissolves in the waters of the baptism of love. The body of glory is born, the one that emanates the splendor of divinity. That which does not need words and pastoral programs to transmit the love of Christ.

Flaminia Morandi
NP March 2020