The mad lover

He is madly in love! In front of a lover, the comparison that immediately comes to mind is madness, a feeling that breaks the banks of ordinariness. So is the love that God has for men, says Nicola Cabasilas. God loves to the point of emptying himself: he does not stay where he is, he goes down to seek man; from rich he becomes poor; openly declares his love; rejected, it does not go away; insulted, does not answer; driven out, stay behind the door; tortured, he is silent, endures and dies. To give us proof of his limitless love, God becomes capable of suffering the unspeakable, covers himself with wounds and is proud of them: when he is risen, his spiritual body without more gravity and depth remains marked by the wounds received for the love of human weakness.

Life in Christ, for Cabasilas, is for those who realize this love, want to respond to it, live their humanity as he lived it, with his own will. The extraordinary thing is that whoever writes like this is neither a monk nor a priest. He is a lay person from the Middle Ages who had studied astronomy, law, philosophy and theology in Constantinople. There he had been involved in the political struggle for the conquest of the imperial throne between Giovanni V Paleologo and Giovanni VI Cantacuzeno. Cabasilas had sided with the latter, a great supporter of Hesychasm, that is, of the ascetic path centered on prayer of the heart. When Cantacuzeno had lost, Cabasilas had chosen a life of silence and prayer at a monastery. Not as a monk: deliberately remaining a layman to show with this choice that grace is for everyone, women and men capable of welcoming it to live a completely new existence.

The concrete means is there: the sacraments. Christian rites are not external gestures, but a real mystical experience: through water, oil, bread, wine God touches us inwardly causing a progressive transformation of our whole being. If we are slow to change, it is because we are not aware of this extraordinary experience that is not transmitted to us by people who live it deeply, in their own flesh. “We actually receive baptism to die of Christ's death and rise again from his resurrection; the anointing of chrism to become participants in the royal union of his divinity, effectively eating the most holy bread and drinking from the most divine chalice, we communicate to the same flesh and blood that the Savior has assumed ".

With the sacraments we enter into the same spiritual experience of Christ: actually we receive an immediate perception of God, actually his ray invisibly touches our soul. There is nothing juridical in Christianity: there is no law that the Legislator engraves on stone, there is the Mad Lover who engraves himself in an available heart. With him, life here and eternal life become the same thing.

Flaminia Morandi
NP June / July 2019