Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life: a meditation on John 14: 1- 5

This meditation comes from reading Adrienne von Speyr, and Dom Luigi Giussani. In my opinion, these two spiritual giants compliment and bring out the depth of each other's gifts. As you go through Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, I hope you will take off in the direction the Spirit moves you, and feel inspired to add your own personal reflections. The text is long and wordy, but, I hope, worth reading slowly and responding to, not in one prolonged sitting, but in bits and pieces.

I believe all of us experience the tensions of living the human adventure and journeying towards God. The tension of being finite and hungering insatiably for the Infinite; of being limited and  yet wanting to be the measure of the Unlimited One; of feeling the urge to surrender to God and yet remain independent of him; to have his Divine Life in us, but have it on our own terms and under our own control; to possess God without giving ourselves to Him; to follow Christ, yet be in charge of the way we go. This tension comes from living in the Spirit, under the influence of Grace, in virtue of faith, hope, and charity instead living by our natural inclinations to see, feel, taste, figure out,  understand, enjoy, and digest everything we experience according to our human capacities and limits. How could we not experience this tension, when we inevitably reduce the Christ to what little we are open to receive from Him who wants to take us over completely? How could we not perceive his generous offering of self as an invasion of our freedom and autonomy. But we can't have it both ways: we can't belong to ourselves and belong to him.

(Where Christ says “you” in the singular or plural, personalize his message by speaking out your name. His revelations are to all of us, as the different, unique persons we are, and as a common family, who share all his gifts with one another.)

Jesus said to his disciples:(including all us who follow him today)  Let not your hearts be troubled.

Do not let all your worries, fears, anxieties and insecurities overcome you, nor your ideas and feelings. None of that is the measure of who you are. The measure of who you are is your relationship with me in faith, hope and love.  I am the measure of who you are. Get yourself out of the bio-dome, or ego-bubble inside which you live, that ego-bubble where you need to stay in order to feel secure, safe, and in control, that bio-dome where you imagine yourself autonomous and free. Get yourself outside of that artificial environment, that comfort zone, and into the supernatural life that flows from me to you. Live in that ever-deeper, always developing, ongoing relationship with me.)

Believe in God; believe also in me.

Put the same faith in me that you have in my Father. That is going to be difficult for you, because soon I am not going to look like my Father’s Son to you. When I am hanging on the cross, helpless, dying, and forsaken, I will look like anything but the divine Son of my Father in your eyes. Yet that will be when I am most perfectly the Son He eternally calls me to be, for I will be giving myself to Him for all of you. I will be pouring out on you all of the Life and Love the Father eternally pours into me. I will be absorbing the sin and evil of all mankind, and cleansing you of your sins. That is my mission, my purpose in life, my destiny: to give myself away, give myself in sacrifice to you, for you, in order to bring you back to the Father.

You can trust that gift I am making of myself, even though you cannot comprehend it.  You can trust me and my Father. We know what we are doing, even though you are not capable of understanding it.

In my Father’s house there are many rooms.

So many rooms, many places. As many places as there are persons, and there are so, so many of you. Here on earth, you have no place that is really yours. Whatever home you have is temporary. Your real home, the place where you finally settle down, is with me and my Father. On earth your whole life is a journey home. As long as you are here you are a person-the-way; to be a wayfarer is who you are; it is your identity on earth.  You don’t become your full self until you arrive home and are in my Father’s embrace. Here you cannot be your full self, your definitive self, because you are not with Him.  What you are on earth, who you are on earth, is a continual growing towards him, an on-going movement towards Him. That’s why wayfarer is your identity in this world. This identity gives your life meaning and purpose. Here as you journey you start discovering who you are, you develop self-awareness, in your relationship to me and my Father. How could you know yourself any other way, since you belong to us?

If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

Who you are, your personal characteristics, would get lost in the immensity of the Kingdom, if there were not a special place in my Father’s house for the unique person that each one of you is. If there were only one huge dwelling place, I would have to reduce you all to one common denominator, and level you all down to single manageable mass. But no, this is not the case. Here on earth, I have a specific purpose for each person, including you, a calling, a mission, a vocation that no one else can fulfill.  I guide you principally by my grace in the sacraments. What you do on earth is not a matter of indifference or unimportance. I call no one to exist, no one to follow me, without a purpose. Each one has a different part in my divine plan for the Kingdom.  What makes you all different on earth will continue to make you all different in heaven. Hereafter, all the differences will all fit together  into the beautiful, harmonious, glorious Kingdom of my Father, where He  is all in all. Then you will be fully yourself and finally be his child forever. This is why I have told you over and over I am going back to my Father.  I came from him by myself. But I will return to him with all of you. And my Father will accept you, because he will recognize me in all of you. You have already been sealed as mine in Baptism. In the Kingdom, you will be stamped with the final form my grace gives you. You, in all the richness of your differences, will mirror me to my Father and give him glory. I do not go back to him empty-handed.

And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may also be.

My going to the Father is part of my mission, as is my coming from the Father. This commission from him is my path, the Way that I have received from my Father. It starts and ends with Him. You see my going to him begin with the Cross, and continue in my Resurrection.  From you I go in suffering and to him I return in glory. And I take with me all who believe in me. I will be beyond your eyes with the Father, and carry you who love me to him. As the Risen Son, I am no longer limited to one place.  I am with, and in, whoever believes in me and loves me, in every place, at all times. So you do not have to be afraid because your eyes do not see me as before. When I am with the Father I am also with you in the world. I, the Unlimited One, am with you who are limited.  You are everywhere I am, because I am everywhere you are, whether you see me, or feel me, or not. I am not reducible to your senses, your emotions, or your ideas.  Always remember: I want you with me and my Father once and for all.

When the Father and I are One forever, beyond my mission, beyond any more possibility of separation caused by sin and suffering, then the final stage of your redemption will be achieved. My coming again in glory at the end of time will not be because the Father has sent me to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, but to bring you whom I have redeemed into the fullness of His Kingdom. I will come as the One who lives with the Father and dwells in him.  You will have eternal life in us. You will live in our reciprocal love. And that love will fill you with the intense, divine life of the Spirit. Your very self will be the dwelling place of our glory.

 And you know the way where I am going.

I am going to the Father. Since you know I am going there, now you know how you will get there. You know the path that leads you there because you know me. And you know there is no other Way to the Father.  So you know enough, even though you have not seen the Father for yourself. You know where I am going, you know the Father is love, you know He sent me to show you what the way of love is by walking it ahead of you. Now you know how to follow in my footsteps. My Father infinitely surpasses what your eyes can see and what your minds can imagine. So you cannot get to him without me, without the way I give you, without the Way that I am.

True, the way of love is the way of suffering. That is the path I walk, the Way I am. True also, that you will only know this way when you travel it, when you experience it. Suffering will persuade you to hesitate on the path, to refuse to go on, to stop and then go in the wrong direction. All that happens because of the pain involved in loving others and suffering for them.  Even though Baptism has set you on the right path, even though Penance and Communion will bring you back to the path again and again,  you will never reach the point where you  walk the path steadily and unhesitatingly without failure. Just because one day you are ninety does not mean you have made more progress than someone who is forty. My grace will be working in you, molding you and conforming you to me all the time, but you will not be able to measure it. Nor will you ever stop being somewhat reluctant to receive it, no matter how old you are. Your progress, growth, lies in my hands, not yours. I am impatient for you to grow and progress. But mine is the impatience of divine love which will seem like endless patience to you, endless opportunities which you fail to respond to, opportunities you perceive as challenges too surprising and unexpected to recognize and accept. In my divine impatience I will patiently keep on teaching you that you must let my love, my sacrificial self-giving, find a place in your heart now, instead of later, today instead of tomorrow!

Thomas said to him: Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?

You are like Thomas. Every person is. You want clarity. With your limited heart and mind you want to comprehend me completely. You want to know the whole way even before you start out. You can’t help trying to grasp and measure me with your human senses and abilities. That is impossible.  Even if you had physical contact with me in the flesh as the Twelve had, even if you had been in the upper room with them and could both see and touch me as Thomas did! You would never be the measure of me, just as they could not.  Like the Twelve, you have to stop being so small-minded; stop making the mistake they did.

The only path you know is one that your feet walk on.  My path is greater than that. You cannot understand my plans, my destiny, even though I have told you everything. The reason why I came into the world, the only purpose that I have, is to bring all of you back to my Father. Doing his will, giving myself away for you in love, pouring myself out in sacrificial love, that is my path back to the Father.  All that is my will; all that is my way of love.

Of course you can’t picture and grasp this path, no matter how you try. You hear what I say about the Kingdom, and you learn the truths about eternal life, but it is abstract theory to you, because all you can see is that human life always ends in the disaster of death.  In one sense, that perception is right. The life of my Father, the place where he is, the way to him, all remain totally incomprehensible to you, for they are beyond human reaching.  You need, you want, a concrete goal you can see, perhaps a marker that is a mile away. That’s the way you are. But there is no way to take the infinite, and make it quantifiable, clear, and certain. Everything you humanly know and do during your whole lifetime is only a passing moment of your already unending life in me.  That’s why you have to put your faith in me and realize I am the way to the Father, the only way, your way, and everyone else’s. Only by believing in me and following me can you become part of the Always More and Ever Greater Way that I am.

Jesus said to him: I am the way, the truth and the life.

I understand how discouraged you feel at times and how blind you usually are. I know you crave security. That’s why I am revealing my deepest secrets to you and all the others.  Even though I reveal my secrets to you, they remain mysteries, however. They can only be grasped in the dark light of faith. You cannot yet see my mysteries in all their light and clarity. Nor can you help reaching out and trying to measure to what I say by means of your limited capacity to receive. Your very lack, your neediness, is why I will infuse in you the gift of the Holy Spirit. That will enable you to get beyond yourself and operate out of the gifts of faith, hope, and love, which unite you to me. The Spirit who come from the Father, he will receive my call in you, the call to follow me back to the Father. The Spirit will get you beyond your human limitations and enable you to enter into the mystery of who, and what, I am. The Spirit will teach you what it means to believe. Then you will hold to the mystery without trying to measure it.

You will begin to understand that I am the Way:  the-way-to-the-Father. I am the only Way, and the whole Way. The whole Way is everything I am – my conception, birth, growth, manhood, work, suffering, and death. All of that is the Way that I am. So it is the way you have to travel. You do not have to see the whole way; you do not have to survey the entire journey to know you are on the right path. I give you the grace to go step by step, then more grace for the next step you are to take. That’s what it means to walk with me in the light of faith.

I am the Truth. I cannot be anything but truth, because I am always witnessing to my Father, the whole truth of who he is. I am that Truth, his Truth, the Truth that comes from him.  I only speak of what I have seen in Him. I am no empty word, no meaningless verbiage; I am the fullness of his Truth. I am not some changeable or temporary message. I am his eternal, living, always new Truth.  All other truths you know are only partial, and therefore deceptive.  Nothing else you know can exhaust nor grasp the all-embracing Truth I am.

 I am the Life. His life, I am the Life that comes from him. All the divine life he is, he pours into me. I am his Son, his very substance. His is movement-to-me, and I am movement-back –to-him. That movement-from-and-to the-Father is who I am on earth. That life is what I pour out unceasingly on the Cross; that is what I give you in every Eucharist – the self-gift of the Father to me and of me to him,  the donation we endlessly make of ourselves in the perfect communion of the Trinity. In every Eucharist I am bringing you back to the Father in the one reciprocal movement of life and love that the Three of us is.

No one comes to the Father but by me.

How do you go to the Father?  The way the Father has prepared for you: The Way that I am. By following me, by living in union with me in this life through faith, hope and love, you are on the way back to my Father. You have to walk the way that I did, by receiving from me the grace to make an offering of yourself to my Father.  When you do that, my whole life will envelop you. That is how you live in me, and at the same time go beyond me to him.  I will go with you all the Way, and I will hold you out before me to present you to the Father. You need not be afraid. He will see my life in you. So he will take you in his arms, just as he takes me.  He will love you as totally, freely, joyously as he loves me.

That is what my Mother did when she and Joseph joyfully held me up and first presented me in the temple.  She was unaware then of all that was ahead of her at the presentation. She was innocent of what she would suffer. At the end, when they took me down from the cross and placed me in her arms, she offered me to the Father again, this time in the joy of faith and yet the agony of presenting me to him as the sacrificial victim of your sins.

 I carry you the way my mother first carried me: not at all naively, but knowing fully the cost of all sin and every evil, having borne it joyously. My Mother went beyond her pain and agony at my death and offered me to the Father for you. In the same way I forget my pain, because of the joy of redeeming you and bringing you to him. You need not to be afraid to be in my arms, or in hers. You need not fear even death. Let me give you over to the Father as my Mother did with me, so that I can fill you with his life.

Bergoglio and Giussani

A few weeks ago I read an article on the CL website entitled Bergoglio and Giussani. It was by Massimo Borghesi, and explained not only why Bergoglio like Giussani so much, but also showed some of the influence Giussani has had on  then Cardinal Bergoglio's (and now Pope Francis') thought.

Cardinal Bergoglio's esteem began back in the nineties when he first started reading Giussani's works. In 2001 Bergoglio publicly offered two main reasons:  "The first, more personal, is the good that this man has done for me, for my life as a priest, in the last ten years, through my reading of his books and articles. The second reason is that I am convinced that his thought is profoundly human, and reaches even the most intimate part of human yearning. I would daresay that it is the most profound, and at the same time, most comprehensible phenomenology of nostalgia as a transcendental fact." 

 Bregoglio was explaining and deepening what had said in 1999, when he commented on The Religious Sense "For many years, Monsignor Giussani's writings have inspired my reflection...The Religious Sense is not a book for the exclusive use of those who are part of the movement, nor is it only for Christians or believers. It is a book for all men who take their own humanity seriously. I dare say that today, the question that we must primarily face is not so much the problem of God - the existence of God, the knowledge of God, but the problem of man, the knowledge of man, and finding in man himself the imprint that God left there, in order to meet him...If a man has forgotten or censored his fundamental 'whys' and the longing of his heart, the fact of speaking to him about God proves to be an abstract, esoteric discourse, or a push toward a devotion with no bearing on life. One cannot begin a discourse about God without first blowing away the ashes that suffocate the burning embers of those fundamental 'whys'. The first step is to create the sense of those questions that are hidden, buried, perhaps suffering, but that exist." 

Brogoglio found in Giussani's writings a God whose grace, ( i. e. whose  unpredictable, always new, action in man), comes first. Grace is always the source, as well as the sustenance,  follow-through, and fulfillment of  man's hunger for the Infinite. Man today doesn't see Christ as the satisfaction of his human aspirations because his religious sense has been blunted. 

 

Bregoglio continues his commentary on The Religious Sense: "...in order to interrogate ourselves when faced with signs, a extremely human capacity is necessary, the first one that we have as men and women: wonder, the capacity to be amazed, as Giussani calls it, ultimately , the heart of a child. Only wonder knows. ... The cultural opiate tends to obliterate, weaken, or kill this capacity for wonder. The beginning of any philosophy is wonder. There is a phrase of John Paul II that says that the drama of contemporary Christianity lies in the fact of putting categories and norms in place of wonder. Wonder comes before all categories. It is what brings me to search, to open myself; it is what makes my response possible, and it is neither a verbal nor a conceptual response. Because if wonder opens me as  a question, the only response is the encounter - and only in the encounter is thirst quenched." 

When Bergoglio presented  Giussani's book The Attraction of Jesus, he confirmed: "Everything in our life, today as in the time of Jesus, begins with an encounter, - an encounter with this man, the carpenter from Nazareth, a man like all others, and at the same time different. The first ones, - John, Andrew, Simon, - discovered that they were looked at in their very depths, read deep down, and a surprise was generated in them, a wonder that made them feel tied to Him, a wonder that made them feel different. ... One cannot understand this dynamic of the encounter that arouses wonder and adhesion without the "trigger" of mercy. Only those who have encountered mercy, who have been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, get on well with the Lord. ...The privileged place of he encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ toward my sin."

In Borghesi's article, Bregolio  then cites another book by Giussani, Something that Comes Before, to explain what an unmerited gift the encounter with Christ is: "the 'something that comes before' is the encounter with Christ, even if unclear, not truly aware - as for John and Andrew, it was something astonishing, not definable by them. The thing that come first, grace, is the relationship with Christ: Christ is the grace, it is this Presence, and it is your relationship with it, your dialogue with it, your way of looking at it, thinking about it, focusing on it."

This encounter is the essential form in which Christianity has to manifest itself today! The Cardinal's understanding of this profound insight is what  influenced him to say a  some years later as Pope Francis that "The dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent. The Church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focus in essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts us more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall as a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow." Without the encounter, the moral behavior has no foundation.  If it is Christ that attracts us first, and encountering Him comes before all else, there is no danger of falling into moralism, dogmatism, or any form of Christian fundamentalism which reduces Christ to an ideology!

Bregoglio wrote  in 2001 :"This Christianly authentic conception of morality that Giussani presents has nothing to do with the seemingly spiritual quietisms of which the shelves of today's religious markets are full. And neither does it have to do with the Pelagianism that is so popular in its various and sophisticated manifestations. Pelagianism, at bottom, is a new version of the tower of Babel. Seemingly spiritual quietisms are efforts at prayer or immanent spirituality that never go beyond themselves." 

Pelagianism and Quietism are two ways we can reduce Christ and Christianity to a this-worldly equivalent but still deceive ourselves into thinking we are  being religious and spiritual. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis continues and deepens his explanation of how and (more importantly) why we still  try today to reduce Christ to what our Ego can control and manipulate instead of losing ourselves in the wonder of who He is.  The pope says: "This worldliness can be fueled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of Gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings. The other is the self-absorbed promethean neo-Pelagianism of those who ultimately trust in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyses and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. These are the manifestations of an anthropocentric immanentism. It is impossible to think that a genuinely evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity," (94)

 Wow! After reading that a few times and chewing on it over again, I have to conclude that Pope Francis is every bit as deep a thinker as Pope  Benedict! Praise God that in his everyday preaching, Francis knows how to say profound things in an evangelical, missionary style! 

 All quotations are from the article Bergoglio and Giussani, by Massimo Borghesi, which can be read in its entirety on the Communion and Liberation website.