An Overflow of Hearts

My children have never given me a gift that did not in some way come from me. Every Christmas, my wife takes some of our money (which came from the sale of my books), and takes the children shopping. They purchase something using my money just so they can give it back to me.

We don't look at this like some kind of economist. "Well, that's not efficient! It's far more efficient to spend my money on what I need or want!"

But there's something that happens in that exchange that won't make an accountant's spreadsheet. Yes, they take my money, and they buy something for me with my money. But in that very exchange, love itself circulates... my love to them, their love in the giving of the gift, returning it with something of them in the gift.

This is the only kind of gift we ever bring to God.

King David said exactly this this when he gathered Israel’s offerings for the temple: }But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to make this freewill offering? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you" (1 Chronicles 29:14)

Of your own have we given you.

David had nothing that did not first come from God’s hand, and neither do we.

In the most intimate hour of prayer, when the noise falls away and we are simply before Him, we discover that our pockets are empty. We have nothing of worth to lay on the altar. All we can do is open our hearts and return to Him the very love that He first gave us.

After all, what else would be a fitting gift to our Lord? Nothing of our making is worthy.

John put it more simply: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

The Greek verb of "we love" here agapōmen is in the present tense, a continuous flow, not a single action. His love is described in the aorist, a completed action. His love continues, yes. But it's full, it's complete—demonstrated preeminently in His Passion.

Loving is an enduring response that responds to an action that yes, is complete, but in some sense endures, beyond time and place: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4:10).

Love does not begin in us. It begins in Him, arrives in us, and then, if we don't "grasp," if we don't try to "hoard" it (which is inimical to the very meaning of the word love), with open hands, and broke-open hearts, the overflow returns to its very source.

This is the meaning of "communion."

Love is not a transaction, not an exchange. It's cyclical, it's diffusive.

This is what the "communion of saints" means (there's that word communion again!). It means that God so chooses to pour His love into our hearts in such a way that the overflow from our hearts fills the hearts of others—a single pouring, a single source! From His heart, to ours, and from ours to the hearts of others, while still remaining entirely His love!

St. Teresa of Avila described prayer as “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us” (The Book of Her Life, 8.5).

Notice the order even there: alone with Him who we know loves us. The knowledge of being loved comes first. The prayer turns to "sharing" or "communion" with its beginning in Him, but in His grace, unites us to this flow of love.

That's what happens in worship—there's a reason why in Scripture the highest understanding of worship came in sacrifice. Abel's sacrifice, we hear in beginning of Hebrews 11, was accepted rather than Cain's because it was offered in faith, that is to say, in an open heart that simply receives and remains open to communion.

It's also why God's perfect love was made most manifest to us in the most profound and love-and-blood-bathed sacrifice in history. That is where His very heart was pierced, and the flow of blood and water was poured out for us in the most intimate moment in all of time and eternity.

You won't see that when you look at a crucifix if you're looking at it the way the Romans designed it. You won't see it if you see it as a curse, as a cruel execution. But that's a part of why this very act is the highest icon of Divine Love. Because His blood poured out even on the very person who'd pierced His heart with a lance. His love is not dissuaded by our sin—and there was no sin greater than when we rejected, mocked, and crucified Love Incarnate! His love overcomes our worst. Which is why the Cross is the refuge of sinners. It is there where our hearts are crucified, broken open with His, that the flow of love might begin in intimate communion.

And that changes us. Not just a little "tweak" here or there. Not just a small "refinement" of our minor imperfections.

It changes us by killing us. It changes us by making us new.

Which is why St. Paul can say, "all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

You cannot gaze on love and remain unchanged by it. You cannot truly behold the Cross of Christ and remain uncrucified... and if you are Crucified with Him, you come out "new," passing as from death to live.

As His love flows into us and we return it to Him, our hearts slowly take on His shape.

We do not accomplish this by our effort, though it does require our surrender, what is sometimes called our cooperation. That kind of cooperation isn't the kind of cooperation we experience when someone helps us do the dishes, each doing our equal share. Our cooperation is more like getting out of the way, uniting our will to His flow of love, His action, His grace.

A river does not carve a canyon by arduous effort; it also does not happen in a day. The canyon emerges simply as the river flows over the same place, slowly eroding at dirt and rock.

That image is helpful. Because many of us want to become "minute saints," microwaved in holiness. But the living flame of love is one that takes hold of us and continues to consume until the very substance of that which burns begins to resemble the flame itself.

St. John of the Cross is famous for this image. When fire first ignites on wood, the wood remains unchanged. It starts to char, it burns. But after a while, the wood itself is inhabited by the fire. It becomes as coals, not merely consumed by the fire, but becoming the place where fire dwells... and that coal is enough to set everything it touches on fire, too.

This kind cannot be contained.

David sang, ”my cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5).

God does not fill us to the brim and stop. He keeps pouring. Our prayer alone cannot hold what He gives; our little hearts were never built to contain infinite love.

They were built as channels. Jesus said of the one who believes in Him, "Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:38).

Not a cistern meant to hold the water. Not a reservoir. Rivers that flow. Where water moves, and always moves. If it stops moving, it stops being a river.

So the overflow of love we share in prayer, which we receive in the Sacraments, spills out! It overflows! If moves into the kitchen, into the office, into the streets. It reaches into the hospital room. Into the shelter. Into the jaded and parched hearts of those who know not yet the love that might turn their hearts of stone into those of living flesh.

And that communion doesn't stop with the "amen" at the end of our prayer. It keeps moving. The same Christ we adored in silence now meets us in the face of another, someone made in His Image. "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40).

The hungry, the stranger, the sick, the stressed, the depressed, the imprisoned.

Jesus does not say that serving them is like serving Him. He says it is serving Him.

Not everyone wears the image of God well. Most of us do not. So we are to be the mirror that reflects back to them the Love that made them, that dignifies them, that adores them.

That can't happen when someone encounters me and sees just me. It only happens when I am so consumed by His love that His radiance shows forth. And in the eyes of faith, we begin to see our neighbor not as they are, but as He made them, and as He intends to re-make them in His love, His mercy, His grace. For in the eyes of "faith" we see more than the "now," we see in the eternal perspective of He who loved us since before the creation of the world.

We only see that way when the love poured into our hearts expands, it claims our members, our hands, our very eyes.

Do you have the eyes to see?

The face of Christ looks back at us from every suffering face. It's there under every scowl, over every weeping face that's contorted in its sadness.

This exchange, this encounter, face-to-face, does not happen always in grand gestures. It is not the size of the gesture that matters so much as the infinitely great love that keeps flowing through us, His love, in others.

Is this His love or is it our love? Yes! If we are fully conformed to Him, His love becomes our Love. Our heart becomes His even as His heart becomes ours.

It means opening our eyes in love to those in need, and doing the little thing that no one except someone who truly loves them would think to do. It means opening our ears to the person whose story is wrapped in the bandages of sorrow, and entering into that sorrow as if it were our Lord's sorrow, in love.

The love that came from God and returned to God now flows outward to His children, and in doing so it still flows back to Him. St .Teresa saw this clearly in the final pages of The Interior Castle: “This is the reason for prayer, my daughters, the purpose of this spiritual marriage: the birth always of good works, good works” (VII.4.6).

Contemplation that produces nothing is not truly contemplation. The deepest prayer always has somewhere to go.

 

Living the Overflow

Begin each day by receiving before you give. Spend even five minutes not asking, not planning, simply letting the truth that you are loved settle into you. Psalm 116 offers words you might include in your prayer: "What shall I return to the LORD for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD" (Psalm 116:12-13).

Lift the cup He filled. He'll keep filling it. Don't worry about it spilling over. The cup was never large enough to contain it. It's enough to hold, and that gives us confidence we will never lack. The overflow is meant to pour out beyond itself into another's cup.

Then, through the day, let that love train your eyes and ears. When someone is difficult, exhausted, or hurting, pause inwardly and say, Hello, Jesus. Thank you for allowing me to love you here and now, let this overflow fill their cup as well!

Finally, do not hoard or grasp. If God has given you comfort, pass it on. If He has given you forgiveness, extend it. As Jesus pours His love into the cup of our hearts, He doesn't pour carefully telling us to "say when." He keeps pouring. It's meant to spill out, to run over, so that love, having come from Him and returned to Him, might also change lives, to re-make the entire world in the image of His love.

 

God Bless,

Judah