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29Jesus answered, "The most important is, 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."
Mark 12, ESV
"God is not loved without reward," writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux (b. 1090). St. Bernard continues: "even though he should be loved without thought of reward."
Indeed, loving "has its reward in what it loves." Therefore, one does not seek reward from that loved--that would be seeing the other as an object of love, rather than recipient of and sharer in love; rather, that one loved and the privilege and blessing of loving the other is itself the greatest reward a true lover can imagine or desire in this life.
The lover is already filled by love in the act of loving, prior to any consequent reward of loving, through loving the one he or she loves. And, all my elaborations upon St. Bernard apply to our loving the All-Loving Triune Deity.
Does this mean that you are not to accept any reward for loving? Again, referring to St. Bernard, "True love does not ask for a reward but it deserves it." You and I do not have to see ourselves as either asking for reward or deserving reward, for we are the servants of Love, and reward, or blessing, is derivative of no goodness or act within us; rather, the inherent purity and beneficence, and godliness, of true love deserves and procures reward.
Then, why do we not seek first this love, which is Love, or God? Why is this not the priority of our lives, that for which we give our mind and heart above all else, until our very lives are in the image of Love Itself, and persons can sense its scent upon us like he or she could smell the odor of roses in a fully abloom garden of roses? How foolish it is to be always, remarks St. Bernard, to be longing for things that cannot satisfy such longing and, likewise, will blunt the longing. "... however much you have," he writes, "of such things you still desire what you have not yet attained; you are always restlessly sighing after what is missing." If St. Bernard is right, then, indeed, most persons live in "extreme madness."
Therefore, my Love, sweet and beautiful friend, Holy Spirit, I must sacrifice my desire for reward in loving on the cross with You, Christ. I must pray to You for at least brief moments of pure joy of knowing I have loved another and with no felt need for reward or any sense of deserving reward. Possibly, the last offering I must offer to know true love, as I have never known it, is the wish for such love and its joys. Then, from the death of such longing, possibly, a resplendent love, beyond imagining, will tear through the veil of unconscious demands and expectations, by Your interpentrating gaze, O most holy Spirit. Then, possibly, even in not having love, I shall know a Love that I cannot speak, but must carry in the quiet of my heart, only to be seen by other true lovers.
Possibly, this absence of love itself is the gift I am now called to offer as love to You, Sweet and Ineffable Holy Spirit. If so, I rejoice in such an honor, and pray I shall offer it unwearyingly and without complaint. Only show me the way, for those my intents are pure, how to fulfill them is beyond my understanding or my courage.
O Holy Spirit, I find within myself bliss and in the thought of this offering of even my desire to love and be loved to You, and this very night. How can such a feeling, in what would otherwise be felt as such a loss, be true, if not through You, and You showing me that through such a death I find love, I find Everything.
*Material from St. Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, Trans. G. R. Evans, "The Classics of Western Spirituality."
OneLife writings are offered by Brian K. Wilcox, a United Methodist pastor serving in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. He writes in the spirit of John Wesley's focus on the priority of inner experience of the Triune God; scriptural holiness; ongoing sanctification; the goal of Christian perfection (or, wholeness). Brian seeks to integrate the best of the contemplative teachings of Christianity East and West, from the patristic Church to the present. Brian lives a vowed contemplative life with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, in North Florida. OneLife writings are for anyone seeking to live and share love, joy, and peace in the world and in devotion to God as she or he best understands God.
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