If You Want to Enter into Life: Therapy and Spiritual Growth (Part Two)
Père Philippe Dautais
Translated from
Philippe Dautais, Si tu veux entrer dans la vie: Thérapie et croissance spirituelle. Bruyères-le-Châtel: Nouvelle Cité, 2013
Read Part One
The Unitive Vision
All is one. Everything proceeds from unity. Each element expresses, in its own specific way, an aspect of this unity. The human journey consists essentially in discovering this unity and bringing it to life.
The unitive vision considers not only the unity of the whole but also the uniqueness of each thing. In this it differs from the notion of “globality,” which tends to make each singularity disappear for the benefit of the whole. The unitive vision is the perception of the whole in each element. Thus it invites us to respect and care for every plant, every animal, every species, every human being, as essential to the whole. It highlights the importance of diversity, of biodiversity, which is not contrary to unity but intrinsically bound up with it. By virtue of this vision, we can say that we are a hologram bearing within ourselves the totality of the cosmos. Nothing is foreign to us — least of all the other person. We are woven together and share in the same flesh (Isaiah 58), the same humanity, the living universe.
In continuity with this, it seems that we are gradually emerging from the dualism that opposed soul and body — exalting the soul and despising the body. At the start of the twenty-first century, however, there is a strong temptation to swing to the opposite extreme — toward an anthropology that reduces the human being to biology alone, even to denying the soul — despite the considerable advances of psychosomatic medicine in recent decades.
In Christian circles, reintegrating the body has reopened for us the field of inner experience and allowed us access to a spirituality of depth. It is striking to see how bringing the body back in has changed our spiritual outlook. We have moved from a regime of mere belief — most often reduced to intellectual assent or sentimental piety — to the desire to live the realism of God’s Presence at the core of ourselves and of our daily life. No longer only believing in Christ, but living in Christ.
There is no longer a body–soul opposition, but a complementarity that gives full meaning to the theology of the Incarnation.
At the same time, the human sciences entered the discussion to contribute to the ongoing anthropological work. They reminded us that Man is also moved by the unconscious, and that from birth (even before), he develops psychological processes that sometimes disrupt his vital movement and his relational world. The relevance of these insights has led many Christians to take an interest in the flourishing field of psychology.
Catholic priests and Protestant pastors have become psychoanalysts, and many programs have arisen aimed at healing both soul and body. Many books have been published bearing witness to a new understanding of the human being that answers the expectations and thirst of our contemporaries. The field of human and spiritual experience has been enriched.
In Western Christian contexts, this approach leads us out of an opposition between a spirituality that would neglect somatic and psychological dimensions and a humanism that would refuse the divine and transcendent dimension, in favor of a spiritual dynamic that does not deny the human but opens it, from within this very humanity, to its capacity for transcendence. There is no split between the psychological and the spiritual, but a relationship between them.
We have seen, in the unitive vision of the biblical tradition, the relationship between the noûs and the psychē. Both are essential to the human being; each has its own proper function. The danger lies in denying one of these dimensions. On one side, in the name of spirituality, people avoid taking into account the movements of the psychē and its psychic derivatives (the “psychic contents,” in C. G. Jung’s terms). On the other side, out of suspicion toward religion, the human being is reduced to the psychosomatic — or even to the “neuronal man”; consciousness is treated as an aspect of the psychē or as an epiphenomenon of the brain.
Now, in our anthropology, as we have shown, the event of becoming conscious belongs to the noûs, to the human spirit, and not to the psychē. Firstly one forgets — or worse, ignores — that the essence of the spiritual path consists in the purification of the soul and in its “pneumatization.” But the purification of the soul entails a true psycho-analysis in the literal sense of the term: an analysis of the psychē that leads us to name the movements of our nature so that we are no longer subject to them, but instead gain the authority of consciousness over them. One cannot attain inner freedom without passing through self-knowledge.
Healing According to the Unitive Vision: the Quest for Inner Unity
Every human being aspires to a fullness of life and ardently desires to love and to be loved. This inner thirst wells up from the depths of our being. It is the most precious good we possess, for it is what gives us creative impetus and joy in living, and enables us to pass through trials. By this thirst we can transform obstacles into opportunities for growth and maturity. It reveals within us capacities undreamt-of. This thirst is not a trait of nature but a gift of God, which must first be recognized as such and nourished with gratitude and thanksgiving.
In its psychological emergence we call it “resilience,” the capacity to withstand shocks and to bounce back in the midst of trial. It is through this that we shoulder each stage of existence. When it fails us, various symptoms appear: fears, self-depreciation, discouragement, giving up — in short, what we commonly call “death-drives.”
Being alive is one thing; tending the desire for life is another. That is why every path of healing begins in this desire, in this thirst. If a person does not wish to be healed, no therapy will benefit them. To the Canaanite woman who implored him — after putting her to the test — Jesus replied: “Woman, great is your faith; let it be done for you as you desire” (Mt 15:28). In other situations Jesus asks the one who comes to him to voice the desire: “Do you want to be healed?” (Jn 5:6) or “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mk 10:51; Lk 18:41). In response to that desire Jesus says, “Go; your faith has healed you.” Faith in the life that wells up from the depths of being, faith in God the giver of life, or simply faith in Jesus’ power to heal — if such faith is the cause of healing, then it is essential to care for it.
At first, such faith is a Yes to life that expresses the desire to live. This Yes is the founding act of a new birth — just what Christ affirms when he says, “Go; your faith has healed you.” We were brought into existence by our parents’ begetting; we are the fruit of their desire. With this Yes we signify our full acceptance of the gift of life; with this Yes we are born into life.
One of the key points of baptismal initiation is the Yes to Christ and the No to Satan — Yes to life and No to the powers of death. For it to lead us toward the fullness of life, this “yes to life” must be accompanied by a no to death and to death-drives. For the yes to life is undone if we keep, on the side, a few indulgences toward the death-drives. So as not to yield to them, the yes in question must be a total yes that inaugurates a path of transformation — one that does not come without struggle.
This path of transformation begins with accepting what is, which includes accepting not understanding. We know that acceptance can already be the fruit of an inner journey that passes through denial, bargaining, revolt or anger, depression — a journey in which all the attempts of the “old man” to evade the inescapable wear themselves out, so that we reach the fertile ground of letting go. Saying yes to the reality of the present moment allows us to become one with the event; it opens the field of a future, a possibility of growth and change that will reveal unsuspected resources.
This yes is therefore the opposite of fatalistic resignation or of giving up; it is the fruit of trust in life — or, for Christians, trust in God. It is the possibility of a future that is not a mere repetition of the past. It is a way of listening and becoming aware, an attentiveness to the divine pedagogy communicated within events, without confusing the two (strictly speaking, the event is not willed by God).1
It is then the expression of that original thirst. It restores the symbolic link between the exterior and the interior, between the existential and the essential; more deeply still, it ushers us into the dynamism of divine–human cooperation.
Man: a Being in Becoming
As we have seen above, the human being is unfinished and therefore inscribed in a process of becoming. He or she was created in the image of God, capable — by the grace of the Holy Spirit — of likeness. By this grace and by the disposition of his or her freedom, in cooperation with God, he or she is called to become consciously the image of God. According to this anthropology, each of us is set within a dynamic of growth that has a beginning, a development, and an end.
St Irenaeus of Lyons, heir to the Johannine tradition, affirmed that “Adam was very small, for he was a child and, by developing, had to reach the adult state” (Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 12; see also Against Heresies IV, 38, 1). Here “Adam” is to be understood as the generic term for every human being.
If Man was created by the divine will alone, the dynamic of fulfillment nevertheless involves his freedom and responsibility and makes him a co-actor in his own becoming. St Isaac the Syrian (7th century) therefore considers that life in this world is a school in which “God instructs His children in knowledge” (II, 3, 3, 71) — a school in which the divine pedagogy is expressed at every moment. For him, life on earth is a time of formation and growth.
From this perspective, the yes to life — which is the renewal and actualization of baptismal commitment — opens us to the possibility of making every trial, every illness, an occasion for inner growth and maturity. A priori, trial, sickness, and accident are hard to accept; they can arouse revolt and incomprehension. One may feel a victim of an evil suffered and helpless before the reality of what happens to us. It falls upon us; we must cope; the only remedy is to fight against the blow of fate with whatever means we have. If we place ourselves simply within the unfolding of history, in the consequences of a past, on the merely existential plane, we can be overwhelmed by feelings of injustice and powerlessness, feeling crushed by a burden we cannot bear.
In the face of the weight of the past, of the chain of causes and effects, of the specter of determinism, Christ — in the ninth chapter of St John’s Gospel — proposes a reversal of perspective. Instead of seeking the cause of what happens to us in the past, He invites us to discover it in a becoming. In that episode the apostles present Christ with a man blind from birth and ask Him: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered: “It was not that this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”
Christ does not deny that this man or his parents may bear responsibility, that there might be a transgenerational cause, but He places the accent on the to-come as the possibility of transformation. He moves us from why to for what. He reminds us that we are inscribed in a becoming that can save us from the past and from the consequences of the past.
What is essential, from the perspective of healing, is not so much to consider the cause or causes of the trial, but to attend to the path of transformation that a person lives because of (or thanks to) the trial. Only this path opens onto the dimension of meaning and makes us agents of our own growth and subjects responsible for our own becoming.
In the reality of our lives, illness, accident, and trial are inscribed within the unfolding of causes and effects; they are the outcome of a process. What remains is to assume, as well as possible, the consequences of these events. Faced with what imposes itself upon us, we may feel powerless or feel injustice and revolt: Why is this happening to me? What did I do to end up here? In what am I at fault? Why is God sending me such a trial? These questions have no answer; they express the distress of a person who undergoes the event and does not understand what is happening to him.
If the person accepts the event, it can set one off on an inner path and become the cause of a dynamic of transformation. A diagnosis of illness, an accident, can produce a salutary shock and prompt awakenings in such a way that the person’s life will be upended. The question of meaning appears not in the why but in the for what. Meaning is not in the event itself but in the path of transformation that we will be able to live thanks to the event. The future opens the field of possibilities, whereas the past is inescapable.
On the existential plane, the trial can be painful and hard to bear. However, it is the possibility of an awakening with respect to the inner person. What matters is the trajectory it can set in motion. This does not mean that we should ignore the causes of illness or trial, but that, first of all, we attend to the information that can spark awakenings and contribute to the process of transformation.
The search for causes in the past can meet two pitfalls. On the one hand, that of offering explanations that justify the event, one might place it back within the natural order, and thus strip it of all meaning and of any initiatory dimension. On the other hand, it can lead to the temptation to designate culprits — for example, the parents or the transgenerational line — and to lay on others the responsibility for what happens to us, which sterilizes the very idea of a path of personal transformation. Two ways of denying any pedagogical dimension to the event, short-circuiting the possibility of an awakening, and remaining in a life merely undergone.
Perhaps it is necessary to recall that, for the first Christians, salvation is the fruit of a “divine–human cooperation,” or — as the Orthodox tradition still holds — of a “holy synergy.” God calls every human being to deification; he “wills that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). God’s will is to lead each person to full “participation in the divine life” (2 Pet 1:4). To be fulfilled, this calls for a free human response to the divine initiative, an adherence to the divine plan.
This Yes, of which we have spoken, is not simply an act of faith but a faith enacted. Grace does not impose itself. Certainly, we are saved by grace, but the human being, in his or her freedom, can welcome it or refuse it. Assured of God’s love, it belongs to the human being to dispose himself or herself to grace so that it can be operative. “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (St Matt 5:45). God’s love is unconditional, but not all welcome it; this is the meaning of the saying: “Many are called, but few are chosen” (St Matt 22:14). The chosen are those who respond to the call. Saying Yes to life and to God makes us among the chosen. In this sense we can reread the parable of the wedding guests.
That is why Jesus Christ, following Saint John the Baptist, calls for metanoia, repentance — a conversion of the heart — so that divine grace may act and bear fruit. This disposition of the heart is to be understood dynamically, calling for active participation on our part, and not as something that follows automatically from baptism. Metanoia is the mode by which we can actualize baptismal grace.
To help us discern the proper articulation between what comes from God and what belongs to the human being, Christ gave us the parable of the sower, the seed, and the soils. He himself provides the interpretation to his disciples (St Matt 13:18–23).
He said: “And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: but other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mt 13:4–9).
“Parable” comes from the Greek parabolē, which means comparison. Through parables, Jesus Christ describes scenes from everyday life, familiar to everyone, and at the same time speaks of the inner life. He establishes symbolic links, in this case between the seed and the word. Just as good seed will bear fruit according to the quality of the soil, so too the word of God will bear fruit according to the quality of listening, the disposition of the heart, and the inner experience of the one who receives it. Jesus unfolds this inner disposition in four stages:
Christ taught the crowd in parables by the sea, to indicate the lowest, most accessible level. Everyone could listen to the word, but not everyone allowed himself or herself to be touched by it. Only those who were sensitive to the word would remember it and keep it in the heart. This word would make the heart fruitful. The others would forget it or, according to the Gospel account, it would be taken away from them. This is the meaning of the seeds that fell along the path. Awakening happens more through allowing oneself to be touched than through resorting to analysis; that is why Jesus concludes by saying, “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
The second level of listening consists in letting the word sink down into the depth of the heart, especially through “eating” the word and memorizing it, so as to make it one’s own, to interiorize it, to draw out its sap. The word is information; Christ shows us the path of the disciple who must be attentive to the biblical word, meditate on it, open himself or herself to its meaning, and then be able to hear the message given in the midst of events and trials.
Depth of soil, rootedness, is acquired through the interiorization and then the putting into practice of the biblical word, through awakening to the meaningful dimension of events, and finally through the resultant spiritual experience. This experience roots faith; it makes a person able to persevere and remain faithful in the midst of tribulations. The lack of rootedness and of experience, signified by the rocky places, means that the word will not find sufficient resonance and will not be judged essential. In time of trial, it will be of no help. The word was heard with joy, but it did not make the heart fruitful.
The third level, in reference to ground overrun with thorns, raises the demand for purification of the heart and the guarding of the heart. It is not enough to listen to the word and put it into practice for it to be fruitful; it is also necessary not to let oneself be diverted by the worries and concerns of the world, which could eventually overwhelm us and choke the word. Guarding the heart is a state of vigilance not only with regard to worries, but also to all parasitic thoughts, especially those inspired by the passions. Vigilance is a key for the spiritual path.
According to the quality of the exercise and the intensity of the practice, the word will bear more or less abundant fruit: in one case thirty, in another sixty, in another a hundredfold.
This parable places the emphasis on receptivity. Spiritual fruitfulness presupposes a well-disposed heart. In the relationship of divine–human cooperation, the parable highlights human responsibility and the necessary work of purification or uncluttering of the heart so that grace can act and be fruitful. From this point of view, we are not saved solely by grace as such. Human freedom has its full place.
God does not save man in spite of himself. By way of comparison, no therapist can lead a person toward healing without that person’s consent and cooperation. Salvation is not automatic, nor is it a matter of predestination. It joins together divine grace and human freedom. Grace does not cancel freedom, but freedom can resist grace. Our responsibility is linked to our freedom; it expresses, according to the very etymology of the word, our capacity to respond. Spiritual growth and fruitfulness depend together on the outpouring of grace and on the right disposition of the heart.
Grace is poured out on everyone, but not everyone responds in the same way to the action of grace. Put differently, it is night in broad daylight for someone whose eyes are closed or whose bedroom shutters are closed. That is why the Desert Fathers, taking their inspiration from the Bible, strove to “till and keep” the garden of the heart (Gen 2:15), so that it might be fruitful in God.
The Genesis of the Righteous Act
The book of Genesis is not a historical account that one could place 5,773 years ago. This book cannot withstand historical and archaeological criticism. It is easy to show this, whether the fundamentalists like it or not. The light of “day one”2 mentioned in Genesis 1:3 is not that of the sun, which does not appear until the fourth day. How can the seeds on the earth, which appear on the third day, bear fruit without the light of the sun? The lights in the sky which are “signs for the seasons, for days and years” and which “are to give light upon the earth” do not come into being until the fourth day.
Because of this, the “days” in question are not twenty-four-hour days. The narrative cannot be reduced to a scientific explanation. Operating on a completely different register, it describes for us the depth of reality, which each person can experience. In the mode of parable, it forges a link between, on the one hand, inner and heavenly reality and, on the other hand, outer and earthly reality. From this point of view, the invitation to “till and keep” the garden establishes a correspondence between the purification of the heart and the right attitude in tending the cosmic garden.
The Fathers understood well that words and actions are the expression of what springs from the heart. If the heart is not purified, words and actions will not be rightly ordered; they will not be the fruit of sound discernment. That is why, in the spirit of the Gospel, the Fathers so strongly insisted on the need to begin with inner purification (praxis), which opens onto a new way of perceiving outer reality (theoria). Behavior will then be guided by this perception, which does not stop at appearances but opens onto the contemplation of the glory of God hidden in beings and in things.
It is an attitude of wonder before the intelligence of life and the ordering of living things. It is by entering into true life that one can perceive the majesty of all life. It is within this kind of sensitivity that a genuine ecology can take root. “What is essential is invisible to the eyes. One sees rightly only with the heart” (The Little Prince, by Saint-Exupéry).
Tilling and Keeping the Garden
We have already mentioned that the human being is unfinished and, for that very reason, is inscribed in a process of becoming. Within, each person bears an immense wealth that we are invited to recognize in order to express it more fully. Recognizing these gifts is essential for the flourishing of the person. In order for talents to bear fruit, they must at least be noticed and taken into account. One of the tasks of therapeutic accompaniment is to help the patient become aware of this wealth so that it can become operative. For some, this is not obvious because of wounds. We carry within ourselves two archaic modes of defense: denial and splitting.
Denial is the refusal to recognize the qualities inscribed in the depths, either because there is no access to them, or because they are hidden under marked self-deprecation and perhaps the fear of having to take them up.
Splitting relies on a mechanism of repression born of the inability to reconcile what the subject feels with what the subject knows about himself or herself. The subject will then attempt to retrieve what has been repressed in an idealized form, or will remain in denial. This mechanism of protection tends to paralyze all growth of the psychic life.
We have understood that the recognition of gifts can only take place in a climate of trust. If this recognition could not take place through the benevolence of parents, only a gaze of love will allow access to it. In the Gospels, we see this gaze at work. By this gaze, and certainly by the whole of his attitude, Jesus enables those who come to him to reconnect with the immense potential they bear in the depths of the heart. Enriched by this experience, they can then assume their destiny in a dynamic of life and spiritual growth.
To till the garden means above all to make talents bear fruit and to place them at the service of the common good.
The parable of the talents illustrates this theme wonderfully. Like all parables, it draws on a scene from everyday life to speak to us of the inner person.
Here is the story: a man goes on a journey and entrusts his fortune to three servants. “And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.” (Mt 25:15–18).
A quick reading of this parable awakens a feeling of injustice. Those who have received the most make it bear fruit and receive even more, while the single talent entrusted to the third is taken away and given to the one who has ten. What is more, that man is condemned.
Such a juridical reading seems to confirm the logic of the world, where the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. It is not coherent with the Gospel, and therefore not with the message of Christ. We must therefore look at it in another way.
The first two make their talents bear fruit: the one who received five gains five more, and the one who received two gains two more. Each doubles the patrimony received, in a relationship of trust toward the master. Thus, through their activity they have produced as much as they received from the master. By extension, one can think that if two others had received three and four talents, they would likewise have doubled their patrimony. What is highlighted here is the notion of fruitfulness, which is proportional to the capacity of each person.
The third has not made his talent bear fruit because he has refused to take part in the enrichment of the master, whom he sees as “an hard man,” reaping where he did not sow and gathering where he did not scatter. “And,” he says, “I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.”
This servant has adjusted his behavior to the judgment he has formed about his master. He sees himself as a slave and not as a free person. Because of that, he has not perceived the possibility his master was giving him to make the talent bear fruit, and thus to make his capacities valuable. He has not received the talent as a gift, but as a burden to carry. He has been paralyzed by the fear of losing the talent instead of feeling encouraged to make his capacities count. He has not set in motion, put into circulation, the talent received.
If we place this parable back into the whole of the Gospel, we find again the theme of sending and receiving, as in: the seed and the various kinds of soil; the one who gives an invitation and those who are invited to the banquet; the one who gives and those who receive. This theme points to the human condition. According to the biblical account, we have received “life and breath and all things”; the human being is not his or her own origin, not the creator of himself or herself. The human being is the receptacle of a gift that is called to bear fruit, or, in other terms, the trustee of a potential to be fulfilled.
We can then ask whether fruitfulness consists in increasing the patrimony as though it were a matter of acquiring new gifts, or rather in making the gifts received bear fruit by letting them live. If we place ourselves in the biblical perspective of the unfinished human being, to make talents bear fruit means to actualize the immense potential wealth that has been sown in humanity. To recognize and then to name the energies of life that we bear within is the foundation of every dynamic of fulfillment — a dynamic that implies a divine–human cooperation.
In this parable, the two servants who make their talents bear fruit gain as much as they received. Cooperation between the master and the servant makes it possible to double the patrimony. This is what earns them the words: “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” Their status changes: from servants, they are called to share the joy of the master, because they have entered into the dynamism of life.
Life is fruitfulness and fecundity; life is a dynamic of interrelationship, a dynamic of exchange, an unceasing flow of giving and receiving; it places everything in relation with everything. Might not the capacity to make talents bear fruit be bound up with the dynamic of gift, which consists in setting in motion what has been received? It must be added: setting it in motion not for personal profit, but in the service of all beings. Is it not this disposition of the heart that is exalted here, with a pedagogical intention? The master would not then be the one who keeps knowledge and privileges for himself (see Gen 3:5), but the one who rejoices to give and rejoices still more in the fruitfulness of the gifts — in the capacity of human beings to make the gifts circulate, to place charisms at the service of others, and to grow in the acquisition of graces.
Life must not be held back or buried; it must be able to circulate freely. To bury one’s talent is to prevent life from circulating. That leads to death. According to this parable, judgment and fear prevent life from circulating and bearing fruit. It remains necessary, however, to recognize a gift as a gift and not as something owed or as a burden. Life is given so that we may become truly alive, that is, so that we may grow in the dynamism of gift, which is the dynamism of love.
Might not growth in love, the fruitfulness of gifts, and the fulfillment of the human being be in fact the same reality — equivalent expressions? If so, then everything is said in this parable. Through the parable, Jesus presents a God who calls the human being to enter into true life: by recognizing the immense potential wealth inscribed in the very being of the person; by self-giving; by the fruitfulness of gifts; by setting gifts in motion at the service of humanity and creation; by a dynamism of fulfillment that is growth in love. St Irenaeus of Lyons affirms in this sense: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”
An edifying image is given to us by St Thérèse of Lisieux, which completes our reading. She says in Story of a Soul that it matters little to her whether she is a large glass or a thimble; what matters is to be filled with grace. Then she adds that the more she allows herself to be filled, the more she sees her capacity grow. The welcoming of grace enlarges capacities. The more one gives, the more one gives oneself, the more one receives. The more one becomes, the more life bears fruit within.
The rest of Matthew 25 speaks to us of the Last Judgment, “when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him” (Mt 25:31). We are told that he will separate the sheep from the goats, those on his right from those on his left. The criterion of separation rests on the care given to one’s neighbor, on the openness of the heart, and on the capacity for self-gift. The gift made to the other returns as a criterion for eternal life, for entering into true life.
Here Christ gives particular depth to his message. By saying: “Truly I tell you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” he identifies himself with the poor person, with the one who is hungry, with the one who is thirsty, with the stranger — with the one who benefits from attention and self-gift. In the poor person he becomes the receptacle of the gift, he who never ceases to give his life. Those who will have made the gift of love circulate are blessed; those who have not given have cut themselves off from life.
The usual assumptions about the Last Judgment are reversed. Instead of a divine sentence, this account sends the human being back to freedom and responsibility. Instead of a moral and juridical judgment, we are confronted with a law of life. In order to enter into life, it is essential to enter into the dynamism of giving and receiving. This is the message Jesus addresses to the rich young man: if you want to enter into life, prefer relationship to material wealth. True wealth does not depend on money but on the relational and dialogical dynamism lived with others and with the whole cosmos.
To enter into this dynamism, two things are necessary:
the desire for life, the aspiration to be;
liberation from all obstacles, from everything that prevents access to true life.
We will first take up this second point before approaching the first, because most often it is necessary to clear the sand from the spring in order to feel it gush forth, to unclutter the heart in order to make contact with the power of desire, with the meaning and the taste for life.
Natural events, wars, conflicts, famine… do not arise from the divine will but from human self-determination or, in the case of natural events, from the play of cosmic forces in relation to human impact. On another level, such events can take on meaning; one can read them in an edifying way.
And not “first day” as in the usual translations. This day is not counted along with the others.