Learn to Bear the Beams of Love

Fat Tuesday – February 25, 2020

The season of Lent suggests starkness, struggle, and difficulty. Typical Lenten images include desert and dust, pilgrimage and preparation. Words like repentance and redemption show up often. Some folks image Lent as a time for a spiritual house-cleaning.
Those images are appropriate and good, with a long history in the Church. They help us realize that we don’t appear on Easter morning to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ without some context, without making a journey toward that celebration. I affirm those understandings of Lent and their corresponding images, but I want to suggest another image for Lent.

Lent is also the time to dig deeper into the heart of God, to find ourselves immersed more completely in the mercy, compassion, and generosity that are at the center of life. This may not be a typical Lenten theme, but I believe it carries significance for us. The journey with Jesus toward Holy Week, the cross and Resurrection is a pilgrimage of love. His deep love for his Abba and for each of us animated each step toward the Passion. He embodied the love of God. His movements toward his final week were permeated in a generous and compassionate love. Mercy is who he was.

So I think about my life, our lives, as they are shaped by love. I’m drawn to one of William Blake’s poems in his “Songs of Innocence,” where he writes:

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

Beams of love illumine our world in every place and at every moment. Creation is full of love-beams. We are surrounded by them. In a sense, the beams of love are God’s work, God’s initiative, God’s gift to the world. The human responsibility, though, is to “bear” those beams.

The dual meaning of “bearing” is important. We are here to bear the beams of love, that is, to stand up underneath them. To bear the beams of love is to receive their weight and significance into ourselves, to welcome them into our being.

But the word “bear” also has another meaning. To bear is to carry or to deliver to another. We can bear good news. We bear something when we take it to someone else.

This is our Lenten journey, both to bear the beams of love by receiving them into ourselves, and to bear the beams of love by carrying them to others in the world. It is the twofold movement of the Christian spiritual life: First, the soul’s movement inward where we are connected ever-more deeply to God and to transforming love. Then the second, outward movement to carry love into society in a way that transforms the world.

Persons throughout history have borne the beams of love. Across the generations, they have given themselves to a more intentional spiritual path, affirming both inward and outward dimensions of life with God. We are invited to join them in this holy journey.

I'll post daily reflections throughout Lent on my sister site: https://dailylent.blogspot.com/


Welcome to Lent!