and now I guess notes to you as well (for what they’re worth).

~ TELL Story of grade schoolers writing to Dorothy Day asking her how she could see Christ in the destitute of NY City and her answer:

It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of love, resulting from an act of faith. It is an act of hope, that we can awaken these same acts in their hearts, too, with the help of God, and the Works of Mercy, which you, our readers, help us do, day in and day out over the years.

~ By Little and By Little, 329-30).

~ It is an act of love, constantly
repeated,
repeated,
repeated,
repeated.

~ What we need and what we are called to as Christ-ones, as vagabonds on our way to becoming human and holy, are not random acts of kindness but conscious and intentional acts of love.

Christian spirituality, by which I mean the Christ-life, is a course in life-long learning. Course not so much as an academic class but as a manner and/or pathway of life.  The Latin term CURRICULUM VITAE most often associated with academia or a record of one’s accomplishments in one’s career, literally means “course of one’s life or path of life.” Why not the chosen path of our life looking forward and not merely as a biography or account of accomplishments looking back. So, the first, most basic, and most important thing to understand is that the Christ-life is a chosen way of life, a conscious way of LIVING, and this living is an intentional response to the Source and Giver of Life who called us into existence through love for the sake of love. The Christ-life is simply (and not so simply) the response of love to Love. That’s the curriculum. And that’s the life.

~ Not to love — to resist or neglect or refuse to embody love is instead to embody ungratefulness. The nature, can we say the desire, of Love is to evoke love. So the Christ-life comes down to what we do with this divine evocation.

~ An aside: Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus is the full expression and embodiment of genuine life — and the motive force, path, and end of life is love.

~ Jesus, as Henri Nouwen put it, is “the living reminder” — of what? Of what it means to be human. How ironic and misguided that so many think Jesus was the way he was on earth because he was divine, because “he was God.” As if every time he was confronted with a difficult situation or given the opportunity to compromise or forfeit his humanity he simply flipped on his God switch. Yeah, I don’t think so. That’s a form of docetism which was/is a heresy. That’s not what we mean when we say he was fully human AND fully divine. Jesus was a “living reminder” of what? Of what it looks like not to compromise or surrender one’s humanity, what it looks like to remain faithful to our humanity, to our true self.

But also a living reminder of God’s ridiculous, extravagant love, transforming love. Jesus doesn’t so much bring it (the extravagance of God’s love) to a world empty/absent of love, but rather as one sent/come to reawaken what was given to all reality from the beginning. A better image is us as First Responders come upon a horrific accident in which love has been ejected (rejected?) to the side of the road and it is up to us to rescuscitate it, to bring love back to life. Here the To Be List and the To Do List become one — REVIVE LOVE. Find the chest of love. 100 – 120 compressions per minute. 2 breaths every 30 compressions. And every breath is rûaħ, Spirit; every breath IS love, for only love can revive love. No?

~ Jesus’ life flies in the face of the vision, values, and anti-virtues promoted, peddled, rewarded, and celebrated by the dominant culture. It is in his wholeness that Jesus shows us what it means to be human. It is in his woundedness that Jesus shows us what God is like. Go figure. His wholeness is captured in the times he refused to cave to pressure and sacrifice his human integrity (SEE having it out with the satan in the desert who tempted him to turn in his humanity for power, prestige, possessions). His woundedness is captured in his “magnificent defeat” on the cross, in his utter poverty and vulnerability, in his kenosis, in his downward mobility in a world duped and addicted by upward mobility. This is the paradox of Christian faith. Jesus is the reminder that God’s calling card is not being almighty but being all in, all vulnerability, all merciful.

~ The summons of the Christian is to access what has been present and available to us since the First Poetry Slam when, as one storyteller has it, the world was spoken into being — a word of love from the mouth of Love — and it lies within each of us and within the natural world. It is waiting to be accessed and activated.

~ NB! The CURRICULUM VITAE, the way of life, for anyone who receives and consents to the name of Christ-one, is emphatically/specifically the way of love, that is, the way of INCARNATING love. SEE above.

Another thing: this incarnated love inherent to the person and work of Christ that for us is to be a way of being in the world is something that, as Dorothy Day said, must be constantly repeated if we want love to be credible, if we want love to be disassociated with sentimentality or platitude or naivety.

~ Jesus was publicly executed because he took love so seriously — not grim, long-faced, humorlessly seriously but in the sense that his life depended on it (as does ours and our planet’s). Jesus was killed because he was an indiscriminate lover, he was a Lover without Borders and it becomes apparent that he knew or suspected the fatal implications of embodying love.

Chesterton famously said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Which is to say, that incarnating love in thought, word, and deed — especially in daily, common deeds — has not really been tried and tried and tried again. And love is difficult, among other reasons, because it is so inconvenient. It requires self-forgetfulness and if there is anything we’d rather not forget it is ourselves, our small, concocted, false selves. Can I get an Amen? Can I get an ouch?!

~ Coming forth from love, he lived love, and died for loving, and he returned to Love — leaving us the echo of a question “Is there anything else worth living and dying for?”  As DDay said, “the final word is love.”

~ It is quite possible that by the end of her life the enactment of love had become a spontaneous way of being for Dorothy. But, if so, it had become an unpremeditated daily and ongoing action because for fifty years, morning, noon, and night, day in and day out, week after week, year after year she had consciously, intentionally, and prayerfully chosen in her freedom to incarnate love. This, and only this, is the one thing necessary, the one enduring truth, and the one ultimate spiritual practice. Every other authentic spiritual practice is penultimate to this one essential practice: incarnating love. Dorothy Day knew that the one sure-fire way to unite/align oneself to Christ, the one way to make love credible was to consciously and constantly repeat it again and again in the smallest, humble, hidden, seemingly insignificant ways — a word, a glance, a gesture, an extended moment of presence, daily quiet for prayer, the sacrament of a cup of coffee or soup given . . .

(The more faithfully and hopefully we incarnate love the more deeply, fully, and widely God continues to call us into the fullness and divine meaning of our ever unfolding existence.

~ Dan Miller, © 2019.

~ If this or other postings from THE ALMOND TREE are beneficial to you, please consider forwarding it to family and friends (or foes) and “Liking” The Sacred Braid Facebook page. Thank you. ~djm