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THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT

For Reflection

David Torkington is a lecturer, retreat conductor and spiritual director with a great gift for explaining the tradition of Christian prayer in a meaningful way. He is also the author of Inner Life: Fellow Traveller’s Guide to Prayer and How to Pray: A Practical Guide.

God’s Inexhaustible Love

People like to present Jesus as the model for Christian action, by showing He was so uncompromisingly available to all men. They often fail to realise that He was only able to be open to all men, because He was first open to God. It was only because He had exposed Himself without restraint to God’s love that He was able to be filled with the fullness that He could communicate to others. Without the hidden years, the desert, the lonely garden or the inner room, there would be no compassion for the needy, no love for the loveless, no healing for the sick.

To follow Him, doesn’t mean that we should try and copy Him as an artist copies a model. It does not mean that we should merely imitate the outward manifestation of the inner light that burned in Him, it means that we must expose ourselves to that self-same light that it may set us afire too.

I had now come to realise that there is only one source of energy to revitalise man. It is only when the dynamic rays of God’s inexhaustible love begin to permeate the very marrow of our inmost being that we receive the strength to stand upright and grow, to ripen and bud under its influence, and finally to open out, to blossom forth. Without this source of light, we’ve no more chance of growing than a drooping geranium in a dark room.

We can only begin to expose ourselves to the Light, if we are fundamentally convinced that we cannot grow without it. This is why the proud, the pompous and the pretentious will never be able to see the direction of the Light, let alone expose themselves to it. Once we see clearly that the spiritual life begins with God, everything else begins to slot into place. It does not begin firstly with us trying to love Him, or other people for that matter, but with trying to allow His love to burst into our lives.

If we first seek the Kingdom of God then everything else will fall into place. Only when this process gets under way properly will we be radically and fundamentally renewed, will we be able to love Him in return, create community and enter into others in a way and on a level we never envisaged before. All this will be possible not just by the power of our love, but because another will live in us, and love with, and through us.

PETER CALVAY: HERMIT RAYNER [DAVID] TORKINGTON

Scripture Reading

ST JOHN 15:8–17

‘“Abide in my love.”’

Prayer

Lord, expose me to your light

that I may pray

not just in words or phrases,

not simply with the words of others

more saintly than myself,

but from my heart

that your love may throb within me

bursting into my life

so that I may praise you for ever.