Love Bending Low

By Eileen Dooling, RSM, Executive Director

Posted on 12/15/2016

As I reflect on Christmas and Incarnation this year, I am struck by the words of Ilia Delio, OSF, author and Catholic theologian at Villanova University. In her book, Mercy and the Humility of God, she describes a God who is “absurdly close” to us, who bends low to embrace us and all of creation and asks us to do the same.

Delio writes:

…[W]e have a God who gets absurdly close, so close that we are forced to discover the face of God in all the mess of the world—racial injustice, terrorism, poverty, global warming. Too often we want a God who will hear our cries and fix things…But the mystery of Christmas tells us otherwise. It is not that God is deaf to the cry of the poor. It is rather that God is poor. It is not that God does not see our tears, but that God, too, is weeping. Only a humble God who bends so low as to pitch it all away in love can heal us and make us whole….Our only credible action is to bless this world by allowing God to break through our less-than-stellar lives. We have enormous power to heal this wounded world through merciful love, loving hearts which welcome the stranger and accept the suffering of another as our own.

Delio goes on to reference Saint Bonaventure who saw Christ as completing the order of creation and we completing the work of Christ. We are not off the hook. No matter how much we are overwhelmed by circumstances beyond our control, the work of merciful love, welcoming the stranger and accepting the suffering of others as our own is our work. Let us not be found wanting.