Love without why and the true meaning of letting go

Ego elegi vos de mundo (John 15): I have chosen you out of the world. These words, which I quote in the Latin, are from the gospel reading of today, the feast of one of the saints, named Barnabas, who is commonly called an apostle in the scriptures. Our Lord says, I have elected you, selected you, chosen you out of the world, from all created things, so that you should bring forth much fruit and that your fruit should remain, for it is very good to bring forth fruit and for the fruit to remain, and the fruit does remain if we dwell in love. At the end of this gospel our Lord says, Love one another as I have always loved you; my Father has loved me eternally and so have I loved you; keep my commandments, so shall you remain in my love.

All God's commandments come from love, from the kindness of his nature; if they did not come from love they would not be God's law, for God's law is the goodness of his nature and his nature is his gracious law. Whoever dwells in love dwells in the goodness of his nature: he dwells in God's love, and love is without why. Suppose I had a friend and loved him for benefits received and because of getting my own way, I would not be loving my friend, I would be loving my own self. I ought to love my friend for his own sake, for his virtues, for his own intrinsic worth: I love my friend rightly by loving him like this. And so it is with the man who abides in God's love, seeking not his own interest in God or in himself or in anything else, but loving God simply for his kindness, for the goodness of his nature, for what he is in himself: that is true love. Love of virtue is the flower, the ornament of virtue, indeed the mother of all virtue, all perfection and all happiness: it is God, for God is the fruit of virtue, and it is this fruit which remains to man. When a man works for fruit and the fruit remains to him he rejoices greatly. Suppose he has a vineyard or a field and makes it over to his worker to farm while keeping all the produce; he may give in addition all the things that belong to it and still be greatly pleased to have the fruits remain to him in payment. In the same way a man rejoices in the fruit of virtue; he has no worries, no troubles, because he has given over himself and everything.

Our Lord says, Whoever leaves anything for me and for my name's sake, to him I will restore a hundredfold and eternal life besides. But if you leave it for that hundredfold reward and for the sake of eternal life, you are leaving nothing; indeed, even if you leave it for a thousandfold reward you are leaving nothing: leave yourself, give up self entirely, that is true letting go. A man came to me not long ago and told me he had given up a great deal of land and goods to save his soul. I thought: how little, how inadequate are the things you have given up. It is blindness and folly as long as you still care at all for what you have renounced. Renounce yourself, that is true letting go.

The man who has let go of himself is so impartial that this world will have nothing to do with him, as I said here not long ago. The one devoted to justice is given over to justice, taken hold of by justice, made one with justice. I once wrote in my book: The just man serves neither God nor creature: he is free; and the more he is just the more he is free and the more he is freedom itself. Nothing created is free. As long as there is anything above me, except God himself, it must constrain me, however small or however great it is; even love and knowledge, insofar as they are creature and not actually God, confine me within their limits. The unjust man, whether he wants to or not, is the servant of illusion: serving the world and creature he is the bondman of sin.

I was thinking recently that my being a man belongs to other men in common with myself; I see and hear and eat and drink like any other animal; but that I am belongs to no one but myself, not to man or angel, no, nor even to God except insofar as I am one with him. All God's work he puts into his one likeness of himself, and though they differ greatly in how they act, all creatures tend toward reproducing themselves. In my father nature took its ordinary course. In the ordinary course of nature I should be a father like he was. The tendency is always toward self-repetition, toward the preservation of the species: it is every man's intention that his work should be himself. Any shifting or hindering of nature results in woman: thus where nature stops God begins to work and to create; for without woman there would be no men. The child as conceived in its mother's womb has shape and color and material being; that much is accomplished by nature. That lasts for forty days and forty nights, and on the fortieth day God creates the soul in far less than the blink of an eye. At that point the work of nature ends, all that nature can accomplish in color, form and matter. The activity of nature withdraws entirely, and as the natural energy is finally taken away it is restored whole in the rational soul. This then is the work of nature and the creation of God. In created things, as I have said many times, there is no truth.

There is something that transcends the soul's created nature, not accessible to creature, not existing; no angel has it, for an angel's is a clear intelligible nature, and clear and open things have no connection with this. It is like unto Deity, intrinsically one, having nothing in common with nothing. Many a priest finds it a baffling thing. It is one; better unnamed than named, better unknown than known. If you could become nothing to yourself for an instant, less than an instant, I would say that all this is in itself would belong to you. But as long as you are mindful of yourself at all you know no more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye knows of taste: so little do you understand or perceive what God is.

Plato, that great priest, who concerned himself with lofty matters, makes reference to this thing. He speaks of a light which is not in this world; not in the world and not outside the world; not in time nor in eternity: it has neither in nor out. God the eternal Father, the fullness and the source of all his deity, gives birth to this here in his only-begotten Son, so that we are that very Son, and his birth is his presence within and his abiding within is his bringing forth. That which comes welling up in itself remains always the same. Ego, the word I, belongs to none but God himself in his sameness. Vos, the word, implies your collective unity, so that ego and vos, I and you, stand for unity. May we be that very unity, unity abiding. So help us God.