agape and letting them give a felt content to agape was the
lesson of Jesus and what the liturgy of the Word was teaching us.
St. Augustine was a great example of sublimated friendship and
St. Francis was a beautiful example of sublimated affection.
In the way they imitated Jesus we came to see how Jesus
had a special agapeic affection for everyone, a special
agapeic friendliness for all, and agapeic eros for each woman.
We came to see how Jesus loved each person as having
an equal worth, each person as unique and each person in
relation to all other persons so he would even love each woman
with a special sublimated eros that went out to her uniqueness.
The liturgy of the Word’s history taught us of Jesus’ friendliness.
I,2.4 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Word’s Present
The liturgy of the Word taught us the history of many examples
of love that we should practice in the present for the sake of
a blessed eternity in which every true love will conquer death.
Trying to be celibate and get my eros sublimated into agape
was the main trial of my life for I still a few times a year
fell into mortal sin, and sex for some of us was the great temptation.
In our first year there was a handsome, blond, curly-headed
youth from California who told me that sometimes
even when he was going up to communion he had impure thoughts.
He did not return in our second year and must have decided
with his spiritual advisor that the celibate life was not for him.
My confessor in my sophomore year was Father Justin who
had previously been a rector of the seminary and yet again
told me as he listened to my sins that my lust and anger
were related as are the concupiscible and irascible appetites.
I must have inherited from my father and his example
the habit of getting angry and swearing and no matter
how hard I tried I would still get angry on the spur of the
moment at something that hurt me and use God’s name in vain.
The liturgy of the Word taught us a lot about eros for we could
wonder about the polygamy of Abraham and all the sexual sins
of David that are right at the center of the court history of David
and that brought him and his family the punishment of the rods of men.
And then there was Solomon and The Song of Songs, which began
with those words of a woman, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”
When Father Bernard became a Benedictine he took the new name
of Bernard after St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Father Bernard
told us that he wrote over sixty sermons for nuns that were
based upon The Song of Solomon and that had to do with the kisses
of the feet, the hands, the mouth, and the breasts and somehow
the female within us was supposed to be the beloved of Jesus.
I,2.5 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Word’s Future
The three great secret things that make their way into great art
are sex, death, and religion and the liturgy of the Word is filled
with meditation upon the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
The history of art since the beginning with the Egyptian pyramids
and with the early cave painting and with all early literature
like The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had to do with the mourning
process that lets us help our blessed dead with prayer and ask
the community of saints to pray for us so that the very core
of spirituality is also to live in the world beyond the material.
St. Paul’s epistles which form a big part of the liturgy of the Word
focus most of all upon the death and resurrection of Christ’s body
and upon how we should live now to be resurrected with him.
The Hail Mary, which we prayed many times a day, ended with
those words: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
The eschatological theme of death, purgatory, heaven, or hell
was always there in the liturgy of the Word and we prayed often
for the poor souls in purgatory that they might go through
their reconciliation process and come to love all with no negativity.
As the liturgy of the Word taught us more and more of the lost
things we came to see how the theological virtue of hope was
being strengthened by all of our prayer, for the Our Father
brought us to pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.” And the Glory Be taught us to pray:
“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world
without end. Amen.” And that was the pattern of our spiritual life.
So we came to see that sex had to do with beginnings and death
with endings and that religion dealt with both and the eternity
that was there before sexual beginnings and our mortal endings.
Of course, as a second-year fifteen-year-old student I thought
a lot more about sex than about death and it was as if
I was coming to mourn a sex life and family I could never have.
I,2.6 Nourishing Agapeic Affection in the Liturgy of the Eucharist
The second part of the mass that we prayed twice a day was
the liturgy of the Eucharist in its offertory, consecration, and communion.
As our teachers and especially Father Bernard taught us,
the Eucharist makes history become present and our hope
becomes so real that our agapeic love makes real for us
our faith in all that Jesus did 2000 years ago and it makes real
our hope in a future life with Jesus and all he came to save.
At the consecration of the mass when the bread and wine became
the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus my heart grew
in affectionate love as I prayed: “I praise, love, worship and adore you.”
Adoration is a special kind of feeling that we might have for
the baby Jesus and for the suffering Jesus and for God once
Jesus makes God known as the love between the persons of God.