Do you want to enter into this reality with me?
In a recent issue of the Vatican newspaper, I read an article about two Ukranian nuns and their experience of the war that is raging there. Because this article reveals something about the nature of God, I want to share the testimony of one of the nuns, named Sister Svitlana.
On February 24, the Sisters in a small town were awakened by the sound of explosions. At first thinking it was an accident, they came to realize that the explosions signaled the beginning of war. “How is this possible? Is this really happening?” The terrible suffering becomes sharper when Sr. Svitlana meets and listens to those who have stared death in the face: the wounded soldiers she visited in the military hospital and the refugees who saw people die during their journey. Sr. Svitlana said, “Listening to them raises many questions to God, and among these, questions on the nature of evil. Before the war I knew that evil existed, but it did not touch our life as it does now. This is another reality in which God is also present, who suffers and is crucified…And God answered me with a question: ‘Do you want to enter into this reality with me?’ I do not want to run away from this, creating illusory worlds for myself. Rather, I want to enter it, to be there to do as much good as possible.”
What really struck me was God’s question: Do you want to enter into this reality with me? It’s understandable, in times of such suffering, to ask: Where is God in all this? Why doesn’t God do something? God asked Sr. Svitlana: Do you want to enter into this reality with me?
When I was studying in Belgium, I learned about a Flemish mystic named Jan van Ruysbroeck, who lived from 1293 to 1381. He had an interesting way of looking at God’s way of working in the world. Van Ruysbroeck compared God’s love and grace to the action of the tides of the ocean: going out from the source, and then drawing everything back to the source. God’s love constantly washing over us like the tide, constantly nourishing us, constantly drawing us to himself.
Today we celebrate the feast of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit—three persons, yet only one God. If you want to put it into mathematical terms, what we are saying is: 1+1+1=1. But the Trinity is about much more than abstract math!
As a trinity of persons, yet one God, God reveals God’s self as a perfect community in which love is so strong that it binds perfectly. What’s more, we learn that love is not real until it goes out and loves the other, and then receives the love back.
In Jesus, God came to us as one of us and loved us to his dying breath, to the last drop of blood. God’s Spirit gives us life, prays within us, reminds us constantly how we are to love, and inspires us to love God with our whole being, and our neighbor as ourself.
This God we celebrate and worship, even within God’s very self, is love given and returned, from the Father to the Son and back again. And God created us with freedom so that we might freely do as God does: give the love we have received back to God and to each other.
And where is God when love seems to be absent? Right in the middle of it, dying for us on a cross. Right in the middle of it, amidst those dying in Ukraine, asking Sister Svitlana: Do you want to enter into this reality with me? God is like a policeman, or a firefighter, or an EMT, who, when there is a problem, doesn’t run away from it, but right at it, right into it.
And now God may be asking us, when children are shot down in schools, when deadly guns are so readily available: Do you want to enter into this reality with me and create change? When a powerful country attacks a weaker one without any provocation: Do you want to enter into this reality with me and demand justice for the oppressed? You see, in the Bethlehem stable God entered into our poverty. As one who was known to come from Nazareth, a desperately poor town in the middle of nowhere, God entered into our prejudice and racism. As one who was wrongly accused and sentenced to death, God entered into our injustice. Wave after wave, like the rising and ebbing tides, God’s love washes over us, helps us to face our pain and suffering, our hope and joy, continually drawing us closer and closer to the font of infinite and eternal love.
So, look around. Don’t close your eyes to the pain and suffering, the poverty and injustice. Instead, let God ask you: Do you want to enter into this reality with me? Do you want to build a human community worthy of the name, built in the image of the Trinity, a perfect community of love?