To know more is to love more

INNER LIFE BY DAVID TORKINGTON
wBROTHER had a fair working knowledge f Zulu and of the Zulu people until he came to know a beautiful young Zulu girl. As he came to know her more and more his knowledge grew into a deep and lasting love. This love not only enabled him to know her more deeply, but the culture, customs and traditions of her people that were embodied in her. These in their turn enabled him to understand and love her more deeply both before and after their marriage.
William of St Thierry, a famous Benedictine writer once said, "You will never be able to love someone unless you know them, but you'll never really know them unless you love them." So long as an unwarranted self-love is kept at bay this process simply goes on and on, as two separate personalities interpenetrate each other though a loving mutual knowledge that is only bounded by eternity.
We all have a fair working knowledge of the ancient Jews and their traditions and cultures from our knowledge of the Scriptures. But the more we come to know an individual Jew who embodies within himself these traditions and cultures the deeper our knowledge becomes. Then, if that knowledge deepens into love it becomes fuller and ever
more complete. The customs and traditions, the language and the way of life of the people who are embodied in the one we have come to love are seen in a new light and with a renewed interest. They become alive as never before, and lead to a profounder knowledge and so a deeper love than we ever thought possible before.
This is precisely what happens to a person when their knowledge of Jesus that deepens through prayer and ripens in love, is reinforced by studying the customs, traditions and ways of life of the people whose cultural heritage is perfectly embodied in him. As this knowledge grows into union with Jesus a believer in simultaneously drawn into an ever deeper union with the great mystery of God's love that is not just embodied in Jesus, but can be experienced in him. This experience may seem similar in many respects to human love, at least to begin with, but it ultimately transcends it.
Like its human counterpart this experiential knowledge gives not only understanding, but strength to do what would be quite impossible without it. That's why the great Christian mystics were not just romantic dreamers but men and women who saw what God wanted of them and then were given the power to do it. There is nothing more important then for a Christian than learning how to enter into the mystery of God that was first embodied in the mystery of Jesus. This involves coming to know and love the human in him that was fashioned and formed by the culture in which he grew up and was inherited from his mother. Then at the same time it further involves coming to know and experience the divine in him by imitating the prayer life that enabled him to be open at all times to his Father's love.
BUT FIRST I would like to spend some time trying to understand the human in Jesus by studying the culture and traditions in which he grew up in so far as they help to shed light on his personal spiritual life. This must be the starting point for any authentic Christian spirituality.
However, whether we like it or not we are Europeans and culturally Greek in origin. Personally I'm proud of it, always have been and always will be. I'm proud too of the glories of the Renaissance that inspired us to re-fashion almost every aspect of our culture on principals and ideals drawn from the ancient classical Greco-Roman world. However it cannot be emphasised enough that our spiritual origins are not just in the West but also in the East. Our spiritual ancestor is a Jew, a Semite, not a Greek and we must look to him and the spiritual traditions that formed him if we ever to appreciate fully the spirituality that he has bequeathed to us.
This spirituality has been repeatedly misinterpreted and misunderstood throughout the last two thousand years by people who have tried to interpret it in the light of and in the language of pagan Greek philosophical thought, In the weeks ahead I will do my best to try to disentangle the one from the other so that, while remaining culturally Europeans, we can at the same time become more spiritually Semite like Jesus so that we can live by the same spirituality that he lived by and be inspired by the same Spirit who first conceived, penetrated and finally raised him from the dead.t