we love out of fullness

It isn’t that loving others will make us feel fulfilled.  It’s the other way around:  when we feel fulfilled, we will spontaneously love our neighbors, love them unconditionally and without motivation, not in order to gain anything but as a result of our own fullness of being.

Meanwhile, the craving for secure and complete being drives us to bolster our petty, finite beings in all these miserable and destructive ways.

                                                              Beatrice Bruteau

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There is an old story about a man who had many faults

He did many things that people considered “sinful” and bad

But he attended a church that had a weekly “altar” call

A charismatic fellowship that took seriously the “filling” of the Holy Spirit

As the story goes each Sunday evening this man would sit through the sermon

and every Sunday he would become emotional and caught up in the moment

and every Sunday he would go forth to confess his sins and accept again

the grace of God

As he would wander forward to the altar he would call out, in a loud and fervent voice

“Fill me Jesus, fill me”  “Fill me Jesus, fill me”

He would leave renewed

Only to act the way he had always acted

Only to come back the next week and go through the some routine

Finally one Sunday, as we made his way forward calling “fill me Jesus, fill me”

A voice cried out from the congregation.

“Don’t do it Jesus, he leaks”

We all leak

All of us

We are such poor containers for the Sacred

And yet

And yet

This is our hope

This is the hope for the world

That we can be filled with God

And thus filled

Go forth in fullness rather than need

And love