The Fire That Consumes, The Light That Saves … Our Hearts

©2010, Randall A. Beeler

13 For if my enemy had reviled me, I would verily have borne with it. And if he that hated me had spoken great things against me, I would perhaps have hidden my self from him. 14 But you a man of one mind, my guide, and my familiar, 15 who took sweetmeats together with me: in the house of God we walked with consent. (Ps 55, DRE)

For 2,000 years the Church has aptly taught Psalm 55 in light of Judas' betrayal of Jesus. The rawness and pain of betrayal are palpable in light of the thorn-crowned Heart of Our Savior.

The Psalm embodies the sense of faithlessness we experience when a friend or loved one deceives us. Indeed, all our experiences of betrayal stem from the original duplicity—our fall at the lies of our brother creature, the fallen Lucifer.

His name means "light-bearer," but what did he bring to light about us? We took sweetmeats together in the House of God (yes, the Psalmist means the Temple of his time); yet, what is that Temple but the tabernacle of our hearts?

We dine in Eden alongside our fellow creatures, the Angels. There, the Light-Bearer dims his gifted light into a gnawing, envious fire that wound itself serpent-like around our own hearts. We are duped—and all the more our sense of betrayal as we realize that, in our very freedom, we dupe ourselves. For our sense of betrayal extends not only to our primordial enemy—but to our very hearts.

5 Thus says the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusts in man, and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart departs from the Lord … 9 The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it? 10 I am the Lord who search the heart, and prove the reins: who give to every one according to his way, and according to the fruit of his devices. (Jer 17, DRE)

In the garish glare of hellfire, the pathways of our very hearts are now blind alleys. "24 Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom 8, DRE).

Pope Benedict XVI offers us Blessed John Duns Scotus, who rejoices in how God calls to us from our hearts and returns us prodigals from our original sin to our original hearts:

though aware that because of original sin Christ redeemed us with His Passion, Death and Resurrection, [Duns Scotus] makes it clear that the Incarnation is the greatest and most sublime work of the history of salvation … Christ is the centre of history and the cosmos, it is He Who gives meaning, dignity and value to our lives … [In] the doctrine according to which Holy Mary was free from original sin from the first moment of her conception, Scotus espoused the argument of "preventive Redemption." [This held that] the Immaculate Conception represents the masterwork of Christ's Redemption, precisely because the power of His love and His mediation ensured that the Mother was preserved from original sin. (Pope Benedict XVI, 7 July 2010 General Audience)

Yes, we do have a primordial enemy—and his enmity is personal. If we cannot fathom our hearts, no wonder then that we cannot plumb the depths of Satan's duplicity. Rather than question why one who tread Paradise with us would expose us to the vulnerabilities of our own freedom, we ought to focus on freedom itself—God's freedom … to provide for us One of us Who is free of Satan's gnawing fire, One Whose Immaculate Heart is the womb and pattern for God's dwelling with us.

Blind alley no more, our hearts are lit by a fire that does not consume us. As the Burning Bush shone without consuming itself, so, through Mary, God shines His freedom upon us—the Freedom that says "Let it be."

In that light, we see our true enemy—the Satan, the one who accuses us night and day—in a new light, as he is cast into the lake of his self-consuming fire.

Yes, we can and do still deceive ourselves, but that death has lost its sting. For even our worst self-betrayals can become, through God's Grace, a death-to-self that, in the same way Mary bears Christ, births Christ's resurrection into our hearts.

As Pope Benedict notes, Christ's Body, the Church continues, in the power of Christ, and the Fiat of Mary, to bring the True Light to the world:

Freedom ... grows and is perfected, said Duns Scotus, when man opens himself to God ... When we listen to the divine Revelation, to the Word of God, in order to accept it, then we receive a message which fills our lives with light and hope, and we are truly free … Blessed Duns Scotus teaches us that the essential thing in our lives is to believe that God is close to us and loves us in Jesus Christ; to cultivate, then, a profound love for Him and His Church. We are the witnesses of that love on this earth. (Pope Benedict XVI, 7 July 2010 General Audience)