In this question of openness, especially to others in a community, there is a difficulty which is not of the moral order. How can we share our innermost being with another? As we are often reminded, and rightly, every soul is a special creation of God. Each is unique, called by name, by God. While this is a divine gift, it constitutes a definitive solitude. There is a corresponding duty, therefore, to respect the “sacred and delicate mystery” of the other, that is, her inner liberty. It is a question of both allowing her to exist in her otherness and also to enter into mutual understanding and communication with her. We have to be careful not to fashion others in our own image, in a more or less subconscious attempt to subvert threats to our own autonomy. So may the bridge be crossed? Yes; and the solution to the conundrum is, as ever, love, the act which says ‘you’. Here is Guardini: “It is in that act that one ego moves toward another. He takes his eyes off himself and looks to the other.”  In this act, I am moving away from the attitude that the centre of the world is me, that everything revolves around me. I am choosing to recognise that the other also has a centre, “a personal origin and a personal goal.” It is “to reverse my customary point of view and to look upon the other in such a way that the whole world, all existence, centres in” the other. This is the meaning of the commandment: to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Such a love is not achieved once and for all, but requires a “continually renewed movement.” Love, says Guardini, is not a frame, nor a bridge, but a constant opening and re-opening of the heart. The same might be said of fidelity; fidelity to God, to our vocation, to our monastery.

Christ is the source of this self-replenishing love, because He is the origin of our life in God. As we read in the Prologue of St. John, those who receive Him and believe in His Name, those who are born of water and the Spirit, are given power to become children of God. We thus lay claim boldly to the freedom of the Father’s House and to a special ‘room’ in the spacious Heart of the Son. This is the ultimate expansion and fulfilment; here we share in God’s infinity, in “His eternal, definitive, holy life.” His will is no longer experience as restriction; it is “the very heart of our own will.” Since this divine and human Heart of Jesus is both undefended and merciful, it is from Him that we learn sacrificial love and a wide compassion. And not only from His example, from the sight of the “One Whom they have pierced” and from the knowledge that the aperture of His Heart was caused by a wound, but also because we may enter into that Heart and live by it. Christ invites us to enter, with all our hesitations and proclivity to narrowness of view, just as He invited the doubting Thomas. St. Bonaventure calls the Heart of Christ “a secret fountain, from which we draw water” springing up to eternal life – it is a symbol for the intimacy of love He shares with us.