Like newborn infants, long for pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. …Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babes you have prepared praise for yourself. (1 Peter 2; Matthew 21)

Today we are given this theme of newborn infants and nursing babes, and spiritual milk, strange images it seems for the dedication of our Chapel. What is this spiritual milk? How do we come to long for it and find it and drink it? And why does praise come from such feeding?

Apart from the one line already quoted, the Gospel of the cleansing of the temple appears to have little to do with nursing babes. Three things happen in this scene. The first is that Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, and the dealers in sacrificial doves. The second, just as important, is that the blind and the lame flock to Jesus in the Temple and are healed by him. The third is that children cry out in praise, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

We see Jesus proclaiming the end of the transactional, economic, sacrificial relationship with God and proclaiming instead the revelation of God as pure gift, flowing about in abundance to any who want it. This was the heart of Jesus’ mission in the Gospel.  God is gift, is pure self-outpouring, incarnate in the self-outpouring of Jesus for everyone who wants it. Relationship with God is no longer about doing little things for God in the hope of getting little things back but, in the person of Jesus, something new has begun: the flooding-over-us offer of God’s life as pure gift to us. The shocking and searching Light that God is, the Love and Life, is offered freely, without mediation, without any kind of bargaining, in Jesus. It flows through Him to us as gift. There is no transaction here, no tallying of coins. There are no sacrificed doves. He gives himself to all who ask, even if, as it historically has turned out, very few have wanted receive him.

What does this have to do with our experience of this Chapel, and with nursing babes and pure spiritual milk?

First, we all begin the spiritual and religious life as moneychangers, making little transactions with God, little sacrifices for God, hoping that God will do or be something good for us. This Chapel then is, at least unconsciously, used as a space that is all about us and our needs or desires. It is a space where we do our religious or spiritual stuff (for God? for the world? for ourselves?) perhaps being fed, consoled, inspired along the way, perhaps indeed offering small sacrifices now and then — twenty minutes of time to come do our duty and pray Noonday Prayer. The picture here is that of a huge circle with ourselves at the center, and God as being a little node on the outside of the circle, to whom we choose to relate in order to get more things for ourselves. We begin in a kind of bargaining system, making little sacrifices and disciplines for God, liturgical and contemplative, so that we can get what we need. This might be a sense of being a good monk or nun, of calm or peace, of fitting in with the group, of standing out from the group. It’s all about ourselves and this Chapel is, in essence, merely a space where we make small transactions in order to get what we want from God.

Jesus is however always active against this mindset, overturning the table, scattering our coins, refusing to allow it to function. It always breaks down. Jesus is at work in our lives here to reveal to us in shocking clarity the economic, small-minded, pusillanimity of our self-centered relationship with God. And Jesus does this by uncovering the reason for our small-mindedness. He shows us, perhaps through others, how relationally insecure we are, how fearful, how needy, and how much we dislike ourselves, how we are crippled, too, because unable to stand in the truth of our own presence and being, and to like it there. We see how we do almost anything to avoid being-in-ourselves. It’s because we are so needy, and so fearful, and so uncomfortable with our own selves, that we can’t conceive of life as anything more than a fearful scrabbling for the things we want and need. It’s like living with the mindset of starving people or fierce gladiators or stall-owners in the religious marketplace, having to scrape up or fight for or bargain our way to just a shred of feeling good about ourselves or feeling happy with life. Our needs and fears become our gods.

The core of Christianity is our encounter with the One who loves us, and this encounter which happens in so many ways is always an encounter with One who gazes upon us in love. The whole of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is about just this encounter, painstakingly recorded for us by an exquisitely sensitive and gifted soul. This experience of being gazed on in love, and learning to raise one’s fearful eyes to receive the gift of that love, and to love back, to receive from him the desire of his heart and self, and to offer oneself back, is the pure spiritual milk we are told to long for. This is the spiritual infancy we need — and so many of us just skipped over this first step of receiving this love, and this is why our lives remain about ourselves, about our doing big things for God, and remain empty, anxious and needy at the core. Because we have never fed on this milk — our Mother Jesus feeding us with his very self in love, feeding us with the gaze and self-giving of love — our lives remain about ourselves. Long for this milk! Peter tells us, and taste how good the Lord is.

Once we begin to feed on this gaze of love (and that is so much like a child nursing almost blind at the mother’s breast!), we might find that our spiritual blindness begins to be cured. We can begin to see in fact that this Chapel is not a place for us to do our religious or spiritual things for God, conducting our little transactions, sacrificing a few doves a day, but it is a place, primarily, where God in Godself acts. This action of God, in continuity with the two fundamental self-communications of  the Incarnation and Pentecost,  happens in this chapel in two discrete events: the occasional baptism at the font, and the action of the daily Eucharist, the Mass, where our Mother feeds us especially with Himself.  The more our spiritual eyes are opened, and the more we feed on Jesus’ gaze of love, the more we begin to see a different picture from the self-centered one in which we started. Now the big circle of reality is filled with God, and God’s action, and God’s rejoicing, and God’s tremendousness — and we are, relative to this, just about nothing.

I don’t mean this ‘nothing’ in a morbid or self-hating way. No! It is celebration, it is joy, it is offering praise as a child, “Hosanna to the Son of David.” It is being able to stand in oneself, in one’s own skin, one’s own reality with a deep, resonant affirmation and joy in being there, one’s eyes fixed no longer on what “I am feeling or needing” but on the giving and action of God.

For years I have found a great freedom in contemplative prayer and meditation and in simply refining the experience of mindfulness and the non-objective awareness of Being. I have discovered in this a freedom in the ability to lay aside the “gregory-self” (poor thing!) and be in the presence of that self-giving Light. This is huge freedom. It is, to paraphrase the Zen master Hongzhi, “my family business.”

But seeing God’s action, primarily in the Eucharist, in this way — seeing that everything I will do in the rest of my life is almost nothing in relation to that Giving — gives the same Freedom but in a distinctly Christian way, rooted in the person of Jesus. The ego just deflates on seeing this, like a balloon with the end untied — phhhhhhhht! And we can let this deflation happen, and we can let the freedom flow in. It is safe for us to do so precisely because we have previously nursed, taken suck, on the pure spiritual milk of our Mother Jesus who offers himself and his desire to us in that gaze and longing and action of love. This makes for a shout of joy indeed. We once were blind, now we see. We were lame in love, now we walk in Him.

What I’d like to see for this community, as we grow in our spiritual maturity, is a growing recognition that this Chapel is not a place for us to do our little spiritual, religious, or contemplative things, hoping to get what we need or want from our Lord in exchange. May Jesus drive this from us by the gaze of his love! This Chapel is not a place for us to do our religious stuff; it is a place where God acts, uniquely, and powerfully, where the Incarnation and Pentecost happen again and again in the giving of love we call Eucharist. Julian would have us to experience some real “reverent dread” when we walk into this place, a “reverent dread” that will increase in the measure that we have learned love. Because when we walk through the statio door, we are not entering a precinct approved for religious transactions, but we are entering a place dedicated for God’s action, free and non-bargained for. We can be relieved and happy in what Jesus reveals — that this divine incursion and action in our midst is always an action of intense cherishing of us, to the point of it giving itself up so that we might live.