"The 'Great Divine Romance,' God's Suffering, and God's 'Pathos' (or 'Wrath'?)"

                                                                                                           Ps. 116:5, NIRV

   

    To speak of God’s tender, compassionate love (as we have in recent

posts) is not to speak of slushy, namby-pamby love!  We have just

finished a series in which we made frequent reference to the “great

divine romance of Heaven for us .” [1]  We now turn to another theme

that is also a part of the "great divine romance": the pain

that can be a part of any immense love (as every parent

already knows).

     In recent years there has been much discussion of the suffering of God:

God in pain and experiencing pathos because beloved children care little

for God’s abiding presence, care, and tender love.  This topic

includes God in pain as we, God’s children, disregard God’s

wishes that we pass love on to one another or that we show adequate

love and concern in our stewardship of this world.  In essence, this

is God’s pain about a world that has chosen to live in a "far off

country" spiritually--remote by choice from God’s love and care

(here we use imagery from Jesus' great parable “The Prodigal Son”--

discussed previously[2] ).  Furthermore, this includes God’s pain about

what has happened to this world: it’s disordered state in this self-inflicted

"far country" experience.  (Note: The pathos of God is one secret to

understanding many difficult passages of scripture, as we will see. 

For example, when Jesus is especially stern, we often eventually

find pathos behind the scene; e.g., see Lk. 19:41-42 and the entire

passion story that follows.)

     We once attended a retreat with the late spiritual guide and pastor Gordon

Cosby, who one commentator called “perhaps the most Christian human

being I have ever known.”[3]   At this retreat Gordon said that we cannot get

a hold of any understanding of suffering until we get a hold of the idea

that God suffers.[4]   

     To try to understand what this means we begin by looking at several reports of persons seeing through to a higher spiritual vision.  It seems that the Holy Spirit granted something of a transitory insight about the great mystery of suffering in each case that follows.  First, however, in order to place this in context, we consider Job in the Bible.  Something similar happened to him.  Job probed the mysteries of suffering--including his own firsthand suffering--and got nowhere until God addressed Job personally in an inexplicable whirlwind (Job 38).  What was that whirlwind?  A miraculous encounter with God, but beyond that no one entirely knows.  

     However, this encounter changed Job’s whole outlook! 

Whatever the whirlwind was, Job knew that the Spirit of God had responded to his personal rantings and his outrage over his own pain, as well as his questions about the inexplicable mysteries of suffering (see Job 7:16-21; 9:12, 32-33; 10:1-22; 38; 42:5).  The

Spirit of God had answered Job with personal encounter rather than human-sized answers. Arnold Rhodes writes: "The book

of Job is the voice of Every-person crying out in the anguish

of personal existence: ‘Why?’  But it is also the voice of God

answering not the ‘why’ but the [person]. . . . When God

comes to us and we turn to him, we may still have

unanswered questions but we ourselves have been answered

at the deepest level of communication.  Job found himself

small yet cared for personally by God."[5] 

And thus, Job was given a new way of seeing!  However,

Job did not yet see into the mystery of God‘s own suffering. 

That revelation would come later through the prophets and especially through Jesus.  Nonetheless, Job came to greater

peace about his own haunting questions because of personal

encounter with God. And modern seekers can also have

their own experiences of personal encounter, even if they

may be less dramatic, as we will see next.     

 

     So next we offer several insights--perhaps even modest revelations--with some small similarity to Job’s experience.  Like Job, Thomas Kelly

addressed the mystery of suffering--going even further by addressing the

topic of God’s suffering.  Kelly does this by sharing a friend’s revelatory

inspiration (perhaps, in a modest sense, something like the whirlwind

in the Book of Job).  Kelly's friend’s experience was as follows:

 “A friend has told me how it was given to her to see [in a revelatory

sense] the entirety of the evil of the world, on its backside, so to say,

and to look through into the face of God. . . .  [The] suffering

and the joy and the serenity at the heart of the world—these

are unspeakably great. . . .  But there is a point of vision

from which one can look through sorrow and pain and still

see the face of the Eternal Lover.  This is a hard saying [a difficult

mystery!], but worthy of all acceptance” (in Kelly’s estimation).”[6]

     Perhaps in the next instance, Kelly speaks in addition of his own revelatory
experience in regard to this topic.  (Note: in general we find Kelly to be

a man of great spiritual depth and understanding of God ways with us;

he has written one of our favorite spiritual classics: A Testament of

Devotion.[7])  In regard to our question today, Kelly writes:

“For a few agonized moments we may seem to be given to stand

within the heart of the World-Father and feel the infinite

sufferings of love toward all the Father’s children.  And pain

inflicted on them becomes pain inflicted on ourselves. Were

the experience not also an experience suffused with radiant

peace and power and victory, as well as tragedy,
it would be unbearable.[8]

     Perhaps in reporting both cases Kelly also recalled an experience

reported by George Fox, the founder of the Christian group known

as Quakers that arose in England in the 17th century (Kelly was a

Quaker--or, more correctly, a member of the Society of Friends).

      Recording a revelatory experience in his journal, George Fox wrote: “I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness.  And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings” (i.e., inspirations and guidance/leading from the Holy Spirit).[9]

     It may seem strange that we begin our topic with these inspirational experiences.  However, when one deals with a topic as mysterious as the pathos, pain, and suffering of God (as well as our own suffering) we deal with deep mysteries that the Spirit may well address in ways that defy explanation.  Again, remember Job ... and God coming to him

personally in that mysterious whirlwind. Also remember thoughts

from Evelyn Underhill that we quoted previously: “In … high moments

we get past the puzzles and conflicts of existence.  We don’t solve

them, but we transcend them” (as the Spirit of God guides us and responds

to our honest search and prayer; discussed in our 10/2016 post).

     We have also experienced our own very modest inspirations in this regard.  For example, when Lorraine was in her early twenties we learned that her father had incurable lung cancer.  There were many prayers and ultimately many “Whys?”  Her father had been such a good man: a salt of the earth, instinctively wise farmer in northern Wisconsin.  He did not deserve his long struggle and death at age 59.

     For a time Lorraine buried her “Whys?”—swept them under the carpet.  But they continued to simmer somewhere deep within.  Then one day a wise person intuited what was going on and said, “Well, go ahead.  Argue with God.  God is big.  God can take it!” 

     Indeed, in like manner God took it in the rantings of Job and finally even stooped to answer Job.  Ultimately, an answer came to Lorraine as well.  It was really quite simple, but it changed everything regarding such questions.  (Note: at this time the suffering, pain, passion, and pathos of God were not often discussed, as they have been more recently.)

     The simple answer (inspiration) came during Holy Week.  We were watching Jesus of Nazareth on TV.  At the crucifixion scene Mary, the mother of Jesus, wept with great pathos beneath the cross.  A new idea shot into Lorraine’s consciousness: Why surely the Father in heaven is in every bit as much pain as Jesus’ earthly mother!  God the Father is certainly suffering too!  And that must also mean that God suffers when we, God’s other “beloved” children, suffer as well.[10]  Then, like Jesus, God is certainly in-and-with us in our pain—not watching from some remote perch in heaven!  

     Perhaps the above doesn’t seem like a great insight—especially now that so much has been written about the pain and pathos of God.  But at that time it changed everything—Lorraine’s entire outlook.  And when we later began to find books or articles on this topic (listed at the end of this post), and when we heard Gordon Cosby wise words above, it all seemed to come as confirmation of the modest insight Lorraine had been given.

     Later we also attended a day seminar with the magnificent Old Testament biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann (who--as we were to learn--speaks of  God’s “pathos-filled love” and “pathos-filled fidelity”[11]).  The topic of the seminar was the Prophet Jeremiah and his expression of the passion, pathos, and pain of God over God’s wayward children and all the wrongs and injustices that had become part of the peoples’ normal ways.  This was probably the first time we heard scholarly discussion of the pathos of God.  It made a great  deal of sense!  This also led us to the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his celebrated discussion of the pathos of God (expressed through the Hebrew prophets) in his great work The Prophets.

     Thoughts about God’s pathos and suffering are also often intermingled with thoughts about God’s wrath (as discussed in the Hebrew Scriptures).  Today it is not unusual to read thoughts like these from James Smith:

We have a difficult time with the concept of God’s wrath. . . .  The solution

to the problem is in understanding that in the Bible the wrath of God is

pathos and not [angry] passion. . . .   [Wrath is] understood as an

emotional convulsion. . . .  ‘Pathos’ on the other hand, is an act

formed with care and intention” . . .  It is actually an act of love.[12]

     Note the words care and love in Smith’s thought.  If God did not care so faithfully and ardently, God would have no pathos--or natural parenting anger.  Every parent understands something of the Divine Parent’s pain, pathos, care, and rightful anger (as we will also see next in Jesus).  One example of God’s profound (almost heartbreaking) pathos is found in Isaiah: “Listen, O heaven and earth, to what the Lord is saying: The children I raised and cared for so long and tenderly have turned against me.  Even the animals--the donkey and the ox--know their owner and appreciate his care for them, but not my people….  No matter what I do for them, they still don’t care.”[13]

     All of the above ideas come together when we consider Jesus.  If Jesus is the “visible expression of the invisible God,” as we are told in the Epistle to the Colossians (1:15, Phillips), surely we can understand the loving pathos and even the wrath of God best by looking at Jesus.  

     First, In regard to the issue of wrath, Jesus’ wrath was rare.  Here also, he was the visible image of an invisible God: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, Slow to anger and abounding in compassion and lovingkindness” (Ps. 103:8, AMP).  

     When Jesus’ anger did occur, it always made complete sense.  It was elicited largely by hypocrites with over-sized egos, the pompous who were abusively distorting real religion, and also those (often the same people) who were abusing the downtrodden and poor—including with unrealistic religious rules that only put burdens upon others; note Lk. 11:42.  (See Albert Nolan’s thoughts regarding these issues, which Gordon Cosby recommended at the retreat discussed above.[14]) 

     Then finally, of course, we must consider Jesus’ pathos and suffering on the cross (where, as 2 Corinthians tells us, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself ...”; 5:19, AMP).  Christ is not suffering separately from God, for Jesus says the one who has seen him has seen the Father (Jn. 14:9) and Corinthians says, God was in Christ.  Note also that Jesus shows no wrath on the cross, although he certainly would have had a right to it.  Ultimately, it is all about an inexpressible mercy, grace, forgiveness, love, and a tender, vulnerable God giving his all--even his life--for us.

     Indeed, a strange paradox is that much of the enigma of suffering seems to be related to the tenderness and vulnerability of God.  (See discussion of God’s vulnerability as seen in the vulnerable Christ in a previous post.[15]  Also see earlier discussion of “God’s ‘Tender Mercies’ and the World’s [Our] Pain.”[16])

     We believe the following principles have long proved to be wise in our own lives (principles that as spiritual directors we would also suggest to others).  We say three things in regard to the mysteries discussed in this post: 

A. We will never think of God’s wrath apart from a Parenting God’s suffering, pain, and pathos over beloved children and their choice to live in a far off country spiritually.  Also note that as in the “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” the Father always waits to welcome the lost child home: for the father in the parable (who represents God) ran to the returning son--without yet knowing what was in his heart--“clasped him in his arms and kissed him tenderly”[17]  (Note also that even if we do not choose to live in a far country spiritually ourselves, as long as we are in this world, we sometimes suffer because our brothers and sisters make that choice.  However, the Parenting God “of all comfort” will always be with us to help, uphold, and guide us; 2 Cor. 1:3-5, NIV.)

B. We will watch for the inspirations the Holy Spirit might give us in our own

lives regarding the difficult dilemmas and mysteries that surround the

whole issue of suffering.  George MacDonald says, “As you grow ready for

it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book or a

friend, or best of all, in your own thoughts.”[18] 

So, humbly, open-heartedly watch (pray) for what is needful--for insights

that will help you.  What comes into our lives may seem insignificant to

others, but it can mean everything to us.  For example, Frederick

Buechner writes of an incredibly difficult time in his life when something

small yet strangely significant to him personally occurred: “[A] car came

along . . . with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the

words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then.  The

word was TRUST.  . .  .  [F]or me it was an epiphany.”  Later, the owner of the

license plate learned about this “epiphany” for Buechner and brought the

rusty license plate to him as a gift.  Buechner writes that he placed it on

a bookshelf and for him personally it is “as holy a relic as I have ever

seen.”[19]   Watch and Pray!

C. As Christians, we will pass all such difficult mysteries through

Christ, the visible image of the invisible God.  We will not think of an

isolated God somewhere up there sitting immovably upon a distant,

lofty throne.  Instead, we will consider all such questions and mysteries

through the intimate, vulnerable God: “Emmanuel: God with us”--

Jesus (Mt. 1:23).  And this includes the God who suffered for and with

us even “unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8, RSV).

     We turn now to a fitting comment from Pope Francis: 

“It’s God’s hands who caress us in our moments of pain and who comforts us.”  God’s hands . . . “are hands that are wounded from love.”  [God] who heals us.  . . . “God’s hands . . . are wounded hands and they accompany us throughout life. . . . [We] entrust ourselves into God’s hands like a child puts its hand into the hand of its father.  It’s a safe hand.”[20]

 (Note: We feel that much of the meaning of New Testament thought, as well as the example of Jesus, regarding our topic today is summed up in Pope Francis’s few words.)  

     Martin L. Smith’s powerful words--recalling some of Jesus’ own heartbreaking words--also point this out:

What agonizing pathos there is in Jesus’ cry of protest and grief over his contemporaries’ rejection of the message of the kingdom . . . “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Luke 13:34).

     Jesus feels his own story recapitulating centuries of history in which a tender God has repeatedly reached out to shelter human beings from the conflagrations ignited by our own stupidity, cruelty, and self-destructiveness, as a mother hen might desperately run to shield her chicks from the flames in a barnyard fire, at the risk of her own life. . . .   [In Jesus we see] the desperate tenderness of a compassionate, rejected Creator. . . . Sometimes the scriptures sear us with a sense that we have so domesticated and trivialized our acts of worship that they can’t act as a crucible for handling the red-heat of God’s suffering love.”[21]

     See resources that discuss God’s suffering, loving pathos, and

comforting, healing, revivifying touch (that have been especially helpful to us) at the end of this post.

* * *

We now turn to personal struggles, processing, meditations, and

prayers--over the years. 

(Indeed such issues can take a great deal of honest seeking, searching,

processing, and prayer.)

“We Stumble (a Meditation)” 

     (With reflection upon Jn. 11:35, 14:9; Ps. 23; Lk. 15:20; Francis Thompson’s
“The Hound of Heaven”; and St. Catherine of Siena’s discussion of God as the

“mad lover,” who has fallen in love with the created--us![22])  

✫✵✫

A prayer in broken-heartedness:

The falling  ❅ snow ❆  heals my soul--

the birds in their merry capers, 

the kitten who snuggles . . . and  nuzzles and purrs, 

the fire with its dancing flames.

 

My 🖤 heart has again been broken, 

but YOU are the

 

In my 60s I know that--have lived it again . . . then again.

I wait for YOUR “leaven” to Rise.  

I wait for YOU to Emerge,

and with YOU my sorrowing spirit 

will Arise once more from the grave.

     “The Lord is close to those whose hearts have been broken”;

Ps. 34:18, NIRV.  (Also note Luke 5:31, 13:20; Mt. 13:33.)

     “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite

hope”; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

✫✵✫

A prelude to prayer:

     (With reflection on Eph. 3:16-20; 2 Cor. 4:7, and Ps. 103:4, MEV.)

✫✵✫

Lord, I had a good cry on Your shoulder today.

Thank You, thank You, that You are a God who lets me cry--

wiping my tears on Your spotless white robe,

leaning my head on Your kindness,

breathing in Your transforming presence,

breathing out my struggle and weakness.          

Gently You touch my sadness.

Softly You whisper of newness.    

Thank You, Lord, that my frailness--humanness--

is but reason for You to love me!

(With reflection upon Jn. 13:23--especially as this comforting scene is pictured

in a great deal of artwork by the early masters--John leaning on Jesus' shoulder

at the Last Supper [and as it is also often pictured in Celtic Christianity].[23])

Julian of Norwich: Someday our wounds shall be no longer “wounds

but . . .  worships” (or no longer “wounds but . . . honors”).[24]

✫✵✫

“Slowpoke Heart (Meditation upon Ephesians 3:18)”

     (With reflection upon Jesus’ words “Watch and pray ...”; and

St. Paul’s “[G]rasp love’s width ... length, height ... depth ...”;

Mt. 26:41, Eph. 3:18, CEB.)

✫✵✫

“A Meditation . . . Quiet in the Air"

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “I would say . . . remember that
there is a meaning beyond absurdity. … [B]e sure that every

little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we

can, everyone, do our share to redeem the world in spite

of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. 
And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build
a life as if it were a work of art.”[26]

✫✵✫

“Springtime Advent”

Life--insisting upon itself   

in every fragile blade,

in every tender filigree,

in every minute bud.

Rising Up out of ashes and dirt  

to proclaim a Silent Advent 

in every fallow season,  

              “world

                       without 

                            END”!

     (With reflection upon Isa. 40:3-5; Eph. 3:20.)

✫✵✫

A meditation upon the "Mystery of ... LOVE Crucified"! [27]

     Here we are reminded of God’s response to Job in Job 38: Who are

you to question . . . ?

     And yet in God’s own mysterious way, God does address Job’s “Why?” 

questions.  Repeating Arnold Rhodes wonderful insight: "The book of

Job is the voice of Every-person crying out in the anguish of

personal existence: ‘Why?’  But it is also the voice of God

answering not the ‘why’ but the [person]. . . . When God comes

to us and we turn to him, we may still have unanswered

questions but we ourselves have been answered at the deepest

level of communication.  Job found himself small yet cared for

personally by God."[28] 

✫✵✫

A prelude to prayer:

    (With reflection upon Jn. 6:20; 1 Kings 19:12; Prov. 3:5; Ps. 37:5, 

AMPC; and Charles Wesley’s great hymn “Jesus, Lover of the Soul.”)

✫✵✫

We close with helpful resources regarding personal suffering

and also God’s suffering and "pathos": 

- Pierre Wolff, (When sorely afflicted, or in pain, or struck by unusual

tragedy ...) May I Hate God? . . . (New York: Paulist, 1979).  (This has been an

especially helpful personal favorite on this topic.  Wolff once acted as spiritual director

to Henri Nouwen, who introduces this book.)

- John Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2004).

- Philip Yancy, Where is God When it Hurts? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990);

and Disappointment with God (1997).

- Helmut Thielicke, Out of the Depths (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1962).

- Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1955) Vol. I, especially

pp. 48-49, 80-85, 112, 119-121; Vol. II, especially pp. 1-11, 99-101. 

- Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). 

- Warren McWilliams, The Passion of God (Macon, GA: Mercer University, 1985).  

- Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms (Winona, MN: St. Mary's Press, 1993).

- Walter Brueggemann, To Pluck up, to Tear Down: A Commentary on the Book of
Jeremiah 1-25 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988), especially
pp. 43-45.

- Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2009), especially pp. 9-11, 43, 64, 164, 170.

- Walter Brueggemann, “A disaster of ‘biblical’ proportions?” Christian Century,
Oct. 4, 2005.

✫✵✫

(See additional blog posts after the “Notes” in “Older/Newer Posts.”

Also see additional posts that address today's topic in other ways.[29])

……………….

Notes: 

1. Our recent series began with: “Martin Luther, the Reformation & God’s

Tender Romance (Inclusion or Neglect?)”;

http://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2017/10/.  Especially see;

"The Great 'Divine Romance of Heaven' for Us & Its Frequent Neglect"; 

https://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-great-sacred-romance-and-its.html  

Regarding the terminology the “great divine romance of Heaven”: a thank you

for inspiration to S. J. Hill with Margaret Feinberg, “The Divine Romance,”

Ch. 2 of Enjoying God: Experiencing Intimacy with the Heavenly Father (Lake Mary, FL: Relavant, 2001); Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.F.S.,

The Divine Romance: Teresa of Avila’s Narrative Theology (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1992); Brent Curtis and John Eldredge,

The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God (Nashville: Thomas

Nelson, 1997).

2. See “The Tender ‘Love Song’ of God”; http://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2017/02/

3. Jim Wallis, “Gordon Cosby: Teaching Us How to Live and How to Die,” 3/21/2013;
https://sojo.net/articles/gordon-cosby-teaching-us-how-live-and-how-die.

4. From personal notes of this retreat in the 1980s at Wellspring, retreat center of The Church
of the Savior in the Washington, D.C. area.

5. Arnold B. Rhodes, The Mighty Acts of God (Atlanta: John Knox, 1964), p. 225,

(italics added).

6. Thomas Kelly,  The Sanctuary of the Soul: Selected Writings of Thomas Kelly,

ed. Keith Beasley-Topliffe (Nashville: Upper Room, 1997), p. 54 (from The Eternal

Promise).  

7. Thomas R. Kelly,  A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Row, 1941).

8. Kelly,  The Sanctuary of the Soul, p. 55 (from The Eternal Promise).  

9. Douglas V. Steere, Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press,
1984), p. 8 (from Journal of George Fox).

10. For the term “beloved,” see “The Tender ‘Love Song’ of God”; 
https://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2017/02/.

11. Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible

(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), pp. 43, 170.

12. James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 2009), pp. 120-121 (includes a quote from Anchor Bible Dictionary).

13. Isa. 1:2-3, TLB paraphrase.

14. Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001). 

15. See “The Descent of Tender Love: The Christmas Story”:

http://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2015_12_01_archive.html; and

“Sacred Tenderness from the Cross”; 
https://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2015/03/.

16. See God’s “Tender Mercies” and the World’s (Our) Pain; 
https://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2016/10/. Also see
“The World’s Darkness, God’s Love & Julian of Norwich”; 
https://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2015/11/.

17. Lk. 15:21, JB.

18. George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God (Minneapolis: Bethany House
Pub., 1990), p. 190 (from The Marquis’ Secret). 

19. Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 49-50.

20. “Pope Francis: Even when scolding us, God’s hands never give us a slap but instead
a caress,” reported by Susy Hodges, Vatican Radio; http://
enradiovaticana.va/storico/2013/11/12/pope_francis_even_when_scolding_us%2C_god%E2%80%99s_hands_never_give_us_a_slap/en1-745893.

21. Martin L. Smith, “Risking Depth and Passion,” Sojourners, Feb. 2013, p. 49.

22. Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, O.P. (New York: Paulist
Press, 1980), pp. 325, 364 (Chap. 153, 167).  Also see “The ‘Shepherd of Love’”;
http://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2018/01/.

23. E.g., see Giotto’s “Last Supper” (others artists also follow this tradition) where
the beloved disciple leans upon Jesus’ shoulder, thus setting an example for us;
view it at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/giotto/last-supper

A similar understanding is common in Celtic Christianity; see “Hearing God’s

Heartbeat”;
http://sacred-tenderness-christian-tradition.blogspot.com/2015_07_01_archive.html.

24. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Grace Warrack (London:

Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1901, 1949), p. 80; Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans.

Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978),

p. 245. 

25. Meditations, prayer/poetry/proverbs by Lorraine B. Eshleman.    

26. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays,
ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996), p. 412.  

27. A phrase about Julian of Norwich's visions of God's wounded--

and often rejected--love in Christ; from James Finley with Kirsten

Oats, Turning to The Mystics, “Turning to Julian of Norwich,” Center

for Contemplation and Action, 8/29/22, p. 9 (capitals added):

https://cac.org/podcasts/turning-to-julian-of-norwich/;

https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/TTTM_Transcript_TTJON.pdf [also see Julian of Norwich: Showings in Note 24].

28. See Note 5 above.

29. See Note 16 above.