Jesus spent the whole night in communion. The way I would like to define communion here is that Jesus spent the night listening to the Father calling him the Beloved. That is the voice Jesus heard when he came up out of the Jordan River (Luke 3:22), and he hears that same voice on the mountain: “You are my beloved Son, on you my favor rests. I declare you to be my Beloved, the one in whom I pour out all my love. You are my favorite one” (see Luke 9:35). It is with this knowledge of being the Beloved that Jesus could walk freely into a world in which he was not treated as the Beloved. People applauded him, laughed at him, praised him, and rejected him. They called out “Hosanna!” and they called out “Crucify!” But in the midst of all those voices, Jesus knew one thing—I am the Beloved; I am God’s favorite one. He clung to that voice. When Jesus enters into prayer in the night he is totally free from everything and totally open to the voice that calls him the Beloved.
Why is it so important that we are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It’s important because it’s the place in which we can listen to the voice of the One who calls us the beloved. Jesus says to you and to me that we are loved as he is loved. That same voice is there for us. To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of our being and permeate our whole life. Who am I? I am the beloved. If we are not claiming that voice as the deepest truth of our being, then we cannot walk freely in this world.
In the world there are many other voices speaking—loudly: “Prove that you are the beloved. Prove you’re worth something. Prove you have any contribution to make. Do something relevant. Be sure you make a name for yourself. At least have some power—then people will love you; then people will say you’re wonderful, you’re great.”
These voices are so strong. They touch our hidden insecurities and drive us to become very busy trying to prove to the world that we are good people who deserve some attention. Sometimes we think that our busyness is just an expression of our vocation, but Jesus knew that often our attempts to prove our worth are an example of temptation. Right after Jesus heard the voice say, “You are my Beloved,” another voice said, “Prove you are the Beloved. Do some-thing. Change these stones into bread. Be sure you’re famous. Jump from the Temple, and you will be known. Grab some power so you have real influence. Don’t you want some influence? Isn’t that why you came?”
Jesus said, “No, I don’t have to prove any-thing. I am already the Beloved” (Matt. 4:1-11).
I love Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. The father holds his child, touches his child, and says, “You are my beloved. I’m not going to ask you any questions. Wherever you have gone, whatever you have done, and whatever people say about you, you’re my beloved. I hold you safe in my embrace. You can come home to me whose name is Compassionate, whose name is Love.”
If we keep that in mind, we can deal with an enormous amount of success as well as an enormous amount of failure without losing our identity, because our identity is that we are the beloved. Long before our father and mother, our brothers and sisters, our teachers, our church, or anyone else touched us in a loving or a wounding way—long before we were rejected by some person or praised by somebody else—that voice was there. “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). That love was there before we were born and will be there after we die. A life of fifty, sixty, seventy, or a hundred years is just a little moment in which we have been given time to say, “Yes, I love you too.” God has become so vulnerable, so little, so dependent in a manger and on a cross and is asking us again and again, “Do you love me? Do you really love me?”
This listening is not easy. Jesus spent the night in prayer. That is an image of the fact that prayer is not something we always feel. God’s voice is not a voice we always hear with physical ears. God’s word is not always an insight that suddenly comes to us in our minds or that satisfies our hearts. God’s heart is greater than the human heart and therefore transcends our feelings and emotions. God’s mind is greater than the human mind and therefore transcends our insights and good ideas. Much real prayer of communion takes place in the night, in the night of faith, in the darkness that comes upon us because the light of God is so great that it blinds us and makes our heart and mind unable to grasp what we are learning.
That is where the discipline of prayer comes in. We are called to pray not because we feel like praying or because it gives us great insights, but simply because we want to be obedient, to listen to the voice that calls us the beloved. The word listen in Latin is audire. If we listen with full attention in which we are totally geared to listen, it’s called ob-audire, and that’s where the word obedience comes from. Jesus is the obedient one. That means he is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, and to the degree that we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more “deaf” we get, the more absurdus we become, and an absurd life is precisely a life in which we no longer listen and are constantly distracted by all sorts of voices and lose touch with the truth that we are the beloved. And as soon as we start to become spiritually deaf to the voice that calls us the beloved, we are going to look someplace else to make us the beloved. And that’s when we get into trouble.
We are going to look for love, affirmation, or praise where we cannot find them and get hooked in all sorts of ways, whether it is alcohol, drugs, relationships, success in work, ho\y people talk about us, or desire to have control over things.
Real freedom to live in this world comes from hearing clearly the truth about who we are, which is that we are the beloved. That’s what prayer is about. And that’s why it is so crucial and not just a nice thing to do once in a while. It is the essential attitude that creates in us the freedom to love other people not because they are going to love us back but because we are so loved and out of the abundance of that love we want to give.
This is where ministry starts, because our freedom is anchored in claiming our belovedness. Being the beloved allows us to go into this world and touch people, heal them, speak with them, and make them aware that they too are beloved, chosen, and blessed. When we discover our belovedness, we begin to see the beloved-ness of other people and call that forth. It is an incredible mystery of God’s love that the more we know how deeply we are loved, the more we will see how deeply our sisters and our brothers in the human family are loved.
But we have to pray. We have to listen to the voice that calls us the beloved.
Oh, if we could sit for just one-half hour a day doing nothing except taking a simple word or phrase from the Bible and holding it in our heart and mind. “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Ps. 23:1, NRSV). Say it three times. We know it’s not true, because we want many things. That is exactly why we’re so nervous. But if we keep saying the truth, the real truth—“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want”—and let that truth descend from our minds into our hearts, gradually those words will be written on the walls of our inner holy place. That becomes the space in which we can receive our colleagues and our work, our family and our friends, and the people we will meet
The trouble is that as soon as we sit and become quiet, we think, Oh, I forgot this. I should call my friend. Later on I’m going to see him. Our inner life is like a banana tree filled with monkeys jumping up and down. It is not easy to sit and trust that in solitude God will speak to us—not as a magical voice but as knowledge that grows gradually over the years. And in that word from God we will find the inner place from which to live our lives.
Solitude is where Jesus listened to God. It is where we listen to God. Solitude is where community begins.
From A Spirituality of Living, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, pp. 22-31
