Contemplative in the Mud

An Excess of Love

1–2 minutes

Benjamin Embley

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2 comments on An Excess of Love

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Towards the end of his novitiate year with the Redemptorists in Hanoi, Marcel Văn wrote on his journal pages,

It is because of an excess of love that my heart has reached this state of dryness.

How does this make sense?

I think it is simply that Jesus is hollowing out in our soul capacities to receive him. And we exercise one new capacity. Then Jesus hollows out another capacity to receive him and love with his Love. And then we use it. Then Jesus stretches us again. These times of “stretching” and “boring holes” are typically spiritually dry. Yet, they only exist because Love is forming the “holes” with the purpose of filling them. It is an “excess of love” that causes spiritual dryness in the first place. If Love were not working in us and completing the good work already begun, there would be no dryness in the first place.

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Benjamin Embley

With backgrounds in engineering (BSc PhD) and philosophy (MA), Ben has lived and worked in England, France, and Thailand and is now back home as a settler in the unceded traditional territory of the Wabanaki peoples in Canada. He is a Laudato Si’ Animator and currently studying an MTS Peace & Justice in Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

2 responses to “An Excess of Love”

  1. LB Michael St. Jacques Avatar
    LB Michael St. Jacques

    Dryness is such a gift because we are able to exercise our faith and trust in a special way. It is such a privilege to be able to say I love You to our God – Trinity in such times.

    Reply
    1. Ben (เบ็น) Avatar
      Ben (เบ็น)

      =) So many times, and in all the new ways that each dryness opens up to us… =)

      Reply

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