Friday, July 30, 2010

July 30 – Never Been Kissed




There are some in monasteries who left a colorful life behind; others came to the Heavenly Lover as chaste of body as of soul.

Let’s have a bit of experimentation. For today, let’s imagine, let’s pretend, let’s try to wrap ourselves in the soul of the postulant who leaves the world without the taste of love’s first kiss. Never held in possessive arms, for good or destruction, never wooed, never the object of love or desire. Are we there? Can we find that imaginary place? For most of us, we would have to travel by our imaginations.

We have used the life of Elizabeth II to prompt our imaginations, for she knew both the riches and rigors of royalty and the challenges and cherishing chastity. She first met Phillip, then a Prince of Greece, at the age of thirteen, and she loved him from the start. She loved him for eight years and during a turbulent courtship, because it was so frowned upon (Phillip was a Battenburg on his mother’s side, and the German connection was quite unacceptable, considering the time.)

Can we imagine what that morning would have been like for Elizabeth, when the beloved but sheltered daughter of the royal house of Windsor walked up the long, long aisle of Westminster Abbey to meet, at last, the only man she had ever loved?

The new postulant enters the monastery with just that beating in her heart. We haven’t the aisle or the cloister, but we have the love. Oh, dear ones, let us await His kiss, He who saw beyond our darkness, Who loves our loveliness, by whose love we are beautified in the extreme. “Let Him kiss us with the kisses of His mouth, for His love is better to us than wine.” Let us not, today, demur.




"Pure as the Driven Snow"
photo by Kerry

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