St. Isaac’s saying pierces like light through a narrow crack.
God has no need of anything. But He is gladdened whenever He sees a man comforting His image and honoring it for His sake. (Homily 5)
How strange and beautiful that the Infinite should rejoice in the tenderness of the finite.
God, who is perfect and lacking nothing, allows Himself to be moved by compassion shown to another.
The mystery is that we do not only comfort the poor, the suffering, or the broken; we comfort God Himself, whose image they bear.
Every act of mercy becomes a small caress offered to the face of the Creator.
The hungry one, the lonely one, the one who wounds me with his need, each carries the secret likeness of the Beloved.
When I offer a word, a listening silence, or the patience to endure contradiction without bitterness, I am not performing charity from above.
I am entering into God’s own compassion, learning the tenderness by which He sustains the world.
Our poverty also consoles Him.
When we accept the emptiness that humbles us, when we cling to Him without demand, our trust becomes His joy.
In this way charity and poverty become two faces of the same faith.
The first is the outward movement that serves His image in others, and the second is the inward surrender that allows Him to act within us.
To comfort the image of God is to enter the mystery of His heart, to touch the love that bends down to our weakness, and to let that love move through us without resistance.
This is the sweetness of St. Isaac’s vision.
The Almighty permits Himself to be comforted by the mercy of His creatures, and in that exchange heaven and earth meet in quiet joy.
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