Feast of Mary Magdalene

The readings from mass this morning include a section from the Song of Songs (this translation is from the USCCB books of the bible, and not the daily mass readings):

On my bed at night I sought him* whom my soul loves — I sought him but I did not find him.
“Let me rise then and go about the city,* through the streets and squares;  Let me seek him whom my soul loves.”  I sought him but I did not find him.

The Gospel is from an Easter Passage regarding Mary Magdalene at the tomb:

Mary stayed outside the tomb weeping.

And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb

and saw two angels in white sitting there,

one at the head and one at the feet

where the Body of Jesus had been.

And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

She said to them, “They have taken my Lord,

and I don’t know where they laid him.”

As noted in an earlier post:

Mary is seeking the Lord, the one whom she loves.

She had gone to the tomb, she was seeking him whom she loved, whom her soul loved.

This is the story of every human heart. God has made us for himself, and our hearts are ever restless, until they rest in God, as St Augustine has written. 

All of philosophy is a reasoned, structured, ordered search for God.  It is a search begun from the human perspective, from the human plain, from below.  But it can never fully reach or find the Truth or God on its' own.  Because eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him.

But:

No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.

God, in the person of Jesus, has come into the world, revealing God to man, and also revealing the fullness of man to man.  Or as Pope St John Paul II often quoted from the Second Vatican Council, Christ reveals what it means to be fully human.

Man, without this Divine Revelation, would be unable to satisfy the longing within himself, a longing placed there by his Creator, so that we might seek him (whom our soul loves).  In His great love for us, God has come to us, in the Person of Jesus, and by his passion, death and resurrection, has opened the gate of heaven, so that we might be with him, whom our soul loves, forever.

Jesus, the living bread come down from heaven, the Word of God, the way the truth and the life, the Light of the World, reveals to us how much God loves us, and makes it possible for us to share in the Divine nature, and the life of God.

The Bishops of the Catholic Church, gathered at the Vatican in Council in 1965, promulgated Dei Verbum.  They write much more eloquently, completely and correctly than I ever could and I encourage you to read it, think on it, and meditate on it frequently.