The Lofty Divine Love that Caresses: Deification in Ephesians as Lived Out by Us in the Mystical Life

By Fr. Ignatius John Schweitzer, OP

“But the word of God is not chained!” (2 Tim 2:9) In an early essay of this Spiritual Revolution Substack, Bishop Barres used this verse to describe the power of St. Elisabeth of the Trinity’s lectio divina on the canticle of Ephesians 1. He noted how astonishing it is that this hidden nun's praying with this Scripture passage continues to have an effect a century later. Something of the spiritual power of the unchained and living Word of God was released into the Church through her lectio divina. The same applies to us and our praying with the Sacred Scriptures today, even if the spiritual effects are smaller and unseen. There is almost a duty for us to do this today since the spiritual revolution we are really interested in is not just a general shift towards more spiritual values in our culture today but rather a release of the transforming and deifying energy of the Triune God into our world today through Word and Sacrament. What is needed is a spark from the inner fire of the Word that is expressed in a poignant way for our time. It is also like what St. Therese provided with her own unique articulation of the Gospel of grace through her “Little Way.” There too is another Word broken open that continues to resound a century later unto the transformation of many lives. The Word of God is not chained! A spiritual revolution is possible!

Recently as the Church began reading through the letters of St. Paul at daily Mass, I was filled with the conviction that this would be an especially graced time to do lectio divina with the same books of the Bible during my regular times of silent prayer. Moreover, it felt almost as a spiritual duty to engage with the sacred text as a way of helping those others scattered throughout the Church also engaged with the same text, as if my struggling with the sacred page would win graces for others praying with or preaching from the same text. Reading through St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, a letter I was rather familiar with, new insights into contemplative prayer sprang up all over the place for me. The Word of God is not chained! And the sense was that this kairos time for reading Galatians was not simply a special time of receiving new insights but, more importantly, a graced time of immersion into the mysteries described in the sacred page. After all, the living Word of God has a sacramental quality of accomplishing what it speaks and communicating the realities it describes to the Spirit-led reader in a deeper immersion into the realities of the Christian faith.

Those couple intense weeks of being quite overwhelmed with the Word of God through Galatians left me somewhat exhausted so that a little breather would have been welcome. But then the Church began reading the even weightier letter to the Ephesians! And the process began all over again for me but this time I began to keep better notes as I prayed with and preached the treasures contained in our beloved St Paul's letter to the Ephesians. And what follows are some sparks that shot off from the words of the One whose eyes blaze like fire (Rev 2:18) in the hope that they will enkindle the hearts of others in their own engaging and praying with this letter to the Ephesians, without which the themes below will remain flat on the page. May my summary reflections add a little fuel to the fire of the One who still comes today to cast the fire of divine love upon this earth! (Lk 12:49) If our own role seems rather small, we should remember that there is strength in numbers and in the communio of the Church and, moreover, the greatest spiritual revolution ever came about through a young, unknown virgin receiving the Word anew in the quiet of her inner room—she who had the habit of pondering all these mysteries and treasuring them in her heart (Lk 1:26-38; 2:19). Like in that time of great desperation for humanity, we today also need a lofty divine love that breaks in from above, beyond our worn-out human attempts at solutions, while also drawing near to us with a divine blessing that is also a caressing.

Ephesians and a Sublime Divine Love That is Also Tender

Ephesians 1:3-14 is so sublime, exalted, and divine that it can seem at times to be a little too abstract and hence a little cold for people. But we need to see these sublime verses in light of Ephesians 5:21-33 and the tender spousal imagery. God's Love is the exalted culmination of Agape and Eros (cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est #9-11). It is a generous self-giving love beyond all deserving that also bears a passionate desire for the beloved no less passionate than the longing of a bridegroom for his bride. Seeing the various passages of Ephesians as a well-crafted whole, we discover that Ephesians ultimately makes known the tender heart of the Father, whose lofty love draws his beloved little ones into the familiarity of his “household” (Eph 2:19) or better yet into the very tenderness of His heart, which we now have access to through Jesus and the Holy Spirit” (3:12, 2:18). And part of the astounding, sublime grace of God is that through the work of ministry (4:1-16), we have a share in bringing others into the fullness of God’s love and life in all its divine selfless generosity and tenderness.

As a husband “nourishes and cherishes” his bride (5:29), so does Christ love the Church (5:32), and this manifests the very heart of God (Jn 1:18, 14:9). The tender love of the Father described in Eph 1:3-14 involves this delicate nourishing, cherishing, and nurturing. The Father “blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (1:3); and the Father’s blessing of us is a caressing of us.

And what are these “heavenly places” in which we are blessed and caressed? Not some abstract location above like the Platonic realm of the Forms, but the very interiority of God. We have found a place in the interiority of God’s tender heart to be caressed there in His love and blessing. Through Jesus and the Spirit, we now have “boldness of access” “to the Father” (3:12, 2:18). We have gained entrance into the “household of God” as His treasured little children (Eph 2:19, cf. Jn 14:1-3), into the very interiority of the Father’s heart (Jn 1:18, Jn 14:2-3, Jn 17:24). The sublime lines of this hymn open up “the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (2:7). And this tends toward spiritual marriage and intimate mystical union with Him, “to unite all things in Him” (1:10) as “the two become one” (5:31-32).

It is a contemplative knowing and loving that surpasses all knowledge of the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ’s exceeding love, and this fills us with all the fullness of God (3:18-19). This is not just a future state but a present reality through the Holy Spirit who is our pledge, first installment, guarantee, and first fruit of all this even now, to the praise of God’s glorious grace (Eph 1:14, 2 Cor 1:22, 5:5). Who knows one’s interiority except one’s spirit, and we have been given the Spirit of the living God (1 Cor 2:9-12), to know God’s tender heart from the inside.

Moreover, the Father above, from whom every fatherhood is named (Eph 3:14-15), works through His ministers to help others grow in the experiential loving knowledge of the interiority of His tender Heart. And as they abide in His Heart, He blesses His beloved little ones, and caresses, nourishes, cherishes, and nurtures them in tender human and divine ways with His immeasurable kindness manifest in Jesus' heart broken open and bleeding on the Cross (Eph 5:25-29), to bring us deeper into intimate mystical union (5:31-32, 1:10). The Holy Spirit witnesses to this personal divine love for us and we witness with Him (Jn 15:26-27). When we see the other tenderly, we perceive God’s heart and the tender love for us that nurtures, cherishes, nourishes, blesses, and bleeds. And we get to live out that tender love of God for his beloveds through our various relationships. They are to receive through us God’s own tender nourishing, cherishing, nurturing, kind, and treasuring love. “Let yourself be loved more than these!” (St. Elisabeth of the Trinity)

After Mass and preaching on the unity of these themes one morning, I was confronted with a concrete image of Ephesians 1:3-14 as I was driving home through gorgeous wooded land of rural New York and the variegated colors of fall. Sun-drenched, colorful foliage manifests to us something of the Father’s heart in the rich, multi-faceted beauty that radiates forth precisely in its tender gentle glow and warmth. The pure white light of God’s love is refracted, as in a kaleidoscope, in all the marvels of God’s grace and His “manifold wisdom” (3:10) among the saints (even us), to the praise of His glory, Laudem Gloriae. The full richness of God’s grace could not be adequately appreciated through one soul alone. The whole symphony of the Church is needed to express such manifold beauty contained in the richness of God’s grace flowing from the diversity in unity of the Blessed Trinity. This is why St. Paul insists that to take into our contemplative gaze the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love, we need to kneel before the Father in adoration “with all the saints” (Eph 3:18). The sparkling radiance of various colors hints at the Praise of Glory that the members of the Church reflect back to the Triune God. And yet the glittering radiance of such a sublime love is not blinding in God’s humble love but comes as a tender caress. The subdued hue of the fall colors of this lovely display of exquisite foliage captures something of the tenderness and warmth of God’s Love. The sublime divine love does not come to overpower us but to woo us, cherish us, and nurture us as we grow up into maturity in Christ and, through a interplay and death to self and newness of life, we too radiate such subdued beauty as those colorful trees of fall in their gentle kaleidoscopic beauty.

A Share in this Nourishing and Upbuilding of Christ’s Body as She is Filled with All Fullness

The sublime, prevenient, and abundant love of God (Eph 1:3-14) is also the “nourishing and cherishing” love of a bridegroom for his bride (5:21-33), and this comes to us with a concrete, personal human touch as God uses human beings in ministry (4:1-16). The tender, nurturing, lavish heart of God the Father, who is rich in mercy (2:4), blesses and caresses us with “the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (2:7) through the caring hearts of those he has called to “the work of ministry, for the building up of the Body of Christ” (4:12). “Be kind to one another and tenderhearted” (Eph 4:32). For, God “the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named,” (3:14-15) manifests His tender heart in a concrete human way through every heart who plays a fatherly (or motherly) role in helping the Body of Christ “to grow up in every way into Him who is the Head, into Christ” (4:15). For He is the “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (4:6). “No one is so much a father, as God is Father” (Tertullian). And He manifests His tender love through His beloved children who share in the work of Christ and His own self-giving love: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted…Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (4:32-5:2; cf. 1:4-6).

We are to “be filled with all the fullness of God,” filled with “the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ” (3:18-19). One of the marvels of God's grace here is that this being filled with the fullness of God is accomplished through the lowly human “work of ministry, for the building up of the Body of Christ, until we all attain to...mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (4:12-13). The Son who descended is the one who ascended and “gave gifts to men,” “that He might fill all things” through our work (4:7-10). For “grace is given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (4:7). “And He gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers” and some others as parents raising children and some others as friends encouraging friends and some others as intercessors standing before God on behalf of the Church and world, all in their particular vocation “for the work of ministry and the building up of the Body of Christ” (4:11-13). We are able to make known in the here and now, and experienced concretely, something of God’s own immense love, nourishing, cherishing, kindness, tenderness and self-giving. We are given to be co-workers, through our role in the Church, in God’s astounding work of deification. “Now you are light in the Lord, so walk as children of light, for the fruit of Light is found in all that is good and beautiful and true” (5:8-9).

St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a masterpiece and an intricately developed whole, with various passages illuminating each other. Without this holistic reading we miss much. For instance, when read alone, Eph 5:21-33, about Christ’s spousal love for the Church, contains a phrase that is awkward, namely about husbands loving their wives as they love their own bodies (5:28-30). In spousal love, we normally do not think of the husband’s love for his own body. This makes sense here only in light of Eph 4:1-16, about Christ building up his mystical Body, which He loves as his own Body. Christ loves His bride and nurtures her as His own Body. He “nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His Body” (5:29-30). Jesus’ heart manifests the Father’s tender, nurturing heart and moreover Eph 5:21-33 explicitly brings us back to Eph 1:3-14 and the Father’s blessing and caressing so that the Bride might be presented "in splendor, without spot or wrinkle that she might be holy and without blemish” (5:27), language clearly echoing Eph 1:4 and us being “holy and blameless before Him.” These themes of Ephesians are a tightly knitted whole, whose full beauty and breadth can be appreciated only in gazing upon the harmonious whole.

The lofty and superabundant Agape love of God (Eph 1:3-14) is also the passionate Eros love of a Bridegroom for His Bride (5:21-33), and this is a “nourishing and cherishing” love (5:29) that comes with the personal, human touch of God using us in ministry (4:1-16). It is precisely in this way, through human ministers, that the fullness of “the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ” comes to us so that we may come to be “filled with all the fullness of God”—through God our Father being such a good, good Father (3:14-21). To receive this fullness more and more, we have the grace of contemplative prayer, where the Father gives us the first installment, foretaste, pledge of the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, unto the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened” that we might taste “the riches of this glorious inheritance” as Jesus the Lord is given as Head to the Church, “which is His Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (1:15-23).

God’s Power at Work Within through Contemplative Prayer and Mystical Union

The last section of Ephesians in our final reading from this book at daily Mass tells us to “Draw your strength from the Lord and from His mighty power” (6:10). It is worth pondering what this power consists of. The New Testament bears witness to the power we have in Jesus Christ thanks to his Passion, Death, Resurrection and His sending of the Spirit. It would be right to first of all see this power as a power to overcome sin and to live the new life in Christ, a power to love like Jesus loved. It is a power stemming from being born again as adopted sons in the divine Son and being transformed into his image and likeness (Jn 1:12-13, 2 Cor 3:18). Most astonishingly, it is a power to be deified and share more deeply in the divine life as we also help others through the work of ministry to grow in this fullness of God. We are made “partakers in the divine nature” through “His divine power” and through “His precious and very great promises,” among which those promises expressed in Ephesians perhaps stand out as the most lofty of all (cf, 2 Pt 1:3-4). What else do we learn about this deifying power at work within us from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians?

From Ephesians, we learn that this power we have in Christ is radically contemplative. It is a power that involves receiving in contemplative prayer. Consider the breath-taking passage of Ephesians 3:14-19. St. Paul prays that we might have power to grasp what is the length, the breadth, the height, and the depth, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that we might be filled with all the fullness of God (3:18-19). It is a power to receive divine love, to know that we are loved, to receive grace and the inflow of God, so that we can live the life of divine love. As we kneel before the Father (3:14), we need to be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner man” (3:16) in mystical prayer, to gaze upon and to take in and be immersed anew in the fullness of the immensity of God’s love and so be filled more and more with all the fullness of God. When we grasp the loftiness of this divine call, we appreciate how this power is the most significant of all for us and all humanity, even as much of the world runs so eagerly and devoted after other forms of power and away from this divine call to all of us. As we see our incapacity to attain to such a lofty divine call and God’s generous and sublime love in giving us such a power in the gift of Christ, we appreciate Paul’s exuberant language and overwhelmed adoration before the mystery, and how crucial and vital it is to release this power of divine love at work within us into our world today.

Ephesians 1:15-23 furthers this theme of the contemplative quality of this grace-given power at work within us. This is St. Paul’s prayer right after the lofty canticle of Ephesians 1 that speaks of all the spiritual riches with which we have been blessed in Jesus, the Beloved, as even Paul’s most eloquent and boisterous language falters in loving adoration before the mystery. Then St. Paul prays for deep graces of mystical prayer for the whole Church that, among other things, we might know “the immeasurable greatness of his power at work within us” (1:19). He prays that “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” that we might have an experiential knowledge, an immersed tasting, of what is “the hope of his calling, what are the glorious riches of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing power at work within us who believe" (1:17-19). Amazingly this power in us is the same power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places (1:20). We need power to receive in faith and to lay claim to in hope the marvelous riches of grace given to us as we too are, even now, seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph 1:3, 2:6). We need power to rise in faith and hope with Christ, to follow Him to the right hand of the Father where we too are seated in the heavenly places with Him (2:6). We need the contemplative power to receive this through an intensely convicted faith and to lay claim to it in audaciously bold hope. For, the Lord Jesus, true God and true man, has been given to us as head of his Body, the Church, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23).

The French Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, in his Givenness and Revelation,¹ notes of the four dimensions of the “breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love” (Eph 3:18) that with just three dimensions we would have an object within our gaze yet outside of us. But with the fourth dimension, the depth, we have an interior dimension and thus are immersed in the mystery of God’s Love as its interiority is opened to us. It is a mystical “knowing that surpasses knowledge” precisely because it is “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph 3:19, 17). We are granted access and entrance (3:18, 2:19) and given “the immeasurable greatness of his power within us who believe” (1:19) to be immersed into the interiority of this grace-filled four-dimensional space of the Father’s heart. As we are gathered with “all the saints” in stretching and expanding to contemplatively take in this reality and even to be taken into this reality, into the very interiority of God’s immense Love, we enjoy all the intimate familiarity of a household to an even greater degree and pitch. The rich tenderness and kindness of the Father’s heart touches and caresses us through human means as we are stretched and expanded by love of God and neighbor, in Jesus Christ and the Church, rooted and grounded in real and concrete personal love: “to Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations,” “to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Eph 3:21, 20).

St. Elisabeth of the Trinity shows us what this power looks like in a real human life lived amidst ordinary circumstances. She manifests what this contemplative power looks like and how it can radically change our lives and the world we live in. She has laid hold of these lofty promises of Ephesians 1 in contemplative prayer and it transforms her life with the power of God. She is the Laudem Gloriae, the Trinitarian Praise of Glory, caught up in this place of adoration and the silence of excess of contemplative love. Praise of Glory is a phrase that is repeated three times in the canticle of Ephesians 1, marking out its Trinitarian structure in the three sections that emphasis Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively. For Elisabeth, this canticle is not just a hymn on the page but dynamism of contemplative mystical union that she is caught up in through every aspect of her life. She lives in the sacred Page or, better yet, the living Word of God has opened up to her a graced space that she inhabits among the spiritual realities of the Triune God and the Church’s share in the life of the Trinity. And when, later in life, she is struck with that terrible sickness that will lead to her death, she has power to not be overcome by it because she has received and laid hold of the reality of being seated with Christ in the heavenly places as a Praise of Glory—even now in time, which is “Eternity begun and in process” and her very life as a Praise of Glory resounds as her eternal Sanctus.² She has power to rise up to those heights of the heavenly places in faith and hope through contemplative prayer, a power greater than anything in this world, so that this terrible illness and even death cannot hold her down as she turns it all into a holocaust of eternal love.

Through faith, hope, and charity, St. Elisabeth’s perspective and life are transformed through this power at work in us who believe. Elisabeth, the Praise of Glory, now also sees herself in faith and hope as Hostia Laudis, Victim of Praise, and this allows her to live the life of divine love as the holocaust of her life is wholly consumed. Rooted and grounded in the Word that is Spirit and Live, she is whole convinced that Love will triumph in the end. “Set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things, for you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (cf. Col 3:1-4). Or as Hannah Hurnard puts it, “We feel we would give anything if only we could in actual experience live on the High Places of love and victory here on this earth during this life—able always to react to evil, tribulations, sorrow, pain, and every wrong thing in such a way that they would be overcome and transformed into something to the praise and glory of God forever” (Hannah’s prologue to Hinds’ Feet on High Places). Elisabeth was able, through the power at work within her, to rise to these heights of victory and love that transformed her life and also the lives of those around her as this sublime divine love expressed itself, as seen in her final letters, in her tender, nourishing, and cherishing love toward those around her among her Sisters, family, and friends. This tender, nurturing, and caressing love blessed those around her with all the power of divine love. It was the small beginnings of a spiritual revolution that Elisabeth helped further in her own day through the releasing of the divine power and energy of Ephesians 1 and that continues to have ripple effects a century later. It is an example of how the spiritual revolution of our own day can spread through our own relationships of ordinary life as a Love beyond this world continues to be released through contemplative prayer and transform this world.

Keeping Intact the Strong Bond Between Deification and the Mystical Life

What it means “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (3:19) will remain a closed, chained-up secret for us, until we spend time prayerfully reading the mystics of our Catholic tradition and live a deep liturgical life. These are two vital ways that we need to read Sacred Scripture in light of the Church’s living Tradition. We need to let the saints unchain these and other potent lines of God’s divine Word as we drink in divine life from the Sacred Page and the Sacraments. To enter into this mystical knowing that surpasses knowing so we will be filled with all the fullness of God, we need to prayerfully read the saints on contemplative prayer and mystical union, such as Elisabeth’s Last Retreat, Teresa’s Interior Castle, Therese’s Story of a Soul, Catherine’s Dialogue, and Bernard’s Homilies on the Song of Songs. And as we return to praying with the Word of God amdist a rich liturgical life, our hearts will exclaim, “The Word of God is not chained!” The Word of God has power to draw us up into this mystical knowing and loving of God and to energize us with divine power as we are immersed and caught up in the realities and dynamism mediated to us through the Word of God, the powerful “Word of God at work in us who believe” (1 Thess 2:13).

Despite people’s common impression of things, it is not the case the Bible lays out a basic baseline level of the Christian life and to go really deep, we need to turn to the saints and mystics who take us further. No. It is rather that we need to let the saints open up for us the deep riches of the Word and Sacrament as God’s Word continues to exert its power to save and deify us today and draw us up into reality of the Triune Life, Light, and Love. This divine power at work within us involves the profound receptivity and cooperation of contemplative prayer. Deification plays itself out in the mystical life.

Deification, so popular in contemporary theological circles (as in the newly released 2024 Oxford Handbook of Deification), can seem abstract and inaccessible to people, among the simple and learned alike. However, deification gets very concrete and practical in the teachings of the mystics as they existentially open up their prayer and interior life. The strong and needed bond of CCC #460, on deification, with CCC #2014, on the universal call to the mystical life, needs to be expounded more in the spiritual revolution of our own day. To make deification more accessible and a lived reality for more of the faithful, we need to engage the writings of the saints and mystics.

Then as we return to the Source of the Word of God with a theology of deification and the practical explication of it in the mystical life through the spiritual classics of the Catholic Church, the Word of God will be unchained. The Word will be able to manifest and accomplish all its lavish and exalted purposes toward us with all its divine richness, depth, and existential power. Ephesians will come alive. Other scriptural teachings on being born again as adopted children of God, or on our life in Christ, or on the mystical Body of Christ, or on the gift of grace we have received to share in God’s own life, will no longer be commonplace or even banal but will have their living power released. The mysteries of the Christian faith will glow with a new splendor as we share with nonbelievers the depths of what we have in the Church and the gift of God given to us in all the rich interiority of the divine love and life poured into our hearts and manifested radiantly in the Saints. These spiritual realities mediated to us through the divine Word will then become a living force in our lives and in the world through contemplative love and the work of ministry in the humble and caring tasks entrusted to each of us in our particular vocation as God’s sublime love humbly blesses and caresses us and fills us with His fullness. For our revival to come to a new fullness, we need to inch closer toward the high and yet to be realized ideal laid out by the Second Vatican Council on the vital place of the Word of God in the life of the Church:

“In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life” (Dei Verbum #21).³

1. Givenness and Revelation, Oxford University Press; 3rd edition (May 30, 2016). Jean-Luc Marion is Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Paris-Sorbonne, the John Nuveen Distinguished Professor in the Divinity School and Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

2. See her Complete Works, vol. 1, in both of her retreats Heaven in Faith, 1 as well as Last Retreat, 1.

3. How to read the Bible more like the Saints, the monks of the Middle Ages, and the Church fathers—namely in a fully Catholic way—can be glimpsed in Mariano Magrassi’s short book, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998). While truly appreciating the insights we have gained through the historical critical method, he moves beyond a too flat of a reading of the Scriptures so common today, into praying with the spiritual depths of God’s mysterious word. The Catechism of the Catholic Church does this as well through stating some Catholic principles with regards to Scripture and advocating for the three spiritual senses that build on or open up the literal sense of Scripture, such as the Church fathers and medievals read the Bible with great spiritual gain (CCC #111-19).