South Bend’s Catholic Worker houses of hospitality are three-story affairs in which the attics have been converted into multiple bedrooms. When the women’s yellow house was full, there were thirteen women packed in. What joy we experienced cooking big summer meals for thirty and serving them on the back porch that doubled as a labyrinth; growing roses and cherry tomatoes and goji berries in a backyard farm; cozying up for the liturgy of the hours; finding a friendly face nearly all times on the porch or by the coffee pot. What joy we had running a free laundromat-café for unhoused neighbors on the weekends and then, predictably, piling the generous donations in our living room. When the houses were full, we experienced rich joy.

Yet, I had an experience – a repeated one – of entering a retreat house and releasing a deep exhale. The spiritual retreat house was a house of hospitality, just as the Catholic Worker was, but the space offers a heightened peacefulness, roominess, and harmonious attention to detail that a Worker could surely appreciate!

The disciples, in following Jesus, were often receiving hospitality (or, as we would call it, couch surfing). In Jesus’s ministry instructions to the 72 disciples, he tells them to accept hospitality from those to whom they preached, staying at the first house and “eating and drinking whatever they give you” (Luke 10:7). We can surely imagine that this life on the road was full of joyful encounters even as it probably wasn’t always comfortable.

But Passover was to be different this year. When the disciples ask Jesus where he would like them to prepare the Passover, they were probably thinking that it would require navigating the wishes of their hosts and cramming disciples into a family home. But instead, Jesus directs them to follow a man carrying a water jar into a house where he is known; here they will find a room “spacious, furnished, with everything in order.” Suddenly they are headed to a retreat.

After all this forward motion, all this striving to bring healing and spread the good news, suddenly they will be sharing sacred time with Jesus. This gift of a room communicates the goodness of God. It’s over the top; it’s abundant! It sets the stage for a shared intimacy – the gift of Jesus’s body and blood. He was offering for them to become one with him.

Now they too would be like Jesus: healer and liberator and friend to all. Come to think of it, the reason that their lifestyle on the road had been so peaceful is because Jesus himself was like a room “spacious, furnished, with everything in order.” His very presence was refreshing and full of light! Now the disciples were going to become empowered to bring refreshment, peace, light, healing, and deliverance to those around them just as Jesus did. They would feed and nourish others because fundamentally God is Creator, Giver of Life. Harmonious abundance is an attribute of the divine. We see this when Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes (abundance) or calms the storm (peace). When they received his body and blood, they received all of whom Jesus is. They receive the life of God.

The theology of divinization – the truth that human beings are invited to share God’s own life through union with God – has early roots in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyon, whom Pope Francis named a doctor of the church (“the doctor of unity”) in 2022. Irenaeus could be called a theologian of “goodness” – the goodness of the Creator, the created world, human bodies, and the journey of Jesus through every stage of human life. He developed the theology that would grow into an understanding of divinization in his work against Gnostic teachings (Adversus Haereses), stating that Jesus “bec[a]me what we are, that [h]e might bring us to be even what [h]e is [h]imself” (Bk V, Preface). By asserting that it is through “becoming what we are” that Jesus has offered us to “become what he is himself,” Irenaeus honored our human experience of limits and finitude. God is in the experience of mud-caked shoes, cramped malodorous rooms, broken noses, ripped garments. But we will not be bound forever by the greatest finitude which is death – Irenaeus explains that humanity’s mortality will be “swallowed up by immortality, and the corruptible by incorruptibility” (Bk IV, ch. 38, para. 4). Jesus shared our human experience in order to welcome us into sharing God’s life – sharing God’s divinity.

How can we partake of God’s life? The psalmist invites us to “take up the cup of salvation.” Let us therefore ask Jesus: 

“Where do you wish us to go to prepare the feast?”

The part of our bodies where flesh and blood are united closely is our heart. Today as we contemplate Jesus’s gift of his body and blood, we can also ask to receive Jesus’s own heart.

This meditation is meant to be prayed in three-to-five minutes’ time, but you can also extend it as you wish.

Find a relaxed position and breathe in and out.

When you feel comfortable, bring your awareness to your heart. Spend a moment here. As you rest in your heart, in confidence ask God to place the divine Heart in your own heart’s center. 

Stay here.

As you rest, slowly become aware of the divine Heart growing within you. Allow the heart of God to grow until it encompasses your breast and then your upper body. Slowly, slowly, allow the love of this heart to encompass your entire body. Rest here.

In God’s heart there are many others – indeed, everyone on earth. Stay here. Acknowledge your union with every person within God’s heart.

As your awareness of God’s goodness grows, you will more and more live from the heart of God.        

Rabia of Basra, the early Sufi mystic and teacher, is said to have been born into an impoverished family and sold into slavery before being freed to pursue a radical life of prayer. Fascinatingly, a tomb at Jerusalem’s Church of the Ascension in the Mount of Olives bears her name; the woman widely considered the first Sufi female saint is associated with the place of Jesus’s ascension to God. Rabia’s poetry (or, rather, the poetry attributed to her) explores the mysticism of love between humans and God.

“Cherish Myself,” a rendering of Rabia’s verse by translator Daniel Ladinsky, crushingly renders the poet’s experience of total union with her divine lover. With the shocking honesty of a mystic, the poet writes of God: “our minds will have wed, / our souls will have flowed into each other. / How to say this: God and I / will forever cherish / Myself” (Ladinsky 18). Rabia’s love of God makes her a profound witness for would-be mystics today.

The tomb at the Mount of Olives that bears Rabia’s name…how could this be? A saint from Iraq, buried in Jerusalem? I imagine that the link is spiritual. Her life is remembered where Jesus suffered agony and ascended. Rabia knew the suffering of life through the ordeal of her imprisonment and also knew the path to ascend to God. May we study her life and learn from this incredible witness to divine outpouring.