The Wedding Garment
Saints are specific. When, in the parable of the wedding party, the man arrives without his wedding garment, this is particularly offensive because, in that culture, everyone was provided with a specific garment — the invitation would have come with the garment the guest was to wear. The guest accepted the invitation to the feast, but declined the garment given him, specifically, to wear at the feast.
One way to understand this garment we are required to wear is the specificity of each person’s sainthood. It is tempting to see the specificity of others’ sainthood — a St. Francis or a St. Therese, for example — and to decline our garment in pursuit of fashioning one like theirs. Or perhaps we see the garment, and not even desiring another’s garment, we simply decline to wear it — it isn’t to our taste and doesn’t seem like it would fit right. This virtue is too tight and pinches at the waist; the color of martyrdom is off-putting; the cut of this charism isn’t particularly flattering, and really, what I’m already wearing, the life I’m living, is perfectly fine and shouldn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities...I’ll just wash up a bit, and that’ll work for the wedding.
But God notices that you aren’t wearing the garment he specifically wove for you — your sainthood, your gift, your charism, your life — which you are meant to bring to the wedding feast — not to substitute with some imitation of another’s gift or some prideful refusal. When the King asked the guest where his wedding garment was, the guest was silent.
When we face God at the wedding, having declined the life he painstakingly fashioned for us and intended and required...all our sly excuses, all our clever exegesis and lazy sophistries, will be silenced. Looking into His eyes, the eyes of the one who loves us, we will have no way to account for having rejected the sainthood He made just for us. The only thing He asked us to wear — why didn’t we wear it? We want to go to Heaven — but on our own terms. And what kind of idea of Heaven does that imply? One we fashion for ouselves, one we determine, one we design...one that mirrors and abides our self-fashioned, self-styled, self-determined lives. But that is not perfection...
In He and I, God says to us through Gabrielle Bossis: How concerned I am for your perfection! You are My members. May My body be perfect... Keep your will closely knit with Mine. Be My dream of you...
God’s dream of you is better than your dream of you; the garment He has laid out for you is better than what you were planning on wearing. But we often forget this or doubt it; and a holy friend reminds us of the beauty of our garment, how it is perfectly fitted to His perfection, to His dream of us...
A friend dreams the same dream of you that God dreams. She does not wish you were Francis of Assisi or John of the Cross or Mary of Egypt. She wishes only that you become, each day, more and more perfectly the saint God has planned from before time, she helps you into the garment, day by day, until at last the time for the wedding is nigh, and behold, how beautiful you are!
And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
At our friend’s joy at seeing Christ residing fully within us — their joy at seeing us in the divine array of our wedding garment — we respond ecstatically, with Mother Mary: “My soul magnifies the Lord!”
To be a friend to another, we must see the grand dimensions of their sanctity, and praise and nurture them in their pursuit of attaining to it. A friend never low-balls a friend, nor does she falsely flatter what, though objectively inoffensive, is not a divine quality the other friend truly magnifies, what is not a true aspect of the friend’s garment. Sister Miriam Heidland said, “A friend sings your song when you have forgotten how to do so.”
Nothing could be more important than the singing of that song, and the singing it well. A friend is never deceived into believing your sainthood to be a slight or unimportant matter. Though others may grow cold to the saint in you, or seek to temper it or even ridicule or attack it outright...the friend fans the flame...she knows who you are...she knows who is within your womb, she knows who you are called to bring into the lives of others, who you are meant to raise on Earth...
She delights in the dream of the Lord...Blessed are you who believed!
“Don’t be timid when it comes to loving Me since you comfort Me for the coldness of others,” said the Lord to Gabrielle, “I may have been counting on you for a long time. Are you going to disappoint Me? Don’t forget that I am Man also. I too have my dreams and hopes. May I say to you, ‘Respond to all my dreams for you, for your pilgrimage among men and for your influence, as though you took from Me to give to others.’ Even the stars impart their light one to another; have you noticed this?”
“When you keep yourself before Me, My Gabrielle, look at Me with great tenderness and think that it is just as sweet to be seen as to see.”