God's Love or, Why I am not Reformed

Near the beginning of his Confessions-esque autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts a childhood story. He tells of playing with his friends and his refusal to allow his younger brother to play with them - “if they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.” For Merton, this came to give him a picture of all sin. He describes the scene,

When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: … standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move. 

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.

Written into human nature is the desire to be loved and to love in return. Understanding this, Merton addresses the true nature of sin as he continues.

Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives. And we refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation.

This description of sin fascinated me for three reasons: 1) it parallels St. Augustine's writings on love and the importance of ordered loves; 2) it is so often true of me; 3) it seems symptomatic of so much of modern Christianity.

Just last Sunday, I attended a protestant worship service after going to early mass at my Anglican church. The sermon, which interestingly enough seems to take the place of the Sacrament as the focal point of the service, centered on the first chapter of Jonah and emphasized the will and sovereignty of God. According to the sermon, the chief end of man was to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” God's will was to bring glory to himself; this will motivated his actions toward mankind, and his sovereignty prevented the thwarting of his will. I sat mute in horror (perhaps also out of politeness/cowardice). The God who creates and sustains the worlds through love, the God who became man, who turned his back on himself and died to redeem me, was described as supremely self-obsessed.

I ought to clarify my objection. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in On the Perfection of Religious Life, “Love is orderly and just, when the greater good is preferred to the lesser good.” God then, in order to be just – to give to himself his due, must love himself first and foremost. According to St. Anselm, God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” On this level, I accept a sort of divine self-obession. To give greater love to a lesser entity would be a failure of love. But I think the type of protestant approach that centers on God's willing himself glory goes much farther and either leads to or consists of (or both) deeper misunderstandings.

The first of these is a misunderstanding of the nature of the Holy Trinity. The Athanasian creed states that, “the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal.” There is then, community within the Godhead; this community leads to self-sufficiency. Because of the multiplicity of persons, God is able to be love, to be loving, without any created things. Because of that multiplicity, his glory is already perfect. God glorifies himself, in himself, perfectly. This protestant misunderstanding¹ fails to understand God as he is and actually decreases his glory.

This view also fails to understand love. Thomas Merton describes God's love as disinterested – that is as regards himself. Love is eternally giving, particularly in the form described as agape. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa of Christian Teaching, “True love requires one to will another's good as one's own.” Julian of Norwich writes of the central importance of love in God's relation to the world, 

Love is our Lord's meaning....Before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end (Showings).

 The stunning characteristic of this love of God is its activity on behalf of his beloved. St. Ignatius of Loyola writes in Spiritual Exercises, “The effect of true love is the reciprocal communication of all good things between the persons who love each other; whence it follows that charity cannot exist without sacrifice.” Dante notes that love, while kindled by goodness, increases virtue only when expressed outwardly - "Amore,/acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese,/pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore.”² This activity on our behalf is consistent with the nature of love, the nature of God himself. To suggest that God created us primarily to increase his glory attacks the very nature of God.

This attack involves both God's self-sufficiency and the nature of love itself. If God's glory can be increased by his creation, then he is not sufficiently glorified in himself. If his love is ultimately focused on himself, then love itself it not what we have been taught to believe. Nobody would consider human actions motivated by a desire for glory to be loving – how then can we say this of God? The Bible itself presents a different message: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).” True love is always directed outward toward the beloved; the more perfect the love, the less self-directed the love becomes. God's love is perfect.

Far from supreme self-obsession, God's love is only interested in the good of his beloved. Were his love self-directed, he need not have created the worlds, with all the self-sacrifice that would entail. “God is love.

In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him (I John 4:8-9).” This love animates the universe, holds the elements together, and makes life worth living. This love is at the center of Christianity and is expressed in its chief symbol – the Cross – and the central mysteries of the Incarnation and Eucharist. In the Incarnation, God becomes man, shares our weaknesses and trials, and demonstrates what true humanity is. In the crucifixion, the ultimate portrayal of love (John 15:13), Christ made possible the reconciliation of man and God. This reconciliation opens the possibility of union with God – that is, perfected love. This union in perfected love, far from subverting our humanity, allows for its fullest expression. Pope Benedict XVI writes, “But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17).” Finally, Christ gives us the most precious gift of his body and blood for the assistance our faith and the maintenance of our union with him. Just as God's love maintains the bonds of the universe, so “The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God's action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit (Congregation of Rites, instruction, Eucharisticum mysterium, 6).”

Despite these gifts (and the innumerable benefits procured by them), there is no shortage of those who would deny the love of God. Similarly, there are those who claim the name of Christ, like the church mentioned earlier, whose conception of God ultimately precludes the possibility of love itself. Both these errors are truly sin in that they are willful separations from the love of God (which is to say God, himself). The former is much more easily answered. Reason teaches that free-will is a necessary condition for reciprocal love. C. S. Lewis makes this clear; as he argues, it is useless to point to the existence of evil as evidence of an unloving or impotent God; the fact that free will exists, the fact that evil exists, demonstrates that our love is more important to God that a “perfect” creation.
Man was created to experience the love of God and to love him in return. God's love persists despite mankind's failing to love him in return, as Saint Catherine of Genoa notes: “But God loves us so much that although he sees us so blind and deaf to our own advantage, yet he does not for that reason cease to knock continually at our hearts by his holy inspirations, that he may so enter and make therein tabernacles for himself into which creatures can never enter more.” Echoing I John 4:19, St. Bernard of Clarivaux writes, “God loves, he desires nothing else than to be loved; for he loves only that he may be loved.”

The very existence of love, then, demonstrates God's love to man. The appropriate question is not, “Why does evil exist?” but “Why do goodness, love, and beauty exist?” and “Why does man desire them?” Why, when happiness is so fleeting, when goodness is so rare and hard to achieve, when love so often fails, when pursuit of them so often leads to disappointment and sadness, do we desire these things? We desire them because we were created out of love and for love by a loving God. St. Basil the Great argues that “In the very nature of every human being has been sown the seed of the ability to love. You and I ought to welcome this seed, cultivate it carefully, nourish it attentively and foster its growth by going to the school of God's commandments with the help of his grace.” This ability is also the end of man - man will not be satisfied until he loves God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. It is love that makes beauty, goodness, and the happiness of their experience possible. St. Faustina writes, “Love is a mystery that transforms everything it touches into things beautiful and pleasing to God. The love of God makes a soul free.”

Freedom is central to love, not freedom from restraint, but freedom from compulsion. St. John Chrysostom notes this, “Love cannot be compelled. You do not love because you are forced to love: you love spontaneously, of your own free will.”St. Bernard of Clairvaux also notes the free nature of love, arguing that it cannot be compelled by either the one loving or the one being loved. “Love is an affection of the soul, not a contract: it cannot rise from a mere agreement, nor is it so to be gained. It is spontaneous in its origin and impulse; and true love is its own satisfaction.” God's love and desire to be loved in return is demonstrated in mankind's gift of free will which enables man to love God. 

Glorifying God is certainly a chief part of the human telos and an aspect of our love for God. But even that is designed for our good. While God is glorified in and through those who love him, his is sufficiently glorified in himself. His desire for mankind to glorify him is directed towards the good of mankind. As mentioned earlier St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the greatest glory and love ought to be given to the greatest being; that being is God. God's being who he is creates a duty (honor/privilege) of loving him first and foremost. This is not primarily due to his command, rather it is written into the nature of man as a created sentient creature. St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes,

You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer, the reason for loving God is God himself; and the measure of love due to him is immeasurable love...Therefore even the infidel who knows not Christ but does at least know himself, is bound to love God for God's own sake. He is unpardonable if he does not love the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind; for his own innate justice and common sense cry out from within that he is bound wholly to love God, from whom he has received all things. (On Loving God).

God's love for mankind is so great that he has left signs throughout creation to direct mankind's worship and love back to him. Psalm 19 declares, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” This, coupled with Christ's continually offered body, demonstrates a perfect love desperate for the good of the beloved.

The danger of considering God to be self-obsessed, demanding love and the increase of his glory, comes from the liberty with which God has endowed man. Because love cannot be compelled, it cannot be commanded. To command love is to be unloving. Those who reject this version of the God of the Bible do so because their very natures revolt against the absence of the love they were created to seek.
But the absence of the command does not reduce the utter necessity of loving God. And again, here we turn to Christ. 

God is the most lovable of all things, and meditation on his nature is the strongest incentive there is to love and devotion; but because our minds are not strong in themselves, we need to be led to knowledge, and so to love of God by way of the world we sense, and above all by thinking of Christ the man, so that by seeing God with our eyes we can be lifted up to love what we cannot see (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica).

Christ offers himself continually to unite us to God. Christ says in John 6,

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

St. Francis de Sales writes, “Love is the chief among the passions of the soul. It is the king of all the heart's impulses; it draws all things to itself, and makes us like to what we love (The Devout Life).” By participating in the love and gifts that flow from the sacred heart of Christ, we become more like him. St. Catherine of Sienna writes, “Love is so powerful that it makes one heart and one will of lover and beloved. Whatever the one loves, so does the other, if it were otherwise, it would not be perfect love.” It is only through this love that we can be so transformed. St. Bonaventure writes in The Soul's Journey Into God, “There is no other path but through the burning love of the Crucified, a love which so transformed Paul into Christ when he was carried up to the third heaven (II Corinthians 12:2) that he could say: With Christ I am nailed to the cross. I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20).

1I mean here the particular protestant misunderstanding I mentioned earlier, not that all protestants share this misunderstanding.

2 Love kindled by virtue always kindles another, provided that its flame appear outwardly. (Canto XXII, lines 10-12)

Why I am not Reformed

The Bible tells us that God is love. This means that by his nature he is loving - he cannot be anything else. Needless to say, some Christians seriously misunderstand both God and love. Here is an example of such a misunderstanding and a good rebuttal as noted by my friend at The Harp of Alfred:

Does God Love Everyone? A comparison between Reformed and Lutheran approaches to predestination. 

My next post will give my personal perspective on Reformed theology's failure to understand both the nature of God and the meaning of Love.

On Hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T. S. Eliot, East Coker III

          This lesson is one I find myself having to learn over and over and over. Again and again I find myself placing my hope on earthly things and their promises of happiness; in doing so, my gaze is turned from my hope in Christ and the true happiness that arises from being in Him. But such hope is not truly hope; as with the others, the theological virtue of hope is inseparable from the rest. Hebrews 11:1 states, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The Greek work translated “substance,” ὑπóστασις, means “real being” or “assurance.” This is why true hope is anchored in true faith, for if hope is based on something that does not have real being or for which there is no assurance, than that hope can be dashed. Proverbs 13:12 warns “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick:  but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.”

          So, once again, I find myself heartsick merely a week after my college graduation. A “hope” which I had been looking to for more than the last half of my final semester failed to come to pass. The funny thing is that I did not even believe it would happen until the very last minute when there actually was “assurance.” Being disordered in my loves for so long, I had often hoped in vain; I was not ready to go down that road again. But this time there was something more – despite my unbelief, everything had fallen into place. I began to hope, and hope gave way to reality. But my hope for happiness had been, yet again, turned from Christ and toward my external circumstance. But God was not ready to let me alone; this has actually been the defining element of this particular friendship, and once again this misplaced hope failed.

          C. S. Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain that 

          What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like,
          "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a
          Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say,
          "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was
          simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". 

What is really pathetic in this desire is that “God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived (St. Anselm, Proslogion, II);” when I desire something other than God, or desire God to be (or act) other than He is, I am desiring something lesser than that which I already possess. But God, being supremely loving, wills to give me the more perfect gift of Himself; “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness (Lewis, Problem of Pain).” The same thing happens with my hopes; God, in love, is unwilling to let me attempt to sustain myself (though bound to fail) on lesser hopes. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (Ibid.)” So God allows those false hopes to be dashed so that I can freely blunder my way to Him. This heartsickness, coming from deferred hope, is necessary as a potential if free will exists; free will is necessary if love is to exist. “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. (Ibid.)” Having free will means that I am able to choose to love and hope for lesser things than God, but having free will means I am able to love Him in the only way love can have meaning. In Lamentations 3, the writer notes this relationship between dashed hopes and the return of our gaze to God.

And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace:  I forgat prosperity. And I said, My strength and my hope is perished from the LORD: Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul;  therefore will I hope in him. The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD (17-26). 

          What then is the nature of true hope? True hope is hope for unseen and unactualized reality. Romans 8:24-25 states, “For we are saved by hope:  but hope that is seen is not hope:  for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” This hope is not in expectation of earthly happiness (though that will be thrown in as well), but in the promises of God. “My soul fainteth for thy salvation:  but I hope in thy word….Thou art my hiding place and my shield:  I hope in thy word (Psalm 119:81, 114).”

          St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes hope from fear, joy, desire, and despair. Hope is concerned with the good, while fear is concerned with evil. Joy is the experience of present good; hope is the expectation of future good. Hope is distinguished from desire in the difficulty of obtaining its end; man does not hope for what he is able to reach out and possess. Finally, because hope is based in something that is obtainable, it is different than despair which looks at the impossible. Hope is an appetitive power resulting from the apprehension of a future good (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 40, a.1,2) This hope is a cause of our love for God.

Because by the very fact that we hope that good will accrue to us through someone, we are moved towards him as to our own good; and thus we begin to love him. Whereas from the fact that we love someone we do not hope in him, except accidentally, that is, in so far as we think that he returns our love. Wherefore the fact of being loved by another makes us hope in him; but our love for him is caused by the hope we have in him (Ibid., a.7). 

As well as love, hope inspires action. It inspires action because of its object which is a possible but difficult good; its difficulty catches man’s attention and makes his actions intentional. Hope, because it is directed toward good, causes pleasure – this too helps action (Ibid., a.8). This hope, if virtuous, is grounded in the promises of God. “Wherefore, in so far as we hope for anything as being possible to us by means of the Divine assistance, our hope attains God Himself, on Whose help it leans. It is therefore evident that hope is a virtue, since it causes a human act to be good and to attain its due rule (Ibid., II-II, q. 17, a. 1).”

          God promises me fulfillment despite, and through, the sufferings and anguish of this life. Job speaks of his hope, “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant (14:7).” Job’s friend, Zophar, offers this advice:

If thou prepare thine heart, and stretch out thine hands toward him; If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away, and let not wickedness dwell in thy tabernacles. For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot;  yea, thou shalt be stedfast, and shalt not fear: Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away: And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday;  thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning. And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope;  yea, thou shalt dig about thee, and thou shalt take thy rest in safety. Also thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee afraid; yea, many shall make suit unto thee (Job, 11:13-19). 

While his words are true, Job speaks of the difficulty of abiding in that hope. “But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:  yea, who knoweth not such things as these?...Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also:  I am not inferior unto you. Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God (12:3, 13:1-3).” He desires, despite his knowledge of God’s justice and power to question God as to the reasons for his suffering.

          Elihu, the young man who alone is not rebuked by God, advises Job to ground his hope in the person of God. “Therefore hearken unto me, ye men of understanding:  far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity. For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to his ways. Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment (Job 34:10).” Later, he hits at the root of Job’s desire to question God – his pride and lack of faith – “Thinkest thou this to be right, that thou saidst, My righteousness is more than God's?...Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out. (Job 35:2, 36:26).” Faith is the foundation of hope; without faith in the goodness of God, there is no ground for hope. In the following chapters, God repeats the argument made by Elihu asking again and again if Job has quite so much understanding as he thought he had. Job replies, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear:  but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42: 5-6).”

          To the Israelites who in captivity suffered for their sin and lack of faith God gave a promise of hope. Jeremiah records, “Thus saith the LORD;  Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears:  for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD;  and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border (31:16-17).” It is because my end rests with God that I can have peace.

          The redemptive work of Christ brings a hope far greater than the return home from captivity; rather it is a return to the true Home from the most debasing and debilitating captivity. Again, this hope is in the unseen promise of God, and its security is based in His person, 

Wherein God, willing more abundantly to show unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; Whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec (Hebrews 6:17-20). 

The object of hope is eternal happiness found in God. St. Thomas comments on this passage: 

Wherefore the good which we ought to hope for from God properly and chiefly is the infinite good, which is proportionate to the power of our divine helper, since it belongs to an infinite power to lead anyone to an infinite good. Such a good is eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of God Himself. For we should hope from Him for nothing less than Himself, since His goodness, whereby He imparts good things to His creature, is no less than His Essence. Therefore the proper and principal object of hope is eternal happiness (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 17, a. 2). 

God is my only surety and the only sure foundation for my hope; if I anchor my soul to anything else, I will become heartsick or, in prosperity, estranged from God. Faith in God, then, precedes hope.

          Thus faith in God must precede my hope in Him. In order, therefore, that we may hope, it

          is necessary for the object of hope to be proposed to us as possible. Now the object

          of hope is, in one way, eternal  happiness,  and in another way, the Divine

          assistance…both of these are proposed to us by faith, whereby we come to know that we

          are able to obtain eternal life, and that for this purpose the Divine assistance is ready for

          us…(Ibid., a.7).

Because this hope is based in faith, I can have courage. “Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the LORD (Psalm 31:24).” Aristotle writes, “The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition (Ethics, III.7).” Sadness and despair result from unfulfilled hope, from hoping in what is not sure or for what is impossible. When hope is grounded in the Persons of the Trinity, it is grounded on the Essence of Goodness; this hope will not fail.

          Like with brooding, sadness and despair are the result of turning away from the Essence of Goodness to something lesser, something transient, something less real. I look at myself in these moments and again question whether I have learned anything from Thomas à Kempis and Brother Lawrence; God – Christ – must be at the center of my being. When I become focused on or motivated by something else, I am cut off from happiness. And here I find myself once again sad and disappointed that a longed for blessing did not occur. But I know that I am loved of God, “that all things work together for good to them that love God (Romans 8:28),” and that God is all I need. More than that, I can look around at all the temporal blessings I possess and see that my cup runneth over. I look to that friendship itself, the meeting of two souls in pursuit of the same good. Aristotle says “We have reason to be satisfied if we can find even a few such friends (Nicomachean Ethics, IX.10.19-21).” My gaze returns to the goodness of God, my hope to its proper end; and God takes me back.

          C. S. Lewis writes about God’s acceptance of us after we stray: 

I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. 

The recognition of my own unworthiness and the mercy of God reminds me that my hope is in the Essence of Goodness. My joy returns as I am driven to my knees and “bless [God] for [my] creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for [His] inestimable love in the redemption of the world by [my] Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory (1928 Book of Common Prayer, “A General Thanksgiving”).” As I hope for glory, I am humbled by the blessings already given me. As I am humbled, I am made content. In contentment, I find Joy.

A prayer from Psalm 33:22
Let thy mercy, O LORD, be upon us, according as we hope in thee.

Of Brooding and Grey Days

           It’s currently raining this Sunday morning. Rain always seems most depressing on Sundays; perhaps it is because that is the day I tend to be most joyful. Not today. Today there is a grey sky, a light, spitting rain, and gloominess in my heart. Now I know this gloom is partially caused by external factors – I’m sick, more tired than I’ve ever been before, and I’m stressed out of my mind by school. That’s the wonderful thing about being an embodied soul, I get to be affected by the physical and the metaphysical, the temporal
and the transcendent. This is seen most clearly in the Eucharist where Christ feeds us both bodily and spiritually. While the blessings of this relation are self-evident – I can be spiritually blessed by eating a strawberry (perhaps I even ought to be spiritually blessed) and I can be physically made well through the joy of laughter and the soul-healing that comes from deep friendship (Ben and Brodi, this means you) – it is not without its drawbacks. Even though my spiritual life may be excellent on its own, it will be affected by my physical state; mental and physical exhaustion can often lead to spiritual exhaustion.
          This is never truer for me than when I am depressed. I rarely become depressed spiritually first; it is always the result of emotions running amok during times of physical exhaustion and sickness. This depression often leads to a sort of brooding. Webster’s defines brooding as

 1: a of a bird : to brood eggs or young; b : to sit quietly and thoughtfully; to meditate
 2: to hover, loom
 3: a: to dwell gloomily on a subject; b : to be in a state of depression

Brooding seems to be the proper word for such behavior. Brooding, like caring for a nest of eggs involves a separation from the outside world and a focus on the one thing that seems most important to me at the moment (while this is legitimate and proper for hens, I think it less so for me). Like a hen, I sit isolated and alone thinking about myself and what it is that makes me feel sad, lonely, and depressed. Rather than meditate on the transcendence of God’s beauty, truth, and goodness which He communicates in Love, I tuck my little problems and worries under me and keep them warm and alive. Soon, despite the fact that they are making me miserable, they become the focus of my existence, the center of my thoughts. Like Gollum’s ring of power, they become precious to me despite the fact that they are destroying me. Why? Because they are mine. I seem to possess them utterly (though in reality they utterly possess me). Like Gollum, I begin to hover and loom over those “precious” things, staving off all attempts at their removal. Perhaps, like Gollum, I am aware that their removal would bring me peace, but I must be in control.

          This “dwelling gloomily on a subject” always involves a narrowing of focus, like that of a hen with eggs. Focusing on those negative elements shuts off my sight to the world “more full of glory than [I] can understand.” This step is vital for a state of depression. One can legitimately dwell gloomily on certain subjects; for many evils in our world that is the appropriate response. But in refusing to see glory and Love in the world – even on grey days – I create the perfect situation for pride to be incubated. As Richard Hooker describes the fall of the angels, “There was no other way for angels to sin, but by reflex of their understanding upon themselves; when being held with admiration of their own sublimity and honour, the memory of their subordination unto God and their dependency on him was drowned in this conceipt, whereupon their adoration, love, and imitation of God could not choose but be also interrupted,” so my depression involves a turning away from my dependency on God. Even more perverse than the angels’ fall is my fall into depression; angels were enamored of their own sublimity and greatness, in depression I am enamored by my weakness.

 So often this depression, once begun, turns to disappointments for nourishment - little things (or big) that I expected from God. Some are even in the normal course of things and their absence is disruptive and abnormal. This happens in relationships often; as people fail to live up to the expectations I have arbitrarily (or sometimes even reasonably) set for them. Sometimes people are not what they seemed, or lack a quality we thought we treasured in them until we found it lacking. But all this is a depressing brooding over the eggs of self-love, personal expectations, and desires. This is especially perverse in relation to God. Such feelings depend on my feeling worthy in and of myself to make those demands. The truth is that nothing I have, not even my existence is of myself – it is all a gift from God. The fact that I am able to make these demands demonstrates that I have no right to make them. This becomes even more evident as I move past the question of existence and look at all the rich blessings provided to all mankind. Finally, the blessing of the Incarnation and His death and resurrection for me calls me out of myself, to wonder, and then to worship. Worship leads to communion with God through Christ, the very reason for my existence. The fact that God has made this possible through creating man with an insatiable desire for that communion, for giving man reason, for the gracious gift of faith, and for the inestimable gift of His Son to make it all possible leaves no room for self-focus and pondering one’s “problems.”

          But God also calls to me in little things throughout the day: the delicate pattern of raindrops on glass, my aged and worn prayer-book, my rosary, the fresh green tones that only appear after a rain, the early, unexpected encounter with a dear friend (Ben again), a warm, extended, and compassionate embrace. Well, friends and embraces are hardly little things… And then I’m reminded of all God’s gifts, and I am humbled and ashamed at the baseness of my ingratitude. And I teeter on the knife edge between redemption and fuller depravity, because it’s easy in becoming ashamed at my failings and weakness to become ashamed of myself. But that is just as self-focused as ingratitude, and just as far from the truth. Focusing on my weakness turns my gaze from Christ and handicaps my attempts to imitate him (and I ask myself, “Is this not the message you have learned again and again from Brother Lawrence and Thomas à Kempis?”). But God catches me and, through various mediating forces – especially my dearest friends, pushes over onto the side of redemption. He never stops His pursuit of me; this both inspires and overwhelms me.
          In returning my gaze to Christ, I am able to see His glorious gifts through the illusion of grey and gloom. "The world is hot and cruel,/We are weary of heart and hand./But the world is more full of glory/Than you can understand." In focusing my sight on Christ, my periphery becomes filled with wonders; these wonders, once seen drive me to Christ. Sometimes cycles are hard to break; sometimes that’s a good thing. And then I remember the cycles of the universe in Dante, all driven by the Love of God; I smile through tears.
          I’ve been crying a lot lately; often, stronger than the most despairing pressure of depression is the pressure of a Love that is truly inexpressible. I think this is what St. Thomas meant by the beatific vision. Wonder leads to worship, worship to communion in contemplation. And then there is the Love – it burns like an all-consuming fire yet leaves me larger than when it started. And I am again humbled. At such times, I think of St. Augustine and C. S. Lewis both of them world-weary, both of them longing for their true home and the release from temporality. But these moments of intense longing, the kind of longing that almost breaks my heart, don’t come out of depression. They don’t come from being weary of the world’s trials. They stem from a longing to be fully united with the Love that “moves the sun and the other stars” and to be perfected in my love. I realize that I will never be truly satisfied here because this is not my home – I am made for something better, more glorious, more beautiful, and less grey.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,/The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed/With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,/And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama/And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away…/I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope/For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love/For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

          I think also of this life and what is best in it. And again I’m crushed by God’s love for there never is any true loss. Everything I possess is (supremely in my case ;) ) replaceable except for those friendships God used and is using to draw me to Christ. I’ve heard it often said that you don’t take anything with you when you die; that isn’t true at all, I am able to take that which is most precious to me. In heaven, I will bring with me those friends that I impacted and especially those who have impacted me; does anything else even matter? And this is not a loss, this is a gift greater than anything but redemption. Earthly friendships are ever tinged with the specter of loss – whether it be by death or location – and the distemper of disordered love. This is all made new as I will join my friends in perfect Love united in the love and worship of God where there will be NO PARTINGS. This is something for which I daily long.

          I look at God’s gifts of friends in my life and see tangible evidence that I truly have no excuse to be depressed or self-focused. I think of Ben who has loved me long and taught me the meaning of unconditional love; words fail utterly. I think of Brodi (we used to loathe each other) and his demonstrations of care for me; I think of how I have learned from his passion, longsuffering, and devotion – my communion with Christ is stronger because of you and all I have learned from you. I think of Bart who, heaven knows what he saw in me, invested in me and bullied me into a reconsideration of my faith; this past year has been the largest period of growth in my life and is directly the result of God’s work in me through Bart. I think of Erik, whose wisdom and patience is like a rock. I think of my newer friends, David, Stephen, and Belle. God’s blessings truly are never ending and I’ve already learned so much from you. Thank you all for your investment in my life, it will have eternal results.

          This brings me finally to what must be the solution to depression. This solution must entail a shift of focus away from myself and towards Christ and others. I am a work in progress and am still very broken, the beauty I can see in myself is akin to the tragic beauty of a shattered stained-glass window or a bombed cathedral. But in looking to Christ and seeing His work in me as mediated by others, particularly friends, I can see light and true beauty and I am made whole. Brooding is the opposite of wonder, the opposite of participating in the transcendent. In brooding, I set myself over the world and judge it; in wondering I become a passionate participant in the goodness of God. As St. John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” The funny thing is I never truly decrease when I turn myself over to God, rather He, being infinite, fills me. I am made whole and greater than I could ever have been had I not surrendered. “In order to possess what you do not possess/You must go by the way of dispossession.”

Joy and Letting Go

I have a hard time letting go of the things I love; my impulse at such times is to sink in my teeth and nails and hold on for dear life, unfortunately such a reaction never works and often makes the feeling worse. My entire life, God has been teaching me this lesson – all joys involve a little loss. Well, almost all joys for there is never an end to the enjoyment of God, only an increasing. And this is, I suppose, what earthly joys were intended to do, to lead us to the Eternal Joy. It is in the experiences of the best kinds of earthly joys that we begin most to desire the joys of heaven. C. S. Lewis writes in Till We Have Faces,

[Psyche] ‘I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.’ [Orual] ‘Ah, Psyche, have I made you so little happy as that?’ [Psyche] “No, no no. You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine…where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.

Psyche also says, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” C. S. Lewis, of course, makes this longing one of the central themes of The Horse and His Boy as well. In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” For the Christian, the desire for heaven – the desire for the presence of God – ought to be at the center of all joys. All joys ought to point him to the place where there will be no more tears. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Earthly joys are fleeting, because they are only foretastes of greater blessings to come. As such, they cannot be clutched at if they are to be enjoyed properly. All earthly joys are tinged with the sadness of loss. But rather than allowing that sadness to turn focus inward, to refuse the earthly joys, or to clutch on to them past remaining joyful, that sadness of loss ought to orient ourselves towards the eternal joys of heaven. Through them, God whispers promises of greater Love and Joy and draws mankind to Himself. But those earthly joys must not be confused with the eternal Joy; they are not ends in themselves. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are

restless until they rest in thee” (St. Augustine, Confessions, I.1). When earthly joys are enjoyed as ends in themselves they can lead either to insatiability or despair – insatiability because earthly joys do not ultimately fulfill, despair because without the eternal Joy, all joys end in loss. St. Augustine calls such thinking “marvelous shallowness” (City of God, XIX.4) This despair can be seen most clearly in the fear of death; death involves the loss or leaving behind much of what is held most dear – spouse, friends, children, one’s life’s work. But death, properly understood, is only the ending of the earthly joys and the beginning of the joys that never fade; death then is not to be dreaded but is “a consummation/Devoutly to be wished.” St. Augustine writes of the goodness of death “as we cannot attain to [the supreme good] in the present life, however ardently we desire it…Salvation, such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself be our final happiness.” Ibid.

But the experience of earthly joys can also be a kind of death. There is the last time you see a friend, the last time you look at your home before moving, that last caress before burying a pet, the last class with a favorite professor, the last page of a book – in all of these, we die a little. St. Augustine writes in The City of God (XIII.10) “For no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, then we begin to move ceaselessly towards death….Man, then, is never in life from the moment he dwells in this dying rather than living body – if, at least, he cannot be in life and death at once.” This is more than merely biologically true. But we are ever grounded in the glorious hope of the eternal Joy experienced in our release from temporality. And it is properly ordering our loves that allows us to truly experience earthly joys. Again, St. Augustine writes (XIV.7), “Love, then, yearning to have what is loved, is desire; and having and enjoying it, is joy…Now these motions are evil if the love is evil; good if the love is good.” When the experience of earthly joys turns our desire towards the eternal Joy, our love for them is good.

St. Augustine further explains the difference between earthly temporal joys and the eternal Joy (XIV.25),

But even the righteous does not live as he wishes until he has arrived where he cannot die, be deceived, or injured, and until he is assured that this shall be his eternal condition. For this nature demands; and nature is not fully and perfectly blessed till it attains what it seeks. But what man is at present able to live as he wishes, when it is not in his power so much as to live? He wishes to live, he is compelled to die….or if he wishes to die, how can he live as he wishes since he does not even wish to live? Or if he wishes to die, not because he dislikes life, but that after death he may live better, still he is not yet living as he wishes…

St. Augustine realizes that blessedness is only possible when it is eternal; this is because blessedness must be possessed, and nothing can truly be possessed when that possession is temporal. In temporality, there is ultimately only loss.

For a blessed life is possessed only by the man who loves it. If it is loved and possessed, it must necessarily be more ardently loved than all besides; for whatever else is loved must be loved for the sake of the blessed life. And if it is loved as it deserves to be – and the man is not blessed who does not love the blessed life as it deserves – then he who so loves it cannot but wish it to be eternal. Therefore it shall only be blessed when it is eternal. Ibid.

The earthly joys, as Lewis writes, are whispers that God uses to align us more closely to Himself. St. Augustine agrees (XIX.13)

God, then, the most wise Creator and most just Ordainer of all natures, who placed the human race upon earth as its greatest ornament, imparted to men some good things adapted to this life, to wit, temporal peace, such as we can enjoy in this life from health and safety and human fellowship…the objects wish are accommodated to our outward senses, light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us, and everything the body requires to sustain, shelter, heal, or beautify it: and all under this most equitable condition, that every man who made a good use of these advantages suited to the peace of his mortal condition, should receive ampler and better blessings, namely, the peace of immortality, accompanied by glory and honour in an endless life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of one another in God; but that he who used the present blessings badly should both lose them and should not receive the others.

God is both the source (I Corinthians 6:17) and end of all joys. Living without recognizing the earthly joys would seem to demonstrate a perverse denial of God’s gifts not unlike the rejection of the gift of grace in salvation. Similarly, misunderstanding those gifts as ends rather than

means, like grace, of drawing closer to God, perversely destroys those gifts and the possibility for true joy. This

earthly joys beyond their appointed span; I must not allow the gift of friendship to become an end in itself and is the lesson God has been teaching me my whole life and a lesson I still am learning. I must not seek to sustain

from it seek the love and satisfaction that only God can give. I must not lose sight of the heavenly, eternal Joy that is at the root of all earthly joys nor the Love that begets all other proper loves. In surrendering to that Joy and that Love, “my desire and my will/[can be] turned like a wheel, all at one speed,/by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.142-145)

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