St. Hedwig
St. Mary Margaret Alacoque
The love of God has two connotations: God's love for us and our love of God. The two are inseparable. We cannot love God unless He loves us first, but we cannot experience God's love without turning to Him in love.
I do not think "love" used as a verb can express this meaning. "God loves us," "We love God": both imply unidirectional action, whereas love as it truly is - love as the being and essence of God, God as love - is dynamic, fluid, orbital. God's love flowing into the Son through the Spirit and then upon us; our love carried by the Spirit through the Son and to the Father.
Our sinfulness blocks this flow. And the worst sin of all is refusing to let God love us. For when we refuse to let God love us, we make ourselves unable to love God.
Surely it's easy to see the sinfulness of those prideful people who think they do not need God. But it is almost equally sinful to realize how much you need God, but to think yourself unworthy of God's love. In doing so we place our judgment about God's, for we know in faith that God has deemed us worthy of salvation. God has already judged that we were worth dying for. How dare we contravene His wisdom?
And when we refuse to let God help us, save us, love us - well, think how hard it is when you love someone but are not permitted to show your love! And we are doing that to God, by refusing to let Him show our love to us! Refusing to let Him love us, to show His love of us, wounds His very heart.
It is an act of charity to let yourself be loved. It is an act of mercy to accept another's mercy.
To approach God in love requires a strange mix of boldness and humility. Humility to acknowledge that we need help; boldness in believing that we are worth helping. It is a brazenness in being willing to expose our need. It is a painful, terrifying exposure: raw wounds left open to the wind.
Think of the woman who crawled through the crowd to touch Jesus' cloak. Think of Zacchaeus, ludicrously climbing the tree. Think of the paralytic descending through the roof. Think of the woman's repartee with Christ: Even the dogs are allowed to eat scraps from the master's table! These people are, in the eyes of the world, worthy of scorn, laughable. They make fools of themselves, approaching God in such vulgar ways, but Christ rewards their foolishness. Because their foolishness is the foolishness of faith and love. And their foolishness echoes the folly and vulgarity of the Cross.
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Yesterday I finished reading Crime and Punishment. Rereading, I should say, as I read it once before in high school and did not understand a thing. There is, obviously, much food for thought, but the part that struck me most was the image of Raskolnikov making his own via crucis through the streets as he heads to the police station where he is to confess his crime, and of his turning to see Sonia's face following him mournfully, lovingly, through the crowd. Is this what Christ saw when he carried the cross - looking up through the dust, looking up in despair, and seeing the loving face of that paradigmatic redeemed prostitute Mary Magdalene following Him on the way?
Though he is guilty as Christ never was, Raskolnikov is a Christ-like figure, bearing the guilt of his people on him: the guilt of nihilism, materialism, utilitarianism. Dostoevsky is casting judgment on his entire society: we are all guilty for Rasknolnikov. Yet this communal guilt does not eliminate Raskolnikov's personal guilt, which he must confront in the depths of his own soul. Alyona is merely a cipher: her character is undeveloped because it does not matter who she is; what matters is the effect her murder has on Raskolnikov. Lizaveta, on the other hand, is the innocent, sacrificial lamb, whose death - though incidental in Raskolnikov's mind - is what opens the door to his salvation by revealing to him his guilt and leading him to Sonia.
How is it that Rasknolnikov is guilty because he commits murder while Sonia is innocent though she engages in prostitution? Does Rasknolnikov's guilt stem from his motive, which is only altruistic through self-deception but is truly based on a nihilistic will to power? Is Sonia innocent because she is acting out of true charity? Is she any worse than Dounia, who was willing to sell herself to a man in marriage? Both Sonia and Rasknolnikov sense that they are driven to their situations by fate, but Sonia's humility and acceptance of her guilt contrast with Rasknolnikov's haughtiness and insistence on his right to commit the crime.
How easy our lives would be if we could simply acknowledge and accept the fact of our guilt. Rasknolnikov's rationalizing self-deception struggles against his innate conscience telling him that what he did was evil; it is this struggle that leads to his madness. How often do we all sin, and struggle to rationalize our sin, rather than simply admitting our guilt, when a simple, humble confession would relieve our minds and hearts of so much of the burden - a simple turning to God, acknowledging our helplessness in the face of evil and a sinful world, an embrace of our guilt instead of a flight from it.
We must take our guilt into our own hands in order to hand it over to God. And it is only God who can relieve us of its weight.
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