For the love of God

  • From today’s “Daily Lives,” this from St. Her­man of Alaska:

    Should we not above every­thing else love God, more than every­thing else desire Him and seek Him? I, a sin­ner, for more than forty years have been learn­ing how to love God, and I can­not say that I love Him com­pletely! How should we love God? If we love some­one, we con­stantly remem­ber him, strive to please him day and night. Our heart and mind are occu­pied by the object of our love. Do you love God in this way?

    I think there are two mis­takes that non-Christian intel­lec­tu­als make about Chris­tians. One is to just plain dis­be­lieve that there are any “mere” Chris­tians — devout, sim­ple, unselfish, ortho­dox Chris­tians — out there at all. The sec­ond is to utterly mis­take why Chris­tians are Chris­tians. I heard a series of phi­los­o­phy lec­tures on the val­ues of good­ness, and when it was impos­si­ble not to ignore the reli­gious impli­ca­tions of this, the lec­turer sum­ma­rized all Chris­tians by say­ing that they were peo­ple who believed in heaven and did Chris­t­ian duty in order to get there.

    I was flab­ber­gasted. Does this guy actu­ally know any real Chris­tians at all? I guess it’s pos­si­ble that there are nom­i­nal­ists and imma­ture Chris­tians who may start out like this, but I haven’t met any. Would it have been SO impos­si­ble for this man to have been intel­lec­tu­ally hon­est and arrive at some­thing much nearer the truth?

    Namely this: we do what we do for the love of God. We’re Chris­tians for the love of God (and by the love of God). We say prayers, we sing hymns, we wor­ship and — for those who have made their whole lives an offer­ing — we work, sleep, breathe and play for the love of God. We don’t keep from cheat­ing and steal­ing because we think we’re bet­ter than every­one else or because we don’t want to lose our free pass to Beulah-land. We do it because we know Some­one who loved us so much that we can’t bear to offend Him, who is Him­self so good that we can’t be near Him with­out at least attempt­ing to be good our­selves. And we can’t bear not to be near Him.

    This is the love that St. Her­man talks about; it’s what we par­take of on Sun­days and hunger for through­out our lives. We only do it imper­fectly here — if St. Her­man con­sid­ers him­self a fail­ure at it after 40 years than what a long, looong way I have to go — but we do it all the same. Because we have to do it, and because all of our love will only really find its best object in God.


    Related posts:

    1. C. S. Lewis on the love of God
    2. God doesn’t desire sorrow
    3. On Ques­tion­ing God
    4. Pray­ing to God to make you a good activist
    5. Polygamy — is big love a many splen­dored thing?

    May 27th, 2008 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • James the Thickheade 05.27.2008

    Grace:

    Great response. Very to the point. Sounds like one of those places where you really really want to ask the pivot-point ques­tion.. but either the “be nice” bone gets in the way… or you just can’t think of it until you’re outta there.

    But then there’s a touchy ques­tion: Is the love of God ratio­nal or irra­tional. And there I’m stuck… I mean the premise in the ques­tion is a prob­lem… so the answer is of course as well… either way you try it. Maybe that’s why the guy can’t fig­ure it out.. because he tries to rea­son through a ques­tion like this through spec­u­la­tion rather than through experience.

  • Grace

    This was a recorded lec­ture series that I was lis­ten­ing to in my car, so I was able to turn off the CD-player, give the guy a piece of my mind, and then turn it back on. If only real life were like that. :-)

    Rational/irrational: I’m not very good at abstract thought, so I may have this wrong, but I think that by def­i­n­i­tion you’d have to say that reli­gious truth is not ratio­nal truth. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, just that it isn’t the kind that can be exam­ined sci­en­tif­i­cally by the evi­dence of the senses, empir­i­cal evi­dence and all the rest.

    That’s the rea­son that non-religious peo­ple give for want­ing to reject all reli­gious thought as untrue. But I think it’s disin­gen­u­ous and log­i­cally incon­sis­tent to do it. If you’re going to say that you will refuse to con­sider any­thing that can’t be exam­ined and quan­ti­fied sci­en­tif­i­cally, then you hypoth­e­size a life with­out the love of a child, the ter­ror of a night­mare or the poignancy of a mem­ory. There are lots of things that aren’t ratio­nal that are very real.

    On our end of the spec­trum, we have some­one like Fr. Seraphim Rose who says that the ONLY truth is revealed truth, that all of our sup­posed strides with ratio­nal, sci­en­tific facts are only times when we’re tak­ing credit for God choos­ing to reveal truth to us.

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