awhile back

...I mentioned my puzzlement at the belief in the intrinsic goodness of human nature. It would be easy for me to shrug such a perspective off as misplaced and slightly pitiable ignorance, but the reality is that any denial of God that lies protected beneath such carefully re-constructed fragments of the truth destroys the human dignity it seeks to preserve.

Thomas Merton puts it this way -

The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy - or, rather, irrespective of one's worth!

Humanistic love will not serve. As long as we believe that we hate no one, that we are merciful, that we are kind by our very nature, we deceive ourselves; our hatred is merely smoldering under the gray ashes of complacent optimism. We are apparently at peace with everyone because we think we are worthy.

That is to say we have lost the capacity to face the question of unworthiness at all.

But when we are delivered by the mercy of God the question no longer has a meaning.

God save us from the burden of maintaining the illusion that we are worth anything apart from him.

the magic

of being snowed in is that there's no guilty residue left behind from

sitting

and reading

and eating

all day.

an extraordinary transaction

...takes place between Jesus and Peter on the Tiberian seashore. The most plaintive words ever spoken take the form of a heart-stopping question: "Do you love Me?" As we lay aside our fuzzy distractions and actively listen, we hear the suffering cry of a God never heard of before.

What is going on here?

No deity of any world religion has ever condescended to inquire how we feel about that god. The pagan gods fired thunderbolts to remind peons who was in charge. The Rabbi in whom infinity dwells asks if we care about Him. The Jesus who died a bloody, God-forsaken death that we might live, is asking if we love Him!

The etymological root of "passion" is the Latin verb passere, "to suffer." The passion of Jesus in His dialogue with Peter is "the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.

The vulnerability of God in permitting Himself to be affected by our response, the heartbreak of Jesus as He wept over Jerusalem for not receiving Him, are utterly astounding. Christianity consists primarily not in what we do for God but in what God does for us - the great, wondrous things that God dreamed up and achieved for us in Christ Jesus. When God comes streaming into our lives in the power of His Word, all He asks is that we be

stunned and surprised,

let our mouths hang open,

and begin to breathe deeply.

---Brennan Manning, "Abba's Child"