So why does the World (continue to) crucify Love? Not because it doesn't know, from the very pit of its self-inflated misery, that it needs salvation. And not because it doesn't understand that salvation can be difficult, and costly, and even painfully sacrificial. Notice how our Great World today does not in the least shrink from ordeal, from the gauntlet, from tribulation, from the constant testing of its own mettle. As if there was nothing it desired more to flaunt, more to put on display than its own toughness, its "I-can-take-it-and-then-some," its own omnicompetent resilience and resourcefulness. Rather, what this particular world finds most offensive, what drags all its pretension, pride and dignity through the very mud, as it were, from which Adam was shaped, is the notion that it can't be the savior of itself, and in every minutest detail: that it cannot be in control of the entire process from start to finish. Imagine it: that God could so love the world as to redeem, to cleanse, to dignify and glorify it from the dregs of its worst insufficiency, from the pit of its most abject weakness and helplessness - in short, that He should save it with so little help from itself - that is something for which the Great World can never forgive God. Any more than Satan can.
Notice how hard it is - in a world where even what we call charity can somehow be competitive - notice how hard it is to love any being who loves us, first and foundationally, simply for who we are, and for all that we are. Which is to say, who loves us for the sake of our utmost joy and fulfillment, long before it loves us for any other reason. How hard it is to love a being who insists on enveloping us in his own nurturance, his own sustenance, his own substance, quite apart from, quite above and beyond any improvement he seeks from us, or any demands he will make upon us. How hard it is love a Being who seems to us so contemptibly weak, in a world so obsessed with our being strong.
In the Gospels we are warned all over the place that every disciple, no matter how diligent, is liable to stumble. And yet I wonder: Would we stumble so often, if we weren't looking SO far ahead, and moving through life with such overweening confidence, and at such aggressive all-consuming speed, that just about the last thing worthy of our attention was where we were putting our feet?
I suppose it's possible to demonstrate the Truth of Christ purely by way of argument and contention: by not only proving all your contenders wrong, but by exposing their foolishness, and even rubbing their noses in it. But to reveal how Christ loves, and why He loves, surely that is something altogether different? There is, it seems to me, one surest, simplest, humblest way of disclosing the Nature of Christ to anyone, be they proud or despondent, pentitent or indifferent: it is ourselves to emit the kind of light that makes any created thing - even one that's human - more alive and interesting and priceless by its glow. You know, as if it had been actually made by a God.
A strange yet possibly sensible prayer:
Lord, give us such a poverty of reason and confidence, of intellect and will and resolution, as will leave us with nothing to offer, nothing to sacrifice but ourselves: nothing, in short, other than our own naked and helpless, yet altogether fertile, and immeasurably resourceful souls.
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