Power, Corruption, and Impure Love

Earlier today, I wrote this on my pilgrimage blog:

And a third intertwining point, connected here, is that love, the pure love of God in us, brings us holy death. We resist this with all our energy. What God wants most deeply from us all is to let Him love us. Once He has this, He can move. We cannot induce this "letting" in anyone; each door must be unlocked from within the heart.

And this was the upshot of my second point:

St. John and St. James made it clear that we lie if we say we love God but do not love our neighbor in practical, active terms. Likewise, if we seek to love our neighbor based on personal power and agenda that omits surrendering Lordship to Jesus, it is not love in which we deal, but corruption.

And while that post was complicated enough without developing these thoughts any further, the whole post was really born from the collision of those two points in my soul. That's something I need to go back to and think about.

There is a moment when even a genuine love can turn into ugliest violence. It is all the easier, the less genuine and the more impure that love is. I have done this. There is that moment when a soul, which loves, but impurely, makes a terrible shift in its motivation and its fuel. Genuine love gives and seeks the good of the other, even at the cost of the lover. This shift in motivation is about exerting power over another and attaining something for itself by some degree of force. Perhaps all of the time, this shift into the corruption of exerting power over another comes because the desired good is to be loved in return, but the person is not able to believe either that they are loved, that they can be loved, or that they will be loved, and so they take out their rage on someone they do love, because of their cavernous failure to believe.

There is perhaps nothing so agonizing as to extend all of ones energy, effort, heart, and soul, to hold it forth in deep vulnerability, and to feel it slapped down, rejected, crushed. But it is very important to a real relationship of love that rejection be borne with patiently. Under no circumstances should rejection by a loved one trigger a show of force of any sort by the one rejected. Sadness should never provoke violence, either in act or word.

There is nothing so frustrating to impure love as to not be able to impel love in return. It is death. It is precisely how impure love is purified. It is the price we are to pay; the cost of loving is this process of dying for the beloved. We love, and we long to be loved in return. When the one we love disappoints us, the disappointment is to be the flame that darts up and purifies our love to love all the more ardently, and with more detachment. We can even experience a taste of the bitter way God is treated by His creatures regularly, and we can praise Him more ardently for His faithfulness to us.

There have been moments when I have felt justified in being angry or frustrated over someone's failure to have a change of heart. There have been times when I have expressed that anger in just the corrupt way I am describing, as if the primary problem in their lack of conversion to Christ is that they have offended me. Decades ago the Lord was trying to teach me something that I have only begun to truly take in from the Carmelite Doctors: the point of prayer is to unite my heart to God's, not to bend creation to my will. The powerful intercessor is not the one who can call fire down from the sky to consume God's enemies; the powerful intercessor is the one who believes what God has said about Himself and who is consumed by His love.

And so I come back to the point I highlighted in the last post: What God wants most deeply from all of us is to let Him love us. Not infrequently, "letting Him love us" means willingly bearing a bit of pain, a bit of fear, a bit of vulnerability, as a concrete way of telling God that we believe He is worth it and His love for us is true. To believe in God, I keep teaching my daughter, is not so much to just believe He exists as to believe that He loves you. How much it grieves His heart when His own people do not trust His love.

But it is a grief He will bear, patiently. It will never provoke violence against you.

What Pilgrimage Made Grow: I didn't see this coming

One of the outcroppings of my pilgrimage which I did not at all see coming while I was in Poland was a certain practical shifting in my prayer focus. It continues to surprise me, though "surprise" isn't exactly the right word for something that I find having taken root in my soul.

Because it is the Year of Mercy, works of mercy came through as a theme at various World Youth Day events. And during that time, the spiritual works of mercy in particular sort of hummed with an attention-getting sort of resonance with me. But upon returning home, I found myself drawn powerfully to pray specifically for those in addictions, for those working in sex trafficking (pimps and prostitutes), and for those suffering violent abuse, whether physical or emotional.

It isn't that I have never prayed before for these needs, but since returning from Poland,

Read the Rest

(Cross-posted from my blog "A Pilgrim in Poland".)