Genesis tells us God spoke to Adam. Before the wily serpent enticed them from friendship with God, Adam and Eve walked with Him in the Garden He made for them. The words that passed between them as they walked together were meant to be the beginning of a Communion, a “sweet converse together.” But rather than the words of his Friend, Adam chose to listen to the enticements of the snake. The friendship God created us for faltered; Adam’s hearing (and ours as a result) became garbled. God continues to speak to us, but what we hear, we often misunderstand.
God hasn’t changed. Since the beginning, His words of love and friendship for us remain the same. Since Adam munched the apple, though, our hearing has changed, and the clarity of God’s words has become muted.
Our hearing problem isn’t only with God, it’s with each other. The problem isn’t really with our ears, but with our hearts and minds.
I hear what I want. All of us do. God’s call to us is plain, but it’s not a call I particularly want to hear. At all times and in all places, He calls us to His charity, not just when we want to, not just with those we care for, but with every person, like ‘em or not. He’s calling us to be like Him, to love like Him. He means us to show His love in the ho-hum everyday circumstances of our lives.
When the Lord Jesus did this—and that’s practically all He did when He walked the dusty roads of Roman Palestine two thousand years ago—it cost Him. But He heard the Divine Voice with crystal clarity, and He passed it on to us. “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what He did every day of His life. Every person He met, the bitterest Pharisee and the most corrupt tax-collector and the scoffing, full-of-himself know-it-all, He loved them all perfectly and fully. He loved—and loves—every human failure: each one of us who tell ourselves we’re so successful.
“God,” St John tells us, “is love.” That is the core of Christian truth, the necessary dogma of the Catholic Faith. It has nothing to do with sentimental schlock or pious emotion. At the center of everything visible and invisible is this Truth: the Father eternally loves the Son, the Son eternally loves the Father, and the Holy Ghost, the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, is their living Bond of Love. God created us, mirabile dictu, to enter into those ties of Love. That’s what salvation is. That’s your High Calling and mine.
God bothered to make us out of nothing at all, so we could come to know love and become partakers of His Love. That’s why we’re alive. It’s not to see who wins, who claws his way to the top of the human heap, who has the most stuff when he dies: we’re made to find out what love is, so we can understand what’s going in when we wake up in eternity. The language of eternity is Love—the Father’s Love for the Son, the Son’s Love for the Father, and the Holy Ghost breathing that Love into us. Love is self-giving.
Hell isn’t so much a fiery lake of bubbling magma as much as it is a state of utter, joyless incomprehension. It’s an eternity spent in the presence of Love when you don't know what Love is.
A lot of people say they wish God spoke to us now as Scripture tells us He spoke to them then. The Good News is that He does. His call to us is the same now as it was when He spoke to Adam. He still wants us to walk with Him as friends. In this fallen world, though, the Gospel choice always costs us. As we walk with Him along that narrow Way, we hear a little more clearly the Voice which is calling us. It is Love Who speaks, calling us to be who we were made to be.-Fr Gregory Wilcox
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