God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands Him to do so. No one commands Him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.
When Saint Paul says to us, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” you don’t stop there like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to His pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. … We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that he is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all, for any reason.
She said, “Didn’t you know, Dougald? I’m dying.” And just for a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of conversation we were about to have. Then I saw the edge of a smile on her lips, and she started to explain about this programme she’d joined called A Year to Live, where a group of you go through a whole twelve months, living as though this were the last year of your life.
He goes on:
In the summer of 2020, I heard this question from the Inuit poet Taqralik Partridge: “What if the pandemic is just a warning shot?” Not the big event that changes everything, but the first in a chain of crises. Some days I can picture them, lined up like storms on a satellite picture of the Atlantic in hurricane season, rolling in, one after the other, to make landfall along the coastline of the future.
People get broken all the time, there’s no art in that, but there is an art in making spaces where we can be broken open with a chance of healing. Encounters that leave us changed, with a chance of becoming the people we’d need to be to bring about those “presently unimaginable futures”. That feels like work worth doing, in a time when the world is on fire.
The Musée d’Orsay was very busy and physically exhausting. But the building is extraordinary, and it was wonderful to come face to face with so many famous impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Van Gogh’s stare has stayed with me…
We’re just home from a few days in Paris. I wanted to visit Notre Dame for the first time since the fire. It was busy and chaotic but also unexpectedly moving. There was a real sense of people responding emotionally to the restored building. Last time it felt like a simple tourist attraction; this time, there was more.
Helen Stanton is very good on the apophatic tradition:
Telling the truth: that we do not know, cannot understand, but recognise that God is in that place of darkness as much as in God’s glorious light. This is, I think, one of our resources when our equations fail as our words do. And it is important for others too. Staying with the not knowing about the planet shares some resonance of God’s solidarity with God’s suffering creation in Jesus Christ. Thomas Trahern wrote of God’s dazzling darkness, as if the darkness of God is indeed somehow light. Isaiah (43:3) wrote of the treasures of the darkness, hinting that there is something about the dark that enables us to know God. And in the darkness of despair, of destruction, of boredom, of plain nothingness, God is also present. God’s presence isn’t like the switch of a light. All is not easy and bearable. God bears, and we too must bear, that which must be borne.
