St. Margaret of Scotland
I served the first three years of my priesthood right here at UD. 2005-2008. I was a campus minister and professor of English and theology. After three months of hearing confessions, I realized that some (maybe most?) Catholic UD students suffered from a form of Pelagianism. How so? They seemed to believe that God only loves them when they were sinless, thus making holiness possible w/o grace. IWO, in word and deed, they believed that grace was earned by being sinless. This is heresy. Plain and simple. Here's the truth: there is literally nothing you and I can do to beg, borrow, steal, or earn God's love. And there is literally nothing we can do to make God cease loving us. God is love. He is love by nature. Who He is is Love. God isn't someone above and beyond love Who loves. He isn't a super powerful human-like being Who loves this but not that. To be God is what it is to be love. We cannot beg, borrow, steal, or earn God's love b/c we cannot beg, borrow, steal, or earn God Himself. If God were to cease loving me, I would cease to exist. In fact, all of reality would cease to exist b/c God would cease to be love in failing to love me. So, how do you know – with absolute certainty – that God loves you? Easy. Do you exist? If you say, Yes, then God loves you. Freely, absolutely, unconditionally.
Now that that question is settled, we can move on to the more complicated question: do you love God? God loves b/c He is love. You and I are not love. We participate in His love (b/c we exist), but we are not love itself. IOW, we can sin. We can fail to love as we ought. This is where our problems start. One way of experiencing my sin is to feel or sense that God has stopped loving me. In the presence of Perfect Love, my imperfect love feels like divine abandonment. It feels like God has set me aside. Then, in my desolation, I start trying to earn back God's love with penances and prayers, sackcloth and ashes. We turn to moral perfectionism. Maybe if I am an absolutely morally Good Boy/Good Girl – forcing myself to commit no sins – God will love me again. We turn to liturgical athleticism. Maybe if I kneel longer, pray slower, add six more daily devotions, and wear three more scapulars, God will love me again. We start comparing ourselves to Those Other Sinners. Well, at least I am holier than him. He never goes to daily Mass! I do. Surely God loves me now. The Devil eggs us on in our vain efforts to win God back. Why? B/c all these efforts work to keep hidden from us the one truth we find hard to accept: God's love for us is absolute, free, and unconditional. Nothing can keep God from us. But we are more than expert at keeping ourselves from God. Our love for Him is almost always relative, bound, and conditional. So, Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.” What did he tell us? God is love. He – Christ – is in God's love. And we remain in His love by following His commandments. What is his command? “Love one another as I have loved you.” And how does he love us? Freely, sacrificially. If you want a spiritual challenge, something to really put your faith to the test, forget the religious theatrics. Forget the idea that it's remotely possible for God to stop loving you. Drop the heresy that you and I can change God through pious deeds. Instead, go to your family and friends and ask for their forgiveness. Then, forgive them in turn. That's how you start and live your life in Christ.
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