Striking the root of the matter

I just can't pick a phrase or two from today's second reading from the Office of Readings that particularly struck me. Usually I prefer the selections that are chosen from the early church fathers, which often resonate with their timeless truth. Yet today's reading from the documents of the Second Vatican Council kept drawing me into its own veritas as I continued to read. A couple of things in particular struck me, and I hope I'm able to capture them before my own thoughts obscure them.

Without God, the higher kind of life to which we aspire is obscured, taking the form of our mere dreams and wishes. Sometimes there is a sincere element of selflessness in this striving, insofar as we are able to understand and apply it. But what we understand to be the freedom to live this higher calling becomes instead an enslavement to the ideas, the dogma, that becomes an empty shadow of the true freedom we find only in living in God's love.

Without God, we do not understand our weakness and our sinfulness properly.  Rather, we often mistake these characteristics as noble causes which we should embrace, or toward which we should strive.  And the power of our own wants can become all the more consuming if we have no source we trust that might serve to steer us away from them.  The unhappiness we experience in response to our failure to understand that our loving God is providing for our true needs ends up driving us toward more unhappiness, for ourselves and for those whom we are trying to love as well as we can.

These questions with which we grapple should serve to bring us to a relationship with God.  Yet when we begin the struggle with an inner conviction that God cannot be the answer because there is no god, that indeed no rational person should believe in any form of god, they can indeed drive us to despair.  By no means is this inevitable; there are undoubtedly atheists who accept their fatalistic position with an inner peace, but in my experience they are often driven off of their precarious peaceful perch when they encounter various sorts of upheaval in their lives or opposition to their point of view.

Yet faith in God does free us from our own inner struggle between sinfulness and righteousness, nor from our tendency to close off when we are hurt rather than reconcile.  The battle wages within us even when we believe in God, even when we have a relationship with him that transforms us, and the efficacy of that transformation wanes when we fail to give ourselves regularly and with increasing consistency to this most perfect of loves.  I cannot fully imagine the effect that not believing must have on that battle, and pray that I never will experience it.

Only the conclusion of this selection, its last three brief paragraphs, provide the proper context for the resolution of this conflict, and therein can be found the only way to approach it that brings life rather than death, selfless love instead of narcissism, grace and forgiveness in place of vengeance and judgment.

Yet none of these positive approaches is possible of our own effort. Only the Holy Spirit can manifest grace, and at our best we merely participate in and give ourselves over to this work of God.