Let me dare the following rant, at the risk of feeling ashamed of myself later. For religion has its religiously correct attitudes which reign us in, and in the name of avoiding sin we curb thoughts that may need to be aired, to be pondered, lest we miss something. People complain of “toxic positivity” in our culture, and sometimes rightly. Religion has its own versions of this, wherein some thought or feeling that steps outside the doctrinally correct is immediately stifled. The good Christian folds his hands prayerfully and smiles grimly inside, intoning, “think doctrinally correct thoughts, think doctrinally correct thoughts,” like those lamentable characters in that horrific story, “It’s a Good Life,” thrusting all rebelliousness from their minds lest their omniscient tyrant hear them. Must Christians hunch their shoulders through life in mortal dread whenever the traditional wisdoms are questioned? And for Christ’s sake anyway, what has he to fear from my thoughts or words? You may say WE have something to fear of our thoughts and words, very well. We also have something to fear of NOT saying them.
Thus:
You can’t tell people that if justice were done they would be tortured forever, and then in the next breath tell them you love them. Humans are not made this way. Here is what God, according to some Christians, is saying to us constantly: “you are a worthless sack of shit, and I love you.” No. This does not work as love. This is the manipulative, Good-God/Bad-God. And there is no sense saying we SHOULD be able to humbly accept the love of someone who thinks we deserve eternal torture, that we are being PROUD: the fact is, we don’t, and we can’t. How can you oblige someone to do the impossible? (even assuming the impossible should be done in this case even if it could). And obligeing us to accept in gratitude the gift along with the supposely graciously suspended judgement does not work. If we are wholly evil, and nothing but wholly evil (and we must be to deserve eternal damnation) there is nothing there to love. And there is no point saying, “God does not love us for something in ourselves, but because it is his nature to love.” This is blather. “Love” is not an intransitive verb. It has an object. And if this is not the case, we must say simply, “God loves,” but we cannot truly say “God loves us,” if indeed, there is nothing good there to be loved. For how can God love evil?
Nor must we say therefor that we seek to be loved through merit, because parents love their babies, and what merit has a baby performed? The baby is in some way good in their eyes, and we tend to agree with them.
No matter how evil we are, no matter how much we need the mercy, if there is not someone beneath the rust of spiritual ruin to receive that mercy, then who is it who is being loved? Perhaps God simply loves himself then? Then who are we?
There is no point exorting humans to be good and then saying they can’t do it, and judging them for inevitable failure. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory”; does not reason pipe up here and say that if not one has been righteous there is more going on than countless billions of people, all of whom just happen to be evil? Might there just be something systematic about this evil none of us could escape of our own efforts? Liberals have been mocked for being soft on criminals, saying they are in some way “victims of society.” But what kind of “society” is it, when every bloody citizen of it is a criminal? I think there is a wee bit of a structural problem here that nobody can escape. Sin is that structure.
What are we to say to God, then? “Love me according to my deserts?” God does not love according to deserts, does he? Was this not the mistake of the pharisees? Thinking they could buy or earn God’s love? Is it not free? And we don’t quite bloody know, each of us, exactly what our deserts are anyway. Certainly we cannot claim somehow to have earned eternal bliss. Nor can we claim, in truth, we SHOULD have.
Good-God/Bad-God is Blake’s Nobodaddy, hypocritically pretending to love freely while all the time reminding you of what a rotter you are. “Just think what I MIGHT have justly done to you,” he mutters under his breath.
Enough! Enough! All this nonsense, and maybe this meditation itself, is simply another attempt to keep justification hovering in the background as a dark and powerful shadow, even as we try to accept with trembling gratitude the Master’s love. “Oh Lord, please judge me positively for eschewing my worthiness…”! Yes, let us say we are too proud to accept unmerited love, then. But we are too filled with self-loathing also to accept that love. Ah, but the sages, say, that self-loathing is a form of pride. Perhaps it is: a form of pride we learned from those same sages teaching us humbly to loathe ourselves!
No, what is needed steps outside, beyond even what I am saying here. What is required is a miracle.