On Knowing Love and Being Loved
The spiritual life often feels like a pendulum held at its maximum potential energy. Things are good, prayer is joyful and easy—but it feels as if the other shoe is still to drop. I don’t know if this is a common experience, but I think St. Ignatius would back me up here. His Discernment of Spirits (highly recommend!) dispenses some profound practical wisdom on dealing with both consolation and desolation, and the piece of advice I remember most is for coping with the good times. He writes that when one is in consolation, one ought to mentally fortify the walls for the coming desolation: to shoring up good habits and storing up good times to remember, yes, but St. Ignatius reminds us that things will swing back, eventually. The comfort is applying the principle in the bad times as well, to know that good times are near. Perhaps we may fortify ourselves against all bouts of dramatic emotion eventually, and love in its purest form.
I realized while trying to fortify for the upcoming bad times—and let’s be clear, they came MUCH more swiftly than I thought—that I don’t really believe that God loves me. That may sound striking, but I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most Catholics (and perhaps Christians broadly) don’t really believe that God loves them. It’s strange to hear, even as a cradle Catholic, about an experience of outpoured (unrequited, often) love that stretches the breadth of the ever-growing universe, for you specifically. How is one supposed to deal with that in any reasonable way? Surely the entire lives of the saints were spent comtemplating this very thing.
But we often respond to this love by trying to match it with the practical love we find on God’s green Earth (Ed. note: if I type “we” you can read it as “I”, unless it applies to you too. Then carry on). Trying to match up the infinite with the deeply finite not only causes an overflow #REF error, but adds all these odd and wacky rules to what is fundamentally a perfectly simple love. God loves you, and He always will. If you screw up, He’ll look for you and ask you to come home: not out of anger, or disappointment, or to enact justice. Out of mercy, pure and simple. The offer’s always on the table. And yet, the complications we are taught that apply this unbelievably perfect proposal!
In the sense that we experience love on Earth, it is almost always flawed. And it is such a natural temptation to reflect the broken and hurtful attempts at love that we have felt onto the Cross. God is someone Who loves me, yes, but really we’re just dancing around détente until I sin again, right? And then He’ll cut me off until I get to confession and build up a nice streak of Doing Good Things. But then maybe once I’m there, and maybe that’s where consolation lives, then we can have a talk about what I’m experiencing in an honest way (Phoebe Bridgers had it just a touch off—I have emotional whiplash). Envisioning God’s love as a tottering game of Jenga, always one false move away from tearing everything down, is so obviously incorrect when written down—but how often I think this way about my relationship with the Divine.
I think often, too, of how radically my life would be changed if I was able to accept the fullness of God’s love—if I truly, really, understood His love for me and the practical consequences of it in my own life. Clearly we can only go so far this side of heaven. But even the idea of living in such a constant love, basking in its warming presence like the golden rays at dawn…how much easier I would be able to love others! How much easier I would be able to love *myself*! To me, this is the clear link the doctors of the church draw between hope and love, two of the theological virtues. Knowing that you are loved allows you to live in the hope of the resurrection, the hope that one day, we all might understand that Divine love just a touch more.
It’s pretty natural to blame weird personal experiences on how we perceive God’s love, and I definitely think there’s something to that. But a lot of the popular culture around the Church—especially in conservative circles—leans on teaching and metaphor that clashes directly with the idea of Divine love.
Purity culture is a great example, and the majority of Catholic women I know have heard or been told about the duct tape metaphor, or the chewed up gum, or “damaged goods”. Men usually don’t get the metaphors, but the same implied threat of What Happens When You Go Too Far is clearly communicated. In either sense, the idea that one could be irredeemable, that one could simply be disposed of and tossed away for something they had done, is so obviously incongruent with everything we believe about Christ. And yet this culture is perpetuated all the time within our churches, within our youth conferences, within our Catholic media!
I feel this way about discernment, too. Every Catholic media machine runs on those two things: discernment and talkin’ bout’ sex (n.b. not “all” media etc etc but you know what I mean). Teenagers raised in the church are taught to be hypervigiliant about both these topics, and it so clearly causes undue stress and anxiety about things that are deeply simple. Just desire the good for yourself and others! Don’t be weird! But discernment culture has you thinking that you have to pray for months before asking a girl out, which builds up the pernicious idea that every decision you make in your life related to your vocation is of Great Monumental Importance and that if you pick the wrong option, God Will Hate You Forever. Why did I and everyone else I went to these talks and retreats with think that? Because that was the implication of what we heard there! How did it take me until I was 21 years old to find out that as long as I am sincerely loving God and want to do good, that He will use whatever I end up doing for His and my good?
Culture war conservatism plays right into this. If you’re not fighting the good fight, readying up the spiritual warfare tanks, then you’re on the wrong side—the Devil’s side. If you don’t buy into the little battles we fight about the most bullshit mineutia out there, you must not really care about Truth or God or Christianity or whatever. Aside from how obviously evil the us vs. them mentality is, none of it makes any sense. If I don’t stop shopping at Target, God will strike me down? And yet there are BILLION dollar industries devoted to churning out this nonsense, because people click on it, and people believe it, and it becomes part of them—part of their faith.
My tone is halfway frustrated and halfway grateful, and I want to lean on the latter here. I know that God loves me—what I want is to believe that He does, and to believe the implications of what that means for my relationship with Him. I get the sense that not many Catholics know they are loved by God, and I don’t think that’s their fault. Everything we were raised on tries to put limits on His love and complicated rules for when we’re allowed to feel good about it. The truth is, we ought to rejoice always—even when we know we are in sin. One of the most evil lies going is that when you sin, even if you sin mortally, that you are somehow walled off from God, or that you can’t talk to God, or that He doesn’t love you. To me, this is the crux of the whole thing. There’s nothing you can do that will make God not love you. Absolutely nothing. His love abounds and chases you down, hoping to pick you up and hold you close to Him. And maybe—just maybe—somewhere in that tender embrace, we’ll know that He loves us, too.
In Christ,
Hunter