In All Utterance, and in All Knowledge

1 Corinthians 1:3-6

Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ;

That in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge;

Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you:

What is truth?

Truth is not a something, but a someone.

Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.”  Jesus Christ is the Light of the world – “The true light, which enlightens everyone”.[1]  All who seek knowledge, all who seek wisdom, all who seek truth, seek Christ.  For, he is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”[2] 

He is that divine Logos the Greeks glimpsed through inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  Christ is fully God – and fully human, being God Incarnate.  By assuming human nature, Christ Jesus, Word of God made flesh, sanctified human kind.  Every human being, therefore, who receives grace from God is given it by Christ; likewise every human being who is enriched in truth is enriched by Christ.  Every human mind, every human heart, seeking and longing for truth, for beauty, for wisdom, is in quest for God’s Word.  Whether we know it or not, whether we profess Christ as Lord and Savior or not, Christ is Lord in that he is God Incarnate, the Alpha and the Omega, the one through whom all things are made.  There is no ageless wisdom, no true discovery, no real knowledge, without the Word of God.  And all who speak truth speak in his name, whether they profess belief in his name or not – for by seeking and finding and praising truth, they cannot help but seek and find and praise Christ.  We who know him as Savior and Lord know this because, through the gift of faith and Salvation in Christ, our finite eyes have been opened toward the infinite and we recognize him in all that is good.  Praise be to God.

Christina Chase

 

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[1] John 1:1-9

[2] John 14:6

The Holy Ghost Was Given, he Offered Them Money

 

Acts 8:17-22

Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.

And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money,

Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.

But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.

Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

Money can’t buy me love.  Or can it?

 

What is the experience of love if not a pleasant feeling of belonging and satisfaction?  I can purchase feelings of pleasure: massages, fast cars, ice cream cones, teddy bear sheets, or a trip to the amusement park.  I can purchase a feeling of belonging: memberships to a gym or celebrity fan club, or the novel or handful of coupons that get me into the book club or coupon trading circle.  And I can purchase a feeling of satisfaction: home improvement, pizza delivered to me whenever I have a craving, or the perfect outfit that makes my classmates envious at the reunion.  If love is the ultimate of feelings, then it, too, can surely be acquired through money.  Maybe I can’t technically purchase a person, but… If I have a lot of money, then I can find people I like and buy them pleasures and satisfactions.  They will therefore love being with me and praise me for giving them such great gifts, thus deepening my feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and belonging – for we will share a life of enjoyment together for as long as those good feelings last.  And when the pleasant feelings end, I will simply find new ones.  What more can we ask of love?

 

Isn’t that true?

No.

 

First, we overuse the word love.  I love ice cream cones, I love discussing books with other people, and I love a well decorated house.  But, when I say that I love God… This is something else entirely.  Our overused word of “love” is utterly insufficient to express what exists between me and the Creator and Master of the Universe.  I don’t like God to an extreme degree or intensity.  It is not enough even to say that I have a positive feeling toward God.  To know Him is to love Him.  Not because He is so wonderfully likable or because He does such delightful favors for me.  This love for God, this love of God, is beyond anything that I experience in an earthly way.  And God’s love for me… There are no words to describe it.  So, for now, for here, I’m going to call this love Love.

 

To my second point: Love isn’t a feeling.  I said that to know God is to Love God.  To be in any mindful kind of way in the presence of God is to experience Love… I don’t even want to use the word experience… it is to Love.  I have heard it said that Love is a choice.  And I agree.  Love is an act of will, it is not simply something that we feel or that we experience in a happening kind of way.  Love doesn’t come serendipitously to us and we don’t find Love out in the world – no matter what romance novels may say.  Rather, true Love is.  And we either do it or we don’t.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with money or health or influence or fame or even likability.  The poorest of humans can Love the most richly.  And Love has nothing to do with how we feel.  In fact, you know that you truly Love if you are doing it when you don’t feel like doing it at all.

 

And what are you doing?  If Love is something that we do, what is it that we do?  We are simply opened up and giving ourselves always and everywhere.  And, no, not giving our bodies for other people’s pleasures.  That’s not Love.  Rather, we know ourselves, we know the truth of who we are, images of God, and we share this truth, this reality of our being, with ourselves, with God, with every person that we meet, with the world.  Do I mean evangelize?  Yeah, sure – but in the sense that the words that we choose to speak, just like the actions that we choose to take, are so at one with the reality of who we are, that the truth simply, naturally, flows forth from us to others.  So, the first question to ask, when pondering Love, is, Who am I?  I am goodness, I am truth, I am kindness, I am generosity, I am mercy, I am strength, I am gentleness, I am Love – because I am the image of God, as created by God.  This is who I am.  It is only when I am truly myself that I am truly able to Love.  For when I am truly myself… then I truly Love.

 

You have heard it said that God is Love.  Let me try to explain that further.  God is the free gift of self.  That is Love.  To think that this is something that we could actually buy with money?  …As if it were some perishable thing, some fleeting feeling… And as if what is inherently free could ever be up for sale, could ever be possessed – it cannot, for Love can only be given and Love can only be received by giving it away…

Christina Chase

 

Ignorantly in Unbelief

1 Timothy 1:12-14

And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry;

Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.

 

Just unveiled, in the state of Florida, is a monument erected by the American Atheists on the public grounds of courtyard.  A few years ago, a Christian group erected a large monument engraved with the 10 Commandments on the same grounds.  The atheists’ monument, in the form of a bench with quotations carved upon it, is meant not only to counteract the other but also to show that freedom of religion is not just for Christians.

 

As a former atheist, I take great interest in this story.  For, though I now see that I was in error in stating that there was no such thing as God, at the time I did so in ignorant unbelief.  I was not angry at God or at whatever forces may be behind life.  I was not a disgruntled human, unhappy with my lot.  I was neither contemptuous nor mean toward others who did believe in God.  I claimed no superiority over anyone, even though I believed I was right as an atheist and that everyone else who believed in God was wrong.  And I was not an evangelical practitioner of atheism, zealously seeking to spread the gospel of no God.  I simply became an atheist after I asked myself a simple question: am I trying to find a way to believe in God and to practice a religion out of fear?  I then let myself do something that was very easy – stop believing.  There was no benevolent Creator, no merciful Lord, prayers were useless and the afterlife was a fairytale.  I got every religious and spiritual habit out of my life and knew that there was nothing Beyond and nothing More.  And I wasn’t afraid.  And I wasn’t unhappy.  So content was I with knowing that there is nothing spiritual that I didn’t even feel the need to convert anyone.

 

This is not the place to tell how I could no longer be an atheist and how I became a believing Catholic Christian.  What I do want to write here is that I respect atheists who are such because of serious thinking and committed choice.  What they may not want to hear me say is that I respect their beliefs.  Beliefs, yes, for only a true blue agnostic can claim not to believe anything – they get so hung up on not being able to prove something for certain that they just go about their lives without choosing one way or the other.  (And also, perhaps, people who claim to belong to a religion but who don’t care to think about whether they believe it not.)  But, atheists actively choose.  And that takes guts.  That takes courage.

 

And so, I am glad that the American Atheists have erected a monument in the public square alongside the 10 Commandments.  (Which, by the way, are obviously not only Christian, as millions of Jews will tell you.)  I am glad that they feel so strongly in their beliefs that they want to share them with others – and that they are able to do so because of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.  Being in the form of a bench with writing, the designers are even inviting people outside of a government building to sit for a while and read thoughts about God.  The quotations carved on the bench show how breaking of the 10 Commandments was punished in the Old Testament of the Bible, providing a great (albeit unintentional) demonstration of the mercy that comes in the New Testament.  (Yes, I’m smirking.  Why do some atheists like to talk about God so much?)  And some of the other quotations show how the founding fathers claimed no religious mission on their part, that they wanted to make it clear that the government of the United States would not be based on a divine right of rulers (it would be based on a divine right of human beings, but that’s not on the monument) and would not provide funds for the budgetary needs of any religion, like Great Britain did for the Church of England.  This is one of the greatest things that the founders of our country did – to establish a national government that would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”[1].  And I’m glad of the choice made by the American Atheists to enter into the public square and share their beliefs instead of trying to make the public square barren with very little “free exercise”.

 

Having read several articles, however, I’m not quite sure if this is the true intent of the organization.  In fact, the key quotation that is most visible on the bench is from the group’s founder and sounds thoroughly anti-religion.  The superior tone of the quote was even noted by an atheist and blogger at NPR, Barbara J King.  This vision of atheists as having superior thoughts is even, it seems to me, embodied by the group’s own symbol: the nucleus with a large letter A at the center.  I don’t know of any mainstream Christian symbols with a cross at the center of a nucleus… A nucleus is a nucleus.  Shouldn’t atheists of all people know that?  The group’s intent in erecting the monument is, I believe, to tick off us ignorant Christians so that we will agree to their original idea – an empty public square.  I’m sure there are some Christians and other religious people who will be offended by the monument (especially by that quote by the American Atheists founder) but the majority of us will see that this is what freedom of religion is all about and why nations around the world can look to America on how people of various cultures and religions can live peacefully in one place.  There is nothing threatening to faith in this monument.

 

It atheists really wanted to see this monument as the 1^st monument to atheism erected in United States on public ground, then, perhaps, they should’ve done a lot more to extol the virtues of atheism in the monument itself.  Instead, it inaccurately suggests that religious people are opponents of public works and mercy under the law.  And all that they can say about the founders of our country is that they did not see the founding of the US as the founding of a Christian Nation and that the Constitution was not inspired by the gods.  What, are we supposed to be shocked by that and become instant atheists?  Please.  Where is the information about the goodness and soundness of atheism that will inspire a generation to embrace unbelief?  I saw a picture of a man standing on top of the monument and shouting out to the crowd.  I don’t know what he was saying.  But, from what I’ve learned about the zealous/activist atheists of today and what I know of my own personal experience as a nonevangelical atheist, I think this is a clearer monument to atheism: a pile of gray, stony arguments topped by a shouting individual.

 

Meanwhile (getting back to my randomly given Scripture quote) I thank the Lord for grace, for enabling me to be counted among the faithful, and for the exceeding abundance of faith and love in Christ Jesus.  And I’m grateful to live in the United States of America where I am free to seek the truth… the truth has set me free.

Christina Chase

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[1] Bill Of Rights – I don't think this is on the monument

I Will

Matthew 8:2-3

And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

 

The tenderness of God cannot be exaggerated.  Infinite and eternal, beyond death, beyond fragility, the Lord of the Universe is all-powerful.  Whatever God wants, God gets.  The forces of nature obey His Will and there is no question, no doubt whatsoever, as to who is in charge.  God’s control is absolute.  And yet… Where is love in this?  Because of love, God willingly chooses to create a species in which He will claim none of His omnipotent control.  He grants freedom to these creatures and truly loves these creatures because they are not switches and gears, preprogrammed entities of unquestioning obedience.  They are fully alive as God is fully alive; and God shares with them the ability to love, to willingly choose to give of oneself completely to the other, not as a will-less response to inevitable forces, but as a free choice to truly love.  And, so, human beings.

 

Though all that is good, all that is healthy, all that is right, all that is true resides in God’s Ordained Will, we, humans, because we are free and not forced into acceptance of Truth, have the capacity to reject Truth and turn away from all that is good, to turn away from God.  We do this in embracing self-consciousness, in seeking to please ourselves, we do this in refusing love.  For love is God-consciousness and, when the first human beings chose to absent themselves from this, the effect on human nature was ingrained.  Our God-given intellects became darkened and our God-given free will became weakened, and we make our choices in the half light of a fallen world, self-centered and afraid.  Prone to the suffering of mental confusion and physical illness, prone to the pain of the selfish greed and using cruelty of other humans, we have the capacity to merely survive until death ends the thrust of our existences.  And… As we are still created in the image and likeness of God… We also have the capacity to have our minds cleansed of selfish toxins and give over our very hearts to God-consciousness, to truth, to love.  But, who will help us?

 

The tenderness of God cannot be exaggerated.  Though infinite and eternal, He took on the fragility of a finite human form; though divinely omnipotent and divinely omniscient, He assumed human nature and became one of us.  In the ultimate humility and generosity of love, His self-sacrifice is a total commitment, a sacrifice of self through love for the other.  In the Mystery of Incarnation, that, with Creation, is like the second wave of the heartbeat of God’s Word, of the Creative Force that is the ultimate act of divine love, God becomes Man.  He gives of Himself completely – fatigued, frustrated, grieving, betrayed, abandoned, ridiculed, tortured, trapped, thirsty – the full reality of a human life, loving completely, even to the point of death, death on a cross: Christ Jesus.  And while Jesus lived and breathed among us, walking in our midst, unknown to us, he sanctified human nature, he redeemed humankind, he put forth his human hand, calloused with work, dusty with travel, and touched the wounded among us, cleansing and healing bodies, hearts and minds, restoring those downtrodden by the world to the fullness of life, to supreme wholeness, to God-consciousness, to truth and love.

 

And now, weary and lost in this world, we approach Christ and know that we will be cleansed, healed, restored, if He but wills it.  Moved with sympathetic tenderness, gazing lovingly through human eyes, He puts forth His hand and Wills to touch us, wounded as we are, and to transform our lives infinitely.  Christ who once walked among us on travel-worn feet, now approaches us through one another and receives our pilgrims steps in the embrace of His Church.  Therefore, let us not understate by self-centered actions the tender mercy and love of God.

Who Is like unto Thee

Exodus 15:11, 13

Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?

Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.

 

Who is like unto thee, O LORD?  Among all powers, among all treasures, who is like unto thee?  You are not the highest.  You are not the deepest.  You are not the strongest.  You are not the weakest.  And you are not the in between.  You are height and depth and strength and vulnerability.  You are not the most – you are in the most, as in the least, and you are beyond.  No words can describe you.  No images can capture you.  No concepts can contain you.  Infinite, eternal, and absolute, you are the Holy of holies, the Wonder of wonders, the Life of lives, the Hope of hopes, the Love of loves.  Any fears are blinders; we blind ourselves from your mighty mercy and your merciful might; we delude ourselves in the darkness of self-centered night, turned away from you who are the Light of lights, though you call us into your everlasting Day.  You, who creates and masters the universe, create and master us; we have rejected, forgotten, ignored, and manufactured ourselves like unto moles, blinded by our groping further and further into our little graves.  You, who are the depth, who are the height, call us out of the little graves we dig, out of the little piles we mound, rip the blinders off – not with your strength with which you crush the mountains and storm the seas, but with your vulnerability, with Weakness; give yourself totally to us, you who have no total, who cannot be totaled, give yourself absolutely to us in complete surrender of height and depth and strength; finite, fragile and fleeting, breathe but a dying breath in this world of matter and we are redeemed.  For you are the Love of loves, the holy habitation of truth that sets us free.

Not

Exodus 20:13-15

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

 

Rules.  The seemingly common outcry in our society is that organized religion has just too many rules.  The thought is that a handful of men, who think they know better than anyone else, impose strict rules on human beings, regulations imposed upon us that take away our freedom and squash the authenticity of our individualism.

 

Really?

 

We are all human.  We have in common the essence of who we are as human beings.  Yes, each of us is an individual with unique particular characteristics – but, to other members of the animal world, I bet that we all look alike.  And that’s because, essentially, we are alike.  Not just in basic physical needs and appearance, but even in our deepest yearnings and inner needs.  St. Thomas Aquinas, using common sense and reason, laid out basic inclinations of Man, what the founders of the United States of America might call “self-evident” truths about human beings.  First and foremost is the natural inclination to seek the good – and the good is what is in accord with the nature of humanity, that essence we share.  And, so, as a human being, I am inclined to preserve myself, to preserve my species, to live in community, and to know and to choose.  Without getting too much into philosophy for this blog post, let me simply say that the rules of the 10 Commandments are specifics of these basic human goals/needs. 

 

So, if I steal from members of my community, I will be jeopardizing my ability to continue living in that community.  I mean, who wants to live next to an unrepentant, perpetual thief?  The act of thievery, therefore, goes against the grain of human nature, contradicting the natural inclination to live among others.  The act of killing other human beings is generally detrimental to preservation of the species – but not always so.  It is, however, always detrimental to preservation of human life.  So, we could say that it is my natural desire to preserve my own life that instinctively tells me not to kill another unless in self-defense.  Because, I mean, if I go around killing people, someone’s probably going to come along and kill me.  We can take the act of adultery in the same way – if I don’t want someone to take my husband, it is best for me not to take someone else’s.  In this way, I am best able to keep my own husband and, therefore, in a committed and supporting relationship with him, fulfill the inclination to preserve the species.

 

These are just basic concepts of right and wrong and why they are right and wrong.  What is important is to remember that the concepts do not come out of nowhere, imposed upon us from some foreign source.  No, they are organic, true to human nature.  They are also not concepts decided upon in committee, by a majority vote of individuals or their representatives.  We did not make ourselves, we did not design our natural inclinations and, so, we do not get to redesign them or reinvent human beings into something else.  The good that we seek is an objective good – objective because it is innate to who we are as humans.  You could say that it’s part of our DNA – in fact, I heard an agnostic put it precisely that way.  But, let us not reduce ourselves to mere particles and chemical combinations.  Jesus of Nazareth, when asked which of the 10 Commandments was the most important answered, that the most important one was to love God and that the second was in accord with the first – to love one’s neighbor.  And, so, it is good, it is right and true, that we should look upon the basic understanding of right and wrong in terms of love: of what it is to be fully and truly human.

 

For we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator.  We are endowed by our Creator “with certain inalienable rights”[1] and with God given intellect, free will, and imagination.  And we are meant to seek what is in accord with our good.  And, because our Creator loves us, knowledge of this truth is practically “self-evident”, while ways of achieving this quest are divinely revealed to us by the working of the Holy Spirit – through prophets, Sacred Scripture, and most sublimely in, with, and through Jesus Christ.  This is our faith, grounded in reason.  For, as Pope John Paul II said, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

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[1] The Declaration of Independence, United States of America

No Root in Themselves

Mark 4:16-17

And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness;

And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake, immediately they are offended.

 [This is a bit of a mess, which I would like to edit if there were no time constraint.  Hopefully, some parts makes some kind of sense…]

Isn’t Christianity supposed to make me happy?  If I believe in God, in Jesus Christ, if I keep the Lord’s Commandments and do what is right and just – then I should be richly blessed with all good and pleasing things.  I should have property and wealth, friends and family, I should have good health and a long life, with the enjoyment of happy and healthy grandchildren – shouldn’t I?  What use is it to give my whole life to Christ if I will still suffer evils, heartaches, poverty or disease?  Didn’t God promise good things to those who follow Him?

 

How tempting it is to be caught up in the good feeling of Christianity.  And it does feel good to know that the Creator and Master of the universe knows me and loves me, that He became a human being like me and died for me, that He rose from the dead, vanquishing the power of death, and gives to me the gift of eternal life in the joy of heaven.  I would want to live in that feeling always, singing songs of Thanksgiving and praise with my like-minded brothers and sisters, sharing the plenty of God’s Creation, safe from anyone who would harm me – safe even from sorrow, fear, temptation and doubt.  That good feeling that we get inside when we are joyfully filled with the loving presence of God is, it seems, the just reward for acknowledging and accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  But… that good feeling doesn’t last.  We can, however, be satisfied with a more mellow knowledge of divine love without the fireworks.  We can live in a kind of peace that makes the whole world seem right.  But… even this doesn’t last.  And it shouldn’t.  Because the whole world isn’t right.

 

Something terrible happens in our lives – a loved one is diagnosed with terminal cancer or killed in a car crash or murdered in cold blood – and we cannot understand how God, how our loving and Almighty God, could let something like that happen to us.  We might ask: Did I not profess my belief in Jesus Christ loudly enough?  Did I not pray enough?  Did I not make enough sacrifices of my own self-centered will for the good of others?  What did I do wrong that God should let something so terrible happen to me?  Why wasn’t my loved one spared, why was I not saved from evil?  These are the questions inspired by Job in the Hebrew Testament of the Bible.  And God, perhaps, could answer us with the words that He gave to Job.  God could simply say to us, mere creatures, that we have no right, indeed, not even the ability, to question the will of God; for we cannot possibly fathom God’s mind or God’s plan.  In the Hebrew Testament, God allows Job’s faith to be tested to prove to the devil, as it were, that faith is not dependent upon happiness.  Faith is not dependent upon good feelings.  Faith is not dependent upon reward.  Of course… this Old Testament story has Job rewarded with earthly enjoyments at the end of its telling.  And a common answer to us, as Christians, when we suffer great loss in our earthly lives, is that we will be richly rewarded with great joy and plenty at the end of our earthly lives.  And so often, perhaps too often, we rest our faith in that promise.  When cruel people do cruel things to us, when we suffer physically, emotionally or psychologically, when troubles are set upon us from the world, we believe that God will make up for it in the hereafter, we believe that all will be right in the ultimate end.  That is the promise made by God, and, so, I believe it.  But… I should, I must, always remember that my faith cannot be dependent upon reward.

 

I cannot look at my troubles as something to simply endure and get through so that I can get to the good stuff at the end.  I must remember that there is goodness here and now in the limitations and difficulties of my earthly life – not only because through them I am purified, I am made better and more able to love and receive the fullness of joy in eternity, but also because I am created by God, living in the necessary limitations of my own body and of Creation itself precisely because I am not God.  God loves me enough to bring me into being, God, who is perfectly self-sufficient, perfectly perfect without me, creates me so that I may be, so that I may be alive in the goodness of God’s Creation.  As creatures are not God, we are imperfect, and therein lies our suffering.  Yet, this suffering is the suffering of love.  For our imperfections exist only because we exist, and we exist only because God loves us.  How could God love us if we did not exist?  How could we ever be joyful and happy if we were not first created, if we were never alive?  And, yet, in being alive, we first had to be created, and in being created by God we could never be God.  We were always going to be imperfect, which means that we were always going to suffer.  Would it be better to never have been born?  Only if we never become fully alive, only if we merely exist, ignorant of our reason for being, separated from the reality of God’s loving gift of life, only if we use our God-given gift of free will to turn away from God and live merely for the self-centered pleasures of our limitations and reject the fullness of being alive, reject God’s love and cruelly take others from it – only then might it be better to never have been born.  For beyond this earthly life is the choice of loving self or loving God, the choice of imperfection or perfection; one is the way of eternal suffering and one the way of eternal joy – for in eternity, joy is solely the giving and receiving of God’s love.

 

What does this have to do with faith in Christ?  Everything.  For Christ makes manifest for us the truth and power of God’s love.  For, though we suffer, we do not suffer alone.  We suffer for God’s love that brought us into being and God, Himself, suffers for that divine love as well.  God suffers with us, always and everywhere, because God loves us, always and everywhere.  To accept God’s word is to accept God’s love, to receive God’s word is to receive God’s love, and so to live God’s word, which is to live God’s love – it is to accept, to receive, and to give Christ.  Not in a self-centered burst of good feeling, for nothing true or good has it’s source in ourselves, but in the God-centered reality of life-giving, other-feeding love.