A friend is going through a horrible time dealing with the realization that her husband is probably a psychopath of some kind. The situation got me thinking about evil, and then, oddly enough, about the mystery of our existence. I mean, God didn't just "set it and forget it" when it came to human life. We are constantly being sustained in existence. God is always creating us. So what gives when people choose to do what is evil?
I'm not going to attempt to answer that (!), but I want to share my reflections in the general area. It goes back to what Merton wrote about the "point vierge" in every human being; that "place" where we are brought into existence and kept in existence by God. Here we are totally receptive, open, vulnerable, incapable of resisting, because this is "where" we ourselves spring into being from God's creative will. We cannot refuse to be brought into existence.
Even death becomes a kind of arrival at the "point vierge"; the moment when the point vierge begins to extend to our whole being, because there is no longer an "outer" existence, but we are "one" inside and out, and come to our own center to fully receive ourselves from God.
If we are living as children of God, then no matter how disordered our life may be, ultimately we are one with our vulnerability and dependence, and to receive our existence from God without mediation is pure joy. If we are genuinely unrepentant in life, then even in and after death, we still receive our existence from God, but it is torturous to exist like that. We no longer have an "outer" being that we can pretend is our own realm; we cannot hide from ourselves that our existence is always received, always contingent, always dependent, always referred to another, always Gift.
As long as I exist, though, there is a "yes" in me. And there is a "yes" in every person I meet, so that no one is "all bad" and there is always hope that the person will re-claim their "yes," assent to it. There is always hope for conversion.
1 comment:
This is a great reflection, Sr Anne!
On retreat St Ignatius puts some serious meditations on sin toward the end of the first week. It was very sobering to meditate on it, and at a certain point I realized I was feeling uncomfortable. In prayer I had to honestly look at some areas of sin in my life. My director told me to go back to the place where I felt uncomfortable. It was as if the Holy Spirit was "convicting" me (to use a term the evangelicals like that I like too). At that point I went to confession and just gave all the baggage to Jesus. Then I took some meditative walks along the coast and thought about that wonderful verse somewhere in the Bible: "God has cast into the depths of the sea all our sins."
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