Prepared to Love
If I am not at least prepared to love God, I cannot “see” him.
“Prepared” can mean “willing” or “able” or both. In context, Msgr. Guardini’s remark has more to do with “willing,” but taken alone it is equally applicable to “able,” and in fact it is difficult to separate the two where love is concerned. (I think “see” is in quotation marks because Guardini is referring first to the ability to recognize God’s existence.)
It appears that in the end there are only two sorts of people: those who respond to God with joy, as the fulfillment of all their hopes, and those who respond to him with hatred, as the fulfillment of all their fears. The question springs to mind: is it possible to see God and not love him? We all know that many people have false and ugly ideas of God and think that in rejecting these they are rejecting God. But we must suppose that in the end every soul will be given some way to get past this error, to see God as he really is, and then to choose freely. If it is possible to choose, it is possible to choose wrongly, and so it must be possible for a person to see God and not love him. Or would it be more precise to say that such a person has chosen not to see?
Is it possible to love God and not see him? I think not. To love him is to see him, or at least to begin to see him. I think in fact it is impossible to love anything or anyone at all and not begin, if ever so dimly and partially, to see God (I mean genuine love, of course).
Of this I’m sure: the heart that is prepared to love God must also be prepared to love its companions in human life, and the world in which God has placed us all. To a young heart love may come easily and quickly; for an old and wounded one it may be difficult, requiring conscious effort. Either way, love in this world is rarely unaccompanied by pain: at the very least there is always the pain of time, of knowing that the person or thing one loves is passing away, either as a result of its death or decay, or one’s own. And this is the heart of Christian faith, the paradoxical secret hidden in plain sight: to recognize, as the old song says, that love hurts, and yet insist that we must love anyway, and in fact that it is only by entering into this pain that we can ever be healed of it. Only by accepting the pain of love can we attain its joy, the greatest pleasure of which we are capable.
We know that there are some people who suffer greatly and still seem able to love easily, and some who suffer greatly and seem unable to love. Is there some secret movement of the will that makes the one or the other?
There must be. It seems impossible that, as some Christians have said, there are some souls that are so constructed that they will hate God and must be lost, that it is God’s will that they be lost. It must be that thousands of tiny choices made over the course of a lifetime, choices of unlove over love, choices of self over everything else, can so corrode the soul that when it sees perfect love and light it sees only an enemy, something which intends to take away everything it thinks it must have.
This is probably true, but haven’t we also known people who, even as children, were mean, in both senses of the word: closed, petty, unseeing, uninterested in anything except their own will and their own pleasure? Were they born unable, or at least unwilling, to love? We can’t know the answer to that, or how they will end. But we know that God is good, and so we know that he must somehow, at the end, make the choice to love possible for everyone. We say that faith is a gift and a mystery, but those are only ways of resisting the temptation to believe we can fully understand the secret and subtle movements of the soul in its relationship to God.
There’s a passage in Prince Caspian where Aslan romps through a country and every person he meets either sees him with delight and wants to go with him, or sees him with distaste and wants to get away from him. The most interesting thing about this passage (if I’m remembering it correctly) is that they have never seen him before. They simply know, instantly, either that they want to be with Aslan or that they want nothing to do with him.
I think it will be something like that one day for all of us. Though we may seem to make our choice in a heartbeat, we will have been making it all our lives.
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