Wednesday, September 2, 2009

How Can I Find a Gracious God?

Find the true One.  He is always gracious.

It's just hard to grasp when you've come from other religious backgrounds that have drummed into you the idea that God is so severe.

Fr. Stephen has a wonderful post on why Christ died, and the comments section is very moving as person after person writes about his/her difficulty coming to terms with such incomprehensible graciousness.  Here is one example:

Like many above, the process of overcoming the "ideas" of protestantism has been very slow for me. However, my priest recently gave me some very life giving words after I told him that I had a hard time believing that God loved me. He said, "You don't have to believe it, you just have to experience it." Somehow those words set me free and helped me pay attention to the many ways God shows his love for me. I still struggle with the feeling that I must somehow deserve the love and the despair of knowing that I can never deserve it. I know I've come to the right place though and that God is healing me and revealing himself to me as I am ready to receive Him.
Words like these bring tears to my eyes, break my heart, and heal me, too - because, of course, I also come from that sort of background.  I, too, am one of these spiritually handicapped, struggling people. 

Every reader of this blog knows I take every opportunity I can find to fight publicly against those unloving ideas about God. Yet as this woman writes, ultimately, it is only God Himself Who can break through all our false ideas about Him, as He allows us to experience and know firsthand His infinite, unconditional, incomprehensible, sweet, tender kindness toward us, a love unmitigated, undiluted, not held in tension or balance or polarity with anything else whatsoever; a compassion not based upon anything, nor needing to be, but itself being the basis for all things; a love that holds nothing back; an absolute, undeserved, unearned, gratuitous, miraculous, unwavering, unfailing, untempered, universal love, an abyss of pure goodness, pure LOVE.

2 comments:

DebD said...

I think I've read that post from Fr. Stephen 3-4 times... and the comments.

Anonymous said...

I would suggest that Jesus was murdered with the connivance and approval of the then ecclesiastical establishment because what He had to say was completely unacceptable to them, and was a threat to their worldly power.

So too today.

You dont really think that Jesus would be welcome, or even recogized, if he appeared at the Vatican.

Or that he would have attended the installation of the current Pope a few years ago. Or have been invited or welcome.

An installation in which all of our benighted world leaders were in attendence. Plus the military men and the captains of commerce and industry.

And yet Jesus is famous for throwing the money-lenders OUT of the temple.