God is Love - I John 5.8

It is one of the simplest and most familiar phrases in the Bible.  It has also been, for some reason, one of the most difficult for me to make any sense of.  God is loving.  Okay, I get that.  But God is Love sounds like an invitation to worship at the altar of eroticism.  I think I finally made some progress in my understanding when I started from the other direction.  Man is not Love.  But man can be loving.  Man cannot be love, he can only do loving things.  ("This is love, that we follow His commandments." II John 1.6)  Man's love is therefore, ephemeral and transitory, because as soon as he ceases to act in love, his love vanishes.  Only God's love is eternal, because the part of God we reflect in loving actions, resides as a Thing in God Himself.  A man can preach the Word of God.  In some sense he becomes the Word to other men.  But if he stops preaching, he is no longer the Word to other men because the Word does not (this side of Heaven) reside in him as an eternal essence.   He can bring God's salvation to other men.  But he himself is not that salvation.

Suffering & the Sorrowful Mysteries

While saying the rosary with my husband the other day, it occurred to me that each of the first four sorrowful mysteries represents a different mode of suffering.  The agony in the garden reflects the pain of anticipation of suffering, as when there's a root canal on the schedule later in the week. The scourging at the pillar is clearly a physically painful suffering.  The crowning with thorns, although certainly involving a great deal of physical pain, seems to emphasize the suffering of humiliation.  The carrying of the cross was the bearing of a large burden, the weight of the heavy cross and our even heavier sins.  (I'd say this is the kind of suffering one experiences when his child is in pain.) The fifth mystery, the crucifixion, is a synthesis of all four modes or kinds of suffering: anticipation (of complete separation from God: "My God, why have you abandoned Me?"), physical pain (duh!), humiliation (punished as a criminal, strung up naked, and derided by those passers-by and the others crucified with Him), and bearing a burden (the consummation of His identification with our sins and the punishment attached to them).