Meditating in bed,
as I often do upon waking, I thought of a friend who sometimes says, “I wish
God would just take over. Why doesn’t He?” And for a moment I found myself
agreeing wholeheartedly. He is all-powerful. He made the world, the worlds, and
us, and look what we – so far alone, at least in this corner of this galaxy –
have made of the experiment. Why doesn’t He just blow the whistle, call the end
of the exercise, and bring in His reign? The English Lord’s Prayer has “Thy
kingdom come,” but in fact it is “regnum tuum” and it would better be
translated “They kingship come,” or “Thy reign come.” So why leave it in the
optative, the subjunctive, or any of those wish-list tenses? Why doesn’t He
just take over in a coup de ciel and
set this lamentable planet to rights, once and for all?
Of course, we know
why. As I used to say to my students, if you are in love, and an apparently
good fairy offered you the magic power to make
your beloved love you back, would you take it? To their credit, they all said
No. In that context, love and power are fundamentally incompatible. And God’s
very essence being love, this is the one ineluctable exception to His
omnipotence: He cannot go against His own being. Hence, loving all of us, it
isn’t that He will not force us to
love Him in return: He cannot.
The result is that
for many thousands of years He has watched us doing good things, and smiled
approvingly; but also watched us coming it the unspeakable, and not been able to stop us. The law of
love is an iron law, and it binds even the Deity. I tried to imagine this, and
found myself thinking of the tears of God.
It’s not as if He
hasn’t done anything. He planted seeds of goodness in our hearts. He picked
humans to work with: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and quite possibly Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates and Seneca. And in the end, He even sent His own Son to
help us get it right; and when, typically, we crucified Him, He resurrected Him
so that we might be liberated from the tyranny of definitive death. Given the
iron law of love, there is not a lot more that He could do. So: instead of
wishing for a coup de ciel that would
overwhelm even CNN, we would do better to think of His tears. Children, and
even adults, are acutely uncomfortable when they see their own parent weep. How
much more should we mind the tears of our Father, and do what we can to dry
them. . . .
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