The Trust and Love of the Men Who Lowered the Paralytic

We must allow ourselves, as honestly as we can, to be challenged by the reality of God's world, as it seeps through the cracks in our home-made world, and so gradually learn to trust in him, and so to love him, and so to become docile to his creating and his commanding.

The choice, however obscure it often is in the particular circumstances of life, is very clear in its basic principle:  either we surrender to fear, fear of what God has put in us, fear of the world around us that we do not control, fear of God's infinite freedom and sovereignty, and this is inevitably to build up defensive structures of rigid self-determination; or we learn, slowly maybe, to trust and to love.  "Do not be afraid, only believe" (Mk 5: 36).  "Perfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn 4: 18).  So we must use whatever freedom we have, we must use our minds and our imagination, in ways that will build up love and trust.  Also we must let ourselves be honestly hurt by the inevitable inadequacies and frustrations involved in our attempts to be God unto ourselves, so that our motivation to escape from our self-imposed bondage may be strengthened.  

But let us make no mistake.  This means a real dying to self, a real losing of self.  The sentence of death passed on Adam was not just vindictiveness on the part of God, it was a mercy.  Nothing would have been more awful than for man, imprisoned within himself, to have eaten of the tree of life, to live for ever.  It was mercy that subjected Adam to death, just as it was mercy that frustrated the ambition of Babel.  It is a mercy that is offered to us too:  in baptism we died with Christ.  Day by day we can live out that liberating death and be born more and more effectively into the real world of God's light and love.  There we can keep company with him.  The door is open:  are we ready to pass through?

-Father Simon Tugwell, O.P.