This is not a defense of what I believe, but simply what I
believe. I have written this because I feel you are tired, dear reader, of
having theological or philosophical arguments thrown at you. If you do not see
any truth in what I believe, it is my hopes that you will at least see the
beauty of it, so that we can all grow in unity as a Catholics, as Christians,
and as a human race. When two people both stop to admire the beauty of a rose,
even if one doesn’t understand it and the other doesn’t believe it to be a real
rose, aren’t both unified in this act of gazing at something beautiful? They
don’t fight or argue for once, but sit peacefully together, looking at the
rose. I present you, reader, whoever you are, whatever walk of life you are in,
whether you believe in God or not, with this rose, not to defend it’s rosiness
to you or it’s color or it’s photosynthesis, but so that we can both look at
this rose side-by-side in peace, admiring the transcendental that is higher
than both of us: beauty.
“The Lord, your God,
is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his
love; he will exult over you with
loud singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)
“Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was
lost.” (Luke 15:6)
“Finally, brothers and
sisters, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how
you ought to live and to please God
(as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. For you know what
instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will
of God, your sanctification…” (1 Thessalonians 4:1-3)
“I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over
one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15:10)
“…in him there is
found something pleasing to
the Lord, the God of Israel…” (1 Kings 14:13)
“But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly,
bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and
sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and
celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is
found!’ And they began to celebrate.”
(Luke 15:22-24)
“so that you may lead
lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge
of God.” (Colossians 1:10)
“Do not neglect to do
good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
(Hebrews 13:16)
We are called to please God. Our repentance, our sacrifices,
our life has the potential to cause Him to rejoice, to celebrate, to be
pleased! If God made it so that we could please Him, so that this great God
could be pleased by feeble man, think about the implications. If we have the
God-given capability to please Him, it must be a choice to please Him. If it
wasn’t a choice, if He forced us to please Him like a puppet master, it
wouldn’t be us pleasing Him, it would be God pleasing himself through us,
turning us into robots, which cannot be pleasing at all. And for it to be a
choice, an act of free will and not one of coercion, there must be another
option for it to be a choice. That option has to be to pain God, to hurt Him.
If God so desired us to choose Him, to please Him that He would be willing to
be mocked and hurt and pained and tortured and killed by us, how precious must
this choice to please Him, this ‘yes’ to Him be? How sweet must this aroma be,
our feeble ‘yes’ to Him, that He would endure to suffer all of time to hear one
‘yes’ from us. As real as His Passion was and is, His delight in us must be
just as real. Yes indeed, He would “create the universe again just to hear you
say you love [Him]” (Jesus to St. Teresa of Avila).
And how beautiful does that make Mary in His eyes? Her yes
was perfect and complete, not lacking anything, free from the stain of original
sin, putting her entire life and body at God’s disposal from the moment she
could choose, even before the Annunciation. And by her own merit? Not at all!
But because she received the gift God gave her in a way that was so beautiful
that the stunning angel Gabriel, far more outwardly beautiful than any man,
knelt at her feet and hailed her as “full of grace.” How fitting then, that her
yes and her heart and her love was so beautiful, so pleasing to God that He
came down to Earth in that moment in history so that she could be His mother,
so that He could share in her very flesh. In a very real way, so real that we
probably won’t understand fully in this life, the God of the universe was
enraptured by the beauty of Mary’s soul, because of her yes, and was deeply in love with her.
That is how pleasing to God that we can be, that is how much
potential He gave humanity to please Him before the fall. She was the true Eve,
beauty, truth, and goodness in its highest form. She was so beautiful to Him
that her pleasing aroma of holiness brought about the salvation of the world.
Did she save the world? No. Did God choose to enter the world through her? Yes.
God used her in the most crucial and intimate part of the salvation plan, the
incarnation, and again to bring about the public ministry of Jesus at the
Wedding of Cana. Jesus was so taken with delight and admiration for his mother
that He turned water into wine and met human needs at her request. She was so
pleasing to God that the Holy Spirit conceived in her. This is a far deeper
union with the Trinity than any human has been before.
We too have the capability to please Him, and not by our own
merit, but by the grace of God. He has given us a gift (grace) and made it so
that when we receive it (faith), we have the power to please Him. And at such a
high cost, for to have the ability to please Him we have to have the ability to
hurt Him, to nail Him to a tree. May we never misuse this great power, this
great gift by offending Him!
And notice, by being human, by having a soul, by being
exactly who we are, we have the ability to present Him with beautiful bouquets
of love because of the love with which He first loved us. God isn’t pleased
with us because when He looks at us He sees only Jesus or only Jesus’
righteousness because of an altar call we made when we were eight. No, He is
pleased when He sees us, weak, snotty children that we are, using the grace He
has given us to choose Him. He sees us.
He is pleased with us. And when we
please Him, say yes to Him, we become even more free, more able to please Him,
to glorify Him, to love Him. What a God we serve!
This is how He sanctifies us. It is not by throwing a white
robe over us, to cover us, to make us all little robot Jesus’s. No. It is by
taking what’s underneath that imaginary robe, the weak and sinful nature of
man, the us, with all our humanity: our past, our attachments, our desires, our
weaknesses, our genders, our identities, and purifies that instead of covering it all up with a white robe of
righteousness and dismissing all that is us.
We are sanctified, we are made white and pure, but that whiteness comes from
within our hearts and travels throughout our whole body, making us righteous.
It is not snow covering a pile of refuse so that God is happy; this is not
biblical and this is not a loving God. It is God giving His life to redeem that
pile of refuse and working on that pile of refuse until it is something
beautiful, white, and pure.
He can look at you right now and be delighted at your trust
in Him, a trust He has given you all the graces you need to do. And this
process of sanctifying us makes us as white as snow from within happens as soon
as we say our first yes to Him… on this earth. So, when we die in His graces,
in a state of putting our faith and trust in Him, and we see the parts of us
that aren’t white, that weren’t purified completely on Earth, I am sure we will
throw ourselves into the flames of purgatory to finish the process. What bride
would go to her husband on her wedding day with anything that would cause him
pain? If a human bride takes care to look as beautiful as she can for her
groom, how much more will we want our souls to be as beautiful, as pleasing,
and as holy as we can for our Savior when we finally meet Him face to face?
It’s important to note, all of this talk about pleasing God,
that the opposite of pleasure is not displeasure or disdain in the modern sense
of the word. The opposite of pleasure is pain. When we are not pleasing God, we
are paining Him, hurting Him, inflicting wounds onto His body, crucifying Him.
When we are sinning, running from Him, He doesn’t stick up His nose at us, get
angry, indifferent, or just turn away. No. He is right by your side, crying out
in pain as He lets you crucify Him over and over again, saying “I thirst for
you” on the cross you have nailed Him too. He endures this pain for your whole
life so that the moment you want to turn to Him, He’ll be right there waiting. That
is how pleasing you can be to Him. That is how much He loves you, that is how
much He thirsts for your soul. There is no limit on how far you have gone or
how long you have run, He never leaves you. How it must pain His heart when a
soul dies choosing Hell!
See, we are not pleasing to Him because we are so great, but
because He has chosen to love us so much. The look or touch or kiss of a lover
is so pleasing because we desire it so badly, because we love them so much, not
because their look or touch or kiss is so good in and of itself. Yes, Jesus desires
a yes from you so much that He will endure all kinds of sufferings at your hand
for just one “I love you” from you on your deathbed. That is how precious you
are to Him. And never forget the cost. For us to be given the ability to love
Him, He had to give us the ability to crucify Him.
You might look inside of yourself and see nothing beautiful,
nothing pleasing to anyone, nothing that is desirable even to another person,
let alone to the God of the Universe. And there you have gotten in backwards.
It’s not because you are lovely that He loves you. It’s not because you are
desireable that He desires you. It’s not because you are beautiful that He
delights in you.
It is because God loves you that you are lovely, because He
desires you that you are desirable, and because He delights in you that you are
beautiful. And this, friends, will never change.
