Salesian Literature

Chapter 1  :  While this life lasts, we can lose God’s love

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Once in possession of God’s love, how can a soul possibly lose it?  Wherever love is, it is proof against sin; so how does sin find a way in? Not death itself is so strong as love, not the grave itself cruel as love unrequited (Cant. 8:6).  So how can sins – death to the soul – overcome love with all its strength, is superior claims?  How can a man in his right mind, once he has experienced the charms of God’s love, deliberately gulp down the bitter waters (Ex. 15:23) of sin?  How can a soul, in heaven’s name, a soul enjoying union with the Creator and all that he has to give, leave him for the emptiness of creatures?  In horror and dismay the heavens witness the sight, crumble ruins (her. 2:12);  the angels of peace (cf. Is. 33:7) are appalled at the utter wretchedness of the human heart, which turns its back on what is worth loving, to grasp what is beneath contempt.

 

Surely you have seen that little natural phenomenon which everyone knows about, even if they cannot explain it … Immediately you tap a partly filled barrel, out flows the wine.  Broach a full cask; no wine flows until you let in air from above.  Our souls, in this life, are never so filled with God’s love that temptation cannot drain it off.  In heaven, where God’s beauty will fill our minds, his goodness satisfy our will, where we shall be brimming with the fullness of his love, nothing – however closely it touched our hearts – could ever draw off a single drop.  No possibility of letting in air, so to speak, of deceiving our minds, taking them unawares; they will be fixed in the act of possessing supreme truth.

 

We are like coral.  In the sea, where it grows, it is a pale green, fragile and flexible shrub; taken from the seabed, it becomes rigid, stone-like, while its colour changes to a bright red.  We are prone, from our birth in the ocean of this world, to go from one extreme to the other, bending this way and that – now drawn towards love of God by inspiration, now drawn to love of earthly things by temptation.  Taken out of this life, the pale green of trembling hope transformed into the bright red of assured fruition, we shall sway from side to side no longer, arrested for ever in eternal love.

 

It is impossible to see God and not love him.  Here below, where we catch only a glimpse of him through the clouds of faith, like a confused reflection in a mirror (1 Cor. 13:12), we do not come to know him well enough to prevent other apparently good things from finding their way through the mists which surround the certainty and truth of faith.  Like little foxes, they steal in unperceived, thieving among our vineyards all a-blossoming (Cant. 2:15).

 

What it comes to is this: once charity is ours, free will wears the wedding garment.  We can keep it on by doing good, or take it off by sinning, just as we please.

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