Deus Caritas est Part 1

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, flip flop around and try to go back to sleep as your brain slowly but surely revs up and refuses to acknowledge the time? Such inappropriate behavior! Good gosh brain, just stop it already!

Right now I'm as awake as I most days at like 12 pm! So I thought, maybe I should blog (since that seems to be an appropriate outlet for a racing, sleepless mind). So here goes! If none of this makes sense, I blame the time....its just not good for the production of decent, sensible material :P

So yesterday at mass, Fr. John brought up a point about our call to holiness in life. And not just 'holiness' but 'whole-iness'. So how can we be whole? What does God mean by calling us to such a task?
I suppose, to me, it sort of makes sense. Holiness is a call to live in God's love as much as possible, and as such an act cannot be completed without Him who makes you whole, the very act of being aware of God's love and attempting to revel in it in daily life will, I believe, make you a more 'whole' person.

(I should insert a disclaimer here about my love for long run on sentences. If it annoys you, I apologize deeply; If you think its just plain rude for someone to have such bad grammar, give me this once-in-a-lifetime pass ok? only because its 3 am. Thank you!)

So what do I mean about being in God's love and being aware of it and living in it? Well, I'm glad you asked!
My understanding of God's relation to me is that it is one of purest love. Hence my blog's title ('deus caritas est' means 'God is love' in latin). To me this is a fundamental and important factoid to understand before we proceed to anything else because if you don't know what I mean, you're not going to able to relate to anything else I say. Maybe. Perhaps. Just bear with me okay?

So what do I mean by God is love? Well you know how as kids we were all just a little scared of God and how he could see everything and could punish you if you were bad? (No? Well maybe it was just me then :/)
Anyway, I definitely used to think more in the above said manner about God and had no understanding about what it meant to have a relationship with Him. Its kind of hard to have a relationship with a dude you're sort of scared of/intimidated by too, so there was that.

As I grew older, I began to pay more attention to Jesus' path of salvation and slowly became aware that a guy who wags his finger at you from heaven cannot be the guy who is willing to all-of-a-sudden lay down his own/His son's life for you. This was coupled with a few discussions I had with my mom who had come back from a retreat in Kerala (in a place called Parithrana, I believe) where the priest was preaching about this 'new perspective' regarding God. He talked about how God is love and love alone. It really spoke to me, because to me, it made sense.

I know a person who once said that if you read the bible from cover to cover, you would find yourself reading the greatest love story ever told, and I believe it to be true. The entire salvation history is of a God who is repeatedly trying to win our hearts over. How many times have you watched romantic movies/Bollywood movies (for those of you haven't figured it our yet, yes I am Indian) and seen the hero try to win the girls heart over (think Shahrukh Khan, Leonardo Dicaprio, Richard Gere) and when she said no, he would keep coming back at her, right? He would try to convince her of how much he loved her and how if she could just see that, she could never say no to him. How many times have we seen such stories of a hero persevering over every one of the girls stubborn flaws, or tantrums or embarrassing or even hostile parentals and thought to ourselves, "How romantic! He loves her sooo much that he isn't even deterred by the fact that she is completely ignoring him! I wish I could find a guy like that!" (I suppose guys simply think, "Man, I wish I could be that guy...look at him with his scrawny self just winning girls over left and right! I need to take notes for he is a God among men!" Because he is. :P).

Coming back to my original point that my brain steered right clear off of, how many times have we wished for someone who loves us so much that he would put up with all our weird/embarassing/crazy stuff and love us for who we are? Well guess what boys and girls, there is such a guy, and he's the guy that sees you all day when you look you best and your not so best, when you do things that you know others would just not get, when you're good and when you're not so nice, and he loves you just the same. And no, I don't mean your possible stalker whose possibly hiding in the bushes (just kidding!). My point is, that guy is God and yes he loves you even as he reads the thoughts in your head. That's big for me because many times, I may not do a lot of bad things but sometimes even I gasp at the things that just pop into my head uninvited and make me blush! A God who can love me past even that, is truly God in my book.
So here is this guy who loves us so much, right? But what do we do? We say, "No thank you, not interested!". I mean this guy is the best thing that will ever happen to us and yet we want no part of it. Remind you of a certain hero-heroine interaction? We are the fair-stubborn-tantrum throwing-diva maidens and God is trying to rescue us from our own distress and we say no and continue to moan about how crappy our lives are. So if you think you've ever done this to God, do me a favor and smack yourself in the face really quick. Ow!(yes i just smacked my forehead too). Good, I imagine God got a good laugh out of that (and he deserves it, the poor guy).

So now ask yourself all those questions you were asking the heroine in the movie. "Why don't you like him, he's awesome!"; "Are you stupid?"; "Can't you see how much he loves you?"; "Aww heck no!". Ok so maybe I get a little angry at women who can't see how awesome SRK (ahem, I meant God) is.
I mean, the whole bible is the greatest love story ever told. The story of a God who loves and wants us so much that he not only created us but created an entire world for us. A God who wanted us to be happy and so gave us free will (seriously though, he's God and he gave up his ability to control us and make us love him as much as he loves us? What human being would give up that chance at love like that? Not many, I'd imagine. Its sort of the basic principle funding the love potion industry isn't it?). A God who was so hurt by what we did with that free will and ruining ourselves that he decided to take us to a promised land so maybe there we'd be happier. Instead what did we do? We just couldn't see past the petty things like not having great food (the dude just got you out of slavery and you're complaining that Egypt had better food?) and meat and abundant water (you're in a desert people! get your act together for 1 week so you can stop bickering and actually get somewhere closer to the promised land!). A God who puts up with us even as we complain after reaching a better place and then begin straying from him when things get good. So now he decides to send prophet after prophet to beg us to come back to his love, and all of this to save our own souls. I mean, God is not getting anything out of this but the pleasure of our company in heaven, while we are the ones with everything to lose. And of course, finally realizing that nothing else is working, he sends a part of himself, his own heart and soul so that maybe if we saw his love incarnate, then just maybe, we'd finally understand him and love him and save ourselves.

Lets stop here for now at the first half of our salvation history while you go take a coffee/chai break. Part 2 coming up next!