Last night I was starting to write about being at peace with imperfection. I'd like to continue that line of thinking tonight, because I think there is a tension here that needs unraveling.
On the one hand, we can become too self-satisfied - coming to a point where we simply accept ourselves, with no questioning as to whether we can (or should) grow. On the other, we can become overly scrupulous, focusing too much on our failures and beating ourselves up for not being better than we are.
Personally I struggle with the latter, because when I was younger I think I settled too much. But this isn't about me, it's about all of us. The tension goes much deeper than this, it comes to the heart of the Christian faith and the core question - does God love me, or doesn't He? And if He does, why do I need to do anything? How seriously do I need to take Christ's imperative - Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:48)? Or his admonition - Go, and sin no more from now on (Jn 8:11)?
We need to remember what God's promises to us are - what is being offered through Christ and his Church.
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The past generation or so, the wider culture has reduced questions of Heaven and Hell to a sort of merit-based system, where "if you are a good person you go to Heaven when you die".
But going one step further than that, if Heaven is just a reward for good people - it would be entirely incomprehensible for an all-loving God to punish anyone for all eternity in Hell. What would be the criteria? And how could He be called all-loving while also condemning anyone to that? Do we really think anyone is that bad?
Perhaps more pressingly, what would make Heaven good and pleasant, especially for all eternity? If it was just the final reward of those who are "good", it wouldn't be all that different from this life - we wouldn't suddenly become better people, and none of us is perfect.
One of the fundamentals of Christianity seems like bad news at the outset - You can't earn Heaven, and you would never be good enough to make it there on your own. The reason for this is that Heaven isn't just "the good place people go when they die". Rather, Heaven is the realm where God IS, who is all perfect and is the source of all that is good in the entire universe (not just our origin, but also the one who sustains us all even here and now).
According to this understanding of Heaven and Hell, Heaven is being in the presence of the eternal Creator of all that is good, where Heaven is an existential reality that is absent God.
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That may have seemed like a tangent from the original question, but here's the link - we can't remain in the presence of sheer perfection without burning up. It's like flying into the sun, we just aren't made to handle the power and the heat on our own. As I said - we can't get to Heaven on our own. Instead, we first need to be made like God - receiving God's Divine life into our very being. To do this involves a process of purification, the way metal is refined in a fire.
To become like God is not something we can attain on our own; Divinity is a higher existential plane that we can't reach, and it's not just a matter of "climbing the mountain". Instead, we have to receive the Divine life from God by being brought up into that higher plane. All humanity was elevated to that privileged position when God became Man in the Incarnation, but - from a Catholic perspective - we now need to do our part, working with God in the capacity that we can.
The surest way to receive God's Divine life is in the Sacraments and a life of prayer, but there are no guarantees - we can throw it all away by turning away from God, the way a mirror loses its brilliance when it turns away from the light-source. Turning back towards God (metanoia - "repentance" / "thinking again") requires a painful effort of learning to seeing that our sins actually hurt ourselves, and keep us from being loved by an all-loving Creator who desires to elevate us much higher than we deserve.
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Which returns us to the original question: how do we reconcile loving ourselves exactly as we are with the need to be confronted with our failures?
Simply put - God loves us, and being outside time, knows all that we will ever do (rather, He knows all that we will ever have done across the span of our lives; we are the ones who choose to do what we do). That is the case now, that was the case when God became Man in the Incarnation, that was the case in the Crucifixion when Jesus freely chose to pay debt we owed that we could never pay, that was the case in the Resurrection and the Ascension when Jesus showed us our eternal destiny.
So there is no question of God's love, and we must see ourselves in that same light - for our own sake. Furthermore, we need to come to understand God's love and the extent to which we depend on Him. This takes humility, which for many of us means we need to be confronted with our failings and weaknesses when we aren't living in-step with Him. To seek the cure first requires realizing we are ill.
At the same time, we are being offered more than just forgiveness for our failings and weaknesses. We are being offered the capacity to actually become better, by God's grace!
But He's not going to force it on us. Which means we need to actually turn to Him and ask for the Gift that is already on offer. Once we accept the Gift, we then find an increased capacity to be like God - which is to say we are able to live in total self-emptying love.
That's the hope and the promise, anyways.
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