Christianity is simple

Rejoice in the Lord always.

I will say it again: Rejoice! 

Let your gentleness be evident to all.

The Lord is near.

Philippians 4:4-5

The last six months have been the most surprising period of my life. My intellectual, emotional and even daily world has been subverted and recreated. Outwardly much seems to be still the same, but inside never has been left as it was. Surely, I’m still just at the beginning. The Catholic church is like an immensely vast forest, populated by many different species of trees and animals, spanning over a very diverse landscape. So far, I’ve seen only a little portion of it. However, I recognize more and more clearly some very fundamental points, which capture the essential breath of the whole ecosystem.

If I had to put into just one sentence what it feels like to be a Christian, I would say:

to be thankful for the grace of the Father.

The bottom line (emotionally and existentially) is a kind of joy. But not any joy whatsoever. Rather, a rather specific kind of joy born of gratefulness and thankfulness for someone, like the one a kid would experience when they receive the most amazing gift, which they could not even fathom. This amazing gift can be summed up by the word “grace”, which actually includes a whole dynamic: having wandered away from God, having being brought back to Him, specifically through the mediation of Jesus Christ, His passion, and resurrection. Ultimately, this grace (like Jesus himself) comes from the Father—He is the gifts giver. This simple name reveals in fact the secret of Jesus’s message: revealing who God really is—not a metaphysical principle, not a Tyrant, not an accountant, but my Father. Hence, the thankfulness is not addressed to anyone in general, but to my Father.

To understand this crucial point, two premises are needed. The first premise is that in the beginning (as it will be in the end), the whole of reality is grounded in a perfect love between God and His creatures. God’s love expresses itself in His support to all aspects of existence. The creatures’ love expresses itself in their giving thank and glorifying God (thankfulness, which is the actual breath of everything that lives). It makes sense: when you see that someone you love has made something tremendously good for you, don’t you want to celebrate? The same applies to a cosmic scale, and this is what existence is meant to be: a cosmic celebration of goodness and love. We come to the world to take part to this cosmic celebration.

The second premise is that love entails freedom, and freedom entails the risk for love to be met with rejection, misunderstanding, coldness. Nobody can be forced to love in return. Not even God can prevent that—because God is love, and acting against the freedom of His creatures would be to act against His own nature. The celebration party is meant for all, but everybody is free to leave at any point. This act of leaving is the original sin, and any more specific sin is but a repetition of that gesture of turning back and going away from God’s love. Today, we find ourselves in a world shaped by innumerable attempts (individual and collective) to take distance from God, a little, more, or completely.

A recent turning point in my experience came about when I was asking myself: how do I know that this feeling of love that I experience is not just made up by myself? After several years of Buddhist meditation, I’ve learned that the mind is completely of generating by itself all sorts of sublime feelings of joy, without presupposing any external divine intervention. I also agree with the Buddhist tradition that most mental states are indeed constructed by the mind. Or to use a more prosaic example: it is not difficult to get ‘high’ on some inspiring music. But is then the music expressing something that is already there, or is it inducing it by somehow manipulating your being? Both options are possible, but they are not easy to distinguish (practitioners of contact improvisation knows this). So why couldn’t this ‘divine love’ too be something constructed by myself, or induced as a suggestion received from my environment?

Examining this question, I noticed that love goes in two directions: there is love I can direct towards God, and there is a love I feel flowing from God towards me. The question I raised clearly concerns the second kind. Is there really a ‘God’ behind that love that surrounds me and flows towards me? Am I not making it up?

I arrived at the conclusion that the answer must be: no, I cannot possibly make up that kind of love for myself. I do not hate myself. After years of friendliness, I have learned to relinquish much explicit aversion against myself. Yet, I do still observe that in many circumstances I do catch myself being a bit (or a lot) unhappy with myself (how I look, what I am), worrying about the need of possessing this or that to improve, having to ‘deserve’ this or that, and similar attitudes. They do not belong to the domain of ‘self-hatred’, yet they do not belong to the domain of ‘unconditional love’ either. In fact, the emotional texture and taste (so to say) of the attitude I hold towards myself within myself is entirely different (from a qualitative point of view), from the texture and taste of the feeling of love that flows towards me from everywhere throughout my day when I heed God’s presence. I cannot possibly make it up, simply because I am not capable of such a love. This, for me, is my own private proof of the existence of God.

An important consequence that follows from this discovery is that my own love towards God is in fact an answer to His love. Even more generally, I can now recognize that all my deeper desires and aspirations (which eventually coalesce in this love) are like the afterglow impressed by God’s love in me. The farther I go away from God, the weaker this afterglow become and the more confused also the objects of my desires. It is like trying to talk to someone at a distance, the greater the distance, the more difficult is the conversation, or even just hearing what the other is saying, or even just knowing whether there is anyone there, or who they are.

I lived for most of my life quite far away from God, and in fact for most of my life my desires have been quite diverse, confused, and disordered. Now that I do my best to live closer and closer to Him, everything seems much clearer, unified, tighter and more alive. In fact, there is a value in the experience of distance and dejection. When we discover ourselves alone and instead of a nice idyllic forest we are in the ‘Dark wood’ described by Dante in his Commedia (mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita…), we can usually appeal to two aids we bring with us: reason, and moral law. Through reason we can get some idea about ourselves, the world, and God (much of philosophy, West and East, provides examples for this). Moral law (regardless of its foundation), gives also some sort of directionality in life, helping us to come to term with our passions (in Spinoza’s sense). However, it is no secret that reason ultimately cannot prove anything for sure (as any two philosophers left in the same room long enough surely know), and nobody can really manage to live fully upright in front of the moral law. The service that reason and morality do to us is different: they show that we could live better and be saved, while also pointing out our limitations, they point to the fact that, by ourselves, we can’t save ourselves. In this sense, our failure to use them to escape the ‘dark wood’ can be the first step to do so, if only we use it to learn some good humility and eventually open ourselves to be saved. Nobody can save themselves, but this is a hard idea to swallow, and most often (in my case at least) it must be learned by repeatedly failing at doing so.

Say that one has learned this lesson. I remember how broken I felt that 8th January when I sat in the Münster in Freiburg. When one is broken, they have given up the attempt of doing anything further by themselves. Paradoxically, then, they are really open for God to eventually have some space and leisure to come nearer. We can run away from God, but God does never run away from us, He follows, and hence can find us wherever we fall.

When we live in the distance, in the darkness, our desires are confused. We desire God, but we do not really know who God is. We can have images, thoughts, feelings, but these are at best gross approximations. Humility helps us recognizing that much: we desire to know God, but actually we don’t. While love is different from knowledge, it also depends on knowledge. We cannot aim something we do not know, and depending on how and how much we know, our love is affected as a result. You might love someone because you’ve heard about them, but then being disappointed once you meet them in person, and vice versa. You might not love much someone, but over time start learning better who they are, and start loving them day after day. The same applies to God. If we do not know who God is, our love will be affected. If we have an inadequate idea of God (pardon my Spinozism), our love will also be inadequate. – And it should be clear that here, by ‘knowledge’ I do not mean some sort of abstract theoretical knowledge of specific propositions or bits of information, but a personal, living, experiential knowledge, like the one you have of someone dear to you.

The desire for God that constitutes the core of our being make us predisposed to turn to God, as a speechless child searching with their gaze for their parents. But to learn who God really is, we need to hear His word, speaking to us and thus helping us finding Him—and that word is Jesus. The whole message of Jesus can in fact be summarized in just one epithet: “God, the Father”. We are so used in our culture to hear this, that we have lost the ability to really understand what it entails. Even worse, we hold such strong personal, psychological and socio-political associations with the epithet ‘Father’ that we stop listening as soon as we hear it. That’s just another way of keeping our distance and heading to the next pitfall. I understand this very well, since I cannot say that I had a very nice relationship with my own human father, and it took my whole adult life to somewhat coming to term with it. Yet, once we can put all these complaints to the side (and it can take a lot of time and courage to do so), what emerges is something simply beautiful.

“Father” means someone who is neither too close, nor too distant. On the one hand, if God was too close (see Spinoza’s pantheistic God, for instance), then we could not have any autonomy or freedom (Spinoza, in fact, denies free will), but without freedom there is no genuine love (and for Spinoza, our love for God is just God’s love for itself). On the other hand, if God was too far (see some views of God’s transcendence, e.g. the Protestant one defended by Karl Barth), he could not really take care of us, and hence again, His love for us would be undermined. The Old Testament is already full of this tension, which it is handled by stressing both the proximity of God to human vicissitudes (God is someone you can talk to, and who searches for you to realize His plans for you), and His transcendence (God is ‘in the heavens’, namely, absolutely beyond any place or temple within which you might confine His nature). These two seemingly opposite attributes (closeness and distances) are simultaneously embodied in Jesus, who is God incarnated as the Son. In Jesus, God is both as close as a human being could possibly be, and as far as God remains. Presenting Himself as Son, Jesus declares God to be Father, thereby revealing the right attitude we should take towards God, by recognizing ourselves too as His children.

This is not just some administrative talk about parents. It is an experience (an experiential knowing) of realizing that the one who has generated everything, me included, wanted it to be good and shining, loved, and He wanted it deeply. In the same way in which you will always have a human father, even when you no longer hear from him, or you have abandoned him (or he has abandoned you), so too no matter how far away we move from God, we cannot cut off this bond we have with Him. This means that we are actually never lost. The moment we stop to run away and recognize that we are not getting anywhere, He is ready to come near, help, forgive, and love. Jesus’s task was that of explaining this wonderfully Good News: we think we are lost, but actually we aren’t. We just need to stop running, shut up for a moment, listen carefully, and allowing the Father to reveal that He has always remained near to us, speaking to us through his Word (Jesus).

Jesus reveals God as a Father precisely because He reveals that God loves us unconditionally as a Father would do for his children. The qualification ‘as a Father’ is important here, since it makes this love not only personal (differently from a metaphysical principle that loves because it is its nature’s duty to do so), but also familial. In our parents, we not only encounter the first experience of love in our lives, but we know that their love for us is what generated us. We’re born out of love, and there is no love nearer than the love of a parent (no matter how much and how often human parenthood can get skewed in practice). In our parents, we find perhaps the only example in our life of unconditional love, since it is a love we didn’t choose, but we only received, and which will withstand and remain no matter what will happen to us (and as pope Jhon Paul II once said, God is a Father with the heart of a Mother). This is the revelation of the Cross: no matter how deep the evil and the suffering might be, God’s love is so great that He can take everything in, wash it, and overcome even death. That’s the level at which we are loved by the Father. Not something half-warm. Not something formal or metaphysical. Something bloody absolute.

The idea that there is an ultimate ground of reality, which is irreducible to any finite thing, is surely not unique of Christianity. But even the fact that God is a personal, benevolent being is not unique. Even the claim that “God is love” is not unique. The uniqueness vindicated by Christ concerns who God is and what kind of love He can bestow. By naming Him “Father”, Jesus reveals at the same time the nature of our relation to God (and hence who God is for me), and also the sort of love that comes from God: not a passionate romantic love, but also not an intellectual dry love, nor an ordinary generic love. God loves us as a Father, as someone who wants our good, gives us all our being, and who wants us to be free to love Him in return, if we so decide.

Pentecost is the celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit on Mary and the apostles, fifty days after Jesus’s resurrection. Due to this event, they were able to speak languages they never spoke and announce the Gospel (Jesus’s message) to all. What can you put you in such a state? What can give you such an immense power, optimism, confidence? What else if not the deep realization of ‘being loved by God’. I do not dare to advance theological truths, but in my experience so far, the Holy Spirit is really this stream of love that flows from God through us. As Saint Paul famously reminded: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15).

Insofar as we become capable of fully receiving it, then we realize we have received the most wonderful gift possible. All the rest is just a manifestation of the joy for this grace, and the desire to share it. Wasn’t also this what was happening to the apostles? If it happened to them, it can happen to all of us. All that is required is to let God’s love in. To do so, we need to (experientially) know and understand who God really is. Jesus is here to show and teach us precisely this. The more we follow Jesus (not just by asserting propositions in our mind and recordings bits of information, but most importantly by conforming our life to His life), the better we learn to recognize “God, the Father”—the rest is joy.