Entrust your heart to God to find true freedom
Excerpt from a homily of Pope Benedict XVI on original sin, Dec. 8th, 2005
It was foretold that the struggle between humanity and the serpent, that is, between man and the forces of evil and death, would continue throughout history… The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbours the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival who curtails our freedom…
The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.
He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts… Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand…
Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live… For God's will is …the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.
If we live in opposition to love and against the truth - in opposition to God - then we destroy one another and destroy the world… we all carry within us a drop of the poison of that way of thinking… We call this drop of poison "original sin"… we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring…
We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary… this is not so… evil is always poisonous, does not uplift human beings but degrades and humiliates them…
Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good… with God he becomes great, he becomes divine, he becomes truly himself… it is only then that his heart truly awakens....
Comments
Post a Comment