Good morning…
“Loving can be a difficult business,” writes Roberta Bondi on page 35 in To Love As God Loves. “It is impossible to grit the teeth and love, no matter how much we want to. That is because human effort is only one of the two basic elements necessary for the fulfillment of all Christian goals and desires, but particularly for love. The other is God’s grace. Without grace, nothing is possible.”
“The third-century writer Origen of Alexandria explains the relationship between our effort and God’s grace with a metaphor,” Bondi continues. “It is like traveling in a sailing ship on the ocean. Our life is like the ship, and we are the captain. All our skill, energy, and attention are necessary to avoid shipwreck and arrive in port, for the ocean is dangerous and inattention is disastrous upon it. Our ship, however, also needs the wind. It is the wind that fills the sails and moves the ship, and when the two are weighed against each other, the skill of the captain seems very small compared to the contribution of the wind. In Origen’s metaphor the wind represents God’s help and grace. Great as that grace is, the human being must work, with all the skill and energy he or she can muster, in order to love.”
“In the same way, it is truly God who saves us; it is not something we can do on our own,” Bondi explains. “But a ship cannot sail itself, and the wind will not take matters into its own hands (so to speak!) to sail the ship without the attention and work of the human sailor. To use an example, praying to God to make us love without any effort on our part will not make us love. God’s grace is more like the wind in our sails than it is like lightning. God will not change our hearts without real participation on our parts.”
Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will reap a crop of my love; plow the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and shower salvation upon you (Hosea 10:12, TLB).
…Sue…
P.S. Feel the teetering tension invisibly at work between the Wind and the sailor in this photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash
