Dear Editor:
In the 3/20/04 issue of the Catholic Exchange, John Pacheco began his article by stressing how a true loving relationship can only exist when both parties are able to enter into it in a completely free, un-coerced way, untainted even by what he calls being “immorally influenced.” However, I have had a hard time viewing God's offer of love in this way. Indeed, it seems to me that we are born in this world and confronted by a God whose “marriage proposal” to us as His bride basically goes like this, “I am God. I created you and love you in a way you will never fully understand. I want to enter into a sacred loving relationship with you. Accept my proposal or be condemned to an eternity in hell.”
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds pretty heavily coercive. Sure, we're “free” to decline the proposal, but the cost of doing so really doesn't make it a decision that emphasizes freedom in any sense of the word. Indeed, the best comparison I can think of is the one where the rich and powerful boss pressures his poor secretary to accept his amorous advances, or be thrown out onto the street. Talk about immoral influence! In the civil realm, we have taken such offers — and others much less coercive — and criminalized them as “sexual harassment.” My question is this: Even with the understanding that God's offer is motivated entirely by love, how is it less coercive than the stereotypical harasser's would be? If the secretary refuses her boss, she only loses her job. If we decline God's proposal, as I'm understanding it, the only alternative is eternal condemnation. Sounds like the ultimate coercion to me! Can you help me out here?
Sincerely,
Rich
Dear Rich,
It seems to me that the element you are missing here is that we were already married to God. We, and all of creation, were made to be in a spousal union with the Creator. Being a spouse, producing the offspring of love, is not merely something we choose, but it is our identity, our telos — the purpose of our creation. We are, as the human race, not unattached and free to come and go as we please. Rather we are married — but we have been unfaithful to our Spouse.
God's offer to us is the loving invitation to come back home, to be forgiven our infidelity and be embraced by Him again. In fact, while we were off playing the harlot God was busy building us a new and even more palatial home (a new heavens and new earth). Our illicit paramour, who led us by deceit away from our rightful home, would rather see us follow him to hell, than to have us return to God. Hell, in fact, was made to punish him (Satan) not to punish human beings. But those human beings who will not return to God and who follow Satan to hell do indeed freely choose to do so.
We lose our perspective completely when we forget (or fail to comprehend the import of the fact) that we did not make ourselves and we do not exist solely for our own purposes. We are created beings who owe both the origin of our lives and the continuation of our existence every nanosecond to the God Who by His word sustains all things. This very first truth of our existence — that we are made by someone for His purpose, someone who by virtue of being the Creator has the right to dispose of us as He sees fit — is the very truth that the devil led our first parents to rebel against. It is therefore not an analogous situation that you have proposed in your letter because the sexual harasser sins primarily against God, by attempting to use, as an object of his own, a human being created by God and for God. The gulf between the Creator and His creation is infinite.
God knew, however, that the moral sense which He gave us would prompt the very sort of question you asked. It is ever the propensity of sinful men to attempt to judge God and God's response to that has been (as our Holy Father pointed out in Crossing the Threshold of Hope) to come to earth and place Himself completely at the mercy of human judgment, showing by means of the Cross our abject inability to ever rightly judge Him.
Your question was excellent and I'm sure others will resonate with it. Thank you giving us the chance to answer it and please feel free to write again any time.
Blessings,
Mary
Mrs. Mary Kochan
Lead Content Editor and contributing author, Catholic Exchange
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