1
I lately got back in touch with a girl I was supposed to marry many years ago. I learned that she was still single, though she had a grown child. I also learned that she had converted to Christianity, to what sounded to me like a denomination somewhere in the broad Protestant tradition, perhaps Lutheran. In any case, one time, after a brief chat, I don’t know why, I said to her, “God bless you!”
To which she replied, “God bless those who believe in Him.”
Right there, a resentment rose in me. Whatever God she worships, He is a revengeful, petty-minded God. For what kind of Christian God would say a thing like that—I’ll bless you only if you love me?
Of course, I did not say this aloud. I held my tongue. For I knew she had merely said what she had heard in her church, and it sounded to me like one that preached not love, but vengeance.
2
I used to teach a course called “Ethics,” or perhaps it was “Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy departments around the country used to run this type of course; I don’t know if they still do. But if you ask me, it was a total waste of both my time and the students’. In any case, when we taught this course, we were supposed to cover Kant’s Grounding in something like two class sessions. It was a joke, to put it mildly. Just two sessions, and the students were supposed to leave the classroom with Kant in their heads.
So at the start of every semester I reread the Grounding and tried my best to make sense of what Kant meant by “the good will is the only thing good and good unconditionally.” By his definition of the unconditionally good, my ex’s God, whatever other criteria He meets, fails this one. For if His love of men is on the condition that they love Him back—“Or else!” as the kids say—then His love is not unconditional.
But what about Kant’s own “good will”? What makes it the good it is? I once put this question to my officemate when I was at Central Michigan University, and his answer was, “It’s called good will, ain’t it?”
It was a clever answer, but I felt cheated.
3
In college, I first encountered St. Augustine. One summer at home, I opened my brand-new copy of the Confessions. I had barely turned the first page when I felt awe-stricken. I had never in my life, up until that point, read anything so totally pure, totally selfless, so totally and unabashedly candid in expressing one’s love, and the joy this love brings to one.
Needless to say, St. Augustine’s love and total devotion were to God, not a human being. But I had never read anything like it. I sensed no “if” in that love, just total surrender, joy, devotion, and love without condition.
4
As I look back over my life, ponder the past, and contemplate the rust and diamonds of a life irretrievably gone, I feel that I have only truly loved two persons.
I say this because in my love of them I see and feel what I first encountered in the opening pages of St. Augustine’s Confessions: love without a shred of hesitation or misgiving, not even in the back of my mind. It is love without a hidden motive, without the hope of getting something from them in return.
All the others walking through my past are just that—walking shadows, objects of my base desire, objects of my sympathy, my playfulness. I might have loved them at one point or another, but the love was sullied by a hint of desire here, a shade of passion there, and many other things in between.
Should I one day become a Christian, I think I could then really say: “I’m blessed.”
Yego’s Chronicles 