“The opposite of love is not hate, it is fear”.
This helpful advice offered in a recent parish homily invites further reflection. Do opposites exist at all? Isn’t antonymy simply the absence of a designated quality in one entity as compared to another? Why is short the opposite of tall when being short is merely lacking height? Isn’t cold the absence of heat, darkness the absence of light? How can they be opposites? For us oppositeness implies opposition which in turn suggests competing entities. This perspective unfortunately fosters in us the hope-thwarting Manichean view that evil and good are opposites and hence tantamount, polarizing forces. Manichaeism was that belief system that posited a cosmic dualism where Eternal Good and Eternal Evil were equal, rival powers in competition with each other. Saint Augustine set us straight on this error sixteen hundred years ago.
Evil is not the opposite of good. It is the absence of good. Sin is not the opposite of virtue, it is the absence of virtue, and virtue is compliance with God’s will. God’s will is enduring reality and has no omnipotent opposition. Those of us who ignore or defy it fall for the evil of false reality. Those who respect it are partners in the implementation of God’s plan.
Our theology teaches us that God is the Supreme Being, a personal God who is infinitely omniscient, omnipotent and all loving– a combination which necessarily engenders purpose. God creates us for a purpose, namely for us to share his existences eternally. It is God’s desire and plan that we do so. We, however, are free to reject his will. When, individually or as a society, we comply with it we advance the fulfilment of God’s purpose in ourselves and in the world; when we fail to do so we retrogress or slide into a kind of pseudo or non-existence. The truth of the matter is that God’s will is ineluctable. Our failure to abide by it or even to attempt to oppose it cannot nullify it. Some may choose not to be ‘part of the plan’. However, those of us who accept it but sometimes falter find hope in St. Paul’s reassuring reminder that where sin increases grace – when welcomed – abounds all the more.
In these past ten days countless people around the world have demonstrated their embrace of God’s will by providing assistance to the victims of the atrocity occurring in Ukraine. Members of the NCCF community will be pleased to know that the fund Caritas Internationalis has with us (see Voices of the Vineyard below) has received tens of thousands of dollars from hundreds of donors around the nation to support the Ukrainians. Prompted by basic human compassion, such philanthropy is further inspired by a profound awareness of the inviolable link between the safeguard of human dignity and the advance of God’s plan.
May such an awareness nourish in all of us an abiding hope, the hope that does not disappoint.