“But Teresa,” the Lord answered, “that is how I treat my friends.”

“No wonder you’ve got so few friends,” St. Teresa replied.

There is an intrinsic relationship between divine love and human suffering.  Does this mean that loving God is a means of self-torture?  Fulton Sheen said that some people look for a crossless Christ, while others seek a Christless cross.  To love without sacrifice is not love.  To suffer without love is hell.

The theology of human suffering in the context of divine love is not difficult to understand for those who love God.  Suffering takes the form of a container.  Pain becomes the sacrifice of a saint.  The proof of the love is in the bleeding.

Remove the Christian perspective from divine love and human suffering, and what have you got? – Cruelty, absurdity and foolishness.  Saints who love God dwell in a land alien to loveless souls.  In that region strange events transpire: praise resounds instead of a curse, hope defeats despair, and resignation to God’s will overcomes pride and self-will.  In the place of God-lovers, death is life.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux states his reason for loving God: “Love is sufficient to itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself.  It is its own merit, its own reward.  Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself.  Its profit lies in practice.  I love because I love, I love that I may love.  Of all the movements, sensations, and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which  the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return, however unequal it may be.”

Yet it is more fatal not to fall in love with God.  Souls who refuse to love God are admirably strong.  These people are great heroes without a battlefield.  They are incredible beings who are able to resist the love instinct of the soul.  Loveless people are a phenomenon: they are oceans whose waves don’t return to the shore, flames that have no heat, and rain that does not drench.  They are gods whose power lies in not loving.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes about the consequence of not loving: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully around hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of our selfishness.  But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change.  It will not be broken: it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

Lewis concludes that if a man is not uncalculating toward the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely so toward God whom he has not.  He says that we shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor, Lewis ends with these powerful words: “If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”

Soren Kierkegaard writes that man faces two alternatives: either to remain standing on the cliff --- a life of despair that has no remedy or salvation --- or take a leap of faith in order to achieve the highest self-actualization of the individual through one’s commitment to God.

But if one decides to take Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, the individual should be prepared to take another leap, for without it the act of faith becomes futile and worthless.  After the leap of faith, the soul must take the leap of love.  Faith takes the soul to the mind of God.  Love brings the soul to the heart of God.

Christ took a leap of love to redeem a world.  Imagine Him standing at the edge of Heaven, looking at miserable humanity below.  With open arms Jesus took that great leap from Paradise toward Earth.  He landed as a helpless child in the cave in Bethlehem.  From there He leapt to become a preacher, a teacher and a healer.  Then, another leap: Jesus found Himself on the waiting arms of the cross where His hands and feet were crucified.  Christian life is nothing but a constant leap of love.

But Christ’s leap of love ended in an empty tomb and not on the bloody cross.  Love returns to where it started.  This is perhaps why our instinct to love persists in spite of our weakness, our sinfulness, our misery.  The soul is like a compass pointer: it always points northward toward God.  Our hearts are but a part of the great jigsaw puzzle of God’s own heart.  Unless we fix ourselves on our reserved and exclusive place in that puzzle, a great question mark will continue to burn in our aimless souls. 

Take the leap of love.