November 08, 2008> 9:52 AM
mccabe on forgiveness I've been reading a little Herbert McCabe for a while now, here and there. He's fast becoming one of those guys - the ones you read and nearly everything makes sense, you know the ones. He was an English Dominican Priest/Philosopher/Theologian who died in 2001. Here's a snippet from the back of the book jacket I have... "The major influence on McCabe was the Bible, but he was also a devoted admirer of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas saturated his public speaking." A little more from Wikipedia here. Anyway, I like him - the way he writes and thinks. Very helpful.
I think one of the first bits I read from him was about forgiveness, somewhere. I bought the book I have now not long after - God, Christ and Us - which had in it the whole context. The book is a collection of previously unpublished sermons and talks. The chapter called The Forgiveness of God is a very good one from start to finish. He talks about our forgiveness of others, what injuries cause to need to forgive, and leads into how that helps us to understand God and His forgiveness of us and how that works.
... God, of course, is not injured or insulted or threatened by our sin. So, when we speak of him forgiving, we are using the word 'forgiving' in a rather stretched way, a rather far-fetched way. We speak of God forgiving not because he is really offended but accepts our apology or agrees to overlook the insult. What God is doing is life forgiveness not because of anything that happens in God, but because of what happens in us, because of the re-creative and redemptive side of forgiveness. All the insult and injury we do in sinning is to ourselves alone, not to God. We speak of God forgiving us because he comes to us to save us from ourselves, to restore us after we have injured ourselves, to redeem and re-create us.
... When it comes to God,...it would make no sense to say he forgives the sinner without the sinner being contrite. For God's forgiveness just means the change he brings about in the sinner, the sorrow and repentance he gives to the sinner. God's forgiveness does not mean that God changes from being vengeful to being forgiving, God's forgiveness does not mean any change whatever in God. It just means the change in the sinner that God's unwavering and eternal love brings about.
...it would make no sense to speak of God as refusing to accept our repentence. Our repentence is God's forgiveness of us.
The coming into us of God's own life of love shows itself in two aspects: our repentance, and our being forgiven, our death to our sins, and our new life of love. ... We do not express our contrition in order to persuade God to grant us his forgiveness. Our contrition is God granting us forgiveness.
All that God asks of us is that we put aside the barriers, the illusions and the timidity that stand in the way of accepting his love. All that he asks is that we relax and let ourselves be filled with his love, which eliminates our sins and makes us channels and bearers of his love and forgiveness to everyone. –Herbert McCabe, O.P., God, Christ and Us (bold emphasis mine)
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a nice little meal for us to digest. This is a Catholic theologian getting down underneath and past the legal and technical talk of sin and forgiveness - down into the core of what's going on. What I read here is something about God's Heart, in His infinite immutability, reaching out in His nature of Love, to a broken mess of a humanity who couldn't do anything to fix itself if it tried. He reaches out to us, into us, when the inward barriers are put aside - when somehow we respond to His Grace and perhaps say "yes" without even consciously knowing we have done so - and fills us with His forgiveness, which transforms us from the inside-out.
Sure, there are Sacraments and signs that we experience to help concretize His forgiveness to us, but in a very real way, it's already there. Our sorrow for our sin, our repentance, is only a reflective sign of what's already happened in our deepest selves. This is why our deep, growing and dynamic relationship with God in Christ, through the working of the Holy Spirit is the really important thing. If this is not real and actually happening, Sacraments won't really do us any good. That's not to say they're not real in themselves, just that any effectiveness they would have in and for us is only to be had when they are mixed with a real and living faith. OK, that's good for a Saturday when nobody's reading this. Pax vobiscum.
November 08, 2008
> 9:52 AM
I've been reading a little Herbert McCabe for a while now, here and there. He's fast becoming one of those guys - the ones you read and nearly everything makes sense, you know the ones. He was an English Dominican Priest/Philosopher/Theologian who died in 2001. Here's a snippet from the back of the book jacket I have... "The major influence on McCabe was the Bible, but he was also a devoted admirer of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas saturated his public speaking." A little more from Wikipedia here. Anyway, I like him - the way he writes and thinks. Very helpful.
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