When I was a child, my mother used to tell me, “I hope when you grow up, God punishes you by giving you a daughter that is exactly like you.” It wasn’t a very nice thing to say. However, the part of the statement I want to focus on is she said “God punishes you”. I was raised Catholic and there really is such a thing as Catholic guilt. It is ingrained into my thinking that if I am not a good person, somehow God will find a way to punish me.
I say it all the time without even thinking about it. I even hear myself thinking that the reason bad things happen to other people is because God is punishing them somehow. Then, yesterday, I realized that it couldn’t possibly be true. First, punishing doesn’t really work. God loves us and He wouldn’t go around torturing us out of anger. And yes, I understand that this is the image of God depicted in the Old Testament, but that same God created a new covenant with us in the New Testament. Second, most important, God wouldn’t go around punishing us because He is a God of love who gave us free will.
The easiest way to explain is to go back to the story of Adam and Eve. Humans ate from the Tree of Knowledge and gained the ability to know the difference between right and wrong. We know what is good and what is evil. We assign that category to everything under the sun. Empirically, nothing is good nor evil until a human being decided it is. Therefore, through our own freewill we decide our fate. We are the ones who choose to punish ourselves or to destroy our planet. God is our witness and whatever we decide, He walks with us and He loves us unconditionally no matter how difficult we are to love. The greatest miracle in the world isn’t that God gave His only Son to save my soul. The greatest miracle in the world is that God still loves me after all the stupid mistakes and decisions I have made and will continue to make in my life. What can I do in the face of that miracle, but try to love as I have been loved?
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
