The world we love-hate

In biblical literature, the world can elicit two opposing reactions. One is hating it or at least be cautious of it, as in, “What shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Mk 8,36)

Church Fathers have enlarged that line as typified by some words of St. Ignatius of Antioch: “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire. Do not talk about Jesus Christ as long as you love this world.”

The other reaction is loving it, because God himself loves it, as in, “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” (Jn 3,16)

I am sure that after stirring our mind a bit, we can see that both reactions can be made compatible if we consider the contexts in which they are mentioned. We have to hate the world insofar as it has absorbed our own sinfulness and has become a source of temptation and sin itself.

But we also have to love it because in the first place it is also a creation of God like ourselves, and therefore is good, at least in its original state until we have corrupted it. The world is also where God has placed us to work out our free choice of whether we want to be God’s image and likeness and children as he wants us to be, or not.

It’s important that we don’t get confused and lost in this very nuanced attitude we ought to have toward the world. We have to outgrow the simplistic all-or-nothing mindset that forces us to choose whether we are for the world or against it.

That mentality has produced a distorted culture that divides people into either worldly or other-worldly, without making the effort to relate this world and the ‘other world.’

We need to love the world the way God loves it. We just have to learn to purify it because of the anomalies it has acquired due to our sins.

But we need to understand that the world has an inherent objective relation to God and to us that we need to discover, appreciate and enhance.

This is still a point hardly known and understood by many of us. The common attitude is that one is simply on his own as to what to make out of the world. While it’s true that we can discover some natural laws governing the world, we fail to see how these laws come from God and are supposed to be oriented toward God.

And so we feel quite free, in a licentious way, to do with it in any way that suits our purposes, but hardly connecting it with God’s plans and providence. This is the mentality that is quite embedded in us but which we have to reform drastically, since it does not conform to how we in our relation with the world should be. We need to learn to see God in the world and to act the way God wants us to act in the world. Otherwise, we would just be at the mercy of the blind forces of the world, and vulnerable to the maneuverings the more clever and powerful people around.

We have to start by reminding ourselves that everything that we see, touch, handle, and use comes from God. The very least thing that we can do is to thank God for all these things, and then try to discern what God wants us to do with them.

We can always presume that God has something grand for us to do every day. He is love himself. His ways, his plans, his interventions in our life are of love. And love is always about being generous, heroic, making big things even out of small things.

This is something we need to be clear and be strongly convinced about. Otherwise, we would think our life is just a matter of coasting along and waiting for something big, in human terms, to happen.

If we have the right understanding of the world, we can always make beautiful music out of the humdrum routine of our daily life, for we would know how to discover God who is love there.

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