Going to adoration is the shortest route to coming to know Him better outside of the sacraments. What we fail to understand is God always longs for our attention, our presence. We grow bored with everything, even ourselves. However God does not weary of wanting us, or of our not understanding the infinite depth of His love.
God gives us clues though, with the infinite nature of the sky, the diversity of life on this planet and the ever constant wonderful dramatic depth and range of beauty of the ocean. Our DNA, beauty across time, every sunrise and sunset, all the flowers, all the souls, the constant revelation to the world of God’s imagination is on display. Let he or she who has eyes, see.
In this day and age, we tend to spend a lot of energy on what is hard in life, and all the ways in which creation and life itself is fallen. It’s easy to see all the sins, all the reasons we need a savior. Politics, pollution, sickness, sourness, cruelty, anger, all the the things we see injuring the world, injure our ability to pray, to serve, to love. Sin weakens our capacity to endure God’s infinite love.
Sin leaves us tired, disillusioned, cynical, angered, bored, and alone. When we feel worn and wrung out by sin, we know something of what Christ felt on the cross when pierced by the spear, blood and water poured out. Time and tears flow on in our lives, despite sin. We must surrender to the reality of a world we must love that is fallen.
We must embrace the cross.
My oldest son broke his foot a month ago. As he was struggling to get into the car yesterday with his foot in a boot, unable to bear weight, he accidentally jammed the car door in his eye. Wincing and smarting, he said, “I don’t want redemptive suffering.” “How about some redemptive excessively good luck?”
However, I prefer to think about all of it this way. It’s very comforting to know that our pains, even the most trivial, are not meaningless. Our efforts can be a form of prayer. Likewise, I’m grateful that our pains are not a comeuppance from God. I would not want to live in a universe that seeks to give me what I deserve. I am afraid of what I might deserve. A world unfair in all of our favor, is what I would want. God does not despair of us, and so I know, the world, the whole of creation is unfair, and as rough and difficult as it might seem, it is unfair in our favor.
So I pray again to God and thank Him for His blatant unfairness with us, loving us despite our constant forgetfulness, our constant refusal to recognize His infinite love in all our situations. And I dare to ask the infinite loving God, to be even more unfair, to love us even more, to show us every day, and for those of us who do not understand the cross, through something other than the cross.