The phrase “forced faith” includes two completely contradictory terms (see No Forced Faith and the related posts, December 2009). Understanding that these words are contradictory—an oxymoron—is important. We live at a time when trust in the institutions around us is at an all-time low, ranging from lack of confidence in government, organized religion, and even the traditional family structure. We fear being compelled to live in a certain way.
Love Does Not Compel
That makes Robert Cardinal Sarah‘s statement about the nature of God all the more important:
God is love, and love will not compel, force, or oppress in order to be loved in return.¹
Why is Cardinal Sarah’s short statement so important? It is because some fear Christianity out of concern that it is coercive. To those with such fears, Christianity seems to consist mostly of do’s and don’ts; it seeks to compel behavior based on those do’s and don’ts; it oppresses or even seeks to suppress those with opposing points of view.
God is Does Not Compel
God is love! He needed nothing. He was and is complete. Yet He freely created us to share in His divine love. To demonstrate His love, after mankind’s rebellion (which is also to say the individual rebellions mounted by each one of us), He even made the ultimate self-gift in Jesus Christ while we were still enemies.
Even you and I know that we cannot compel someone to love us, despite the hopes we sometimes have for a relationship with this person or that person. Do we imagine God is somehow different? Has less understanding than we do? Thinks love can be commanded? No, He waits eagerly and watches for us, like the prodigal father.² But he does not compel, force, or oppress.
Emptiness Isn’t the End
Many people feel the emptiness of contemporary life. Robert Cardinal Sarah writes, “People . . . find themselves alone in the world, without anything that surpasses and supports them.” Quoting Blaise Pascal, Cardinal Sarah continues:
When I regard the whole silent universe and man without light, left to himself … lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death … I become terrified, like a man carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, [who awakes] without knowing where he is and without means of escape.³
This is not a new thought. Emptiness abounds even in popular songs that go back decades, from the isolation of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby (“all the lonely people”) to the nihilism of Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is (“let’s break out the booze and have a ball”).
So think for a moment: is it possible that this emptiness more oppressive, even more dangerous, than our fear of losing what we believe is “freedom”? In The Mission of the Redeemer (written in 1990),St. John Paul II wrote:
The Church addresses people with full respect for their freedom. Her mission does not restrict freedom but rather promotes it. The Church proposes; she imposes nothing.
It is true there will be a reckoning at the end of our lives (Hebrews 9:27-28). But we are given free will, the overarching power of to choose—just as the prodigal father gave his son opportunity to choose how he wanted to live.
If you fear compulsion but feel the increasing isolation of 21st-century life, St. John Paul II said, “Be not afraid. Open the doors to Christ!” And Christ Himself said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest . . . my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).
Come. No compulsion. No oppression. Only freedom and rest. That is Christianity Richly.
¹ The Power of Silence, by Robert Cardinal Sarah, paragraph 90 (location 918 of 4186), Kindle Edition.
² Luke 15:20, but be sure to read the entire passage about the prodigal father, from verse 11 through 24.
³ The Power of Silence, paragraph 241 (location 2058 of 4186), Kindle Edition.
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