The Way of Love (Part 1 of 2)

(Ronald Knox - found here)

“Most of us, in our moral lives, shoulder the cross of duty very much in the spirit of the Penitent Thief . . . . We accept the moral law as God’s will for us; we admire it in the abstract; we applaud holiness and mortification in the lives of others. But when it comes to the point, duty always presents itself to us, doesn’t it, as something disagreeable—generally, too, as something negative; there is something we would like to do if only God’s Law wasn’t there telling us not to do it—we should like, for example, to do an unkind turn to somebody who has annoyed us, and then, just when we have got it all mapped out in our minds, conscience comes in and warns us that the action we propose is wickedly malicious. All right, then, we won’t do it after all. But we don’t love conscience any the better for it—a drag, an encumbrance, that’s what we feel about conscience.

And then, after a time, the pressure seems to grow too strong, and the cord snaps. The temptation we have so often resisted has been eating away our resistance, it seems, all the time; the pitcher has been to the well once too often. And we go to confession and tell God we are sorry; and we are sorry; we know that the law against which we have offended is God’s will for us, and in breaking it we have set his will at defiance. And then we make good resolutions; we look forward into the future and see there mapped out before us a whole lot of things which we would rather like to do but know we are not to do, because it would be wrong, because it would be sinful; we must keep ourselves more under control, more under lock and key, in future. That’s how our good resolutions look to us, isn’t it? And, mind you, I am not saying that a life so spent in a continual uphill fight against our own inclinations is not a Christian life, or that it may not be a heroic Christian life. I am only wondering whether our Lord does not mean us to see that there is an alternative—that there is another way of shouldering the cross of duty which is certainly much happier for us, apparently more natural for us, and quite probably much more effective for us? I mean that we should choose, not the way of mere obedience, but the way of love.

The Penitent Thief bears his cross manfully and makes the best of it, but that’s all. He would throw it away if he could; he feels it as an incubus, a drag on his steps. But with our Lord it is different; he likes carrying his Cross. And I think quite certainly the reason why the heroic virtues of the Saints are so different from the humdrum virtues of the ordinary Christian is that the Saints always went by the way of love.

Well, you say, that is for the Saints; it has nothing to do with people like me. But I wonder, is that really true? Even as a matter of psychology, isn’t it probable that all this negative business has a kick-back which is bad for us? I mean, if you sit down and say to yourself, ‘I wish I found it easier to like Mrs. Jones! Of course, she’s a bore, but she can’t help that; and she treated her first husband abominably, but that’s all ancient history, and nothing in the world would induce me to bring that up, naturally. As for her behaviour to me, well, it really has been shocking; but I expect that prejudices me against her, so I am the last person who can safely sit in judgement on her. Yes, I will try to like Mrs. Jones’—if you go through all that process, it’s fairly obvious that in your efforts to like Mrs. Jones you have been stamping a very unfriendly picture of her deeper and deeper into your imagination. Your resolution to avoid a sin against charity has re-awakened in you all the old echoes of uncharitable criticism. Where the sixth commandment is concerned, even the moral theologians warn us that we must be careful not to indulge our imaginations when the mention of such sins crops up in our prayer, or in our examination of conscience. But I wonder if it doesn’t apply to other commandments too? When you are nursing a grievance, for example, how difficult it is to make any acts of the will about forgiving the injury done to you, without feasting the imagination on all the details of your grievance!

Well, you ask, how would the Saint react to the mention of the same Mrs. Jones? I don’t know; I wish I did. I suppose it would be something like this: ‘Mrs. Jones! It’s curious how her interests never seem to be the same as mine. In fact, she rather bores me; I suppose I must bore a lot of people in the same way. How odd our judgements of one another are; how limited! Dear God, what does it matter what anybody thinks of me except you? What you think of me, that I am; your thought squares with reality, makes reality what it is. Poor Mrs. Jones, I’m afraid she was a good deal to blame over that first marriage of hers; let’s hope she has seen that now and made what amends she could for it. How tragic that we should be able to do so little, afterwards, in the way of making amends! Dear God, what amends can I ever make to you for this, and that, and that? But I’m afraid she’s a woman who finds it difficult to get on with people; certainly I seem to have got on the wrong side of her somehow, without meaning to. Well, I suppose it all squares out; after all, there are such a lot of people who are far more patient with me than I have ever deserved. And you, dear God, who know exactly the kind of person I am, who are incapable of not noticing it when I wrong you, incapable in a sense of not minding it when I wrong you, you are so much more patient with me than anybody else. Bless Mrs. Jones, and make her patient with me too.’

We don’t react like that. But I cannot help thinking that is what our Lord is asking us to do.”

~Ronald Knox (excerpt from A Retreat for Lay People - Chapter: “The Way of Love”)