Chapter 3: God Loves You as You Are

That God loves us all equally is perhaps the most difficult Christian conviction to grasp existentially, yet the most obvious to grasp logically. For the myriad factors that have made us “who we are”, also shape our responses to how our own lives unfold. My parishioner Rachel and her husband had no children; by the time I met her twenty years ago, both of them had severe health problems, from diabetes that required amputations for Bob, to Rachel’s own Parkinson’s disease. They struggled to remain in their own home, but with Bob’s death Rachel had to enter a nursing facility, where after losing virtually all her faculties, she died. Like so many others, she wrestled obsessively with the question of "Why Me?" But unlike many, she had a ready answer: God was punishing her for the sins and failures of her life. She was never able to articulate just what these were, but nothing could shake her Calvinist conviction that her misery reflected God’s justice. Existentially, she was unable to believe that God loved her.

Julia de Beausobre, imprisoned and tortured under Stalin, knew suffering of a different order, at the hands of licensed sadists. Later, she was asked how she survived.

It was simple really,” she said, “I tried to love my torturers; because if I loved them I would not be adding to the evil in the world by hating them. And if I loved them, it could just be that it might have some effect on them, reducing the evil they did and reducing the amount of evil in the world.

Hers was a logical calculus that grew directly from the Orthodox faith that had trained her to view suffering as “a thing of which something can be made.” And that something derived from the certainty that God loves both “the just and the unjust” equally. Tutu claims that we belittle God’s love for us when we allow ourselves to be seduced by the culture of achievement and “success.” Rachel was tragically caught in this very trap, while de Beausobre’s confrontation with evil and her determination to transform it, refusing to succumb to despair or hatred, matches Archbishop Tutu’s breath-taking claim that “the most unlikely person, the most improbable situation” is “transfigurable.” Both de Beausobre and Desmond Tutu invite us into the deep mystery of how it can be that “as much as God loves you, God equally loves your enemies”—the topic of our next chapter. [p. 41]

The Reverend Joan E. Fleming