Can we freely belong to God while held by entanglememts?

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 2 continued some more-

We are hard pressed by these pages to relinquish our grip on the snares that hold us fast; to allow their unwinding and loosening so that we can turn more fully and more willingly to the awesome condition that awaits us: “the state of pure love” (Page 58).

Already we have reviewed how much we love and enjoy our entanglements. We have seen enough of ourselves to wonder if it is really worth it to give these up in order to obtain something as admittedly nebulous as “the state of pure love.” After all, we can be saved and entangled, can’t we? That is surely a comment that the 21^st Century Christian should mull.

Do we not, in fact, have plenty of God in salvation, such that the search for deeper and less-convenient spiritual domains is, well, kind of unnecessary?

It is not a strong faith, not a biblical faith and not a Christian faith that entertains such questions. There appears to be no doubt in Caussade’s mind that his hearers will want to proceed with this deeper walk with God. My readers are different. Our culture has provided us with many thinking options. God, if there is one, is accommodating, easy-going, and quite possibly a woman.

But here is where Caussade steps out of line. God, he says, is one of “loving severity.”

He answers how we go about getting ourselves disentangled: “It is only through a continual self-contradiction and a long series of all kinds of mortifications, trials and strippings that one can be established in the state of pure love. We have to arrive at the point at which the whole created universe no longer exists for us, and God is everything” (Page 58.)

Two opposing forces are at work in our faith: Our desire for “the state of pure love” with our God, and our recoil from this love’s severity in terms of “trials and strippings.”

Here we are at the heart of Christian mysticism. A wrong turn here could lead us down a weird and twisted path; a pretense that the world doesn’t quite exist or that physicality is an illusion.

No, we are still talking about the master that we will serve; the influence to which we will yield; the winds to which our sails will respond. We are here faced with the same two shepherds that are mentioned in the Psalms – the Lord, or Death. Truly, the world as our guide is in essence Death in a deceptive more acceptable form.

Christian mysticism does not ask us to live in pretense, but to choose entirely between God or Death (disguised as the world) as master. Once we are faced with this choice, God, indeed, is everything.

“A heart that thus lives for God is dead to everything else and everything is dead to it.” (Page 59)

Here is wording is nearly identical to Paul’s in his letter to the Galatians: “But as for me, it is out of the question that I should boast at all, except of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

In short, the key to freedom from entanglements and those things that hinder us is a true desire to get released from them.