Benedictus: Day to Day With Pope Benedict XVI. Magnificat. Ed.: Rev. Peter John Cameron, O.P., Ignatius Press. 2006. pg. 102
Love and Correction. March 27th.
Anger is not necessarily always in contradiction with love. A father, for instance, sometimes has to speak crossly to his son so as to prick his conscience, just because he loves him. And he would fall short of his loving obligation and his will to love if, in order to makes things easier for the other person, and also for himself, he avoided the task of putting him right sometimes by making a critical intervention in his life. We know that spoiled children, to whom everthing has been permitted, are often in the end quite unable to come to terms with life, because later on life treats them quite differently, and because they have never learned to discipline themselves, to get themselves on the right track. Or if, for instance, because I want to be nice to him, I give to an addict the drugs he wants instead of weaning him off them (which would seem to him very hard treatment), then in that case you cannot talk of real love. To put it another way: love, in the true sense, is not always a matter of giving way, being soft and just acting nice. In that sense, a sugar-coated Jesus or a God who agrees to everything and is never anything but nice and friendly is no more than a caricature of real love. Because God loves us, because he wants us to grow into the truth, he must necessarily make demands on us and must also correct us. God has to do those things we refer to in the image of the "wrath of God," that is, he has to resist us in our attempts to fall from our own best selves and when we pose a threat to ourselves.
Long live Benedict XVI! That book is on my (too long) list of books to get.
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Ah! :)