“What if I told you it doesn’t help?” the man asks as the woman packs up a truck with supplies for her shelter for at-risk youth. “What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it’s all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive and they will never let it get better down here? What would you do?”I recognized the reference early on and got all squeeful/gleeful.
“I’d get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here,” she says. “Wanna give me a hand?”
That scene comes at the end of a very long story. The woman has heard all this before. She’s said all this before. She knows firsthand about “forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive” who will “never let it get better down here.” But she’d also met a real hero who’d showed her different and so she changed her name and became a hero herself.
***
Later in the post, relevant to my tendency toward (self-)righteous anger, he talks about the kind of wrath that is considered a Deadly Sin versus "the wrath of God," and how having just the one word often leads to confusion wherein we imagine a God who is guilty of Deadly Sin. He closes by saying:
“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” St. Augustine said, “their names are anger and courage.” The wrath of God, I think, is that kind of anger — the beautiful daughter of hope.
If you’re imagining the wrath of God as something other than an expression of the love of God, then you have taken a wrong turn, for God is love.
Ah, but isn’t God also perfectly holy? And thus wouldn’t it be possible to say that God’s wrath is an expression of God’s perfect holiness? That’s a slightly different, albeit very popular, wrong turn — imagining the holiness of God as something distinct from the love of God.
Very bad idea, going that route. Jesus had a great deal to say about the idea that holiness could ever mean anything apart from love. His response to that idea tended to be, well, rather wrathful.
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