In a vain attempt to restore my sticky-tab stock, I came across this tidbit from Mere Christianity. It’s positively uncanny how much C.S. Lewis sounds like Cardinal Ratzinger and now Pope Benedict.
All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. … [T]he living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.
I remember trying to explain the relational concept between love and the necessity of a multiplicity of persons to our RCIA class after coming across this in Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology. As I was chatting I realized just how deep a topic I was bringing up and just as I was about to segue into a lighter topic I noticed that light of understanding on their faces. The concept of love requiring two people combined with the biblical revelation that ‘God is love’ really does click with married people, even those who have a relatively shallow theological formation. It is moments like this that I wonder if we (this in the “royal we” sense) are not short-changing our RCIA members by giving them the “solid food” they are capable of ingesting. ‘Tis a fine line we walk some days…
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