What Matters to God

I would like to begin by asking and inviting us all to contemplate the question:  “What matters to God?”  A seemingly simple question, we might be tempted to answer that it matters to God whether we are faithful or not.  Other answers might range from our own personal life decisions, how much we sin, how we celebrate the Liturgy, etc.  And in fact, none of these answers are exactly wrong, per se.  They all contain part of a whole.  Throughout the years, various theologians and scholars have tried to reconcile the dichotomy between God as All-Merciful and All-Just.  The problem appears when you try to comprehend a God who saves and forgives, but who also upholds and invites His children to an objectively virtuous life, even though they are completely unable to live up to the strict standards the life of perfection demands.  On the one hand it would seem that the All-Merciful God can and does simply forgive the failings of His children, thereby making sin itself not matter in a sense.  On the other hand, an All-Just God would have a meticulous account of His children's actions, including their misdeeds.  The truth of the matter is that God's Mercy and Justice are not at odds with each other, and in fact cannot properly be understood outside of their mutual context with the other.  I posit here and present my argument for your consideration that because God has integrity of being, seamless and without parts throughout His whole, everything in its specificity matters to God as reality and truth that cannot be ignored or not considered part of the whole.

First I would like to contemplate the reality of sin and the dichotomy of God’s Mercy and Justice, two concepts which each have their own internal logic.  God is always and at all times Merciful just as He is always and at all times Just.  Luther tried to solve this problem by claiming that humans and our sins are like so much refuse, helpless in ourselves and totally fallen to our core, disgusting through and through. In his view, God simply encompasses and forgives like throwing a blanket over us so that our sin does not matter.  This argument clearly ignores the Justice of God: in all justice our sin has to account for something, down to a meticulous recording.  We know from our faith that we will be held to account, but that we are forgiven by entering into the sacrifice of Jesus.  Sr. Faustina, the Polish nun who was the instrument of introducing the radical Mercy of God in the wake of the Second World War writes a wonderful depiction of the faithful entering into the sacrifice of Christ through our own sufferings.  She writes that “I am conscious of my mission in the Church… I unite myself closely with Jesus and stand before Him  an atoning sacrifice for the world…  My sacrifice is nothing in itself, but when I join it to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, it becomes all-powerful and has the power to appease divine wrath”.  Thus, our every sin does in fact matter to God and has specific bearing in the way of His divine mercy.  

Next I would like to use the figure of Pope Saint John Paul II, and posit as an example of specificity in context that it actually mattered to the Church and to the world that John Paul II was a Pole.  The political and faith significance of Poland then as now is unique in the world: a relatively new country whose existence was plagued by war in pursuit of its own freedom, was the ground zero for two world wars, and even today has a culture welcoming and with one foot in both the Eastern and Western Catholic Churches due to its geological location.  This political and geological heritage, joined with the theological richness the Polish culture inherited from its exposure to both the East and the West set Pope Saint John Paul II up as a figure uniquely situated and equipped to tackle the struggles of a post-conciliar Church and a post-Communist world.

We do not have to content ourselves with the figure of JPII to see great illustrations of specific personal context mattering to the Kingdom of Heaven.  Josef Pieper, whose writings on Leisure and Tradition as a German in the wake of World War II struck some as misplaced; and yet it was this exact context which made his writings so important and relatable to many even today.  The concept of historical, geographical and cultural specific context is even further illustrated in the Incarnation of Christ as the center of History and the fulfillment of the Scriptures.  The historical and geographical significance of the Incarnation is well documented and dealt with at length in many other articles throughout the history of the Church; outside of the Incarnation, the figures of JPII and Josef Pieper are brought up as proximate individuals to point out the specific context of their subjective world experiences as persons in the Thomistic tradition matters to their work and equips not only these two but all of us with the data and experiences in which we must live and work.  In short, the specific nationalities, cultures, and historic place in time matter to God.  

While I was in college a large point of discussion was the concept of soulmates, whether when choosing a spouse there was that one person destined to be with you for all eternity and if so, how to tell if you have chosen the right person.  How am I to tell if I have made the decision God wanted me to make with the right person?  A homily from a priest at a friend’s wedding struck me as summing up the whole solution to the question: if you are wondering, after the fact,  whether you are called to marriage and whether you have made the “right decision”, roll over and look at your spouse.  That person is now tied to your baptismal vows and you are called to be married to that person.  God cooperates with us as individual subjective persons, and allows our decisions to have consequences not only on how we live our lives but how efficacious our decisions are in encountering Him.  Our individual life decisions matter to God.

What exactly this means for us as persons is a long topic and beyond the scope of this presentation; I would however be remiss if I did not touch on it very slightly.  It is worth pondering that if my very specifics matter to God then I should live as if they do matter and not look or search “beyond the fence” so to speak.  In other words, live within the context of my own life, so that I am able to BE encountered as subjective person more faithfully and can thereby encounter others more fully for being seamless myself.  This is not to say that we should not educate ourselves and study other cultures and histories; the world is steeped with studies and elements of other time periods and other cultures.  What this does indlicate is that we are to view such studies as better equipping ourselves to know our own specific context within the world, and to better understand the persons we encounter from other specific contexts than our own.  If our calling in life is to know, love, and serve God and be happy with Him in the next life, we should and must prepare ourselves for personal encounter with a being who is at once the object of our experience and has a subjective experience as well, the I-thou relationship.  We practice this here on earth with the people around us; it culminates with our encounter with God.

God is a subjective being, that is to say, an individual subject who experiences existence itself and encounters Himself.  He is a Person of Infinite depth and breadth, so much so that nothing greater than He can be conceived of.  He has within Himself integrity of being, existing without parts and acting as a complete whole in all of His actions.  This as much to say, that the whole of our own being is considered and encountered by Him all at once.  Every aspect of our own being is considered in this encounter, and He encounters us as individual subjects, as persons.  In short, everything: our sins, our life choices, our nationalities, historical contexts and our cultures are beheld, encountered, and considered by God at once and completely.  Everything that is real and true matters to God, because without any part of this God would contradict His own being as eternally present and without parts.