Our place in the Zietghiest

In an Age of Enlightenment and isolation, where by virtue of complete autonomy God exists completely outside of ourselves and our world it can be hard to see our own place in the context of Salvation.  I can only imagine that the radical isolation that pursuit of individual freedom and “autonomy of thought (Crossing the Threshold of Hope)” creates in society today is akin to that first isolation experienced by Adam after the expulsion from the Garden.  God, who knows all things and beckons us to Himself, knew the shortcomings of our own age and nonetheless proceeded to extend Himself out towards us: He planned specifically for our own Salvation at the exact moment that He planned out the Salvation of all of humanity.

God so loved the world that He would not leave it to swallow His children; He saw their sin and had mercy upon them.  In one action through the Paschal Mysteries, humanity was saved,  embraced and lifted up “with redemptive love, with love that is always greater than any sin”.  I once wrote about the Zietghiest of Salvation, that all of history has the Incarnation and Sacrificial life of Christ as its chronological center: the history of salvation is in short, “a history that unfolds within the earthly history of humanity, beginning with the first Adam, through the revelation of the second Adam… and ending with the ultimate fulfillment of history of the world in God, when He will be ‘all in all’”.

All this said, because God is a Personal Being, i.e., that He encounters other persons, the specific, unique, and unrepeatable circumstances surrounding each individual person matters to God.  There is no one-size-fits-all application of the work of salvation to each individual.  Sensitive to the trials and particular stumbling blocks in the life of each man, God “embraces the life of every man”, and maintains His promise that the Son did not come to condemn but to save.  So that the individuals of humanity might be saved, God constantly works within the heart of man to convince him of his sin, which is “the first condition for salvation”.  Repentance follows conviction, and is the final step in a positive acceptance of God’s love and salvific working in the world.

God did not abandon the world to its sin, and neither does He abandon us.  We might be assured of our own place in the history of Salvation, not through self righteousness or pride but through our earnest attempts to hear the voice of God, the breath of the Holy Spirit in His moving our hearts to a greater realization of our own sin.  One might echo with the Psalmist: Deliver me, Lord, from my unknown faults! (Psalm 19), seeing in this not a cry to a demanding God who denounces even those debts unknown but a plea for the Mercy of a loving Father in our own lives at this particular time so that we might partake in the bounty won for us once and for all by Christ.