Absolute Evil

This is the Meditation of the Day, Tuesday, February 17, 2009 from the Magnificat Magazine, (requires a subscription) Volume 10, #13 February 2009 (pp. 254-255)

“What Jesus wants Us to Understand”

“And so evil, I mean absolute evil which specifically constitutes sin, is the rejection or the break of the nuptial bond that God wants to establish with us and through us, with the whole universe. Evil makes man live outside himself, outside God, and outside everything. It quenches the Spirit (see 1 Thes 5:19). It turns us into things in a world of things, of which we bear the weight in and outside ourselves. Since our freedom is not actualized in self-liberation, it prevents God from appearing to us as absolute freedom. The meaning of creation escapes us, since we are incapable of expressing toward any part of reality the Love that we refuse to accept in ourselves. Our vision of the world becomes fragmented. Our origin is lost in the primeval mists of the first syntheses of amino acids, since we give up the chance of becoming our own origin, today, in the light of a new birth tied to our consent; on the other hand, our end is shrouded in the mystery of death, since we fail to equate it with the Presence within ourselves, the only Way to ourselves. Caught between these two uncertainties, our values collapse. We no longer know on what to found our inviolability and our dignity, our freedom and our responsibility. We cannot distinguish clearly good from evil, for lack of a firm reference to an absolute which asserts its presence—and intermittently at that—only through subjective passions that monopolize and distort it. If such is the havoc wrought by sin when its rule is consolidated, the fact remains that, from the beginning—as in a marriage breakdown—sin is essentially a rejection of love, and only love can dry up the source of evil and undo the harm done.” (Father Maurice Zundel (died 1975) was a Swiss mystic, poet, philosopher, liturgist, and author.)