The Better Angels of Our Nature
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 1, No. 4 (June 6, 1998)

The basic principle of the Christian life is really very simple: treat others as you would be treated. And if this isn't clear enough, Jesus left us with the words, "Love your neighbor as yourself." But these simple expressions mask the complexity of living the Christian life because that life requires a total surrender of ourselves and a turning within us towards what we might call, metaphorically, the better angels of our nature if we are to love God.

Much of the difficulty for me, at least, came from a concept of love based on 19th Century romantic prose and poetry. I believed for years that I didn't love God because I didn't always feel that love for Him. Not like I did for a lover, a child or a friend. But even the earthly love we feel for each other, the euphoria, the "feel-good" state in our hearts, comes and goes. We may love another person deeply, but we don't feel it every minute of every day. In fact, there are days we don't feel very loving or loved at all.

Even had I experienced a sudden conversion like St. Paul, where God revealed Himself all at once, I'd be a little suspect of it. That sudden moment of joy that may possess one in a fit of religious fervor is like that sudden swell of emotions when we meet someone and become immediately infatuated. Such events are based on feelings, and maybe little else.

Not that there is anything wrong with feeling good in God's love. Certainly there are many times that we do. We are human and human love is the only love we know. But feelings come and go based on things as mundane as a digestive tract that is acting up. It is hard to feel great love for anyone, including God, when our stomachs are twisting into knots.

So what is this love in it's nature? I believe it begins with a relationship in which what we do is the least offensive to God. No matter how we live, or what we've done, God loves us. He loves us even when we turn our back on Him, even when we reject Him out of hand.

We are the ones with the choice. We can love God, or not. God could easily have made us with no choice but to love Him. But He gave us free will. It used to puzzle me why an all-knowing and benevolent God would do such a thing. After all, if I was going to create a few billion people, I'd be darn sure to build into each of them an undying love and adoration of me, their creator.

By giving us free will our act of love towards God becomes a choice, a decision, thereby making the love we give back precious to Him. Similar is the human love we give to each other. It, too, in the case of a friend or a spouse, is a choice and a gift given freely. And in it's purest, finest form, unconditional--like the love our Father in heaven gives us.

God's love touches us all the time, even when we have shut Him out of our lives. At the point we accept that love, God has made it very clear how to proceed in it. It goes back to the basic principle of Christianity.

C. S. Lewis put it best when he said for the average Christian, the choices we make to show our love, become little "turnings" inside of us: turnings away from the evil creatures we could be and towards those better angels of our nature. Each small turning brings us closer to loving God and being the person He wants us to be, becoming in and of themselves, our act of love for Him.

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