Waiting for Love

"Love is the soul's true nourishment, yet this food which of all substances we most need is not something we can produce for ourselves.  One must wait for it.  The only way to make absolutely certain that one will not receive it is to insist on procuring it by oneself.  And once again, this essential dependence can generate anger.  One can attempt to shake it off, and reduce it to the satisfaction of those needs that require no adventure of the spirit or the heart for their filling.  Conversely, we can accept this situation of dependence, and keep ourselves trustingly open to the future, in the confidence that the Power which has so determined us will not deceive us." -- Joseph Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict XVI, in Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life.

Rich thoughts here.  This summer they have taken on existential dimensions in my life, as I've wrestled with deep loneliness while I am in Texas for an internship and my beloved wife in Russia for studies of her own.  But Ratzinger points to the posture of waiting for love to come as something fundamental to our very being.  We humans simply are dependent, we cannot nourish ourselves with the fruit of love that is not love unless it comes to us as a gift.

Ratzinger continues by stating why this hope for love's arrival is not simply a "waiting for Godot":

"The God who personally died in Jesus Christ fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation, and in so doing justified that human confidence which in the last resort is the only alternative to self-destruction."

Faith truly is the opposite of despair.  Despair gives up hope that love will come unbidden, and either turns towards the wall or reaches toward love in the self-defeating attempt to procure it for oneself.  (Was this not what Adam and Eve did when they reached out and took the fruit in the hopes that they would thus make themselves "like God"?)  Faith is the quiet confidence that God will nourish our lives with his love.  Faith waits for love even when everything seems to suggest that love will never come on its own.