Your Questions, God's Answers

by Peter Kreeft

True religion isn’t in love with itself but with God.

When the Church teaches something we find hard or don’t feel like doing, for example, in the area of sexual ethics, we have to choose: Do we set ourselves up as God and judge God’s ideas by our own ideas, or do we judge our ideas by God’s ideas? He designed the machine; he has a right to write the operator’s manual.

Here is Thomas Merton’s two-step diagnosis of all problems in human relationships: “We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves. And we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” Adam and Eve certainly learned that lesson when they disobeyed God.

The great American poet T. S. Eliot said that the greatest line in all the world’s literature is the simple line from Dante, perhaps the greatest poet of all time: “In his will, our peace.”