The Ineffable Folly of Divine Love

(Meditation of Psalm 118/119 Grail Translation)

“It was good for me to be afflicted, to learn Your statutes.” The psalmist’s words have ceased to be poetry for me; they are blood and breath. I believe them more than I believe in my own existence. For when every certainty was stripped away—reputation, belonging, even the seeming usefulness of priesthood and labor—what remained was the naked truth of God’s love, fierce and unsparing.

Affliction has become my teacher, and its language is silence. There is no comfort in it for the flesh, no light for the mind—only the slow undoing of everything that once gave shape to “me.” And yet, in that undoing, I have found the pulse of divine life. The very pain that seemed to mock my faith has become the womb of a deeper knowing: that God Himself dwells most powerfully in what appears to be ruin.

The Desert Fathers understood this mystery. They called it folly, the ineffable folly of divine love. Abba Anthony said that the day will come when the world will go mad, and seeing one who is not mad, it will rise up against him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.” Affliction makes one mad in that same way; it severs the soul from the world’s reason. The logic of the cross cannot be understood by those who have not been nailed to it.

I have tasted this madness. I have felt the hand of God press me into the dust until I could no longer cry out, and then, in that silence, His word entered me like fire. I saw that affliction is not punishment but purification, not loss but participation in the love that redeems the world. It is folly, yes, but holy folly, carrying within it the life of God Himself.

When I say that I believe this more than my own existence, it is because in my own existence I have found nothing enduring. But in affliction, in the breaking, in the long night where no human voice can reach, I have found the eternal: the love that burns yet does not consume, that wounds only to heal, that hides itself so that we might seek and find Him in the darkness.

There, in the ashes, I have learned the only truth worth knowing: it was good for me to be afflicted, for through the folly of love, God has taught me how to live.