Robert E. Barron

Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages__hich helps to explain why so many of modernity__ avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel__ God, represented the world__ resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption__ymbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos__pent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, __ am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,_ precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.