From the Friars: Our God is a Consuming Fire

It has been a particularly chilly winter thus far and, like all things in creation, the Creator speaks through this painful thing we call cold. The Sun is perhaps the clearest natural symbol of Jesus, the Light of the World. It is also Trinitarian in that the flames are like God the Father, the source of all that is; again, the light resembles the Son, Word and Truth; and the heat reveals the Holy Spirit, the bond of Divine Love.

The variations of seasons are due mainly to the axial tilt of the planet. In winter our hemisphere is inclining away from the sun despite being about 3 million miles closer than in July. Even though Earth is at its closest distance to the fire, it is the coldest time of the year because of this leaning away.

To get to the poetic point, we are cold because we are running away from the source of heat. We describe a loving person as warm and likewise someone who is heartless as cold. The person who turns away from the Love of God will lose their ability to love. It is -455°F in outer space. We can move to Florida to warm our bodies but the only way to warm the soul is to move closer to the Divine Furnace.

To push the analogy further, it is the huge mass of the sun that keeps the planets in orbit around it. The force of gravity draws other celestial bodies toward it just as the mass of the earth literally keeps our feet on the ground and the atmosphere from floating away. We say that a person is attractive because of their beauty or goodness. God is Beauty and Goodness Itself. We are naturally drawn to Him like planets to the sun.

But unlike inanimate objects, persons are free to turn away from the warmth of Divine Love and the attractive power of Infinite Beauty. In Dante’s Inferno the center of hell is a dark frozen lake.

May the cold of winter remind us to turn toward the warmth and the drawing force of God’s Love, Beauty and Goodness, lest we set ourselves adrift and risk being sucked into a black hole.
Fr. Peter