There is a dark side to what passion can do to faith. I’m reminded of this every time I hear of another suicide bomber blowing him or herself up outside a mosque somewhere in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. Faith is supposed to include passion—an overriding passionate inwardness, as Kierkegaard called it–but an overriding passion can lead men and women of faith to do unnatural things. Passion ignites faith in good ways and bad ways. Passion can lead to an altering of all of our priorities.
The same deep-seated, passionate pulse that leads some people today to blow up themselves and others, as if it pleases God, is the same sort of passion that has led saints to despise the world for God in the desert or on the mountaintop. How to tell the difference? Where to draw the line?
I sometimes wonder who Francis and Clare would understand better today: the devout terrorist or the Wall Street executive. The former, I suspect.
G. K. Chesterton explains passion in Francis’s life when he writes: “He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged into poverty as men have dug madly for gold.”
0 Responses to “Good Passion, and Bad”