wretchedness / qualms /

[Christopher kim]

When we make bad choices and compromises, we get ourselves lost, mired — our life stuck in a slavery of desolation. The Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:5-42) is a perfect example of this.

She’s had five husbands, and now she’s living with another man. But it’s clear that, still, she’s not happy.

Because she doesn’t belong to anyone … which is anguish. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote that “the root of the human being’s wretchedness is loneliness, is the absence of love — is the fact that my existence is not embraced by a love that makes it necessary.”

That’s the love we are waiting for: the love that says to us: It is necessary that you exist!


terrible madness
This dilemma is dramatized by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Brideshead Revisited. A character caught up in an adulterous relationship, suddenly struck with qualms of conscience,


obsesses about that “one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime” — sin … and then experiences a kind of meltdown: