Guess I'll eat some worms

St. Catherine of Siena tells God He acts like a crazy, drunk lover toward mankind. Certainly, taken as a whole, that animal called man is not easy to love. Maybe that's the vicious cycle begun with the Fall: If I don't love myself, no one else will, but loving myself makes me less lovable, so I have to love myself even more.

Jesus spreads out His arms and says, "Whoa! Stop! I love you! I love you! I love you!"

Most of us, though, can't stop -- or rather, we won't let ourselves stop. We're too used to loving ourselves. It's too painful to let God love us instead, in large part because that would mean admitting that what we've loved about ourselves for so long is, literally, unlovable.

In the natural order, we get things like a woman giving $400,000 to Nigerian scam artists, because she "doesn't think she's a sucker" and "the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one."

In the supernatural order, we get things like an ethics advisory board chairman advocating medical experiments on human beings, because "most of these embryos are destined to be destroyed."

Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, the saying goes. I think we have stolen so many lambs, while telling ourselves we aren't thieves, that we are simply unable to conceive that stealing sheep is wrong.

(Nigerian scam story via five feet of fury.)

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