I concluded last week by proclaiming that God
really loves us! But let me begin this week's reflection by stating that in addition to the fact that He loves us, He actually
likes us! I use the word “like” because
that gives an affective, personal dimension to God’s love. God’s love for us is not general. It is specific and individual. It is personal delight. He delights in us; He delights in you! How else do we explain the above words?
How
else do we explain ourselves? God’s love
for me is the answer to the question “who am I?” Blessed John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis: "Man
cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for
himself; his life is meaningless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does
not participate
intimately in it.”
God is
love (1 Jn 4:8) and He loves us (1 Jn 4:10; Rom 5:8; Gal 2:20). And His love is so powerful that it makes us
His children, it makes us His sons (1 Jn 3:1-2). But, do we believe in this reality? Are we really aware of it? Do we feel it and live from it?
The answer to these questions will determine our ability to discern,
choose and live out our vocations in joy and peace; in a word, the answer to
these questions will determine our happiness!
God
desires that we would believe in His love and yes, He also desires that we
would feel
it. We are created to share in His happiness and
in order to do so we need more than a merely general, intellectual knowledge of
His love. We need an emotional,
experiential, heart-knowledge of it.
Really the same goes for our relationship with others; it’s not enough
to know in our heads that we’re loved, we need to know in our hearts. God made us so that the heart has primacy
over the head. The heart is supposed to
lead the head; the head is supposed to serve the heart, because the heart is
the place of loving-encounter--with God and others--the seat of true happiness.
While God’s love is certainly not reducible to an
emotional experience, He does want it to touch us on that level. Our experience of an emotional love for God
can actually lead us to a deeper and lasting faith and the higher, sacrificial
love that Jesus ultimately calls all of His disciples to. The Saints and Mystics often speak of their
union with God in personal, passionate, emotionally charged and poetic
language. The Bible itself, especially
in the Song of Songs, uses powerful, romantic and even sensual imagery to
describe God’s passionate love for us and our response to that love.
Brothers, the beginning and end
of all formation—human and spiritual—is the personal love of God for us. We are loved!
The Christian life has been described as a passage from being loved by
God without knowing it to being loved by God and knowing it. Knowing His love is a must for both
discerning and answering God’s call. And
proper development and maturation of our emotional lives is a must for knowing
His love. Therefore, our
series on human formation by exploring God’s plan for our emotional
growth. Stay tuned…
God bless you all,
Fr. Isaac Spinharney, CFR
St. Joseph Friary
Harlem, NY
