CALLED TO LOVE

SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

There is a necessary connection between God, love, and human happiness which is at the core of Christian revelation, and I want to offer a simple explanation of the logic of the connection.

God has created us out of love and for love. God is the origin and ultimate destiny of human life, and because God is love (1 Jn 4:8), human life can find its fulfillment in love alone.

This love is not something withheld from our earthly existence. It is not something that awaits us on the other side of the grave. If we were able to know nothing of love in this life, we could know nothing of God in this life either, for again, God is love, and "the man without love has known nothing of God" (1 Jn 4:8).

So vital is love to our existence that no one can live without love. "The man who does not love is among the living dead" (1 Jn 3:14).

What is necessary to fulfill the meaning of our existence? What must we do to live lives of love? We must first turn to the source of all love, God, and simply open ourselves to him, so that he may fill us with himself. "Love, then, consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us" (1 Jn 4:10).

This is the secret of the saints and of all who have lived lives of heroic love: they first simply allowed themselves to be filled with the love God desired to give them. By being filled with God's love, they became the source of God's love to others. "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him" (1 Jn 4:16).

It is God's love in a person that gives that person the power to love others. "We, for our part, love because he first loved us" (1 Jn 4:19). Moreover, "everyone who loves the father loves the child he has begotten. We can be sure that we love God's children when we love God" (1 Jn 5:1‑2). Once we really love God, it becomes easy to love others, because we're able to see them as God's children.

If our love for others seems to come up short, it is because we have not yet immersed ourselves sufficiently in love of God. This is a point that needs underlining, because it is often mistakenly thought that we can satisfy the demands of love, or find fulfillment in love, by loving other people through acts of kindness, service, and generosity, but without the need to keep love of God at the center of things. But no program or project of love and service will ever amount to anything that does not have love of God at its center, because God is the source of love. Of the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbor, the first is the greatest.

How many have spent their energies trying to love the world into reform and improvement, only to feel disillusioned, betrayed, or even bitter, because the world did not thank them or return their love.  In these cases, acts of love have turned into acts of anger and retribution.

The problem is that the world cannot satisfy our own hunger for love. Only God can, and that is why I say that God must be at the center of all life’s projects of love.

To be filled with God's love is paradoxically simple but hard. True love is very demanding and difficult. Opening ourselves to God's love requires that we acknowledge God to be God. What this entails is humbly confessing that we are not God, meaning we must admit we're not self‑sufficient and should not try to make all things serve our own will. We must empty ourselves in order for God to fill us with himself. This is why there are not more people who are filled with God's love: it is hard to empty ourselves.

The consequence of shutting God out of our lives, and of trying to be gods unto ourselves, however, is to cut ourselves off from the one and only source of love there is. When we do this, we become blind to the reason for our existence, and then we become a person who "walks in shadows, not knowing where he is going, since the dark has blinded his eyes" (1 Jn 2:11).

We also lose sight of what it means to be a human being. To lose love is not only to lose God, but also to lose our own identity. In creating us in his own image, God inscribed in us the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. That is why it is that love is the fundamental, innate vocation of every human being, and why we can't live human lives without answering the call to love.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 09-Jun-2010 10:44 sitemap