RC questions my affirmation: “God loves you the way you are.”
She writes to me,
“Father, I have a need for clarification:
You used the expression about God’s love for me: “He loves me just the way I am.”
I take umbrage at that expression, as well as the adjective ‘unconditional’ about love.
Now, I think that what you meant in telling me that God loves me just as I am is that he
doesn’t want me to think that because of the sins I repent of and the defects I deplore that
He doesn’t love that self of mine, precisely as He sees me repenting and struggling.
He doesn’t want me to think all day: RC – sinner and weak miserable wretch.
Instead, he wants me to think all day something more like ‘RC, in God’s eyes, you are so
dear and beautiful struggling so hard and loving Me and My grace as I make you every day
a better vessel of My love.’
However, since possibly half the Church members think of unconditional love as meaning
that God loves us so much that He doesn’t care if we miss Mass just to sleep in sometimes, or that we are homosexual lovers, or that we use contraception…
I don’t like to hear the words ‘unconditional’ and ‘love you just as you are.’‘”
____________________________________
RC,
When I tell you that “God loves you just the way you are”
I agree that my words can be easily misunderstood. I certainly do not mean that God’s love is irrelevant to His justice or that our sins do not impede the sense we have of his love.
If we die in a state of mortal sin His love will have proven inefficacious.
Allow me to explain myself.
I begin by declaring again that God loves you unconditionally… albeit one may not be able to encounter that love because of sin or lack of Faith.
But whether your soul is in a state of sin or grace is irrelevant regarding the love He has for you and has already shown you.
Is it not true that Christ died for each one of us for love, while we were yet sinners (Rom 5:8)?
How He so desires to love us into becoming the perfection of His love!
We remember that we can only love ourselves and others, because He first loves us (1 Jn 4:19).
So the first step in attaining the perfection of His love, is to believe in His particular love for You and I.
Love is a supernatural virtue that God must bestow.
I know that experiencing God’s love is very difficult for us, especially after the initial honeymoon of our first encountering Jesus’s love.
We want to feel His love as before but, in God’s wisdom, He must ween us from our dependence upon a ‘sensual’ awareness of His love and enter more deeply into the Holy Spirit, who is love.
This entering is a trial!
And this is the trial that He mercifully leads us through: to have to believe in His love when we don’t feel or sense it or believe ourselves to be worthy of it.
It is easy to love God when we feel His love, but do we still love Him when we don’t feel His love?
The transition from our natural, sensual love to divine love requires great trust and perseverance in Faith. We are yet sensual and not yet spiritual so as to grasp God’s love.
We are proud and have not the necessary humility to accept His love for your and me.
As St. Paul teaches, the sensual mind cannot attain to the knowledge and love of God for this is “spiritually judged ” (1 Cor 2:14).
How do we come to “spiritually judge” God’s love for us?
It is to pass through a certain darkness, what St. John of the Cross terms the “Dark Night of the Senses.”
It is darkness because we cannot proceed by feeling but only by Faith.
We persevere by believing in His love and are forced to reject all temptation to doubt, discouragement or apathy.
We learn to trust. And is this not the heart of Faith, RC, to trust?
What this perserverance in trust eventually yields is humility, the humility to believe that we really do not deserve His love yet, incredibly, how much He loves us, you and me!
Only in this way is God glorified in loving us.
In my pride, I cannot help but feel that somehow I deserve God’s love.
This does not glorify God.
To the contrary, humility reveals how God has freely chosen to love me… to His glory.
God’s love is a supernatural virtue that He mercifully bestows upon those who persevere in Faith.
It requires the correspondence of habitual practice of Faith.
This growth is not easy.
Our “flesh” fights against our efforts to believe, to hope and to love.
But it does get easier.
Jesus said (paraphrasing), “if you love me you will keep my commands and I will love you and reveal Myself to you.”
He reveals Himself as loving you.
And you come to know how beloved your are of Him.
For my part, at first, I only see my difficulty in keeping His commandments.
But as I grow in dependence upon His mercy, forgiveness and love, I acquire that necessary humility without which I cannot accept His love.
As I grow in knowledge of my humility, I come to realize that it is His love and not my works that makes me beloved of Him.
This is what it means to “spiritually judge” God’s love for you and me.
But my humility yet protests: “how can God love me unconditionally while I am a sinner? as you say RC. In His divine foreknowledge He ‘loves’ the person I am coming to be… yet, mysteriously, it is me, the person I am now, that He loves!
God sees me now, mysteriously, as the person He foresees me to be, His new creation in Christ. The person I am coming to be.
God is outside of time. He sees us as already with Him in heaven… but not yet!
This is not some pie-in-the-sky theological hypothesis.
God loves real persons, the persons we are… the real you, His daughter for all eternity RC.
I believe that the Father foresaw you the moment He first created the world… as His beloved daughter!
This truth can liberate us from our false self-love or pride hidden within us,
Pride was symbolized by the response of Adam and Eve after committing their Original Sin in the Garden of Eden.
They hid from God.
In our selfish pride, we still ‘hide’ behind the masks we use to cover the poor person we think we are because of our sin.
This hiding, often unconscious, makes us take pride in things that glorifies self and not God.
Pride is said to be the most deadly of the capital sins.
It causes us to want to be somebody we’re not.
On the contrary, humility is the capacity to accept myself as I truly am… before Him, nothing less nothing more.
It is the freedom to be transparent, to stand without the “fig leaves” of shame before God, and man, whole and fulfilled in the righteousness of Christ.
By faith, I stand before God in humility, without fear or shame,
He has already bestowed the grace of conversion and washed away my sins.
I am content and complete in who I am in Christ because in this Grace.
This is in despite my past failings.
Oh, the wonder of His love! …just as in the parable of the prodigal son.
He will never reject His own.
St. Paul can say that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1).
By Faith, remaining in Christ, God cannot reject you any more than reject His ‘first-born’ Son.
And how much more will He respond to your desire, your ‘hope’ to know the fullness of His love.
I am now thinking of St. Paul’s words to the Romans.
He writes, “and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out
within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Rom 5:5).
Elsewhere he writes that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.”
Faith yields Hope, and Hope yields Love.
Therefore our task in this spiritual life is to believe and hope in His love… and that hope
will not disappoint… because His love actually frees us from our desire to sin and, more importantly, makes us ‘immune’ to the concupiscence that draws us towards sin.
So the challenge for all of us is to believe in AND receive His love.
This is by His grace and our acceptance of that grace.
Another point, His love for you is personal.
In fact, everyone who comes to know His love is surprised as to ‘why He so loves them.?
What a wonderful thing!
Once we experience this everything else in life pales and our lives find their true purpose, which is our ‘personal’ relationship with Him.
Without this ‘personal’ relationship with God, we will tend to measure His love for us based upon external things… what we do to be worthy of being loved.
That leads to the venial sin of despairing in His love.
Or, worse, falsely presuming that He loves us, while freely sinning, as you so wisely noted.
These are the two sins against theological or supernatural Hope: despair and presumption.
God’s love sets us free from the power and will to sin.
St. John writes, “Whoever loves… in such a person there is no cause for stumbling” (1 Jn 2:10).
He who loves no longer desires to sin!
In believing in His personal love we are empowered to choose the Holy way.
It is written: “like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, ‘YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY’” (1 Pet 1:15-16).
We are not born saints, rather we come to be saints by the gift of God, which is Faith.
And to the degree we believe and obey, Christ will reveal Himself to us and we will love Him above all else, for he who loves does not sin (1 Jn 3:9).
Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you the Holy Spirit” (Jn 14:15,16).
The Gift of His Spirit is given to those who love Him above all else and have proven it by their faithfulness in trial… the necessary “Nights” of our growth in the spiritual life.
His love grows gradually depending upon our correspondence to grace.
There are no shortcuts.
Perhaps this gradualness weeds out the lukewarm, half-hearted who follow Christ for selfish gain.
I like what Edith Stein (then St. Benedicta of the Cross) writes, “How can human beings attain
to the love of God, whom they do not see unless God loves them first?”
Of course, Edith is quoting St. John.
She then responds to her own question of how we attain to the love of God: “But in order to give ourselves to him in love we must first learn to know him as the divine lover.”
But it all comes back to the simple conviction that we hold to by faith, a conviction that grows steadily as we nurture it.
Listen to what St, Diadiochus wrote, “The measure of a person’s love for God depends on how deeply they are aware of God’s love for him or her.”
Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (Jn 15:9)?
We abide in His love by making frequent spiritual communions.
There is the practice of extending Holy Communion at Mass throughout the whole day by making acts of loving union with God. I know that you are a daily communicant RC.
Frankly, I do not know how we can come to this degree of sanctity and the revelation of God’s loving presence within us without frequently receiving the Holy Eucharist.
St. Augustine so wisely said, “Love and do what you will.”
In conclusion, living in His love puts us under what St. James calls the “Law of Freedom” (2:12).
It is that wonderful “freedom” to love… and say no to sin.
All the saints knew this love and anyone who loves does not sin for “whoever abides in Him does not sin” (1 Jn 3:6).
.
It is not merely our own power whereby we love, but the Holy Spirit who is acting and loving through us.
How do we receive this power of the Holy Spirit, this power to be loved and to love in turn?
Of course, we must ask for it… and believe that we will receive it.
Again, it comes down to humble Faith that begins as a little mustard seed and grows into a large tree. Belief is the switch that turns on the working of the Holy Spirit within us, for God wills to reveal Himself and give Himself to each one of us.
Yes, I first need to renounce all sin… of course. Then the Holy Spirit comes. He does not merely cover over our concupiscence, rather, He transforms us from within, gradually and gently.
The Holy Spirit is imaged as a gentle dove. He is Gift.
Our Father will not deny this Gift to His children who ask Him for it (Lk 11:13) and seek their destiny in Christ.
Our destiny, what God created us for, is to live forever in His eternal love.
To believe in this Gift of His love should be the act of Faith we make at the start of every prayer.
To seek to grow in this personal relationship with Him should be the purpose of our entire life. A life in beginning here that simply continues uninterruptedly into our next life in heaven.
Truly each one us is loved especially and uniquely now and for all eternity.
In conclusion,
St. Augustine said, “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances; to seek Him, the greatest adventure; and, to find Him, the greatest human achievement.”
The Saints achieved the love of heaven in this life and so can you and I, RC!