No doubt you have seen shirts or art with words containing Blessed and/or Grateful. For many of us, they can summarize our lives especially in the way we have been embraced, welcomed and loved. I don’t ever remember a time when I haven’t felt love. It started “before we were knitted in our mothers’ wombs” when God knew us, and this love has been nurtured ever since. One of my most profound manifestations of love emanates from the relationship shared with my siblings and their children. If I spend a minute or two reflecting on this blessing, tears fill my eyes. To end a phone conversation with an exchange of “love you” with my 12 nephews and nieces is nurturing, life-giving, life-sustaining and too powerful to fully explain. It speaks of connection, relationship, being cared for and safeguarded.
It is through spiritual direction and the sacrament of reconciliation where I discover in an ongoing way God’s love for me. After each celebration of forgiveness and acceptance of who I am and God’s delight in this, I was growing convinced I understood God’s infinite love, until the next experience of it when I realized that I was only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding how marvelously God loves us. In his most recent book, Greg Boyle, SJ writes, “we are all born into the world wanting the same things, and we are all naked under our clothes. We start from this place, then, of our own unshakable goodness, so we jettison blame and embrace understanding. We see God’s light in everything and thereby choose mysticism over morality. We choose connection, not perfection. We explore the things that help us feel beloved rather than on probation. We want to know the God of love, which is more than knowing the love of God. We long to see the wholeness of things and find our wholeness in Christ.” I have stopped trying “to know the love of God” opting to “know the God of love” in family, self, others, the rejected, forgotten, despised, and pushed to the periphery.
Daily, I try to recall that God loves us “no matter what” without judgment and only with “extravagant tenderness.” This God loves us before we sin after we sin, and yes, even while we are sinning for this is who God is…love. We cannot limit or contain what is limitless and overflowing. Boyle often claims that it is not in God’s DNA to look at us with shame and disappointment but only love. We are who God wants us to be. We are loved. From that starting point, we resonate in this love, find ourselves overpowered by it that we must share this with others. While we may be saddened at the lack of love in our world, church or self (constant fighting, violence, hatred, discord), love eventually frees us from this temporary paralysis to forge a world that Christ wants.
In a recent Advent retreat, a few powerful statements concerning love were shared that were either new to me or expressed before but cherished. St. John of the Cross noted, “in the evening of life we will be judged on love alone.” Another comment recalled something I read and have never forgotten that we are not going to be asked by God how faithful we were to prayer, how considerate to others, generous to those in need, loving to spouse and children, though the answer to these may help answer the only question God is going to ask us: have you ever tried to love? It’s all about love. The Beatles had it right, “love is all you need.” No wonder Francis de Sales quoted from Song of Songs, “we have no bond, but the bond of love which is the bond of perfection.”
Advent provides us the opportunity to welcome the love of God into our hearts daily, so God may make low the mountains of hatred and discontent, fill in the valleys of greed, sin, or whatever keeps us from God and one another. Advent love makes straight crooked paths or winding roads taken by desiring our will rather than God’s. In the faculty dining room of St. Augustine Prep, where our retreat took place, the wisdom of Augustine graces one wall, “love belongs in the relationship of teacher and pupil. Love is necessary to awaken love. It educates the heart. Love seals the work of the teacher.” Love is necessary to awaken love. God is necessary to awaken us and who we are called to be. The hope, peace, and love we celebrate every Advent recalls the first Advent that led to that morning when the world experienced the fulness of God’s love, giving us his only Son, God’s “kiss to humanity” as St. Francis de Sales describes the Incarnation. God sharing his very nature, Emmanuel, God with us, to show us how to love and how to live. The Incarnation continues when this love is manifested in our interactions with one another. May love continue to “educate your heart and seal your work.”
Fr. John J. Fisher, OSFS
Rector
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
Camden, NJ
