DEUS CARITAS EST (God is Love)

A friend of mine once asked me, where do you begin when someone is curious about Catholicism and wants to know more?  For someone who knows little about the faith, I suggested the best place to begin is painting with them the image of God is love.  This is one of the first images that I learned of God: God is love all the time!  The very nature of God is love.  That means it is not something God shows, as in God is loving, but something that characterizes who God is, love.  For this reason, God loves us because of who God is, not because who we are or what we do.  The fact that God loves us will never change.  God sets his love upon us because God freely chooses to be in accord with God’s nature.  We are made in the image of God and we are able to love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).

We forget this sometimes because we feel that we are not good enough or holy enough.  As the song (“You Are More”) by Tenth Avenue North suggests: we are more than the choices that we’ve made, we are more than the sum of our past mistakes and we are more than the problems we create.  We are indeed more than our faults and failures simply because we can imagine a God that thinks of us and smiles (Anthony de Mello).  This is because we don’t need to do great things in order to impress God.  We are not called to duplicate Mother Teresa or anyone else on this earth.  What we are called to is to realize our authentic selves.  To be a saint, Thomas Merton wrote, is to be yourself. 

Today marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Vatican II Council.  One of my favorite documents that were produced from the council is Gaudium Et Spes (Joy and Hope).  What a wonderful reminder as we kick off the Year of Faith.  Every morning as we wake up this year, let us be reminded of the message of hope in the incarnation on Christmas day and the joy in the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.