By Sister Teresa Christine, O.C.D.
Love makes us do crazy things. Someone who truly loves will do anything for the sake of the beloved, whether it is a parent’s sacrifice for their child, or the love between husband and wife. It’s the nature of love to give of itself, because the source of all love is God. And of all the lovers in history, God is the most extravagant. He held nothing back from us when He sent His Son to become one of us and willingly lay down His life to bring us into communion with Himself. God is totally given to us, and He has proven it to the last drop of His blood.
St. Paul tells us that we love God because He first loved us. He is the initiator. And when we come into contact with who He is, a force of love takes hold of our hearts. This is just as real as gravity; the force of desire to give ourselves in return to Him who loves us.
I’ve often heard Bishop Robert Barron refer to what he calls, “the lave of the gift,” a kind of spiritual physics whereby the more we give of ourselves, the more fulfilled we will be. This lave of love has been rediscovered again and again by Christ’s disciples down through the ages, who find the shocking truth that Jesus meant what He said; that to gain our life, we must lose it. Give up your life, He said. If you cling to it, it will be crushed. Count everything else as rubbish. Just come follow me. We might recoil at the radicalness of His call, but all who have embraced it have found the sweetness and surpassing worth of knowing Christ. To be totally given to God is the tremendous call of every human heart. Those of us called to religious life give a radical outward sign of what is offered to all. Only a lover can understand the logic of self-surrender.
God is the one who calls us to the precise circumstances where He desires us to be, if we allow Him to lead. But to be totally given within those circumstances, which to us might seem random, messy, and sometimes painful – that’s where we need God’s grace to strengthen us. We grow in our ability to trust God over time and we need Him to walk beside us every step.
We love because He first loved us. And oh, how He loves us. When we ask His grace to enable us to respond with our own love in return, then we will discover the pearl of great price; the secret of saints, that where all is given, nothing is lacking.
