VIII — INFINITE LOVE

Presence of God. — O my God, who are all love, kindle in me the flame of charity.

Meditation

1 — Sacred Scripture tells us: “Deus charitas est” (1 Jn. 4:16), God is love, eternal, infinite, substantial love. As all that is in God is beautiful, good, perfect, holy, so all that is in God is love: his beauty, his wisdom, his omnipotence, his providence, and even his justice is love. Love is perfect and holy when it is directed with all its strength to the supreme Good, preferring It to all goods. This is the love with which God loves Himself, precisely because He is the Good, the only supreme and eternal Good to whom no good can be preferred. The infinite love God bears to Himself is therefore by its nature all holy and has nothing to do with what we call selfishness or self-love, by which we love ourselves with disordered affection, so as to prefer ourselves - in little or in much and sometimes even in everything - to God, supreme Good. We are selfish because we tend to love ourselves excluding every other affection; but God is so free from every shadow of selfishness that, while loving Himself infinitely and being totally satisfied in his infinite good, He tends by his nature to pour out his love also outside Himself. Thus God loves creatures. He does not truly love them because in them there is some good that attracts Him, but it is He Himself who, loving them, creates good in them. “God’s love,” says St. Thomas, “is the cause that infuses and creates goodness in things” (I, q. 20, a. 2). This, then, is how God loves us: with totally gratuitous and free love, with supremely pure love, with love that is at once benevolence and beneficence - benevolence that wills our good, beneficence that does our good. Loving us, God calls us to life, infuses grace in us, urges us to good, invites us to holiness, draws us to Himself, makes us share in his eternal happiness. All that we are and have is gift of his infinite love.

2 — “God first loved us,” exclaims the apostle St. John (1 Jn. 4:10), and in fact He has loved us from eternity. We were in nothingness; yet we were already in God’s thought, and seeing us He loved us and decreed to call us to existence in preference to innumerable other beings. “With everlasting love I have loved you, and therefore I have drawn you to myself full of compassion” (Jer. 31:3): this is how God Himself reveals to us the story of our life, which is the story of his love for us. A story that, once begun, admits no end, because God’s love has no end. Sin alone has the sad possibility of interrupting it; but in itself God always loves us and will love us with unceasing, infinite, eternal, immutable, most faithful love. God loves us when He consoles us, but He loves us also when He tests us and leaves us in discouragement. He loves us when He gives us joy with full hands, but He loves us also when He afflicts us in sorrow. His consolations are love, but no less so are his chastisements and trials. In every circumstance, even the saddest and most painful, we are always surrounded by his love, which can only be love of good and therefore infallibly wills our good even when it leads us along the harsh and hard way of suffering. God “makes us die and makes us live... scourges and saves us” (cf. 1 Kgs. 2:6; Tob. 13:2), always because of his love. Indeed, it is not rare that He strikes more those whom He loves more, “because,” says the Holy Spirit, “acceptable men are tried in the furnace of humiliation” (Sir. 2:5). And St. Teresa of Jesus states: “This [suffering] is what the Father gave to Him whom He loved most of all [Jesus]... As long as we are here below these are his gifts. He gives them according to the love He bears us: He gives more to one He loves more, less to one He loves less” (Cam. 32, 7).

To believe in God’s love, to believe in it firmly even when He strikes what we have dearest, here is the program of the soul that wants to trust blindly in infinite Love.

Colloquy

“Teach me, O my God, poor as I am, how much I ought to love You, and I will love You with all my heart, with all my soul, because You were the first to love me. Behold, I exist because You created me, and from eternity You established to create me and number me among your creatures. And whence to me this, most benign Lord, most high God, most merciful Father? By what merits of mine, by what grace of mine, did it please your Majesty to create me? I was not and You created me. I was nothing and from nothing You brought me forth, making me something. And what thing? Not a drop of water, not fire, not bird or fish or some brute animal..., but You created me little less than the angels, since like them I received reason to know You and, knowing You, I can love You. And I, O Lord, by your grace am man and can be your child by grace, which the other creatures cannot. This has done your grace alone, your goodness alone, so that I might be participant of your sweetness. Grant me, therefore, the grace to be grateful to You, You who from nothing created me!” (St. Augustine).

“O my God, infinite Wisdom, without measure and without limits, above all angelic and human intelligences! O Love who love me more than I know how to understand and love myself! I marvel, almost to going out of myself, in considering the love You have borne us and bear us, despite what we are.

“How could my will not feel inclined to love You? O Lord, I have received from You so many demonstrations of love and I desire to repay You at least in some way. What strikes me most is the thought that You, true lover, not only do not abandon me, but always remain near me to give me being and life. I understand that a better friend I can never find” (T.G. Ex. 17, 1; PA. 1, 7; cf. M. II 4).