Getting to know Love

“…everyone who loves … knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 J 4:7-8)

Today’s world does not believe that God is love, but that love is a god. It is not a simple reversal of order. It is an absolutely different idea. God is a person. The only way to know him is to understand His true nature. And His true nature is love. Action follows being. God, who is love, loves. From love (noun) to love (verb). So “everyone who loves … knows God”.

Today’s readings remind me of the first encyclical letter of our beloved bl. John Paul II: “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself”…. The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he “gained so great a Redeemer”, and if God “gave his only Son “in order that man “should not perish but have eternal life”” (RH 10).

“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 J 4:10).