A crucifix is silhouetted against a stained-glass window at the chapel inside Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Elmira, N.Y. March 18. Good Friday, observed April 18 this year, commemorates the passion and death of Jesus. (CNS photo/Mike Crupi, Catholic Courier) (March 20, 2014)Recently, one of my sixth-grade students commented in religion class, “God must have been really lonely before He created anything.” I responded by explaining to her and the class that God is complete and completely happy in and of Himself, that we cannot add anything to Him, and that He does not need any of us but rather wants us to be a part of His plan. Immediately, my student’s face shone, and I could tell that she understood that this truth shows us even more how much we are loved than if God actually needed us.
Sr. Mary Martha Becnel, OPGod’s love can be easy to generalize, but think about it in the particular and the personal for a moment. God wants you; He desires you. He did not create you out of necessity, but out of a longing to share His very life with you.
We know that our God loves us, but do we also grasp that He desires us? That He is in love with us? Yes, that He even likes us? Do we truly realize that God Himself thirsts for us and that we could not desire Him unless He had first desired us?
And why does He love us? Not because we are perfect, not because of what we’ve done for Him or of what we will one day do for Him, but only because of Who He is, only because He is love. “In this is love,” St. John says, “not that we have loved Him, but that He has loved us…” (1 John 4:10).
We can never earn God’s love; it is a gratuitous gift. There is nothing we can do to make Him love us more — no amount of prayers or good works — because He does not love us because of who we are or what we have done, but because of Who He is.
This, of course, is not an excuse for us to live however we would chose to live. If we are truly open to receive this unconditional love of our Father, His love and His grace will transform how we live our lives, how we pray, how we interact with others. When we live our lives in light of the fact that we have been desired and chosen by our God Who freely pours Himself out for us — becoming one of us and dying to save us — we will in turn desire to pour ourselves out in love for Him and all those He loves.
May we live today and every day with the knowledge that we can love only because “He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Sr. Mary Martha Becnel is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
