Because God is Love
By scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

God creates because He loves, because God is Love.

Creation points to Man, because only a personal entity, capable of knowledge beyond the sense level and of freely loving and gratefully accepting the gift of existence, can offer the friendly relationship required by the very nature of love. Love seeks nothing except its own reflection from the beloved, who returns that light and warmth towards its source in an exchange where the giver is not impoverished but a shared satisfaction and happiness is found by both.

Love is the reason for the most unimaginable mystery: that God became Man, one of us. Love happens between equals, or makes equals of those who love. Thus God's omnipotence facing the infinite abyss of distance from Creator to creature, bridges the chasm by joining in one Person Divinity and humanity. A vital flow of the deepest activity, touching the intimate natures of God and Man, gives human life to God and fills the human nature with eternal life.

Forever will be true that a Man is God; and also that God is our brother. The transforming power of love has made God a Baby, the perfect expression of helpless love whose only strength is his weakness trusting the love that holds him amid happy smiles. In return, he can only offer another smile that generously repays any sacrifice or pain.

Christmas is the glory of having God among us, in our family, in that embrace that is the only proper answer of a human heart to a child who needs warmth and help. The embrace has to be most joyful and total when we know that the Child is the Infinite, hidden in a handful of love.

That God loves us, that He seeks our friendly intimacy and He enjoys our closeness, that He wants to share our dreams and our work and our sufferings, is something almost impossible to really believe, being incomprehensible. More so when we realize that this is applicable to every human person, with a name, and with limitations, defects and quirks that even our closest family might find unbearable.

God does not seek the love of an abstract "Humanity" defined philosophically, but the warm response of every one of us in our own time and place. I can shout in my amazement: God loves me! God wants to be my friend and my brother!

Because God is Love, He found the point of contact with Humanity in the most pure love we can offer Him: a Mother's love. The Sun of generous self-giving of the Divinity was cleanly reflected in Mary, the beloved of God, full of His presence and His grace. God saw His image in her and the essential Image of the Father -the Word- took human flesh in her womb.

Mary is totally love as well, in her confident humility that led her to want to belong to God entirely, as the answer to God who wanted to be entirely hers. Love cannot set limits to its gifts and be true love. The God-Man shared our life, needed protection and constant care as a Baby, grew up and learned as a Child, worked with his own hands, found friends and enemies, sufferings and joys, loneliness and warm acceptance.

Thus it became true that love makes equals, in everything that God could do to be like us, even to the point of undergoing death. Once more, it makes us dizzy to think that all this a historical event, not some poetic fiction that we might consider more or less plausible. Christianity is not a philosophical doctrine or an ethical code or a symbolic mythological tale; it is essentially the acceptance in our personal life of the intimate, affective and effective consequences of being loved by God. A God who was born in Bethlehem to be forever my brother, because He wants us to be together for all eternity: God's gifts are irrevocable and there can be in Him no wearing out that would imply getting disillusioned or tired with us.

If God were less than infinitely wise and all-knowing, we might fear that sooner or later He would realize that we aren't worth having as friends, leading Him to seek others more in accord with His infinite perfection. But since no ignorance or unforeseen event can give Him a second thought, we are certain that His love is eternal.

The program for personal holiness -to fill us with divine life- comprises only one lesson: to love the Lord with our entire heart, mind and strength. This is the First Commandment that, from the first Revelation, presents God as a personal party to the dialogue that constitutes love. Everything else flows from this mutual giving of self in which God sees all creation as destined to Man, and we see God present in it, reflected and acting in each creature: "Loving Him in all things and all things in Him" is the statement of St. Ignatius that crowns the Spiritual Exercises.

The triumph of Christ after the Passion and the promise of a future Resurrection that will make us sharers in his glorious life, are the final consequences of a love that cannot accept being separated. This is why Christ says, in his priestly prayer to the Father (at the Last supper), that He wants to have with Him in his glory those He has received from the Father as friends. Not only that: He will be with us, "every day, until the end of time".

The basis for loving others is that same love of God, who is found especially present in his children who are his "Images and Likenesses". Without this root -love of the Father- there can be no generous and lasting love for our brethren; if brotherly love is absent, our claim of loving God is empty and unreal.

When Christ instituted the Church as his Body, He joined us to his own vital activity, thus extending his presence to every place and time of human history. In the Eucharist He again realizes something incomprehensible: the bodily union with our personal humanity in the most absolute intimacy, something never dreamed in purely human love, becoming for each one of us "Flesh of our flesh and Blood of our blood". One can find no other logical explanation for something that sounds "crazy" even as a hypothesis except to repeat once more: "God IS Love".

If holiness is love and its consequences, these are more evidently found in the special calling to exclusive intimacy that constitutes a religious vocation. The disciple who follows this call and answers with an irrevocable "YES" is telling Christ that He will fill the new way of life with his friendship: no other family ties, or wealth or personal preferences, will be the reason for any thought, word or action until death.

This is why the religious vows have been compared to martyrdom, a total gift of self, not for a momentary heroic act, but for an entire life, where at each instant Mary's "FIAT" -let it be so!- is pronounced again without restrictions, giving God a signed blank check for anything He might want. Life will be the constant effort to better love and serve the One who is the only treasure of a heart that has realized that God has wanted that special relationship.

Revelation and Theology -the effort of a Faith seeking to understand God and his plans- are thus summed up in LOVE. No mere human reasoning can take us to this sublime level where our logic is lost facing the infinite: time and again we must say: "This is so, because God is Love". Seeing the Baby at Bethlehem, before the bleeding Christ on Calvary, adoring the humble Presence of the Eucharist, the only possible reason is an eternal and infinite Love.

The heroic deaths of the martyrs and the hidden sacrifice of thousands living for God through the centuries can only be explained by that mysterious "craziness" that we call Love.

It is the most fantastic "invention" of God, an expression of his essence and of the intimate life of the Trinity. BECAUSE GOD IS LOVE.