God's Love

"Our  culture has lost its sense of God's tangible persence and activity in our world.  We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships.  But, if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises.  It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God's tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can  be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ's passion, death, and ressurection ."

                                                                    Pope Francis - Lumen Fidei - #17

What this says to me is that those who have become so involved in the secular style of our social fabric have turned their back on the reality of God's love being so involved in our lives that it makes a definite impression on our lives.  This is not helped by those who call themselves Christian but spend all of their time worrying about getting into heaven and all of the scrupulous activites that will get them there.  In such an effort, they overlook how each day we can and should express the ineffable love of God to each other in our reactions to other needs, compassion to their circumstances, and  activity to help improve their lives over our own personal needs.  In other words, personal faith has  become so prevalent that the faith and love of abiding communites has been shifted to a secondary level of experience.  It is the communal love of the Trinity that provides us the example of our own communal experience and how we are to interact with each other in grace, charity, and goodness.  As we move through our daily lives, we must refocus on the action of God's love in our lives and its persitent pursuit of us to become involved in the sarament of living the shared life, not ony with Him, but with each other as equals and brothers and sisters in Christ.

We are reminded today in the last two lines of Psalm 18 into day's Office of the Readings, "With you I can break through any  barrier, with my God I can scale any wall."  So when we fully cooperate with this pervasive love of God, we can defeat any obstacle to bringing this love into our world.  May God help us learn to give up our own pride and follow His gracious, generous, and fulfilling infective love.