In my young adult years, I often heard priests, teachers, and campus ministers say, “God loves you.” But, to be honest, this fundamental message didn’t captivate my attention or sink into my soul. “Yeah, yeah…I know God loves me. Of course. He loves everyone. Okay, can we get on to the deeper topics now, like the Eucharist or prayer?”
God’s love for us is something we might know in our heads. But it’s not something most of us fully grasp in our hearts. Yet, if we aspire to move forward in discipleship, we absolutely must encounter this divine love anew—not in an abstract way (“True or False: God loves you”) or in a children’s song way (“Jesus loves me, this I know…”), but personally, profoundly, in a way that turns our world upside down.
Especially in a utilitarian age, we have been trained from our youth to think that love is something based on what we do for others. How useful we are to others, how we make them feel, or how much fun or enjoyment we give them— these are what give our lives value and get other people to love us. Our identity and sense of self are wholly dependent on how well we perform and how we are viewed by others.
Children sometimes grow up feeling loved by their parents for what they achieve in school, on the field, and in their dozens of extracurricular activities. Young people growing up in a digital age are trained to see their value as being based on how well they artificially project themselves, on how many “likes” and comments they get, and on how many “friends” or followers they acquire on social media. Authentic friendship based on two people who seek what’s best for each other is hard to find. Everyone’s in it for themselves. Even in many romantic relationships today, couples are not truly committed to each other—they’re just
committed to the good feelings, emotions, and pleasures they get from each other. Once those feelings and emotions fade, or they can get more pleasure from someone else, the relationship ends and they move on to the next person.
So, when many people feel tremendous pressure to constantly perform well, never to misstep, and desperately to keep up a certain image, it’s no wonder their relationships and identity are built on such shaky ground. Even for some of the most outwardly confident, competent, successful people, the idea of being some-one who is truly lovable—of being loved as a person for one’s own sake—is hard to even imagine. “You mean, me? With all my problems? I could experience authentic, lasting, committed love just for who I am, as I am? I didn’t know such love existed!”
And yet it’s only by coming to know how much my God loves me, as I am, with all my faults and shortcomings, that I can come to see reality properly—most particularly, the reality of my life properly. As Pope St. John Paul II says, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of our Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.”
Prodigals
God often uses moments when we are broken down and stripped of all that we think supports us to bring us to a deeper experience of his love. Even many of us Christians go through life relying on our talent, hard work, popularity, success, looks, or ability to keep others pleased to give us the sense that our lives have meaning. We might know in our heads that there’s more to life than all this, but we still turn to these supports as the foundation for our happiness. But when all is taken away—when we experience broken relationships, health problems, job problems, marriage problems, being overwhelmed by the demands of raising children, or other sufferings—and none of our normal supports are working, the only thing left to cling to is God. It’s then that we come to know God’s love as more than an abstract theory. We experience his love personally supporting us, holding us together, and helping us through.
I’ve had many priests, religious sisters, and lay pastoral workers tell me how they’ve seen this moment over and over again as the crucial turning point for people’s relationships with God. One priest who works with young adults described how many of them feel like trash inside, especially when they admit not having it all together and having struggled with some serious sin. But after a period of time in helping them through their challenges and accompanying them through the process of healing and forgiveness, this priest asks them, “What do you think of the way I responded when you opened up about your struggle?” They all reply with something like, “I couldn’t believe it. You didn’t judge me. You didn’t look down on me or think less of me. You didn’t reject me. You stayed with me all the way.” Then the priest says to them, “If that’s how I—with all my weaknesses and all my human shortcomings—responded, think about how the God whose love is perfect looks at you. He loves you completely. He stays with you.”
At that moment of suddenly realizing the depths of God’s love for them, many young adults melt. It turns their world upside down. They’ve never seen themselves as loved in this way. In fact, it’s a crucial aspect of their conversion: not just their turning away from sinful actions, but their turning away from false views of God and of themselves.
The Father’s Embrace
This is also the climactic turning point in the story of the Prodigal Son. A son who rejects his father, takes his family’s inheritance early, leaves home for a distant land, and squanders the inheritance on immoral living comes to experience his father’s love in a totally new way. Many people think the son’s point of conversion comes when he is living as a slave, hungry and poor, and decides to return to his father. He says to himself, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants’” (Lk 15:17-19).
But another level of conversion happens when he arrives home and encounters something completely unexpected. The son admits his sin, is truly sorry, and turns back to the father—a good first step—but it isn’t enough. He isn’t turning back as a beloved son. He doesn’t view himself as being worthy of that anymore. After all he has done to shame the family, how can he be called a son? The possibility of receiving his father’s love isn’t even on his radar screen. He deserves to be treated as a slave, and the best he can hope for is that the father will pardon him and accept him as a hired worker. As long as he does what he’s told and does good work, he can earn the boss’s approval and merit his wages. That’s why, as soon as he meets his father, he starts saying those words, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son…”
But the father will have absolutely none of this. He cuts his son off and will not allow him to continue his self-effacing sentence. The father embraces him—nothing that the son has done can make the father turn away from him. The father declares the truth that the son can’t see in himself. “This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:24). The parable of the prodigal son is about more than turning away from sin and finding forgiveness. It’s also about turning away from the incorrect picture we have of God and of ourselves. At heart, the conversion in this story involves our very identity as beloved children of God (“This my son…”) and a most unexpected love that turns our world upside down. As Pope St. John Paul II explains, conversion is always the fruit of rediscovering the Father.
Drunk with Love
If we dare to meet God in the valley, we come to experience at a much deeper level how much the Father loves us—as we are, with all our thousands of fears, worries, hurts, suspicions, sins, weaknesses, and failures. God’s love for us is unconditional. It’s not dependent on how we perform. It’s not based on how many prayers we recite, how well we keep our Lenten resolutions, how well our kids behave at Mass, and how often we avoid falling into sexual sin. God loves us, as we are, with all our messiness. He longs for us. He thirsts for us. As we are. Not as we’d like to be.
Yes, Jesus calls us to repent when we sin. And he calls us to the highest standard of holiness: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).
To do that, he needs to forgive us, heal us, change us, and sanctify us. There’s certainly a lot of work to be done in our souls! Good Catholic things. But none of that can happen in a deep, lasting way until we embrace two fundamental truths: the truth about ourselves and the truth about how God sees us. We must face the truth about all our tragic weaknesses and wounds. And then we must see ourselves, even with those failures, in the way God sees us: with a surprising gentleness, patience, and mercy, and with a total, unconditional love that we don’t think we deserve.
And that’s the whole point. It’s not about winning God’s approval or earning his love by doing enough good Catholic things. When we meet God in the valley of humility, we encounter a most unexpected love, a totally free gift that is completely different from our ordinary human experience.
It’s this encounter with God’s personal love that amazed St. Catherine of Siena, who once called God “drunk with love.” It overwhelmed St. Teresa of Calcutta, who couldn’t comprehend how the infinite God loved someone so weak and small as she: “That God is high, transcendent, all-powerful, almighty, I can understand that because I am so small. But that God has become small, and that he thirsts for my love, begs for it—I cannot understand it, I cannot understand it, I cannot understand it.” It made St. Augustine regret that he learned to love God so late. It made St. Dominic weep all night in the chapel. And it drove many saints to the ends of the earth to share this love with souls who didn’t know God.
We’re not talking here about merely recognizing the truth that “God loves me” in the abstract, on a catechism quiz. And we’re not talking about merely being loved as part of group (“God loves everyone. I’m part of ‘everyone’; therefore, God has to love me, too.”) No, we’re talking about God loving you in a unique and unrepeatable way, for he longs for you personally, individually. We’re talking about having your world turned upside down and your view of yourself completely changed, for you begin to see yourself, perhaps for the first time in your life, not in terms of what you do for others nor in terms of your many faults and wounds, but in the way God sees you. And this is a crucial step in maturing as a Christian disciple. It may require many years, in some cases a lifetime, to be reprogrammed from the damage caused by our utilitarian mindset. You can’t earn love, whether from a parent, a friend, a spouse, or a boss. And you certainly can’t earn it from God. It has to be received.
But once this divine love is received, welcomed, and embraced, it changes everything. Indeed, this encounter with God’s love for you, for who you are as you are, is a step in helping you see reality correctly. It is from this fundamental conviction that a soul finds true identity: You are a beloved son or daughter of God, and nothing you’ve done or may do can change that. Your heavenly Father delights in and embraces you.
Living from this embrace gives a much more solid foundation for one’s life. Many of us, unfortunately, go through life with a fragile, artificial confidence—fragile and artificial because it’s based on ourselves (our abilities, our looks, our reputations, how we perform, how we keep people around us happy). None of these things can provide a secure, lasting peace and happiness for our lives. But when we deeply encounter God’s love, we begin to build our lives on solid ground. Our confidence is based not on ourselves but on God’s love for us. When this happens, love is what moves us in all we do, not our trying to perform well to earn love from others or from God.
In closing, consider the following striking words from St. Teresa of Calcutta to the sisters in her religious community, the Missionaries of Charity. Late in her life, one urgent concern she had for her sisters was that many had not allowed themselves to truly encounter Jesus’s love for them. Her pleading words certainly apply to us as well. If she had those concerns for these amazing sisters who give up everything for Jesus and serve the poorest of the poor around the world, imagine what she might say to you and me!
I worry some of you still have not really met Jesus—one-to-one— you and Jesus alone. We may spend time in chapel—but have you seen with the eyes of your soul how He looks at you with love? Do you really know the living Jesus—not from books, but from being with Him in your heart? Have you heard the living words He speaks to you?
Ask for the grace, He is longing to give it. Never give up this daily intimate contact with Jesus as a real living person—not just an idea.
Be careful of all that can block that personal being in touch with the living Jesus. The hurts of life, and sometimes your own mistakes—[may] make you feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves you, is really clinging to you. This is a danger for all of you. And so sad, because it is completely opposite of what Jesus is really wanting, waiting to tell you.
He not only loves you, even more—He longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don’t feel worthy. Even if you are not accepted by others, even by yourself sometimes—He is the one who always accepts you.
My children, you don’t have to be different for Jesus to love you. Only believe—You are precious to Him. Bring all you are suffering to His feet—only open your heart to be loved by Him as you are. He will do the rest.
By Edward Sri, Into His Likeness, Huntington, Indiana, Our Sunday Visitor, 2018, Chapter 7
Ignatius Press / Augustine Institute: https://augustineinstitute.org/
Photo by Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1661–1669, oil on canvas, 262 × 205 cm
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg: https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/
