Fr Foresi. “A God who is hopelessly in love”

“God loves me immensely,” “God loves us immensely.” Saying such a thing – never mind preaching it – in the 1960s would have been a quite novelty, even subversive. Everyone knew it, but in a certain sense it was no longer very present in the personal or communitarian life of good Christians. This discovery of God’s immense love for us, which has marked the beginnings of the spirituality of unity and the experience of Chiara Lubich and her first companions, is presented by Foresi as the foundation of the Christian life, the life of prayer and in the personal calling to a specific vocation. This truth also nourishes and permeates social relationships. It equips us to bring God into our world, to everyone we meet.     

“I remember the deep impression this message left in me too. I perceived the fundamental importance, the complete novelty, I would say, the absolute novelty. Nevertheless, many years later, there is the need to ask how conscious of it I really am. How I fully have understood the significance of these words: “God loves me immensely.”

Our understanding of God and his action in our lives is often in fact determined by our own limited perspectives. We measure according to our own limited feelings and express it according to our own personal categories and thinking. It can then happen that feeling imperfect and therefore far from God’s love, we transfer this perception onto God and end up believing that he could never love us, or, at most, could only love us partially. But this is not the case. God loves us always, infinitely, and his love is near to us and holds us up at each moment of our journey.

If we wanted to sketch images of some of the features of God’s love, the first to stand out would be a familiar one in Holy Scripture, and one found in many spiritual authors: God loves us as a bridegroom loves his bride. Like a man hopelessly in love, he loves us beyond the valor of the one he loves. He loves her to the point of seeing everything in her as beautiful, positive, understandable, even her defects which, when he does notice them, are overlooked and sublimated by love.

But there is one image that also expresses God’s love for us. It is the image of the mother who is always ready to welcome her wayward child, no matter the sorrowful situation he or she may be in. She never reproves but only welcomes and forgets. Because this is what maternal love is: inextinguishable and essential.

When you begin to draw on such love, even if only for a moment, everything is transformed. The life we’ve been given, the world around us, every circumstance happy or sad: everything acquires the mark of God’s personal love for me whom he wants to be holy as he is holy (see 1 pt 1:16). This is the foundation of the entire Christian life: this love of God for each one of us, a love to which we should respond and completely return.”

Pasquale Foresi, Luce che si incarna. Commento ai 12 punti della spiritualità dell’unità, (Rocca di Papa: Città Nuova Editrice, 2014) 29-30.