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«Deus Caritas Est» - «God is Love»

By Suzanne Lenhe

Kraainem (19 March 2006).- The Season of Lent is offered to us each year as an opportunity to take stock of our lives. In heeding God’s call, we are asked to draw closer to God and to our neighbour in need. 
Pope Benedict XVIth’s first encyclical can help us on this Lenten journey. It is an invitation to reflect on the central tenets of our faith, in order to renew and deepen our commitment to Christ. The encyclical reminds us of the profound interconnection between the love of God and the love of neighbour. Our love – in all its different manifestations as eros and agape - is ultimately one, since it is always rooted in God’s prior love for us. Because of that gratuitous gift of love, most deeply and perfectly embodied in the life and death and rising of Jesus, we are in turn empowered to love. Our life journey is to be an ongoing exodus – a journey of liberation of the self in self-giving, patterned on the sacrifice of Christ. In the concern for the good of the beloved, authentic love is gradually purified. 
But the Pope stresses that one needs to receive love in order to be able to give it; hence the need to keep returning to the ultimate source in God. ‘This process is always open-ended; love is never «finished»...throughout life it changes and matures...The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God’s will increasingly coincide: God’s will is no longer for me an alien will...but it is now my own will, based on the realisation that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.’
We are nourished on this journey by prayer and by participating in the sacraments. The eucharistic celebration draws us out of ourselves towards Jesus and also towards unity with other communicants: one bread, one body.‘Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself.’ The Pope stresses that ‘I cannot possess Christ just for myself!’ God’s love comes to us in bodily form, so that His work might come alive in us and continue through us. ‘Love of God and love of neighbour have become one: in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God.’
In the second part of the encyclical Benedict XVI discusses the concrete efforts of praticing charity by various church organisations, working in connection with other charitable bodies, and by individual Christians in their own sphere of life. He insists upon the need to keep both material and spiritual hungers in view, thus serving the whole human being – both body and soul. Our faith becomes active through love and can express itself in witness through action, words or silence, depending on the situation. We should uphold our conviction that ‘love is possible (despite all the agony and destruction around us and that) ‘we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God.’ 

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