What areas of your life are you holding back and keeping from the dominion of God’s selfless love? - Daily Reflections October 23,2013

ARE YOU FREE YET?

 

One of the most important truths of the spiritual life is this: God does not need us. He is God. He is sufficient by Himself and therefore, He doesn’t need anything from us. Long before we came into being, He was already God. He will still be God long after we are gone. So, why did God create us? Because He is simply good — overwhelmingly good. The philosophers call God bonum diffusivum sui – good that simply overflows itself.

       The Bible tells us that human hands cannot serve Him for He has no needs (see Acts 17:25). At Mass, the priest acclaims aloud in the preface: “You have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank You is itself Your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to Your greatness but makes us grow in your grace...” Because He has no needs, it means that we were simply loved into being. We were created for no instrumental purpose on the part of God at all. Thomas Aquinas defines love as “loving the other as other.” It’s different with us — we love ourselves through the other because we can be very needy people. Because God has no needs, we can be assured that He will not manipulate us. This is such comfort. Before God, we can utterly relax. We do not have to fear or doubt — anything that God does and proposes is not for His sake but for ours.

       This is the reason why Paul, in today’s First Reading, speaks of a sweet kind of slavery — a slavery of justice, a slavery that leads to life: “Thanks be to God, though once you were slaves of sin, you sincerely obeyed that rule of teaching which was imparted to you; freed from sin, you became slaves of justice.” This is where the irony lies. We readily enslave ourselves to sin, which leads to nothing but death and destruction. We hesitate to surrender to God when such surrender leads to life and flourishing.

       Let us have confidence in this great paradox. The more we surrender ourselves to God, the more we discover ourselves. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, life to the full” (John 10:10). The more we submit ourselves to His dominion, the freer we become! Fr. Joel O. Jason

 

REFLECTION QUESTION: What areas of your life are you holding back and keeping from the dominion of God’s selfless love?

 

Take and receive, O Lord, my liberty. Take all my will, my mind, my memory. Amen