Years ago, a now-deceased friend of mine came out of a short spiritual direction/confession session, and he was the closest to floating on air that a person on earth can be.

 

Somehow during those few minutes the reality of God’s love for him had sunk in. Deep inside he had experienced it, and I’ve never seen another person glow with joy like he did that day.

 

Theologian and author Edward Sri, in a book (“Into His Likeness”) provided by my parish for Lent this year, speaks about what is too typical for us: thinking “that love is something based on what we do for others. How useful we are ... how we make (others) feel ... these are what give our lives value and get other people to love us ...”

 

As time goes on, we get used to giving and receiving love within such conditions, and we likely begin to believe that’s as good as it gets. We learn to pull away from people who are mean and gravitate toward those who treat us well. And we become resigned to the loss of friends and a feeling of distance with family over issues or simply because our interests have gone in different directions.

 

All of that has us guarding our hearts — deliberately or unconsciously.

 

“Even for some of the most outwardly confident, competent, successful people, the idea of being someone who is truly lovable — of being loved as a person for one’s own sake — is hard to even imagine,” Sri says. It is indeed difficult to picture what we have never experienced.

 

The people around us are incapable of modeling for us God’s kind of unconditional love. The lives of the saints provide us with glimpses, but they had their personalities, learning curves and stumbling blocks like everyone else. 

 

Only Jesus truly embodied God’s love here on earth. That might be why the more we study His life, and the more we receive Him in the Eucharist, the greater the chance that we’ll be able to trust Him and open our hearts to His love.

 

That step of welcoming Him into our hearts takes courage — a willingness to trust Him beyond all the earthly logic we have gained from experience. It seems smarter to remain a step back from the door where He knocks, perhaps talking with Him through the keyhole and sliding our gifts to Him under the door.

 

We maintain a certain control if we keep the door of our inner heart shut. Throwing it open and letting Jesus see our dirty dishes ... and muddy floors ... and messy bathrooms risks His disgust and rejection.

It is a common struggle to like and admire Jesus while keeping Him at arm’s length. 

 

Later in the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, Sri says, she worried that many of her good sisters, he quotes, “still have not really met Jesus — one-to-one — you and Jesus alone.”

 

Mother Teresa called it a “danger” when the pains of life and our own mistakes keep the knowledge of the love of God in our heads because we “feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves (us), is really clinging to (us).”

 

Earlier in her life, Mother Teresa herself had struggled with the meaning of such a powerful love: “That God is high, transcendent, all-powerful, almighty, I can understand because I am so small,” she said. “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.”

 

His is the love we need in order, first of all to feel safe, and secondly to feel so safe we can risk everything for God and become one of His saints.

 

Sri quotes a little more from Mother Teresa, and perhaps her words of experience can help us: “Not only (does) He love 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 ... only open your heart to be loved by Him as you are.”