God in his infinite goodness draws us to his center, the heart of Christ, whose gravitational waves are love. We are made for the endless love of God and Jesus came precisely to respond to the thirst we experience for the infinite. Yet looking for fulfillment in mere human pursuits will leave us empty, and looking for God outside of the revelation of his son is fraught with risks.
As Augustine writes:
The only way that is infallibly secured against all errors, is when the very same person is at once God and man, God our end, a human being our way.
Saint Augustine (City of God, XI.2)
Jesus Christ in his humanity is the way because he can connect with our humanity, and Christ as God is the end of our life because as God his love is eternal. God loves us so much, he sent His son who is “God from God and Light from Light” to share his very Life with us, and to satisfy our hungry hearts longing for the infinite.
So we are made with a potential to be moved toward God, and on the other hand we’re born as St Thomas Aquinas prayed, “in the double ignorance of sin and ignorance.” What moves us is love, and the type, object, and intensity of our love will determine our trajectory and the place where our movement takes us in the end.
As St Augustine wrote: “My love is my weight.” Augustine explains using ancient physics that “each body with its weight tends to its place; the weight doesn’t just go down, but instead, fire tends upwards; the stone, down; by their weights they move and go to their own place. Oil spilled under water rises above water; the water spilled on top of the oil submerges under the oil: by their weights they move: they go to their own place” (Confessions XIII.10).
Our lives are in constant tension because on the one hand we are sought by Christ, and on the other hand our own resistance weighs us down, or at least temptations to resist His action, might delay us from advancing along the path of grace. The irony is that only Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life that can bring us true and lasting happiness, and yet consciously or unconsciously we may linger and resist because our love for Christ and His values may not be pure from wanting to do things our own way.
Every decision to respond to any given life situation can steer us: towards good or towards evil, towards solidarity or towards selfishness, towards self-control or towards excess, towards peace or towards hate, depending on what we love and how we love. According to what I love, I choose, and according to what I choose, I become, and who I am “weighs” me closer to God or away from God. May we pray to love God above our own pride, which may be hurt and may seek its own ways outside of the Way, perhaps blindly escaping pain. May we pray for healing that our love may be purified and enlightened by contemplating Him; in God’s truth may we be illumined; in God’s goodness may we find joy, and abiding in Him enjoy Him all the more for only in God’s eternity we will find our rest. (City of God XI. 24)
