VATICAN - WORDS OF DOCTRINE: Rev Nicola Bux and Rev Salvatore Vitiello -
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) -
"God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles. The "name" of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom.[...]The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted upon his "genome", the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity
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, of God as Love. ".
These words of Benedict XVI at the Angelus on Sunday 7 June, prompt reflection on the fact that, as Saint Augustine says, in the human heart there dwells continual disquietude, a seeking for the truth, for meaning which corresponds to reason and supports life on this earth; this truth is not something abstract, impersonal or independent from us, instead it manifests itself in a concrete encounter with man. The Gospels speak of the "encounters" of Jesus, God made man, who enters into a relationship with man, to reveal that man's being is in itself, relationship, it tends towards the encounter - never once and for all achieved, but always new, happening again every day – and so we deduce that our reason corresponds and adheres ultimately only to the Word of God, the Logos.
Nevertheless, this relationship between man and the Word of God, is not "symmetric", it does not consist simply in reciprocal 'reflection' one in the other. Instead it is, in a sense, an a-symmetric relationship, but of precise origin: the initiative was taken by the Logos when He allowed himself to be touched and to be heard, that is, he allowed himself to be known in the flesh, but without imposing himself, like a 'Deus ex machina', instead asking for our "yes!" which he continues to ask of every man and woman, whom he wishes be involved with their intelligence, their flesh, in full and total freedom.
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This "request for total involvement" happened in primis with Mary, perfect emblem of obedient humanity, when at the Annunciation, God requested her consent: in fact only in this way can freedom become once again authentic, because it is related to the truth. Therefore everything given to us by the Word in abundance, is given, St Paul reminds us, so that everything may become "ours".
This is quaerere Deum, acknowledging his Presence, which is what we seek when we enter into relation with those we love, in a love humanly never definitive, but always new, and which demands human reciprocity!
The Pope writes: "It is characteristic of mature love that it calls into play all man's potentialities; it engages the whole man, so to speak. Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved […].But this process is always open-ended; love is never "finished" and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. Idem velle atque idem nolle [9] —to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing—was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought. 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:" (Deus caritas est, n 17).
Man's being "image and likeness" of God, on the one hand, as the Fathers recall, is a fact inscribed in the "human genome ", on the other, it is a process of "continual restoring " of the image lost due to human frailty, tragic consequence of original sin.
From this we see that the work of the Creator is without a solution of continuity with the work of the Redeemer and that of the sanctifying Spirit. Since Jesus Christ, as St Ambrose affirms, was crucified for sin and now lives in God, it is He who "restores" our human nature: indeed it is in His "image and likeness" that every man and woman created by God is called to rise again and to live.
(Agenzia Fides 18/6/2009; righe48, parole 688)
