Do We Really Love God?

Do you want to know if you really love God? You can ponder these words of our Father St Bernard. They can work as a form of testing if any love is authentic, but they are particularly good to see if we truly love God. This is what Bernard says in his treatise On loving God, “True love is content with itself; it has its reward, the object of its love. Whatever you seem to love because of something else, you do not really love; you really love the end pursued and not that by which it is pursued.”

Are we looking for a reward for spending time in prayer or participating in the Eucharist? Bernard says,“No one, for example, pays a hungry man to eat, a thirsty man to drink, or a mother to feed the child of her womb. . . . How much more the soul that loves God seeks no other reward than that God whom it loves. Were the soul to demand anything else, then it would certainly love that other thing and not God.” In the Our Father and in many other forms of prayer, we present to our Father in heaven our needs and the needs of others, but if we only come to Him to get something, we are missing the greatest gift of prayer: to remain in love, to get closer and closer to the one we love, the one who loved us first.

Love is more than a feeling, it’s a form of being, a form of living, of knowing, of giving and receiving. When we realize that we are falling short of this love, we can look deeper to find the Holy Spirit in us crying out, “Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). He, the bond of love between the Father and the Son, teaches us how to pray and how to love. Come, Holy Spirit, You who are Love, love in me!

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Friends on Earth and in Heaven

Our Cistercian Fathers like speaking about the benefits and sweetness of spiritual friendship. Often, they refer to Jesus’ friendship with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus of Bethany—the saints we celebrate today. They say that Jesus’ earthly friendships sanctified friendship itself and made it a form of preparation for encountering and welcoming the Lord. How? Saint Aelred explains the process in greater detail in his book on Spiritual Friendship . He gets practical, as monastic writers usually like to do, and offers ways to discern and form good friendships. In an earlier work, The Mirror of Charity , Aelred explains briefly one of the great benefits of friendship: my friend’s soul and good heart give me extra space to welcome the presence of God. In my friend, I can possess graces that would be a bit too much for me on my own. This would be part of the joy in heaven, don’t you think? There, our capacity to receive God’s love, beauty, truth, and goodness would be increased tremendously as ...

I found him whom my soul loves!

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