Blessed Easter to you!

For my own spiritual growth, I prefer to evaluate how my Lent usually goes.

And in evaluating my Lenten Season during prayer, I came across this significant, albeit dark, thought: One of the most invigorating and wondrous feelings a human being can ever experience is falling in love with someone who is in love with you.  Consequently, one of the most painful feelings, I think, is discovering that the person you are deeply and passionately in love with is in love with someone else.

The elation that you feel when you discover that she is in love with you as well!  That she, in some strange way, feels the exact same way you feel when you see her smile, hear her laugh, see that one look in her eyes.  The brightness that encapsulates the world.  Suddenly, not only is the world liveable—it is a place where you want to live in.  The world truly is a wondrous artpeice of creation, and it is that beautiful artpiece because she is in it, and she feels so passionately—for you!  You don’t deserve it, you kinda didn’t expect it, it’s rather scary—but nonetheless—she loves you, and you love her…and life is…wow.

Yet on the other side…to discover that her laugh, her smile, that one look, is aimed at someone else.  Yes, she is passionately in love.  Her world is better because that special someone is in it.  He makes her happy.  Yet.  Yet.  Yet that special person…sorry, it ain’t you.

Oh God, what a life.

The foundation of the Church’s teaching of the Incarnation of the Christ is that Jesus has the full human experience.  He laugh, he cries, he jokes around.  He drinks (moderately).  He plays practical jokes.  He falls in love.

Jesus has fallen in love…deeply, passionately, wondrously in love…with you.  With the grace of the Fire of God, cooperating with the Father, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity willed you into being. God gets nothing from you existing.  He is perfectly complete with or without you.  Despite this, God had a wonderful idea, and that idea is reading this blog post right now.  To paraphrase Pope Benedict, you are intended, you are loved, you are necessary.

God created you because He is passionately in love with you.

But not only that, He demonstrated His love for you by doing something crazy and dramatic.  Because He knew that love is sacrifice, God died the most dramatic, gruesome and bloody way to show you how much He loved you.  We are told in the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus went into Hell.  Jesus wanted you to be with Him in heaven so badly that went to Hell so that you didn’t have to.

God died for you because He is passionately in love with you.

Yet here I am, and here we are, evaluating how Lent went.  The times I ate meat on Fridays or didn’t perform my entire prayer regimen.  The times where I didn’t want to give a full tithe to the Church, or performed my perfunctory penance—not because I love God, but because I don’t wanna look bad in front of my community.

Moreover, we always say “Perhaps I’ll do better next year” but that isn’t the point.  God is in love with you now.  What am I doing better now?  How am I, here, right now, making my love of God more pure, more amazing, more honest?

Happy Easter, everyone.

Holy Father Dominic, pray for us!