Salesian Literature

Salesian Views on

::   Generosity  ::   Gentleness  ::   God and Man relationship

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Divine-Human Relationship

 

Relationship between God and man

Treatise on the Love of God, 1:15. The human heart’s natural delight, natural trust in God is due solely to the relationship between soul and God. A close bond it is, but a hidden one; known to all, yet understood by few; undeniable, but unfathomable. 

 

Our natural tendency to love God

Treatise on the Love of God, 1:16. If human beings possessed the original perfection and original justice that Adam knew, when God first made him – they would not only have a tendency to love God more than anything; they would be able to achieve it naturally without any other help from God than the ability he gives each creature to perform actions befitting its nature.

 

Our ability to love God is natural

Treatise on the Love of God, 1:17. To our nature, after all, is sickly with the distressing weakness of sin.  It is like palm trees on the side of the world; they only sprout incompletely, trying, so to speak, to produce fruit, but not quite succeeding.  The maturing of ripe dates is reserved to hotter climates.  Left to itself, the human heart never gets beyond the rudiments, as it were, of loving God.  For love to reach maturity, when we love God more than anything else – that demands the life of grace, the habit of charity.

 

Our natural tendency to love God is not worthless

Treatise on the Love of God, 1:18. Although this natural tendency of ours in incapable, in itself, of bringing us to the happy state of loving God as he deserved to be loved, if only we were faithful to its promptings, God’s loving care would come to our aid, would lead us on.

 

Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme I: Any spirituality rests upon, or better yet, includes a set of assumptions about God and humankind and about how they are related to each other. 

 

Letters of Spiritual Direction, Theme III: Salesian spirituality, while retaining much of the interior spirit of the desert, in the sense that a radical call from God does indeed claim and refashion the human heart, did not at all assert that that voice could only echo clearly in the stillness of the hermit’s cave or the monastery cloister.

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