Salesian Literature

Chapter 18:  Our natural tendency to love God is not worthless

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It is beyond our natural powers to love God more than anything else, yet we have the natural tendency to do so.  Fruitless, you would say, for nature to incite us to a love it cannot give.  No point, surely, in letting us experience thirst for a costly draught it can never provide.

 

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.  If we co-operate with the initial assistance which God will give us, his fatherly goodness will afford us even greater help, gently leading us from good to better until we achieve that perfect love to which our natural tendency incites us.  For one thing is certain: God, in his loving-kindness, never refuses his helping hand, all along the way to perfection, to the man who is faithful over a very little (cf. Mt. 25:21, 23), who does what he can.

 

Not for nothing, then, does a natural tendency to love God more than anything remain in our hearts.  For God, it is an instrument; delicately he can pick us up with it, draw us to himself – as though keeping our hearts (like little birds) on a thread, to pull them towards him whenever his mercy moves him to compassion.  For us it is a token, a reminder of our first principle, our Creator; it urges us to love him, affords us a secret intimation that we are his.

 

The king’s deer, in olden days, would be marked by collars bearing the royal cipher, and set free to roam the forests.  They could then be readily recognized as the king’s game, reserved for him whose crest they bore.  Most assuredly, the creditable tendency to love our Creator, which God sets in ours souls, has a message for friend and foe alike.  Not only does it show that we were once in the Creator’s hands, but it also proves that we still belong to him – though he has let us go, abandoned as to the mercy of our free wills.  It shows that he has reserved the right of recapturing us, of saving us, when his loving providence deems fit.

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