Part 4 - Discovering Our True Selves / Chapter 35 - God Loves Us

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`Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse in Margery Williams’ book, The Velveteen Rabbit. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time,’ he continued, ‘not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.’

Everyone needs to know that they are loved. In our journey through life the greatest discovery of all is that we are loved by God. Only that love makes us completely Real.

The truth is that God loves us and calls us his beloved. But our lives are often so busy that we no longer give ourselves the chance to hear him say ‘I love you.’

But some have a problem in accepting, in really believing or feeling, that God loves them. Jo, a regular visitor to our priory, tells me that she remembers the moment, in her thirties, when she first heard this message. She had grown up at a time when the fear of God was preached more than God’s love, with the result that ‘many of us were afraid of God, of being watched and judged, and threatened with God’s punishment.’

Jo tells me that she went to Mass one day in West London and heard the youngish Irish priest say this: ‘Most of you have come here to live and work in London from different parts of the country and from all over the world, and when you come to this church you feel anonymous. You think nobody knows you and what has happened to you in your life, or what sins you may have committed. But God knows.’

At this point, Jo said, her heart sank. But after a pause the priest continued: ‘And God knows why your life has been as it is, and he loves you.’

This was not what she expected to hear thirty years ago. Most members of the congregation, even the young, would have been waiting for what usually came next, the condemnation or the pep talk. ‘To be told that God knows everything about us and our circumstances, and that he loves us because of everything, not even in spite of everything, was a revelation.’

Sitting in silence allows God to wipe away our fear and our feeling of unworthiness. Gradually we become aware that the love God has for us is very real and that he loves us and cares for us just as we are.

‘You care for each one of us as if we were the only one you had to care for. Yet you care for all of us as if we were the only one’ (Confessions 3.11).


An extract from Finding Your Hidden Treasure

© 2010 Benignus O’Rourke OSA

Published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

© Photo: Ian Wilson OSA

Get the book: www.theaugustinians.org

Community prayer

The great silence of the heart

'God speaks to us in the great silence of the heart." - Augustine of Hippo

Thank you! 36 people prayed

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Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone. Col 4:6

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