Looking for love.
In the right place.
Reading a meditation from Catherine of Siena, I was impressed by how real love is actually the opposite of sin, and how looking for love in all of the wrong places, or ‘making love’ in all the wrong ways, deadens the spiritual capacity for not only recognizing true love, but accepting that we are loved - that we were created by love, in love, and for love.
I’ll try and rewrite Catherine’s meditation in the manner I understood it here. How often we try to convey something we understood spiritually and in doing so, we trivialize it? But I will attempt it anyway.
So, if Catherine wrote it as I understood what she wrote…
“Love God, not for your own sake; the pleasure and satisfaction, or for your own profit; your security and superiority - but love him because he is Love itself, and because he is worthy of all love and of being loved, and therefore deserves all of your love.
Then your love will be perfect and not mercenary - no longer content with sensible gratification. You will thereby be inebriated with love, unable to think of anything save Christ crucified and the delicious wine flowing from his sacred side - that is the perfect love, the highest charity which you see God has gifted you - before the creation of the world. That is love. (It is a love so enraptured, that sacrifice and suffering is no longer distinguishable from consolation.)
That God first loved us.
This is the love God has shown and given you before the creation of the world. He was in love with you before you even came to be. O! My! God! He was in love with you even before you came to be! If he had not so fallen in love with you - he would never have created you.
But because of the love he had for you - as he saw you within himself, he was moved to grant you being.
How your thought, your mind, your heart, and your soul will be expanded when you drink this sweet charity, this everlasting and authentic love. And you will never be satiated.” - Adapted from St. Catherine of Siena
(After writing it out, I don’t think I expressed it well at all.)