Made For Loving Encounter

 

Ever since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis’s witness and teachings have constantly pointed the faithful towards the importance of encounter. We are called to encounter Christ, and we are called to encounter one another.

This vocation to encounter is not new in the Catholic tradition. In fact it builds off of what Blessed John Paul II taught us about the dignity of the human person, made for relationship with God and with one another.

The human person is made for love. In his Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II wrote:

God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.

Being made in the image and likeness of God means being made in the image and likeness of the Trinity. The person bears the imprint of the Trinity, which means that he or she bears the vocation to love and be loved by God and others.

Love is so much a part of who we are as persons, that our lives feel meaningless without it. In his Redemptor Hominis, Blessed John Paul II wrote:

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

So let us embrace our vocation to love today, and let us pray for the grace to encounter others with the love that they were made for.

Blessed John Paul II, Pray for Us!