Faith in love

God who is Love

God exists because there is love. Love exists because there is God. God in fact is love. He lives because he gives life. You breathe: you have a physical existence. You love: you have a spiritual existence. If you don’t love, it would be as if you don’t breathe: you are dead in your soul. But – they say – we can’t see God. That’s true. We cannot see him with the eyes of the body because he is a pure spirit. However, once he became man in Christ, he appeared to a whole population. But we contemplate him with the eyes of the spirit, because he is love and love is a spirit, and we experience him as such. The experience is prolonged by our relationship with people purified. When we are with children, their eyes issue a light which resembles that of the other constellations. Likewise when we approach apostles, servers of humanity, priests who live only of their ideal, and virgins totally dedicated to God, and workers of every type driven by the sense of integrity, another atmosphere issues, enveloping the material world.  In it we easily meet creatures linked to  the other type of love, which prolongs the innocence of Mary and the sacrifice of Christ. 

Igino Giordani, The only love, New City, Rome, 1974, p. 9

The dark night

God’s revelation to the soul resembles the education with which parents raise their sons, using caresses and scolding, amid smiles and tears. This is what the Eternal Father does. Intimacy with him grows, if the purification grows in us.  We feel him according to how much we love him. In this experience, some mystics at the height of the consolations, passed through phases of desolation: the dark night. It happens often during the period of existence in which we expect more comprehension. And instead, it is precisely then that man is confused and fears that he is misunderstood. It is the purification, due to which the relationship becomes a crystalline divine gift. And it results in a serene certainty of one who coexists with Love incarnate, from which a happiness ensues and which not even the most bitter earthly betrayal can upset.

Igino Giordani, The only love, cit., p. 10-11

Knowledge and ignorance

Upon his return from an excursion in space the Russian, Gagarin, said that he did not meet God in the air. The American, Armstrong, from another spacecraft, upon stepping down on the moon recited with his astronaut colleagues, a prayer to God. The case of Gagarin is a sign that under the semblance of science, one can deal with an ignorance regarding the Creator of the universe, so dense as to imagine God like a bird in space or a stray dog amid the clouds. Knowledge and ignorance are inscribed in religion before being inscribed in the heart and then the mind. These are personal rapports, and then, cultural elements. In religion, knowledge is equivalent to love.  We know if we love: and so to know God means living in his love, eternal life which – says the Gospel – consists in this, «may they all know You, the only true God, and Jesus, the one you sent»

Igino Giordani, The only love, cit., p. 12

The face of God

The Lord said to Moses who hungered to contemplate the glory of the Lord: «You cannot see my face, because no man can see me and stay alive» (Es. 33,20). Neither can one contemplate the sun at certain hours, because one would burn. One can burn in him. The mystical exercise aims at that impossibility. If God is infinite, our approaching him conforms with his nature as presented to us by Jesus, and consists in loving him more and more, in keeping him in mind in each thing we do, think or say. In short, it consists in losing oneself in him to become him. This objective means becoming one with God, uniting ourselves with his will, until for love, we become him, though we are aware of who he is and who we are.

Igino Giordani, The only love, cit., p. 12