Watching for What God Reveals

Our prayer during this retreat centers our attention on a loving God who centers affectionate attention on us. Two simple points of the nature of love help us pray during these weeks of praying with and about creation.
Love urges being revealed. If we love someone, sooner or later we will want that person to know. We might send a valentine and then a box of candy and then perhaps make a phone call and then get together. All the time there is a creative, ongoing revelation that presents the beloved with the opportunity to receive the affection or not. The lover wants his or her love to be experienced and received.

Love must be expressed in words and gestures that the beloved can understand. The lover must reverence the beloved so much that he or she adapts the expression of love to the way the beloved can receive it. If I love a blind person, I do not speak to them in sign language. If I love a German-speaking person, I don’t speak any other language to that person except German. The lover adapts to the person and personality of the beloved.

In praying these next weeks, we watch how the loving God reveals that love through gestures of revelation. We also consider how this God adapts that same love to our ways of reception. We pray with God’s courtship of us, constantly attracting us through acts of gentle yet persistent love.

We begin by considering that each of us has been and actually is now being created. God does not create us and then set us on the earth as so many abandoned milk jugs or degenerating cars. God tends to us as the beloved and labors on and around us for our soul’s purpose. God wants only this, then: that we experience infinite love being revealed within our finite experiences and our reception of that love in our lives.

Our having been created tells each of us how important we are in the eyes of God, and our prayer these next weeks helps us to see our value and significance in our own eyes. In so many ways God says, “Look around and see who I have said and I say that you are.” We are in the presence of a God who cannot keep love hidden, and we are God’s best work of art.