Faith Filled Friday: Love is Had Only by Loving by St. Catherine of Siena

This is from a letter of St. Catherine’s as quoted in the March 2020 edition of Magnificat.  It is taken from Susan Noffke’s translation, Volume 1, but I do not know who St. Catherine is addressing.  The bold are my editorial addition to highlight key sentences.

In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of gentle Mary.  I Caterina, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, am writing to you in his precious blood.  I long to see you clothed in the garment of blazing charity…But you will say to me, “Since I have no such love, and without it I am powerless, how can I get it?”  I will tell you.  Love is had only by loving.  If you want love, you must begin by loving.  Once you want it, you must open the eye of your understanding to see where and how love is to be found.  And you will find it within your very self.  How?  When you recognize your nothingness.  And once you see that of yourself you do not even exist, you will recognize and appreciate that God is the source of your existence and of every favor above and beyond that existence—God’s graces and gifts both temporal and spiritual.  So everything we have, everything we discover within ourselves, is indeed the gift of God’s boundless goodness and charity. 

This discovery and sight of our Creator’s tremendous goodness to us makes us rise to such growth of love and desire that we count as nothing ourselves and the world and all the world’s pleasures.  This doesn’t surprise me, because this is love’s way, that when we see ourselves loved we love in return.  And because we love, we would rather die than offend the one we love.  We are fed in love’s fire because we realize how loved we are when we see that we ourselves were the soil and the rock that held the standard of the most holy cross.  For you know very well that neither earth nor rock could have held the cross, nor could cross or nails have held God’s Only Begotten Son, had not love held him fast.  So God’s love for our souls was the rock and the nails that held him fast.

There’s an intentional circularity I think in her thought here.  We exist only because of God’s love, and through that love, love dwells in us, and that love for us is what made God sacrifice His only son, and that sacrifice on Calvary could exist because love was in us to love Him back.  In engineering we call this a feedback loop.  God loves us, we love God, and love magnifies, not diminishes.