Relationships
I was talking to my guardian angel a little bit today and I began thinking about how wonderful it is that two creatures (of different species) can be put together intentionally by God. My guardian angel’s purpose (secondary to glorifying God) is to help me. That alone testifies that God made his creatures for one another.
God is, of course, both our source and destiny: our efficient and final cause. He is the reason for everything. Christ is “the firstborn of all creation.” Everything exists for him. None of us exists for himself. Not at all. We exist for Christ, our creator, for whom everything was created. “Through him all things were made. For him all things were made. He is before all else that is. In him everything continues in being.”
We exist absolutely for God. But God does not need us at all. He is perfectly happy in himself and he gains nothing at all by our love for him. This is why it is “not that we have loved God but that he has loved us.” Our whole purpose is to love him and to be with him. How could it be otherwise?
We need to love God. We need to love others. Since loving God is our purpose, loving others means helping them to love God. The very fact that God created more than one creature means that those creatures must be in a relationship to each other. We are all oriented to God, but we love God by loving his other creatures.
Think of the angels. They are so different from us, but we are still related to them in so special a way. Think of the saints. This is the real key: the Communion of Saints. The communion of saints has to exist because of the very fact that God created creatures with intellect and will. Because each of us is capable of knowing and loving God, he is capable of knowing and loving what God himself knows and loves, namely, each of his creatures. Thus, each creature because of his orientation to God has to love other creatures and lead them to God.
Think of our natural human relationships. The very fact that I know anyone else or can love anyone else to any degree necessitates the communion of saints. If my love for other people were not destined to last forever and to be more perfect than I can imagine now, it would be pointless for me ever to speak a word to anyone, ever to be around anyone else ever again.
It is only because of the perfect relationships that we will have in Heaven, that the saints have now to every creature, that the imperfect relationships we currently know can exist. Loving people on earth would be pointless, would not be good, would not be love at all, without the destiny to love God and to love other people forever in Heaven.
How different all our relationships are too! How different all God’s creatures are! St. Thomas Aquinas said that each angel is more different from the others than men are from angels. Our uniqueness in Heaven will be perfected, this great sense that you are not I, that I am not God, that God is, and that everything is for him.
We cannot possess the truth; the Truth possesses us. How beautiful that God is personal. How could it be otherwise?
