109th Meditation on God the Father
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil 4:4).
Without knowing our Heavenly Father and without the certainty of His love for us, we cannot find true happiness. The joy which passing things give us is temporary and, therefore, cannot satisfy our innermost longing.
God, on the other hand, is willing and able to give us true happiness, so that we may live in it. Thus St. Paul exhorts us to be always joyful in the Lord: this is the key to true joy! It is joy in God Himself; it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. The more deeply we know our Father, the more our wonder and gratitude for His love will grow. We will recognize more and more what He is really like, and with each new discovery of His Being, our joy in Him will grow.
Day by day we can perceive His inexhaustible love, which, with its great tenderness, is capable of enrapturing our soul. It is an everlasting joy, which we begin to savor already here in our earthly life and which in eternity will reach its fullness:
“He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone” (Rev 21:4).
Can we imagine a sad heaven? No! God Himself is the joy of all His creatures, of angels and of humankind. There, in eternity, there is no shadow that could disturb this joy. Nor can the “old serpent”, our adversary from the beginning, continue to tempt us. We will then share this joyful happiness with all those who are also with God in eternity.
If we can already, in our earthly life, experience the joy of living as God’s children, then this joy will be irresistibly “contagious” in eternity. Then we will be able to regard passing things as a gift from our Father and rejoice in them in the Lord. We will also be able to delight in those people who obey God.
But what about others, those who do not yet know Him? God’s own love will impel us to help them so that they too may know the source of true joy…