Beloved Father, how can we come to understand Your love even more deeply?
When the Israelites offended You by dancing around the golden calf (Ex 32:8), You accepted the plea of Your servant Moses on their behalf and did not hold their sin against them. Time and again we encounter Your willingness to forgive, even when it comes to the most repugnant sins—and there are so many.
Faced with such love, we can only marvel. Certainly, we already know it, for the Holy Spirit reveals it to us day after day, and we grow ever more familiar with it. There are so many examples in Scripture, and in the lives of the saints we often find an indescribable goodness in which You Yourself are manifested.
Above all, Your love is revealed to us in Your Son, Jesus Christ, and as we enter Holy Week and are led to the Cross, we will see the living proof of this love.
Yet, beloved Father, we do not wish to limit ourselves to contemplating it from the outside. We want to savor it and experience it at its inner source. We want to enter into Your heart and unite ourselves so deeply with it that we may become like You—not like the one who desired Your omnipotence without Your goodness, and who now seeks to seduce us into exalting ourselves as if we were great in our own right. No, beloved Father, not like that. We are fragile people, but we want to love as You do, to be willing to forgive as You do, to look upon people with eyes of love as You do, to proclaim the truth as Your Son did, and to carry our cross as He did.
We want to know You from within and then bear witness to who You are through works of charity.
If we become more and more like You, as Your beloved children, we will have come to know You better and will have understood love through love.