“Mutuality is the very law of love: There is no pleasure in loving unless the other enjoys equally his being loved. Every man needs to feel that someone is really interested in him, his affection, his life, or even in the smallest gift possible. This need is imperative, far more so than most wish to admit…
And yet, despite this, the concept of a greater happiness to come, mysterious and yet real and complete, stands out beyond all this race after incomplete and partial gifts and indeed gives it meaning. If each gift is a symbol of love, no matter how small the gift, then surely there must be a love, total and supreme, one that doesn’t fail. This is what men intuitively await, and what they are seeking in the smallest gifts received each day…
Sooner or later we realize that all human gifts are relative, limited, and uncertain, even the most beautiful and costly of them. Everything that we receive we can also lose…This persisting need is itself a clear indication that its goal is ever toward a final ending after which we all confusedly aspire: We are looking for an absolutely unchanging love, one that nothing can ever change. The universal quest for gifts is nothing other than a seeking after God, by whatever name we may call him. For only the One Who has made all things and Who owns all things can give them without asking anything in return except our gratitude.
Thus, there comes a day when a man understands that all is of grace, that the whole world is a gift of God, a completely generous gift since no one forced Him to it.…
The great gift, the unique and living one, is not a thing but a Person. It is Jesus Christ Himself. In Him God has given Himself, no longer just things which He creates or has created, but His own Person, His own suffering, and His own solitude, given unto death itself…
Thus it is that God offers it freely. He is the One Who has paid its price, in the death of His Son. The erasure of all our failings and all our remorse, of all our regrets and our rebellion, what a gift it is! The redemption of all our joys about to be swallowed up in death, and their fulfillment in eternal joy itself — what a gift indeed!…
Should then the little gifts of our daily existence lose their importance in the face of such a great and unique gift? Many men have thought so. Once they discovered the riches of divine love and forgiveness, they turned their eyes away from this world in order to contemplate nothing but heaven. But this shows that they had not yet grasped the meaning of the gospel, for the gospel is never a flight from reality. It is, rather, an act of incarnation in this real world. The same divine love created this world that now saves it from disintegration — the love of Jesus Christ.
Such is the biblical point of view, revealing a God of action, One who enters into human history, Who is ceaselessly concerned about our world even in its smallest details, and in every man at every moment of his life. He does not hold anything here below in contempt, for all these are symbolic of the reality above…
Far from turning us away from the world, Christ directs us to it. He awakens within us an altogether new concern for it. Then, just as little children, we can enjoy all the little gifts of this earthly life, seeing in them so many signs of that great and final gift which awaits us.”
