God's love unchanging
- FATHER BEDE JARRETT, O.P.
God cannot but love me.
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Surely there is something overpowering in the concept of this work of God, this unceasing and unchanging love. I talk of fidelity in friendship as being to me the most beautiful thing on earth. The sight of a lover faithful, despite disillusionment, to his beloved is the most wonderful thing in all the world; this loyalty of soul for soul, despite every toil and stress, good repute and evil; beyond all degradation and above all ambition, when soul has been knit to soul.
Love is not love
Which alters, when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Yet this is but a feeble representation of the ineffable union between God and myself. Sinner though I be, He is my lover always. Even my sins cannot break His persistence, can only set a barrier between myself and it, can only by the dangerous gift of my free will prevent its effect from being seen in my soul. But the love of God is with me always, 'in me and within me and around, in million-billowed consentaneousness, the flowing, flowing, flowing' of the Spirit.
How can I hold back, howsoever wrongly I have acted? for His love is the same for ever. As I was deep in His love when I was a child, so also does He love me now.
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Acknowledgement
Father Bede Jarrett, O.P. "God's love unchanging." from Meditations for Layfolk (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1915).
Note: Meditations for Layfolk is in the public domain.
The Author
Father Bede Jarrett, O.P. (1881-1934) was Cyril Jarrett, who received the name Bede when, at age 17, he entered the Dominican order in England. In his own life time he held a recognised position as the greatest preacher in Catholic England. The Times of London noted in his obituary that "he has been called the best Roman Catholic preacher in this country, and he was perhaps the most popular English preacher in the United States, his sermons being marked by their intellectual quality, their appositeness to the times and their incisiveness". He is the author of Classic Catholic Meditations, Life of St. Dominic, The abiding presence of the Holy Ghost in the soul, and Mediaeval Socialism.
