Archbishop offers a love letter for the world

“Love is why God created the world.” It seems like quite a claim, especially if you consider the state of the world as viewed through TV news. Into these tumultuous times, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez offers “For Greater Things You Were Born,” a new pastoral letter.

As far as titles go, they don’t come more aspirational than that. “God’s beautiful plan of love for our lives and our world” might sound simply like something a priest would say. But Gomez’s words, as priestly as they can be, should resonate with the wider world.

Gomez, an immigrant from Mexico, worries that as God has been erased from public life, “the reality of the human person is disappearing, too. We are becoming strangers to our own selves. We no longer know who we are or what is inside us.”

What he points to as some of the troubles and injustices of the day are far from mere churchy interests: “the sad persistence of racist thinking and practices; the bitter divisions along lines of money and education, class and family background; our cruel indifference to the sufferings of immigrants within our borders; the coercive agendas to redefine marriage and sexuality and ‘normalize’ abortion and euthanasia; the brutal realities of human trafficking; the epidemics of pornography and addictions; the inequities in our criminal justice system, starting with our continued practice of executions; and the violence and deviancy in our popular ‘entertainment.’”

And so into Earth’s mix of misery and beauty and our culture’s mix of idealism, optimism, exploitation and fear, Gomez contends: “The world is made for the glory of God and the world was made out of love! What God makes he loves and delights in, and all of nature is like a book through which God reveals his love for us.”

At a time when we’re drowning in hyper-politicization and creating seemingly insurmountable obstacles to human communion, the archbishop also insists that “love is why God creates each one of us. We are not made as anonymous members of the human race.”

Gomez worries most that “our society has lost sense of the truth about the precious nature and dignity of the human person.”

In contrast with the current state of our affairs, Gomez looks to the possibilities for humanity: “Jesus became man in order that we might become God. This is not an abstract statement of theology. It is the destiny and meaning of your life and mine. Everything in our ordinary lives — our work and study, our loves, our family life, our works of charity, even our recreation — all of it is made to be transfigured in the light of Christ.”

But what does that mean? What can be done? Why does it matter?

“... Sin does not get the last word in our lives,” he writes. “We should live every day conscious of our God-given nobility as men and women made in God’s image. But we should also live every day with deep humility and gratitude, never forgetting where we would be without God’s mercy!”

And the Beatitudes would be a good place to begin rediscovering the greatness of man, a greatness that we can better fulfill when we acknowledge and appreciate all of creation, including ourselves, with gratitude.

“Through the Beatitudes,” Gomez writes, “Jesus shows us what we should desire and what we should be seeking in our lives — he calls us to be poor in spirit and pure in heart, to be meek and merciful and to mourn in solidarity with those who are sorrowful; he calls us to hunger and thirst for righteousness and to be peacemakers in our relationships and in our society.”

These and the virtues of faith, hope and charity; prudence, justice, temperance, and courage, may just change our lives and the world around us.

Something greater is something we could all afford to consider signing up for and passing along.