Here and in the next several posts, we shall hear the Jesuit Father Francis Cassilly discuss various aspects of love. In A Story of Love, Cassilly tells of a love which every man and woman is meant to experience, a love so intense and fulfilling that it scarcely seems possible to grasp, yet one that is offered to every human person who opens his heart and mind to its beauty and wonder. This is a love that many have found and even now enjoy, but which so many still seek. It is the unifying and personal love between the human person and his Creator, his Redeemer, his greatest friend. Father Cassilly shows how this ultimate love is the basis of all true love that we experience and how this love awaits us in its fullness at the end of our earthly pilgrimage. A Story of Love bears the imprimatur of Archbishop John Joseph Glennon of St. Louis, dated 1916.
Father Cassilly observes: “An essential attribute of creatures is dependence. The idea of an absolutely independent creature is self-contradictory. This property of dependence we see existing all about us in the physical world, in the mutual attraction and repulsion of atoms to form bodies, in the combination of bodies to form the earth. The globe on which we live receives light, heat and motion from the sun; our satellite, the moon, clings to the earth; and our whole solar system is influenced from without. Nowhere in space will you find a lost star, an unattached planet. The invisible chain of gravity binds together all the heavenly bodies, and swings them off in their appointed orbits. . . . Created force that does not proceed from and tend to something outside of itself is inconceivable.”
“This innate tendency to seek rest and support in something else is found not alone in purely material things, but it is exemplified, too, in the moral nature of man. None of us is strong enough to stand alone; we need assistance of some kind. Man was created apparently incomplete in himself. Like the climbing vine he is ever waving about the tendrils of his affections, feeling for some object to twine and fasten to. Even in the state of original justice was this true, for God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone.”
Quotations from Francis Cassilly, A Story of Love, 2d ed. (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1917).
