Read Part 1 of this series.
2nd Observation: God Is the Very Source of Our Love
Saint Bernard’s second observation for why we should love God is that God, who is Love itself, is the absolute origin of our own individual yearning to love and be loved, and as such He is the proper object and focus of our love. In other words, in a very mystical sense, our love is born of God’s eternal love coming from and returning to Love Itself. He writes, “[God] gives the occasion for love, he creates the affection, he brings the desire to good effect. He is such that love to him is a natural due…Our love is prepared and rewarded by His [emphasis added]…He bestows bounty immeasurable; he provokes thee to good, he preserves you in goodness; he comes before, he sustains, he fills thee. He moves you to longing, and it is he for whom you long” (On Loving God).
Sin and addiction represent the divinely bestowed and holy desire for God gone terribly awry. Because of free will, the effects of concupiscence, and the seductions of the world and the Devil, we lose sight of the origin and end of our natural yearning to love God and be loved by Him. To be addicted or unnaturally attached to anything whatsoever is to be spiritually “off target.” Indeed, the ancient Hebrew word for sin is chatá meaning to “miss the mark.” Similarly, the ancient Greek word for sin, harmartia, has the added emphasis of “failing in one’s purpose.” I think this is a spot-on way to understand our lives in addiction. When we are enslaved in our pride to habitual addictive sin, we are existentially failing to fulfill our purpose to live humbly and love righteously. We are chronically and compulsively “off target.”
Where we should take great hope in recovery, particularly in the early stages when we are struggling or when we find ourselves in the “remorseful” aftermath of a relapse, is that the very desire to want to love God in the midst of our brokenness with a contrite heart actually comes from God. This yearning for God, this innate desire for God bursting forth from within our souls, this expression of our conscience breaking through our pride and self-centeredness in such moments is responding to the real and actual graces, the real love, being given to us by God in every moment. This experience of “guilt” is actually a sign of great hope! We either choose to ascend to the Light of Christ in humility and repentance and enter upon the way of mercy and freedom, or we choose to descend into the pit of pride and self-pity and remain on the way of condemnation and slavery.
God does not cease to shine the light of His grace upon us when we fall. God does not scorn or hate us when we fail. God does not abandon us even when we abandon Him. No. He is a most “jealous” God who loves us patiently, relentlessly, tenaciously, and unceasingly, pursuing us like the “Hound of Heaven” so beautifully depicted in the great poem by Francis Thompson, himself a Catholic and opium addict. God wants our happiness in Him for He knows we can only be truly happy and fulfilled in Him and with Him. When we sin or act out, He truly loves us more intensely. As Saint Paul said, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). His divine light gets brighter, not darker. We must open our eyes!
Saint Bernard’s wisdom here for us in recovery is that we should never lose hope no matter how many times we fail, fall, sin, or relapse. We are called to get up again and again, like Our Lord Himself on the way to Calvary, until our last breath. The spark of righteous desire for God even in the midst of our utter weakness and brokenness is divine and holy. We must trust it and grasp it like a life-preserver thrown to us from God in Heaven, the God who loves us beyond our wildest imagination and who yearns to lift us out of the pit of our isolation and self-destruction and save us from ourselves.
3rd Observation: To Love God Is the Debt of Our Gratitude
Another observation given by Saint Bernard for why we should love God is that, because of God’s eternal love for us as manifested in our unique creation and belovedness, and culminating with our salvation in Jesus Christ, we simply owe God the uttermost debt of our gratitude. He writes powerfully: “For I know that my God is not merely the bounteous Bestower of my life, the generous Provider for all my needs, the pitiful Consoler of all my sorrows, the wise Guide of my course: but that he is far more than all that. He saves me with an abundant deliverance [emphasis added]: He is my eternal preserver, the portion of my inheritance, my glory…Reason and natural justice alike move me to give up myself wholly to loving him to whom I owe all that I have and am. But faith shows me that I should love him far more than I love myself, as I come to realize that he has given me not my own life only, but even himself” (On Loving God).
Again, the great saint’s magnificent words speak for themselves, but where we can discern a strong resonance with life in recovery is with the central importance of finding and living gratitude in every facet of our lives. Step Four was the real eye-opener for me as I plumbed the depths of my resentments and came to understand how my lack of gratitude fueled the bonfire of my addictions. It really is true that resentment is like drinking poison yourself and expecting the other person to die. Resentment is spiritual suicide, the killer of joy, always fatal to sanity, sobriety, and serenity. Only the Devil laughs and thrives in the venomous atmosphere of resentment.
We make enormous progress in recovery when we allow Christ’s light to shine on our resentments and come to find gratitude where we never dreamed we could experience it. That is a gift of immense worth, and it gives us perhaps a whole new perspective on understanding how to fulfill Jesus’ command, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” because “this will make you children of your heavenly Father” (Luke 6:27; Matthew 5:48).
Gratitude is also, as Catholics, the very mode of our worship. We are a “Eucharistic” or “thanksgiving” people for a reason because, in truth, all we have to offer God is our gratitude for His many blessings—the gift of life, the gift of His sanctifying grace, the gifts of faith, hope, and love, the gifts of our consolations and desolations, the gift of His Divine Mercy, the gift of the hope of our salvation, and even the gift of our sufferings. Indeed, everything that is good, beautiful, holy, just, and true in our lives comes entirely from God as unmerited gift. We deserve nothing and yet are given everything if we are only willing to receive and cherish God as the only treasure worth possessing! As Saint Benedict wrote in his Rule for monks (which Saint Bernard of Clairvaux as a Cistercian followed), “If you notice something good in yourself, give credit to God, not to yourself, but be certain that the evil you commit is always your own and yours to acknowledge” (Chapter 4). Our proper demeanor of gratitude in life and recovery, commensurate with Saint Bernard’s point here, is so beautifully expressed by the priest when he exclaims on our behalf in the Mass, “It is truly right and just, our duty and salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy, through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ” (Eucharistic Prayer II).
4th Observation: To Love God Is to Be Fully Alive
A final observation that Saint Bernard offers for our reflection is most important. To love God virtuously is essentially the soul nourishing itself. To do so is supremely vital for the soul’s well-being, just like good nutrition and exercise are needed for the health and growth of the physical body. It is what the soul actually requires in order to blossom and flourish in joy—to be fully alive! The corollary to this, of course, is that to not love God rightly can stunt the soul’s spiritual growth and lead to the soul’s demise: to sin and addiction, to spiritual decay and death.
Saint Bernard writes, “Righteousness [i.e. loving God rightly] is the natural and essential food of the soul, which can no more be satisfied by earthly treasures than the hunger of the body can be satisfied by air. If you should see a starving man standing with mouth open to the wind, inhaling draughts of air as if in hope of gratifying his hunger, you would think him lunatic. But it is no less foolish to imagine that the soul can be satisfied with worldly things which only inflate it without feeding it. What have spiritual gifts to do with carnal appetites, or carnal with spiritual? Praise the Lord, O my soul: who satisfies your mouth with good things [cf. Psalm 103]” (On Loving God).
The utter insanity of addiction is defined by the tragedy of our fruitless efforts to satisfy our God-given and God-seeking longing with anything and everything other than God Himself. It is as if we become deaf, dumb, and blind to the source and destination of our longing for love. We are like the very “lunatic” described by Saint Bernard, breathing air as if it were food for the body and then left wondering why we remain unsatisfied and emaciated in our spiritual hunger.
In the dreadful cycle of addiction, we depravedly drink, drug, lust, fornicate, gorge, hoard, spend, distract, or obsessively clutch after power, pleasure, honor, or wealth in all its myriad forms and expressions seeking to be filled and made whole. It is the ultimate fool’s game! The terrible irony, of course, is that the outcome of such feverish madness is always precisely the opposite—perpetual emptiness and despair. We become merely “inflated” in the illusions and delusions of our pride and addictions, never truly “fed” in the humility of the Spirit. We are rendered perilously diseased or “dis-eased” in a state of life-threatening spiritual starvation!
To be fully alive, we must go to the source of life—Life Itself, God—in personal, liturgical, and sacramental prayer. Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman, “Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst” (John 4:14). And in His magnificent bread of life discourse (cf John 6:22-59), Our Lord goes further: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst” (John 6:35). To love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength is to nourish ourselves on the bounteous sustenance that is God of which the Psalmist exults, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:9).
Having reflected on Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s several observations for why we should love God, let us consider next his description for how we grow and make progress in holy love. Let us discern how his several stages of virtuous love harmonize so well with the life-changing transformation we can experience on the road of recovery.
This series will continue with Part 3.
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Grovetown. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for the CIR Daily Reflections. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life and on September 30, 2023, was invested as an Oblate novice of the Order of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA.