July 2014
Page 5
Made for Love: The Purpose of Mankind’s Creation
By Kyle George
“T
he Lord Jesus,
when He
prayed to the
Father, ‘that all may be one….as
we are one’ (John 17:21-22)
opened up vistas closed to human
reason, for He implied a certain
likeness between the union of the
divine Persons, and the unity of
God's sons in truth and charity.
This likeness reveals that man, who
is the only creature on earth which
God willed for itself, cannot fully
find himself except through a
sincere gift of himself.” --Gaudium et Spes, Paragraph 24
(Constitution on the Church in the
Modern World, Vatican II)
There is a belief that God
simply uses us to be loved,
worshipped, and glorified.
However, this is untrue. God does
not need any creature for any of
those things. God made us so that
we could be loved knowing that we
might not love Him in return. He
loved us into creation knowing that
our refusal of Him through sin
would be the very reason that He
would send His Only-Begotten Son
down to die in order to make up for
that refusal. Fathom that love!
Love is acknowledging that
someone is good, and then willing
(desiring, providing, and guiding
the person to) the good for them.
God knows everything about us,
He knows t he choices we would
make, yet He wanted to share His
love with us so that we might
choose His will over something
that would deprive us of the good
that we were made for. I believe that
the God that made us is perfectly
capable of knowing what is good
and best for us; He made all things
for us, after all. What God would
create something simply to watch it
suffer? It is befitting for a God of
love to come into the human
experience and endure all, except
sin, in order that we might know His
love tangibly.
Love, then, is the art of being
more easily capable to be fully
human. Man finds himself by being
a sincere gift to the broken and
fallen, the ones who have and the
ones who have not, and to those that
do not know love or care about it.
Yet, a gift must be given properly,
meaning that Man must become
aware of his purpose to pursue
happiness through being in
relationship with another. Man
knows himself by knowing the love
of another. He allows the other to
reveal to him how to be a better
person. Yet, without God how can
we know the true standard of the
good that the two (or more)
persons will seek in order to
achieve happiness?
What makes us most
happy is our relationship with
others. By recognizing that as
humans we are relational
creatures, first we must
recognize that we were made for
something that science and
reason alone cannot explain.
How can science and reason
possibly explain the purpose of
humankind’s happiness, and
how our existence makes sense?
Humanity’s relational nature is
supposed to point us towards the
love of God, so that we can
understand our purpose. It is
through love that we are capable
of knowing another person, but
also that we are capable of
knowing the love of God more
fully.
Through a sincere
devotion to God, man can fully
know how to love as he ought
because it was God who
designed humanity to share His
love well. We are imperfect
humans. We have all been given
a purpose, which is to share the
love of God with each other. It
is the heart of the human
experience: to know, to love,
and to be known, and to be
loved in return.
Kyle George is a seminarian at
Notre Dame and is spending his
Summer Assignment at Visitation of
Our Lady. He will return to Notre
Dame in August.