The Love that will not let go

The descent of God’s love, from wavering to the ground beneath the feeling

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16).

Let me begin with three straightforward questions. Have you, in a time of sickness, loss, or persistent temptation, quietly believed that God was punishing you? Have you ever wondered whether God loves you, not the world in general but you, by name?

And underneath both, have you ever wondered whether God is, in fact, love at all? These are questions I have asked myself, and if you have, you are not a bad Catholic; you are a normal one.

Most of the faithful I know waver here, rarely admitting this aloud. The Gospel’s response is not, in the first place, by way of argument. It is a question of descent: the love of God coming down into us, deeper and deeper, until we can at last put our whole weight upon it.

That descent of the crucified and risen Love of the Father, sunk into us by the Holy Spirit, is what the tradition calls the descent of the kerygma—the first proclamation, that God loves us and saves us in Christ.

God is love

Let’s begin with the third question; it is the most consequential: Is God love? Scripture does not say only that God has love. It says God is love, and that whoever remains in love remains in God. And it tells us the length to which He went to prove it: He so loved the world that He gave His only Son. That is the answer beneath the answers.

Now watch how the Church hands it on. Writing to the young, Pope Francis gave them not a system but three sentences. God loves you. Christ saves you. He is alive.

Read slowly: these three are the kerygma itself, falling one truth at a time into a wavering heart. But at first, it falls only as an idea, a thing heard and half-believed.

Why it must come again

An idea half-believed will not bear weight, which is why the questions keep returning. So, the tradition insists it must descend again and again.

In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis is precise: the kerygma is first not in time, to be left behind, but “in a qualitative sense,” as the principal proclamation, the one we must hear again and again at every stage of life.

We are tempted to treat God’s love as the porch of the house, crossed once on the way to weightier rooms. There is no weightier room. All Christian formation, he says, is nothing but entering more deeply into the kerygma. And each time we hear it anew, the love sinks a little further: from an idea we once heard, to a thought we return to, to a principle we hold.

But then the difficulty comes

And then the difficulty comes, and the first question wakes: is this punishment? Here, the tradition refuses to read our suffering as a verdict and reads it as the Paschal Mystery—the dying and rising we name at every altar: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

“Christ’s love compels us,” writes St Paul (2 Cor 5:14). Love is the engine by which the descent travels deeper, and it presses on even through loss. And here, precisely, is where faith is grown.

The disappointment, the temptation, the season that hands us every opposite emotion is the space in which we learn to believe and trust Him when all that we feel tells us not to.

If, in each small death, I hold to the one thing, that God loves me with a love immense and unbreaking, then that love is not merely surviving the crisis beside me; it is using it, carrying me down another floor, past the principle, into the foundation of my being, until it becomes the measure by which I weigh everything and, at last, the air I breathe rather than one more object in the room.

What kind of certainty

The movement now has a name: from uncertainty to certainty. But be exact about it, it is not certitude of our salvation, as though a soul could read off its own final destiny; the Church has always been sober about presuming upon the end.

It is certitude of God’s love—that we are held now, completely and in all things, a gift certain in its giving even while its fullness is awaited in hope. Here hope does its quiet work: not optimism about outcomes, but the whole person leaning on the One who has promised.

And so, Baptism finishes what it began—the day I was named a child of God stops being a fact I was told. It becomes the ground I stand on.

The last descent

One more threshold remains, and it startles everyone who reaches it. The last and deepest descent opens not onto more light, or more warmth, but onto darkness. We saw it in St Teresa of Calcutta, whose interior night ran not for weeks but for decades—radiant to the world, and within, feeling only absence.

St John of the Cross had named it long before as “the dark night of the soul”—not descent as failing but the descent completing.

Why would God withdraw the felt sweetness of His love? To wean us from the consolations of love, so that we cling to Him and not to our changing weather. Now the soul no longer needs the experience of love, nor the emotion of it, nor any fresh confirmation, to know that it is loved. It has put its full weight on the certitude itself, and the certitude holds.

But union is never a sealed room. The soul drawn this deep into Christ does not stay shut in its darkness; it overflows. This is the descent’s last and greatest work: it pours the person out in charity.

St Teresa is the proof of it. The very decades of her interior night were the decades in which she gave herself to the poorest of the poor; the darkness did not close her in; it poured her out.

So, St Paul completes the pattern: those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for the One who died for them and was raised (cf 2 Cor 5:15). Faith learns to trust Him in the dark; hope holds fast to Him; and charity, at the deepest point of the descent, overflows into mission. The kerygma has reached bottom—and from the bottom, it sends us out.

So let me put these three questions back to you, now from the far side. Was God punishing you? No, a Father does not condemn the child He is carrying deeper. Does God love you, by name? Absolutely, and one day you will know it beneath all feeling.

Is God love? He is nothing else. For us in the Antilles—for a Church that carries a wound, a people who know both Calvary and Carnival—the invitation is not to feel more, but to let the Word given us at the font go all the way down, and to put our whole weight there even in the dark—and to be sent out in love.

Key Message:

The Gospel’s answer to ‘Does God love me?’ is not an argument but a descent. God’s love comes down through every stratum of us, even through the difficulty we mistake for punishment, growing our faith, settling into hope, and at the deepest point overflowing into the charity of mission, until our certainty no longer depends on how we feel.

Action Step:

The next time a hard season tempts you to read it as punishment, say once, deliberately, without waiting to feel it: “This is not God’s verdict against me; it is His love carrying me deeper”. Then let that love move through you: do one concrete kindness for someone else before the day is out.

Scripture for Reflection:

“For Christ’s love compels us… those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Cor 5:14–15).