MADE FOR LOVE, LOVED BY GOD

By Father Peter Cameron, OP

Servant Books, 2014

160 pages, $15.99

To order: catalog.franciscanmedia.org/

 

I found myself struggling to make it through Dominican Father Peter John Cameron’s Made for Love, Loved by God. The heavy nature of the topic and Father Cameron’s style of splicing in content from multiple sources — from doctors of the Church, papal documents and Scripture to television programs, plays and current events — made for tough reading, at least for me.

However, I found it fortuitous that I came to the second half of the book focused on God’s mercy and the necessity of suffering to truly understand and embrace love during Holy Week. What time of the year, after all, is more appropriate to contemplate the love of God than when we are commemorating Jesus’ passion and death on the cross?

One of the most powerful sections of the book comes in chapter five, which is focused on suffering. Here, Father Cameron, the chairman of the department of homiletics at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y., shares a story of his part-time ministry at St. Rose of Lima in Newtown, Conn., which celebrated funerals for eight of the victims of the December 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting.

“Why exactly is the cross ‘crucial’ to our happiness? ... [T]he cross is a gift, a privilege, a blessing. For us, the cross is God’s way of separating us from whatever separates us from God. The agony of the cross disrupts our life and throws it into turmoil. And thank God it does! Because the cross manages to get our attention.”

A little later on, Father Cameron put it even more bluntly:

“God possesses an uncanny ability to break into our life and disturb things just when we think we’ve got everything in hand, just when we think we’ve got it all together. At the moments when we become self-satisfied, complacent, content with things just as they are, God sends the cross to shake us up and gain us back. Woe to those who think they have God and his ways all figured out. God is always a surprise.” He is in good company, as the last line has been stated in similar ways several times by Pope Francis.

Father Cameron goes on to discuss the importance of “learning how to suffer” in order to embrace the love of God, and he outlines seven steps to move forward on this path.

In a nutshell, the author is seeking to move the reader to grasp that the highs of happiness and love can only be fully appreciated by experiencing their inverse and that suffering can be a particularly powerful tool to bring persons closer to God.

Father Cameron also offers a chapter on practical spiritual tools the faithful can embrace to more fully experience the love of God, such as Eucharistic adoration and regular prayer and reading of Scripture, with a message that quality trumps quantity. I find such recommendations helpful to consider as I think about ways to enhance my own prayer life.

He closes with a chapter of meditations on the beatitudes, a fitting conclusion to a work focused on love and true happiness. And here again, Father Cameron plumbs some uncomfortable depths, such as his discourse on the necessity of mourning:

“We mourn when a love that means everything to us is taken away. We are blessed in our mourning, as there we come to realize how much we need God’s love. Our mourning is a cry for holy dependence. Mourning makes us mindful of the love we are made for. It predisposes us to receive that love.”

As mentioned at the outset, I did find this book challenging, particularly the upwards of 200 citations, in addition to excerpts from Scripture. But at the end of the day, I found it to be quite a useful reflection on what it means to be loved by God and how a deep embrace of this love can lead us all closer to God and on the path to genuine happiness.

 

Nick Manetto writes from Herndon, Virginia.