We Are Loved

We Are Loved

Deacon Lex Ferrauiola

I took a day off from work several years ago and was home alone in the house for a while. I picked up this magazine, U.S. Catholic, and happened on an article that caught my eye: The Seven Secrets of Successful Catholics. Now I’m embarrassed to tell you that a title like this will usually turn me off. I make unfair assumptions that this kind of a title usually indicates an author who believes that only Catholics have a lock on salvation.

Despite my aversion, I began to read and found the article and the author to be filled with loving spirituality. But when I got to ‘Secret Number Six’, I found myself tearing up. But these were no ordinary tears: they were tears of joy, because what I had read in Secret Number Six resonated with something deep within my soul.

Secret Number Six stated that, “Successful Catholics always remember that God is merciful and forgiving.” The article went deeper: “Successful Catholics recognize all too well their failures and shortcomings, but they have the confidence that no matter how miserably they behave, they can never, ever exile themselves beyond the reach of God’s love and forgiveness.”

Catholics know this in the deepest part of their being. They are sure of forgiveness, of being able to start fresh. Like the author, Paul Wilkes, says: “God has a very short memory of our failings.”

​It’s not this knowledge alone that makes a Catholic or any human being successful — it’s how this knowledge transforms us. Once we can feel in the depths of our being how very much we are loved by God, it is the most natural thing for us to love him, to love others, and to love ourselves in that same way. And by loving like this, we are living the Gospel.

I believe that all the evil committed by people would never happen if those people were able to feel how much they were loved by God. It would be impossible to commit evil and to hurt others if we felt the depth of God’s love for us.

It is my own personal belief that God finds a way to save everyone. That no human soul, no matter how evil the deed, is ever lost. That, in the end, God finds a way, either in this life or the next, toget through and call us to true repentance.

Maybe if we die unrepentant, God sits down with us in a little room and shows us the whole panorama of our lives and all the hurtful and unloving and maybe even evil things we’ve done. And sitting there in the presence of this unconditionally loving father and witnessing the damage we’ve done to other people during our lives, our hearts are opened, and we experience true remorse in the depths of our soul. And we turn to our Father and ask for forgiveness.

This concept might offend our sense of justice, but God’s justice is not our justice. When we get to heaven and sit down with God for dinner, we may be surprised to see who else is at the table.

Jesus, through his presence in our world and through his Gospel, has made the knowledge of God’s unconditional love available to everyone.

The message that he left us is simple; it can be summed up in three words:  We are loved!

With love,

Deacon Lex
deaconlex@nullgmail.com

Lex Ferrauiola is a husband, father, grandfather and a Catholic deacon serving as a pastoral minister and hospital chaplain within the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. His newest book, All Shall Be Well: Finding God Among the Pots and the Pans is available now.