“Today I invite you to reflect on these final lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I would recommend reading them many times, contemplating what it must be like to experience the presence of God through the heavenly beatific vision.
“According to Boethius, love works like physics. It’s an elemental force. In fact, desire (eros) is an animating impulse that governs the entire universe, moving the sun and all the stars.
[. . .]
“God’s love is true love precisely because God knows we have the ability to spurn that love. Otherwise, grace changes from gift to entitlement. Love isn’t love until you give it away! This sort of love, in the final analysis, is the reason why a totally sufficient and perfect God would create something else and allow it to participate in him. If you find yourself suffering today – from end-of-semester stress, work problems, or anything else – try to remember that the source and summation of your created existence is to love. This love is necessarily a movement outside of self, a movement that ultimately affirms your identity in a new and revelatory reality. In this reality, ‘our image fuses/Into the circle and finds its place in it.'” –Benjamin Winter, “The Love that Moves the Sun and the Other Stars,” Conciliar Post, April 17, 2015
