Love makes the seemingly impossible possible. Love carries within itself the power to create, the power to bring something into existence that did not exist before, the power to transform a potentiality into a reality.
Christianity makes the astounding claim that God created the entire cosmos ex nihilo: out of nothing. But Christianity also makes a further claim: not only did God create the universe ex nihilo, he created the universe ex amore et propter amorem—out of love and for the sake of love. And God invites us human beings to share in this creative power of the divine love.
We have been given the gift of bringing something into existence that did not exist before, of transforming a potentiality into a reality.
No, we have not been given the divine ability to create something out of nothing, but we have been given the gift of bringing something into existence that did not exist before, of transforming a potentiality into a reality. And this gift finds its greatest expression, its highest realization, in our relationships with other people.
In Heart of the World, Hans Urs von Balthasar refers to the “bright image” that God has of each and every one of us, an image of the deeply loving person that he created each of us to be. Balthasar speaks for all of us when he says,
Somewhere there exists a bright image of me, an image of what I could have been, of what I am still (but how?) capable of becoming.
One of the main purposes of the theo-drama that is this earthly life is for each of us to strive to become this bright image that God has of us—to learn how to love as best as we can—so that we might share as fully as possible in the divine life and love. We grow into that bright image primarily through cooperation with God’s grace working in our lives, but God also gives each of us the gift, and the profound responsibility, of helping other people grow into God’s bright image of them, by loving them in a way that helps to draw out the potential that God has placed within them.
To do this, we need to see other people as God sees them, the God who loves them and who has held onto the “healed, whole image of [them] from all eternity.” We need to look at them with the eyes of Christ, who sees into the innermost heart of each of us and affirms the good, and the potential for future good, that he finds there. In a beautiful passage from Heart of the World, Balthasar has Jesus describe what he sees in the heart of every human being:
I am the King and the center of all hearts, and the innermost and best-kept secret of all hearts is to me an open book. You see but the outer wrapping by which men conceal themselves from one another. I look into souls from the inside, from that center to which they stand open, defenselessly. And there, at their innermost, is where their true face is to be found. There is where their gold glitters; there the hidden pearl lies. There gleam the Image and the Likeness, the signs of nobility imprinted upon them.
Obviously, we can’t see into the hearts of other people as deeply as Jesus can, but we have been given the ability to see at least some of the good, and the potential for good, in other people—good that they often may not be able to see in themselves. When we utilize that ability, and when we then affirm the good, and the potential for good, that we see in another person, we can bring more of that goodness to the surface and help them turn more of their potential goodness into reality. Through our love, the other person can come to see more clearly the person they could be, the person they were meant to be.
As Balthasar points out, “Many wait only for someone to love them in order to become who they always could have been from the beginning.” When we do this for other people, we are actually participating in an ongoing continuation of God’s original creative act, in which he looked at what he had created, including us human beings, and saw that it was all “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
Ultimately, of course, it is through Christ and in Christ that we will be completely transformed into God’s “healed and whole” image of us, God’s “bright image” of us:
My failing, guilty I . . . is included by Christ in his Cross and death; . . . precisely there, in that event, it is settled and put behind me, and my real, actual, believed-in and hoped-for I lives in him and comes to me from him.
He is coming for me, the one in whom I will be what I should be and would like to be. I am not yet so, but live meanwhile in hopeful faith. . . . This future is my homeland.
But during that “meanwhile,” Jesus has given all of us the opportunity to help bring each other a little closer to our homeland through the creative power of love.