Father Frank DeSiano, CSP

An excerpt from ”Paul the Missionary,” by Father Frank DeSiano, CSP [1]

Paul’s message of grace – God’s totally free and gracious bestowal of absolute love – becomes both the message and the method of Paul. Grace basically means that we are wrapped up in a field of unlimited love. Love has to expand its circle or else it is not love. Love has to be passionate, embracing , open and persistent. It has to be “all things to all people.”

Paul, missionary per excellence, can give us a very respectable way to speak about mission: its all about God’s grace. God’s unrestricted love shows in the work, death and resurrection or Jesus Christ given to the world through the Spirit. This is what God has done, whether people know it or not, whether people can see it or not. The missionary’s task is not to berate people he or she has already judged, but to open up people to the signs of divine love already in their lives and already working in the world.

We look at Paul from today’s vantage point: a world teaming with diversity, full of great dreams and dashed hopes, replete with opportunities for coming together or falling apart. In some ways the fundamental insight of Paul – that it is all about God’s generous and unlimited love – is a message the world has barely begun to hear. One can be passionate about grace and one can insist upon it for humankind, but how can anyone make a point of division, of violence or separation? For centuries right up to the Second Vatican Council, Catholic and non-Catholic Christians saw the possibility of salvation for others in only begrudging ways.

Do we not have to experience what Paul did? Dow we not have to be swept up and away by this empowering love? Do we not have to let this love sear our eyes until they view the world as saturated by divine love? Do we not have to let this love break open the stony edges of our hearts until we love as God loves?

Love can do funny things to us. It can make us jealous or nervous or persistent or petulant. The purer our experience of love, the more love purifies our motives, making us generous and kind and other-focused, and eager for the good of others, as Paul tells us in his hymn about love (1Cor13). So in the end with all that love can make us, it can also make us missionaries, bearers of divine love to the world as generously and graciously as God has done this in Jesus, not resting until “God may be “all in all.” (1 Corinthians 15:28) that is until absolute love may be all in all.

[1] “Paul the Missionary,” Frank P. DeSiano CSP. All Holy Men and Women, Ed. Thomas A. Kane CSP (New York: 2014) pp. 22-27.