A response to love, made in faith

Since God loved us first and reached out to us in his sending of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in a free act of supreme generosity, our approach to God is always a response to that love: our desire to thank him is itself prompted and strengthened by God’s gift of grace. Our thankful response, as we are reminded at Mass, “adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in your grace” (Preface IV for Weekdays).

The response we make to God’s self-gift is the obedience of faith, which is at one and the same time a gift from God, necessary for salvation, available to anyone who asks for it with humility, and also an act of our own intellect by which we surrender our whole selves to God and to his loving plan for us he has revealed. This obedience of faith is not a denial or a contradiction of our human reason, since it is one and the same Lord who gives us the gift of faith and the gift of our human intelligence and reason. Both faith and reason can and are ordered to work in harmony as two wings on which the human spirit rises to contemplation of the truth and the One who is Truth.