You Are God’s Beloved

When I was a campus minister, I did a retreat with the college students every January, and one of the retreats we offered was based the book Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen. The premise of this book is that each of us is God’s Beloved, and our task in the spiritual life is to recognize, accept, and live out of God’s profound love for us. Easy, right? As it turns out, it’s not so easy. However, there is something about being told that you’re the Beloved that stops you in your tracks.

I’m not sure if you know much about Henri Nouwen, but he was a Dutch priest who taught theology for much of his career, and he also lived in a L’Arche Community. L’Arche Communities are made up of people with disabilities and people who supposedly don’t have disabilities, although Henri Nouwen wrote that every person in the community had gifts and limitations. Nouwen recognized the mutuality of that communal space, and he also recognized his own gifts and limitations. Actually, it seems like it took him some time to recognize his own gifts. In his writings, he’s honest about his struggles and feelings of brokenness. His honesty and authenticity make him very relatable to many people. Don’t most of us struggle from time to time with our limitations and brokenness?

I say all of this because students on the retreat came to appreciate both the book Life of the Beloved and the author himself. Even though people in their late teens and early twenties may seem to think they know everything (myself included, at that age), they are not necessarily confident. Some students had a lot of fear and anxiety, feelings of not being good enough, reticence about naming and claiming their identities, especially if they feared they wouldn’t be accepted. However, on our retreats, we worked hard to build a community of love and grace, and so many students eventually came to trust that they would be welcome there. It was a freeing space. In their mutual vulnerability, they found mutual acceptance. They cared about each other, and they were able to grow authentically into themselves. And they had a friend in Henri Nouwen.

They also had a supporter in me. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to have that opportunity to tell my students that they are God’s Beloved. The student retreat leaders gave the talks, so through their vulnerable sharing, they said it too. And more often than not, through God’s providence, our retreat fell on this feast, the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, in which the voice of God descends upon Jesus telling him, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” God’s voice says this of Jesus, and God said it to each student on that retreat too. And a lot of the time, they heard it.

I hope that we hear it too. We’re probably not on retreat at this moment. We’re likely in the midst of our ordinary lives, caring for our loved ones, going to work, doing the best we can. And all the while, we are God’s Beloved. All the while, God is madly in love with us.

Personally, finding out that God loves me, just as I am, was a total revelation. I, like many of my students, spent my young years wrestling with feelings of inadequacy, bemoaning my imperfections, feeling broken. Accepting God’s total all-encompassing love has really been one step forward and two steps back. But even a little toe touch into that water of love and acceptance is a deep and profound gift.

I’ve sometimes wondered if Jesus himself ever struggled with recognizing his Belovedness. Maybe his divine nature saved him from that, and he proceeded through life with utter confidence. Or, maybe his full humanity gave him the same doubts and fears that the rest of us have. In this account from the Gospel of Luke, we don’t actually “see” Jesus being baptized. He just moves through the ritual with everyone else. It’s only when he’s praying afterwards that the sky opens and the Spirit descends and the voice proclaims, or assures, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

From there, Jesus launches himself into the desert. Is the desert a time of further wrestling? We know that he’s tempted to test the voice from his baptism, tempted to test his own power and to keep his power to himself for himself. He perseveres through the testing, coming out on the other side, maybe tired or introspective or determined, but committed to his mission. Maybe he has a certain acceptance, a certain inner-knowing, a new-founded, hard-won trust in God’s love for him. He moves into ministry then, calls his disciples, and begins to teach them about the kingdom of God. He loves them. In loving them, he reveals their own belovedness to them. The disciples, like Jesus, allow God’s love to move them into mission, to loving and serving others, to proclaiming the kingdom of love. Eventually. Their learning curve is bigger than that of Jesus. And it could be a big learning curve for us too.

How easy is it for you to accept God’s love for you and to live out of that? Like me, is it one step forward and two steps back? If so, why is that? Why is it easier to believe in our brokenness than our belovedness? Doubts and fears, feelings of inadequacy and regret are normal. They’re just parts of the human experience. But so is being loved. How do we normalize living as God’s Beloved? How do we walk around knowing we’re loved more deeply and profoundly than we can ever really understand, and how do we not spend our lives trying to understand it anyway?

I don’t know. I still probably only have one toe dipped into that pool of love. Maybe that’s our most important call in the spiritual life — recognizing God’s love for us and learning to live out of that love, moment by moment, amidst our heartbreaks and limitations and doubts and fears. Maybe we spend our lives seeking to enter more deeply into that love, and sometimes we move toward it and sometimes we move away, but all the while God is whispering to us, “You are my Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

May we spend our time, energy, and attention receiving that love and revealing that love to each other.

For Reflection:

• Was there ever a time when you had this revelation, this experience of God’s profound love for you? What brought it about? What was it like? How do you carry that experience with you?

• If you struggled to trust in God’s love for you, to feel that love, what makes it so difficult?

• Maybe you could spend some time talking this over with God. Or, maybe you could spend some time in silence with God, just allowing God to love you.

by Sister Leslie Keener, CDP

Sister Leslie Keener, CDP is the director of God Space, a community-building spirituality ministry in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. She’s a Sister of Divine Providence with a Masters in Ministry and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Retreats from Creighton University. She directs retreats, meets with people for spiritual direction, and serves as the vocation director for her community. She enjoys music, dancing, meaningful conversations, and spicy food.