There’s a Jesuit truth that feels almost startling in its simplicity: “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way.” Not because love is sentimental, but because love roots the entire Christian life. When love is the source, obedience becomes joy rather than duty, and worship becomes truth rather than performance.
We know this instinctively. Obedience to God’s designs is itself an act of worship. Worship without obedience is hollow flattery. And both, no matter how sincere, are less than Christian if they do not spring from the one living root: love of God.
Love is what makes the spiritual life whole.
Mary Oliver once wrote, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down…” Her words remind us that prayer begins not in mastery but in attention. In looking. In noticing. In letting the world slow us into reverence.
Sometimes falling in love with God looks exactly like that:
kneeling in the grass,
feeling the earth steady beneath you,
letting the ordinary become a doorway into the Holy.
Attention becomes prayer.
Prayer becomes love.
Love becomes obedience.
Obedience becomes worship.
And worship becomes the simple, steady way we live for God.
This is the practicality of falling in love with God: it makes everything else our choices, our habits, our hopes align with the One who made us. It restores us to the wholeness we were created for.
As Joseph Whelan, SJ wrote, “Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
May love be the root.
May attention be the beginning.
May your life become the quiet, honest praise of the God who loves you first.
Smitten With Goodness 