Consider, for a moment, the people in whose presence your heart stops racing, those beside whom you feel centered and serene; the ones in whose company the orbit of your life returns to its axis. Your grandmother or your twin brother. Your fiancée, maybe, or your old volleyball coach. It’s like the authority of their stabilizing aura makes everything (the whole world, your sense of self) more real and more solid, more malleable and more free.
You know them. And you know when they’re near and you can live and move in the glow of their presence; everything gets simpler, cleaner. For me, it’s like my wobbly, off-center self finds an anchor outside of itself and all is well.
It’s such a joy to remain there. Chosen by the love of another. Which is why it’s the strangest thing, maybe the most baffling and painful thing, that there is something in us that won’t stay put, that wants to run, that gets bored and tired and restless—restless of even this. How can it be that it is hard to be satisfied in such a presence, to remain in the offered chosenness? We make no sense, sometimes, we human creatures.
Yet it is directly into this tension that Jesus asks us to walk: “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you,” he says. And Paul, too: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.” Consider again the face of that person in whose love you have been chosen and become yourself. It is through them and with them and in them that God’s choice is made flesh. Remember. Call them to heart. Remain.

Fr. Paddy Gilger

Patrick Gilger, SJ, is assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago and contributing editor for culture at America Media.