Then later, in chapter 54 of the prophet Isaiah, God says, “With everlasting love I will have compassion on you.” And also, in perhaps the most famous verse from the New Testament, John 3:16, the author says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

When I was a child, it was easy to believe in God’s love. As children we trust; we accept joyfully the things we’re told. I was sure that whenever I prayed, God listened. And I also was blessed to be part of a family that loved me—I knew what love felt like.

But as I grew older—as I reached my teenage years, then adulthood—I began to lose hold of my belief in a loving God. Somewhere along the line, a furtive and decidedly non-Scriptural belief began to take root: that I had to deserve God’s love. And I was getting so many messages that told me I was not deserving—because I wasn’t bright enough, or outgoing enough, or attractive enough, or kind enough, or because I was too selfish or weird or sinful. I saw how society’s acceptance of me rested on all kinds of conditions. And I grew to believe God’s love must be conditional, too—that it was not freely given, but that somehow I had to earn it.

Looking back today, I know that God’s love was there for me all the time. And yet my doubts and anxieties obscured it, the way bright city lights obscure our view of the stars.

I’m not quite sure today of the reasons that led me, in my early 30s, to begin study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Partly it was a genuine desire to serve God and humanity, but there also, I suspect, was that nagging sense of guilt: that I wasn’t good enough and needed to do something more to earn God’s affection. Yet, even if I entered seminary with mixed motives, it blessedly proved to be the path that helped me reclaim my childhood sense—a truer sense—of God’s unconditional love.

Mark’s Gospel tells us that before Jesus began his public ministry, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness to pray. Similarly, before beginning the second semester each year, we seminarians would go on a weeklong retreat to spend time praying, reflecting and re-focusing. During my second year of seminary, the Spirit—through the means of my fellow student’s rusted Volkswagen van—drove me out into the wilderness of a wooded Retreat Center on the Potomac.