Among all the claims made throughout history, the Christian proclamation is the most beautiful and daring: the God who created us is so deeply in love with us that He chose to take on the very same human nature He gifted us with. The Incarnation is the ultimate expression of divine intimacy, an act of love so profound that it scandalizes human expectations. This is not a distant, impersonal deity, but a God who desires to relate to us on our level, in our very flesh.
This love is not an abstraction or an ideal—it is as real and concrete as our own bodies. The Christian faith does not present God as an impersonal force or a mere watchmaker of the universe, but as a personal, loving Father who formed each of us uniquely. The specificity of our existence—our fingerprints, our faces, our unrepeatable identities—reflects a divine intentionality. No human being is an accident; each of us is created with purpose and particularity.
His love is not generic or collective in a way that dissolves the individual; rather, He loves us in the particularity of who we are. This divine romance is written in the Incarnation itself: Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, was born of a specific woman, in a particular time and place. He walked among us, laughed, suffered, and ultimately died a unique death for love of us.
And yet, many struggle with this reality. Even those who acknowledge a higher power or an intelligent designer behind the cosmos often wrestle with the notion that this God is personal, that He sees and loves them as individuals. Joseph Ratzinger, in What It Means to Be a Christian, articulates this tension well:
“What is both offensive and sublime in the Christian message is still that the fate of all history; our fate depends on one individual Jesus of Nazareth…God unmistakably knows and loves each individual distinctively…God loves me, this particular person; that he loves each one who has a human face, however disturbed and however distorted that human face might be.”
But what happens when the image of love is distorted? Many of us carry wounds from our earliest relationships, particularly from our mothers and fathers. Attachment injuries and childhood trauma do not merely affect our emotions; they carry profound spiritual consequences. If our first experiences of love were unreliable, conditional, or even harmful, how can we trust that God’s love is different? The personal nature of divine love becomes difficult to grasp when human love has failed us.
For some, it feels safer to believe in an impersonal God—distant and detached—rather than risk the pain of a personal God who might disappoint us. To acknowledge Him as personal means bringing Him to trial in our hearts, confronting Him with our wounds, our anger, and our unanswered questions. This requires the courage to be vulnerable, an often understated or misunderstood expression of bravery in today’s world. It demands that we expose our deepest fears and hurts before a God who is not far off but intimately present. And yet, the very scandal of Christianity is that God does not remain at a distance; He steps into our suffering, making Himself vulnerable so that we might dare to trust again.
At a certain point, this confrontation may lead us to the judgment, “God loves me.” Fr. Dan Leary observes that making this judgment is a profound challenge. Letting go of our attachment to wounds and preferring His love and healing over self-protection requires a deep shift. Once we accept love, we have to change. We must begin to live as those who are beloved, for love transforms us. It is within this discomfort, in the unexpected encounter with His love, that He reveals Himself—calling us to surrender, be transformed, and step into the mystery of His love.
This is the scandal of particularity: that the infinite God loves each of us in our own particularity. He knows our names, our wounds, and our desires. He loves us not in spite of who we are, but precisely as we are. And in that love, we find the courage to become who we are meant to be. Yet, the truth remains: God’s love is not a projection of our human experiences, but their source and fulfillment. He is the restorer of every broken image of love, and in His providence, this love is made manifest through others. As Ratzinger writes in the same text, “God wants to come to men only through other men”—a mystery echoed in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words:
For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
(As Kingfishers Catch Fire)
It is through each other that we encounter the personal love of God, who sees us, knows us, and calls us into His infinite life. In the true friends we meet, in every act of love given and received, Christ is present—lovely in limbs not His, yet shining forth in the particularity of each person, if only we accept the grace to recognize Him.
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Image of kingfisher: Unsplash+
