Ut in Deo Sit
The deepest love you can have for someone is to will their ultimate good. And what is their ultimate good? Ut in Deo sit: that they may be in God.
About Rick Clements
I write and speak about the Catholic faith and about current events, cultural issues, and political issues viewed through the lens of the Catholic faith. I've written two books (The Meaning of the World Is Love: Selected Texts from Hans Urs von Balthasar with Commentary; The Book of Love: Brief Meditations), and I've written articles for Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, Catholic World Report, and Crisis Magazine. My Substack can be found at beautygoodnesstruth1.substack.com, and my website can be found at richardclements.org.
Entries by Rick Clements
The Creative Power of Love
/0 Comments/in Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsLove is creative. Love is transformative. Love can create something good that was not there before. Love can take what is there and transform it into something better. God has given each of us the incredible privilege, and the serious responsibility, of participating in the creative, transformative power of love.
Lord, I Want to See
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsMost of us are not physically blind, but we all suffer from at least some degree of spiritual blindness. As people who are so often blind, whether willfully or inadvertently, to the good in others, let us join in the blind man’s entreaty (Luke 18:41): Lord, help us to see!
There Are No Ordinary People
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsThere are no ordinary people, because God made every single one of us imago Dei—in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). Keeping this in mind helps us to see the good in others, even when that goodness is a little (or a lot) harder to see at first.
Where Love Is, There Is the Eye
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love/by Rick ClementsLove enables us to see the good more clearly: in other people, in ourselves, and in life itself.
How Good That You Exist!
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsEveryone needs at least one person in their lives who can honestly say to them, “How good that you exist!”
Food for the Journey
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Eucharist, Love/by Rick ClementsLike Jesus, we are called to “break ourselves open and pour ourselves out” in love for our fellow human beings, becoming “food” and “drink” for them as they make their way through their own journey to Love.
Love Is Life that Pours Itself Forth
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsWe are most fully alive when we are “breaking ourselves open and pouring ourselves out” in loving self-gift to God and neighbor.
Giving Back to the Giver
/0 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Faith, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsTo surrender your life to God is to offer yourself as a conduit for the divine love.
Hand It Over
/2 Comments/in Catholic Writing and Publishing, Love, Spiritual Life/by Rick ClementsTo give one’s self away in love to God is, paradoxically, to be in the fullest possible possession of one’s self, breaking out of the dungeon of the ego and into the infinite spaces of the divine love.