As we reflect on the life and writings of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, we can identify three themes that might be applied to our own call to follow Christ. Just as the late Holy Father did, we are called to seek the face of the Lord, to receive His love and to have hope in His faithfulness.  

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI sought the face of the Lord. This was evident in his manner of prayer and study and in the worship of the divine mysteries at Holy Mass and in Eucharistic Adoration.  

He described his three-volume work on the life of Christ as “solely an expression of my personal search for ‘the face of the Lord.’” (cf. Psalm 27.8) (Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, 2007, p. xxiv)  

This search for the Lord was a central motivation of his extensive scholarly work. He sought to know the Lord and to help others do the same. He noted in the introduction to his second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, “I have attempted to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to personal encounter.” (Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, 2011, p. xvii) 

He reminded us: “What the world needs is God’s love; it needs to encounter Christ and to believe in Him.” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 2007, 84)

The love of God was the theme chosen by Benedict to emphasize in his first encyclical, God Is Love. (Deus Caritas Est, 2005) We may gain insight into the pope’s own spiritual life from the way in which he describes the “love story” of the Bible, wherein the Lord “seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the cross.” (Deus Caritas Est, 17) 

One could say love was the lens through which the Holy Father saw and interpreted everything.

He worked to inspire people to have hope in the faithfulness of the Lord’s love and promises, and in the inheritance of a lasting heaven where the embrace of God awaits. In his encyclical On Christian Hope, he wrote: “Man’s great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God – God who loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until ‘all is accomplished.’” (cf. John 13.1, John 19:30)

Benedict encouraged others to seek the Lord, experience His love and to live in trusting hope, while living in communion with their brothers and sisters. He saw in the Holy Eucharist the source of all communion and mission among the children of God.  

“The more ardent the love for the Eucharist in the hearts of the Christian people, the more clearly they will recognize the goal of all mission: to bring Christ to others. Not just a theory or a way of life inspired by Christ, but the very gift of His Person.” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 86)

The words and deeds of Benedict XVI draw us to Christ and illuminate for us how to be His disciples. In his memory, it is fitting to recall his words of counsel:  

“All people want to leave a mark which lasts. But what remains? ... The only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. The fruit which remains then is that which we have sowed in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching the heart, words which open the soul to joy in the Lord.  

“Let us then go to the Lord and pray to Him, so that He may help us bear fruit which remains.  Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.” (Homily for the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff, April 18, 2005)

Let us pray and reflect: 

•    How can I observe and listen to the Jesus of the Gospels to encounter Him?  

•    How is the Lord calling me, personally, to bear fruit in human souls by sowing the love of God?

Sister John Paul Maher, OP, is principal of Worthington St. Michael School and a member of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.