“As verily as God is our Bather, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed he in all, and especially in the sweet words where he said: I it am”. (Mother Julian, Revelations of Divine Love, c.59).

St. Thomas states (1,47,1; 111,23, 2 ad 3) that the things which are in time are meant to be but manifestations of those which are from eternity; i.e. of God himself, of the eternal self- subsistent life of the Blessed Trinity, the nature ofwhich was revealed to Moses when the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush: “I AM WHO AM . . . Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS hath sent me to you” (Exodus, 3, 14). The Fulness of Being, the Plentitude of Life—such is God’s own description of himself; and when S. John, who had learnt the secrets of the divine life as he lay on the bosom of the Incarnate Word, declared that ‘God is Love’, he was only expressing the same truth from a different point of view. For love is only the ‘affluence’, the diffusion, the self-donation of being. So that Being at its source must also be love at its source (cf. Maritain, Introduction to Metaphysics, 4, 7-8).