“God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Pete Range, director of the Office for Life and Justice for the Catholic Diocese of Toledo, shared that thought with about 75 people who attended the second “Claimed by Love” program on Dec. 21 at the Center for Pastoral Leadership. Attendees were mainly young adults, including many college students who took time after completing finals to spend the day focusing on their faith.
The program was coordinated by the Vocation Office of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland.
“Choose Jesus and choose heaven,” Range told the group.
The program began with Mass celebrated by Bishop Nelson Perez in Resurrection Chapel. The group then headed to the Founders Room for breakfast and the keynote address before dispersing for breakout sessions. Lunch was next, followed by an opportunity for Eucharistic adoration and confession.
The breakout sessions were designed to focus on growth in prayer, discernment and maintaining a healthy physical and spiritual balance in life.
Range reminded the group of what the bishop said during his homily: “God comes to us in the midst of the busyness of our lives and in the messiness of our ‘stables’ (lives).”
He had three pieces of advice, “Allow God to claim me. Allow God to claim you. Cooperate with God to claim others.”
Range shared some of his personal experiences, including talking about how his father was paralyzed twice – once by polio just weeks before he was to have been vaccinated as a child and the second time when polio struck him again years later. But he lived a full life, thanks to the insistence of his mother that he learn to care for himself. Range’s father finished college, got a job, married and had a family of six children before being paralyzed from the neck down for the last 26 years of his life.
“Embrace your cross. You will find peace and joy,” he said. “Jesus told us he was there for us as he was on the cross. He was a happy man as he spread his arms on that cross for us,” he added. Range reminded the group that Jesus of today’s Church is the same Jesus who walked the earth more than 2,000 years ago.
He also encouraged attendees to listen to their hearts and if they have any inkling that they are being called to a vocation, “Do it.” Range said he felt the call and entered the Jesuit community after completing college at John Carroll University to discern his vocation. “I couldn’t be the husband and father I am today if I hadn’t said ‘yes,’” he added. Although he later left the Jesuits, he said the experience was invaluable. Range and his wife have two children and are expecting a third.
“I’m not perfect, but the ‘Hound of Heaven’ continues to pursue me. He claims you,” Range said.
He shared other experiences, including how he became a staunch pro-life supporter, once even offering to adopt the baby of a woman who was considering what would have been her fifth abortion. After seeing the ultrasound and hearing her baby’s heartbeat, the woman changed her mind and decided to keep her baby.
“Jesus stamped himself on you,” Range told the group, explaining that laminin, the cell adhesion protein that binds cells together, looks like a cross. “God did not make the heavens, earth and sun in his image – only man. Take time to look in the mirror. We have a dignity because we are made in the image of God.”
Humans should claim the deepest identity of God, the power to cast out demons in the world, Range said. “Each of you is amazing and every life matters,” he added. “If you eat Doritos daily, you’ll start to look like one. But if you eat Jesus daily in the Eucharist, you will begin to look like him,” he said.
The sacraments are important, Range said, explaining that reconciliation allows us to experience the mercy of Christ. “Let Jesus in to rearrange your house. Give him the joy of forgiving your sins. Allow God to build a palace in you.”
Range said the greatest social service is to bring up children in a family. “As the family goes, so goes the nation.”
He reminded the group that they should allow God to claim them, that every person has dignity and that the family is the nucleus of the nation.
“Jesus has a purpose and a mission in your life. Go, and be not afraid to fulfill your purpose and mission. The bottom line is that God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.