“If God loves us no matter what we do, why keep the commandments? If we are not to be punished or rewarded for our efforts, then why make sacrifices?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we don’t try to be good so that God loves and rewards us. God loves us no matter what we do, and heaven is never a reward for a good life. As Jesus assures us, God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional; nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing can stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else – perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly. Part of Christian dogma is that God’s love is what keeps everything in existence. If God stopped loving anything, it would cease to be. That raises an interesting question: If God loves everything and everyone perfectly, does God then also love Satan as much as he loves Jesus’ mother, Mary? The answer can only be “yes”; God loves Satan as much as God loves Mary. The difference is not in how God loves them but in how they, each in turn, love God. God loves each of them in the same way, namely, perfectly. But obviously, Mary’s response is very different from Satan’s. In that difference, we see what creates hell: a certain attitude in the face of love. God cannot be offended. God’s love cannot be driven away. God does not reward or punish us on the basis of whether we have been good or bad. God simply loves us. As Martin Luther once said, the desire to be good and to keep the commandments follows from genuine faith and love the way smoke follows fire. The intent is never to earn love or reward but to respond appropriately to them. For those of us who are still struggling to be mature, the spiritual and moral precepts of the faith are meant as a discipline, precisely as discipleship, that helps teach us what it means to be a spiritual and sensitive human being. That is true in the case of mature love and faith. Trying to be good should still not be an attempt to somehow earn love or heaven, but rather a humble acknowledgment that one still needs a lot of help in knowing how to live in the face of love.