God our Almighty Father gives His infinite love to us, from His Divine Heart, as “the free and whole offering of a being who has not received anything” (Staniloae, D. 2012. The Holy Trinity: In the beginning there was love, p. 31). Since He desired to give “His whole unbegotten Person from eternity . . . [Our Father] begat another, in eternity, to whom He gives . . . [It is] precisely because He gives all of Himself, He is in the other and the other in Him” (ibid.).

Starting with His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, God the Father gave Himself in His entirety to His Son, so that the Latter, “filling Himself with the unending good  . . . [He received], might offer that goodness, together with all His thanks, back to the Unbegotten One” (ibid.). Our Father did this so that “He might take joy . . . [in the responses] to His giving of His own being” (ibid.). Meanwhile, in relation to ourselves, the Father begets, in similar but not identical manner “the one who receives Him so as to receive His gift in return . . . [because] light and joy exist only in communion with other conscious beings” (pp. 31-33). Never has there been a time, therefore, when God as the First Person of the Holy Trinity was not Father in His function.