Human beings are able to love because God is love. Believing that God is free, rational, just and relational is helpful in explaining many human experiences and the way the world works. But this belief about God is not particularly helpful in answering the question of why God created the world, human beings, the human individual. The Christian tradition believes that God is Love (1 John 4:8). God creates the world, every creature and every human being out of this perfect love. Unlike other creatures, human beings, as images of God, are both loved and are capable of love. Human persons are capable of knowing and loving themselves and, more importantly, they are capable of knowing and loving others with a profound intensity. It is this deep love, this deep gift of self, that Christian's believe triumphs over even the greatest trials, even death.

As they form their identities over time and seek to affirm their own worth in the face of  the goodness and the ambiguities of being in relationship, human beings must choose between accepting or rejecting God's love and God's promise. God gives human beings this choice precisely because of God's love for human persons. God respects the inviolable dignity of the human person and their absolute worth as moral agents, as people who can make moral decisions. Christian faith affirms the worth and dignity of all human beings and God's boundless love for humanity.  However, individual human beings, situated as they are in particular historical circumstances, have to make choices and to act, in ways that realise their own and other's dignity. Such ways of acting 'incarnate' God's love in the world. Because they are free, rational and relational, human beings can choose to tear down and destroy the beauty and goodness that God has given to them. On the other hand they can choose to hear God's call when God asks them to care for the world, and deeply love all that is in it. This is the fundamental choice that all human beings face, a choice that all human beings must make.

Key to understanding the notion of emotional and affective maturity is a proper acknowledgment of the importance of human freedom in the integration of our emotions. Created in the image of God, human beings are rational and free. When emotions come to dominate our thinking and acting in a way that compromises our freedom, then we are not living the fully human lives that we are created to live. When, however, our emotions are integrated through our rationality and freedom into our efforts to fulfil our calling to live wholeheartedly—to stand up for love—then emotions play an essential part in realizing human flourishing. The classical language of the Catholic tradition expresses this human flourishing using the emotive term happiness.

Happiness, beatitude, or flourishing is, according to classical philosophical and Catholic tradition, the thing that all human beings desire and which will ultimately be found in eternal life with God. Because we are endowed with reason and freedom by God we are able to experience a 'not-yet' perfect version of that happiness here and now. As images of God, that is, as God's representatives on Earth, we are able to work for the realisation of this happiness, this flourishing. Through our moral behaviour, moral choices and moral actions we can incarnate God's love in the world. In this way, we can literally make the world and ourselves, happier. Our emotions function to help us to perceive those things which are good because they contribute to this happiness, and those things which are bad or evil because they may ultimately frustrate the realisation of true happiness.