"Excess is God's trademark in His creation; as the [Early Church] Fathers put it, 'God does not reckon His gifts by the measure'.  At the same time excess is also the real foundation and form of the history of salvation, which in the last analysis is nothing other than the truly breathtaking fact that God, in an incredible outpouring of Himself, expends not only a universe but His own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation.  So excess or superfluity - let us repeat - is the real definition or mark of the history of salvation.  The purely calculating mind will always find it absurd that for man God Himself should be expended.  Only the love can understand the folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient.  Yet if it is true that the creation lives from excess or superfluity, that man is a being for whom excess is necessity, how can we wonder that revelation is the superfluous and for that very reason the necessary, the divine, the love in which the meaning of the universe is fulfilled?"

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp. 197-8.

I can go to bed tonight, knowing that my puny existence is not outside of the embrace of God's excess love -- me and all my petty concerns!  Deo gratias!