“God is absolute ontological goodness in Himself and in relation to others.”

This is the goodness of the Lord in relation to us, that He sets things right for us. We muddle and He un-muddles; we lose ourselves and He gathers us; we are wronged and He vindicates us. His goodness to us is that He repairs us.

Can there be a better focus of that goodness than Eucharist? During the Mass, the Priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life. ” He then follows that a very similar set of sentences about the wine.

In this we are reminded about the goodness of God for us, that He comes Himself to straiten out our crooked paths. He gives us the bread and wine, it is not the toil of our hands. He miraculously lets it become His very self (1 Corinthians 11:29) to meet not only our physical needs but also our spiritual. The fact that God decides to appear to us in the form of bread and wine means something. From Him we have our strength and mirth (cf. Psalm 104:15), both our body and soul is healed. God is good to us.

Oh, we might bewail our fate as Job or Habakkuk did, but in the end we, as they, recognize that if our breath is taken we return to clay (Psalm 146). We see that our source of life is God, because our plans, if not supported by Him, fail. We know that God is good to us, then, because He sustains us.

There is also one other part to this dogma, that God is good in Himself. As we know God's goodness to us in that He sustains us, we also know that God is good in Himself in that He doesn't need us. He made the world, He does not need some pittance that we might give back. Everything we offer to God is not for His sake, but for ours. This, then, is the root of why we try to love God as He loved us: love is not forced. If God needed us in some way, His love for us would be a forced love, and therfore no love at all! God alone can show us love, because God alone needs no one. His love is totally free.

Further Reading: Jesus multiplies the bread (thereby supplying the majority not through toil in a field) and describes it as His body (so much so that people left following Him for fear of cannibalism): thereby giving both physical sustenance as well as spiritual to the people (John 6).