Perhaps the most intriguing statement in the New Testament is St. John’s simple, “God is love.” As mysterious and awesome as the revelation of the Divine Name (“I am that I am”) to Moses might be, St. John’s statement gives a content that echoes and infolds the death and resurrection of Christ itself. Indeed, any other statement about God runs the risk of obscuring this essential revelation. More than that, to say, “God is love,” reveals the full character of being and existence.
In our everyday thought and speech, we are accustomed to thinking about love as an action, a moral choice that describes how we treat others. We could say, “I am a human being who chooses to love.” In truth, it would be more accurate to say, “I am love who chooses to human-being.” Every thought and action in our lives that is contrary to love is a diminishment of our being. When Christ says to us, “I have come that they might have life, and that more abundantly,” we may understand Him to mean that He has come to make love possible and to nurture us in the fullness of love-as-being.
We are created with a drive towards true existence – we yearn for it. Frequently, we go no further with this drive than to tend to our bodies – to eat when we are hungry or to drink when we thirst. That same drive towards existence (on the bodily level) can become distorted through gluttony and such. By the same token, we are created to love. The primal bond between mother and child, is physical, emotional, and psychological. It eclipses these biological states, however, and becomes truly ontological.
The Virgin Mary, when presenting her Divine child in the Temple, is told by the Prophet Simeon, “this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”” (Lk. 2:34-35) This describes something far beyond the bond of emotion between mother and child. The sword will pierce her soul. There is an ontological bond – such is the mystery of our true existence and its reality as love.
A difficulty with the world in its juridical imagination is that love is seen as but an emotion, sometimes an action – but not as the stuff of reality. We have everything backwards. It is Love (God) Who created all that is and sustains it. Communion with the true God is to live in Love. When we are told to “love your neighbor as yourself,” we too often hear little more than a commandment to be nice to those around us. St. Silouan heard it rightly and declared, “My brother is my life.”
St. Isaac of Syria wrote:
What compassionate kindness and abundant goodness belong to the Creator! With what purpose and with what love did he create this world and bring it into existence! What a mystery does the coming into being of the creation look towards! To what a state is our common nature invited! What love served to initiate the creation of the world! … In love did he bring the world into existence; in love is he going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of him who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.
Of course, the full nature of love is revealed in Christ’s voluntary self-offering on the Cross: “Greater love has no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn. 15:13) The Cross is more than a saving event. It is an event that reveals.
Contemporary culture imagines human beings as individuals. As such, we seek to be self-contained, self-defining, and self-referential. It is ironic in the extreme that this patently untrue version of human existence is an invention of a culture rather than the product of an individual. It is a culture-wide delusion, sustained only through its unrelenting sales pitch telling us to “be all that you can be” (except that which you really are).
We are not the products of invention or genius, re-imagining or technology. We are birthed by love and bound by love and only fulfilled and realized through love. We are both lover and beloved, or else we are hastening towards non-existence.
Biology gives us a portion of our existence. It does not give us the fullness of our existence. Christ on the Cross, at the very edge of death, is, nevertheless showing the fullness of human existence. Creation itself (the darkened Sun, the earthquake) reveals His humanity as cosmic in its scope.
We are created in the image of God, not as thing, but as person. To be a person is far more than being a mere individual. It is an existence that embraces others as it constitutes itself in the free gift of love. The clinical observation of children in poorly-run orphanages in the former Soviet sphere documented classic examples of “failure to thrive.” Without love, without touch, without human-to-human communion, children withered away. Well-being, much less greatness of being, requires love.
Love is ontological, a matter of true being. Its absence in our lives, in whatever measure, diminishes our existence, our lives becoming thin and stretched. Bilbo Baggins, Tolkein’s hobbit character who carries the Ring of the Dark Lord for decades, describes himself in this classic manner: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” In an age of information, we fail to see that we are wielding the ring of a dark lord, marveling at our power while we ourselves become less and less.
Many years ago, I became convinced that we become ever more like that which we love.
“…love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7–8)
Bearing this in mind, the words of Isaiah seem less strange:
“Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And let your soul delight itself in fatness.” (Isaiah 55:2)
Love is the very heart of our existence. It is the stuff of which our true life consists. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love even your enemy. Delight yourself in the fatness of being.
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