One and All

Christmastide after Epiphany (Wednesday, 9 January 2019)

1 John 4:11-18. Psalm 72:1-2, 10, 12-13. Mark 6:45-52. (Please click the following link for the above readings http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010919.cfm.)

“God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God, and God in them.”

How we relate to God is how we relate to others. How we relate to God is how we relate to everything else. And vice versa. The only true way to relate to God is with our hearts. God can only be loved, enjoyed, cherished and experienced. Loving God and loving anything else is one and the same movement of our hearts. We can't separate God's love from loving this stone or that tree or this squirrel or that human person. Everything flows into one if it is love.

A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love. Love is the gift that keeps giving.

Loving God does not make us good. God's love for us makes us good. Love transforms us deeply and completely. So it is a fallacy to think that I need to be good in order to start loving God. His love has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit given “within” us (see Romans 5:5). So I am asked to discover this love inside of me, which is already loving God. I am asked to love God as I am—with all I am: good and bad.

Perhaps this is the discovery that John talks of as remaining or abiding in love, and thus we abide in God Himself. When we abide in love, we abide in God, and we allow God to love us and love others through us.

Therefore we need to speak about God as both personal and transpersonal. God is a Person, but God is beyond our idea of Person. God is intensely personal, intimate and immanent, but God is also totally transcendent and mysterious. God is both intimate and ultimate: intimately ultimate and ultimately intimate.

If we need to mature as believers we need to eventually move towards a transpersonal notion of God: as presence itself, consciousness itself, pure Being, the very Ground of Being, the force field of the Holy Spirit, God with us, and God in all things. At the same time, we frequently find it helpful, if not necessary, to still relate to God as a Person through the intimate sharing of one trusting self to another. As we experience, it takes two to love—a giver and a receiver. We normally do not give ourselves, fall in love with, or surrender to a concept, an energy, a force, or even to enlightenment. Persons love persons, and the brilliance of Judeo-Christianity is that it keeps the whole spiritual life intensely personal in this very rich sense.

But staying at the personal notion of God can make me think that my relationship with God is individualistic. On the contrary, my relationship with God opens up the whole of reality in front of me. My faith is not merely saying, “I must have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as my own Lord and Saviour.” There is too much “I” and “my” there, although this may be the best way to start off. But we can't remain there. We need to move on to loving God who is a Community, we need to move on to communion with God and everything. My relating and connecting to God, leads me to connect to everything else. No exceptions. If my love for God is true, it makes me love one and all, even my enemies.

So we repeat: How we relate to God is how we relate to everything else!

I really love God as much as I love the person I love the least. (Dorothy Day)