Can a love for God adequately fill in an unintended earthbound deprived void of spiritual core? Or is God love requisite to fully embrace a complete human spiritual experience?
It is a matter of perception. The love of God is never absent. Our perception of it may not be able grasp its reality. The question raises the question of the problem of evil or tragedy in the world. If God is a being of love, then why doesn’t he stop evil like state-sponsored genocide? The same question could be asked as “If God is a being if love, why doesn’t he make everyone happy, rich, and drop-dead beautiful. All these questions go to the question of God’s purpose for creation and it particular for humanity.
Go to the beginning of Genesis where God says, “Let us make man in our image.” So, if each human being bears in some way the image of God, then it means that humans have an agency of responsibility to create goodness and stop evil. He has given this capacity to us. The problem is that the institution of sin in the world through Adam and Eve’s free choice to disobey God, means that our perception of God’s presence and love is always conflicted by our own free choice to believe and follow God or the decision to define God in some way so that we see God as subject to us and therefore existing to do our bidding.
This how the Spectacle of Christianity takes on the form of God as some kind of heavenly Santa Claus granting gifts of wealth and capitalist power upon our command. It is an artificial simulation of God’s love, the same as those who turn God into a social justice warrior to fulfill some Marxist belief in a society of justice and equity.
Our perception of God’s love is wrapped up in our perception of our human agency to be persons of love and reconciliation. There is a mimetic conflict inherent in our relationship with God because we sees ourselves in some manner equal to God. So to discover God’s love means that we are subject to his direction. This is the nature of faith. And because we are talking about the relationship between an eternal, transcendent being and temporal, immanent one’s, it means that trust takes on a greater weight of importance than simply some belief in one’s entitlement to God’s live.
Obviously, this a huge topic. I hope I’ve scratched the surface enough. Thanks.
"This is what love is, and love is at the core of our spiritual being. Without love, we are dead, simply, human thinking, sensory machines, fragmented and broken. When love emerges within us, whether for a person or a cause, it is then that we begin to see how we are to live in the outer world."
Can a love for God adequately fill in an unintended earthbound deprived void of spiritual core? Or is God love requisite to fully embrace a complete human spiritual experience?
It is a matter of perception. The love of God is never absent. Our perception of it may not be able grasp its reality. The question raises the question of the problem of evil or tragedy in the world. If God is a being of love, then why doesn’t he stop evil like state-sponsored genocide? The same question could be asked as “If God is a being if love, why doesn’t he make everyone happy, rich, and drop-dead beautiful. All these questions go to the question of God’s purpose for creation and it particular for humanity.
Go to the beginning of Genesis where God says, “Let us make man in our image.” So, if each human being bears in some way the image of God, then it means that humans have an agency of responsibility to create goodness and stop evil. He has given this capacity to us. The problem is that the institution of sin in the world through Adam and Eve’s free choice to disobey God, means that our perception of God’s presence and love is always conflicted by our own free choice to believe and follow God or the decision to define God in some way so that we see God as subject to us and therefore existing to do our bidding.
This how the Spectacle of Christianity takes on the form of God as some kind of heavenly Santa Claus granting gifts of wealth and capitalist power upon our command. It is an artificial simulation of God’s love, the same as those who turn God into a social justice warrior to fulfill some Marxist belief in a society of justice and equity.
Our perception of God’s love is wrapped up in our perception of our human agency to be persons of love and reconciliation. There is a mimetic conflict inherent in our relationship with God because we sees ourselves in some manner equal to God. So to discover God’s love means that we are subject to his direction. This is the nature of faith. And because we are talking about the relationship between an eternal, transcendent being and temporal, immanent one’s, it means that trust takes on a greater weight of importance than simply some belief in one’s entitlement to God’s live.
Obviously, this a huge topic. I hope I’ve scratched the surface enough. Thanks.
You scratched it a lot. Worthy of another couple of reads. Thanks!
Thanks, Ed.
"This is what love is, and love is at the core of our spiritual being. Without love, we are dead, simply, human thinking, sensory machines, fragmented and broken. When love emerges within us, whether for a person or a cause, it is then that we begin to see how we are to live in the outer world."
Indeed.
Trappist monk Thomas Merton captures some this way of looking at love.
"A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is
diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy."
"There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow
because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love
which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and,
therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit. Infinite sharing is the law of
God's inner life. He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in
loving others that we best love ourselves. In disinterested activity we best fulfill our own
capacities to act and to be."
"Yet there can never be happiness in compulsion. It is not enough for love to be shared: it
must be shared freely. That is to say it must be given, not merely taken. Unselfish love that is
poured out upon a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a
return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved. And if the
one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied. He sees that his love has failed to
make the beloved happy. It has not awakened his capacity for unselfish love."
"Hence the paradox that unselfish love cannot rest perfectly except in a love that is perfectly
reciprocated: because it knows that the only true peace is found in selfless love. Selfless love
consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved. In so doing, it perfects itself."
"The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love
with full effect is also to receive it. So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can
only be given perfectly when it is also received."
From: No Man Is An Island, by Thomas Merton
I love Thomas Merton. Wonderful collection of quotes.