Divine Love: Is something missing?

Can We Fall for God?

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. - St Clare of Assisi

Recently, I had the privilege of listening to a group of people exploring the Christian faith. That day's topic was God's Love, and one discussion question was, “What do you think it means to love God and for God to love us?”

People shared honestly about not being sure what us loving God meant. They reached for a range of similies. Maybe it is like respect, one person said. Another suggested that perhaps it was like appreciation and consideration. I sat silent, not wanting to interrupt the flow of their vulnerable reflections, until someone asked me what I thought.

I took a deep breath and reached for my understanding of God’s love. God's Love is the most passionate love we have ever had for anyone or anything. It’s like when I fell in love with my wife. Like the love that erupted from within me when I held my newborn children. Like my love for anyone or anything that gives me life's most profound meaning and purpose.

Dangerous Love

The Bible is clear and emphatic in wanting us to understand that God is Love (1 John 4:8), and because of His Love for us, He sends His son to us (John 3:16). This Love is agape, unconditional love.

This kind of love is uncomfortable for us, being about faithfulness, commitment, and acts of the will, where those who do not deserve love are loved. It is the kind of love where we might not like someone but are moved to respect and care for them. 

I had not been a Christian for long before a preacher explained how, unlike English, which has one word for love, the Greek of the New Testament has three: Eros (desire/passion), Philia (brotherly/familiar), and Agape (unconditional/self-sacrificing). C.S. Lewis reflected on these types of love in a series of radio broadcasts, and a fourth, not in the Bible but in Greek usage - Storge (affection), which became a book.¹

Lewis shows how these kinds of love are not neat categories, distinct from each other, but how they are related and built upon each other. While agape is the highest form of love, it does so by standing upon the other forms.

In his original radio broadcasts, C S Lewis was taken to task for his candidness about sex and love (Eros).² That was some time ago. Yet despite our modern world now being publicly obsessed with Eros - romantic, passionate, desiring love - our modern World seems embarrassed, if not prudish, at the idea that God's agape love for us is built upon his Eros's Love. 

On the one hand, we don't want God to love us like we love other things in the World - conditionally and inconsistently. On the other hand, we are uncomfortable that God's Love for us and his desire for our Love for Him might be about Eros - passion, desire, and longing. Or, as Robert Marsh puts it:

Yet, if we know anything of love, we know how it makes us vulnerable. Love is the chink in our armour—our armour against change. When God gazes at us and we gaze at God, something distressingly mutual passes between us. We uncover the daring of a God who matches us desire for desire, want for want, need for need. Can we risk falling into the hands of such love?³

So, God is safely relegated to a higher form of love, agape. Locating God's love in agape runs the risk of believing God loves us; He contractually in Christ has to. But we fear He might not like us.

The kind of love we want from or have for others is too risky to experience with God.

To desire God and He desire us would be a dangerous mode of being. To fall in Love with God might require intimacy, vulnerability, and the radical re-ordering of life that our other loves demand of us for the things we want the most.

Ignatian Love Affair

In his encounters with God, Ignatius believed that if others spent time before God, aided by The Exercises as a mode of reflection and contemplation around the gospel stories of Christ's life, death and resurrection, God would meet them, too. And in this, Ignatius reveals his cards to us. He was madly in Love with God and knew God passionately loved him. And Ignatius wanted others to discover the same. It is no accident that the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises begin and end with love. 

Ignatius knew that to experience all the dimensions and types of love with God meant entering them from the doorway of desire. This is the domain of our wanting that we practice as children. Who do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do? Where do you want to live? All are questions and training in our deepest desires for life.

Ignatius states that the purpose of the exercises is "to find better what one desires". And throughout the Exercises, Ignatius directs us to pray for id quod volo, 'that which I desire'. God is not afraid of our desires because they reveal the deepest things within us where God wants to meet us. We hide our desires from God in shame and embarrassment, considering them something beneath his agape love. Or we turn our prayers into requests to an agape God disguising our real desires as if he won’t notice. For example, I might pray for the job I want, wrapped up in noble prayers of providing for my family. When underneath that are my deepest desires for security, purpose, and identity that God longs to meet me in. God wants his agape love to stand upon knowing him in all the dimensions of love, including Eros and desire.

The Hebrew word yâda means to know and to have sex, as seen in Genesis 4:1, where "Adam and Eve knew one another". The metaphor Jesus repeatedly used to describe his relationship with his followers was one of the most passionate and intimate he could have used. He as the groom, and the church as His bride. Ignatius's experience, conviction, and belief were based on this biblical truth: to know Christ means to love Him passionately and with desire and to know Christ's passionate and desiring love for us.

In annotation #316 of The Exercises, Ignatius goes so far as to describe this desire as;

..when an interior movement is aroused in the soul, by which it is inflamed with Love of its Creator and Lord, and as a consequence, can love no creature on the face of the earth for its own sake, but only in the Creator of them all.⁴

How do we fall in love with God?

In the guidelines of The Exercises for how to pray and discover what we desire, Ignatius directs us to begin our prayers by considering how God looks at us (#75). Start each prayer by looking at each other. I look at God and notice how He is looking at me and notice how He sees me looking at Him.  

People who are good at active listening look at the person looking at them and make eye contact. The eyes are the ‘window of the soul’ but also the window to the heart. Couples deeply in love are observed to look into each other's eyes, compared to those who are not, who avert their gaze. In fact, eye contact is the beginning of the whole process of falling in love. Such mutual gazing is how I fell in love with the woman who became my wife.

I know the point in time when I first fell in love and noticed I was in love with Beverley. We were both at seminary; we had led an evening assembly for a local boarding school and shared something lost to the annals of time and from my memories. It was most likely something earnest about the Christian faith. But I remember driving back to college in the dark of an early winter’s evening with others in the car. Bev was in the middle of the back seat, and as I looked in the rearview mirror, I noticed how beautiful this woman was. And I caught her looking at me in the mirror. And I dared to gaze again and notice her looking at me looking at her.

And that was the moment I fell in love.

And here is the nature and mystery of falling and being in love - being gazed upon ignited love in me. Or was it the other way around, my gaze igniting love in her that caused her to gaze at me, igniting more love in me for her? 

Over the years, we have asked each other, 'Why do you love me?' We try to give adequate reasons. Because you are kind, you care for me, are beautiful, hard-working, etc. But eventually, we land on something beyond words and reason. I just do love you. Love that could not be described came first in our mutual gaze, and then the experiences of that love led to things that could be named. This is why we often ask about someone in love with another, 'I don't know what they see in them'. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, and in eros love, where "the lover makes the beloved valuable, makes the invisible visible." ⁵

With The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, we discover that when we begin prayer by looking at God, He is already looking at us in desire and love. We love God because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). 

Greatest Return of Myself to God: My Love Affair

When I was first a Christian, I invited a non-Christian friend to a church worship event. Driving him home afterwards, I asked him what he had made of things. What he said has stayed with me since. “That song we sang, ‘Father, I really appreciate you’. I liked that. Not too much emotional intensity or commitment”.

My love for the Lord has ebbed, flowed, and been tested by the events of my life and my faithfulness or lack of with Him. I discovered he is my best and only true friend (Philio). The beautiful prayer by St. Claude La Colombiere, SJ, expresses that reality better than I ever could.⁶

Two quotations about God’s love have impacted me the most and continue to guide me in my understanding and experience of His love and the nature of mine for Him.

Love God and do whatever you please. - St Augustine

Augustine, in the full quotation, reveals how this is true. “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.” We already live out our love for God. What we do reveals what we love and the pre-existing condition of our love for God.

Then this from Anthony De Melo;

Never give in to the demands of Christ. Give in to the demands of your own love for Him. Anthony De Melo, in Seek God Everywhere

Again, the full quotation from De Melo reveals how this can also be so. “Never give in to the demands of Christ. Give in to the demands of your own love for him because if you give in to his demands when you don't have so much love, you will resent him”.

How terrible and sad it is to serve Jesus, labouring under the burden of demands instead of from our love for Him. And again, it is likely that our love for Jesus is already demonstrated in how we give ourselves to Him. In a seminar, I remember hearing Dallas Willard say that you can always tell someone who is passionately pursuing Jesus.

One of my favourite hymns is ‘When I Survey the Wonderous Cross’. Four short verses, where the first three recall and reflect on who Jesus is and the depths of and demonstrate his love for us. The fourth and final verse declares that upon knowing and grasping this, there is only one suitable response for us to make: Love so amazing, so divine, such love demands my soul, my life, my all.

My love for Beverley Jane demanded that I pursue her, woo her, and win her heart to mine. Holding my firstborn child in my hands, my love for her demanded I provide, protect, nurture, encourage, and help her to find her own faith in Christ.

In prayer, I recently shared with the Lord some burdens I carry about my work and role, wishing they were different from what they are and questioning their why at this time. Why this, and why now? As I queried if the Lord might change them, remove them, release me from them, he reminded me of something. He reminded me of a question my spiritual director asked me a few years ago. “What is the greatest return of yourself to God out of your love for Him?” It was making that return that led to what I face now.

Do you remember that and your response? Yes, Lord, I replied.

No words were necessary for the realisation that came next. This burden was not a demand on me to be removed but was suddenly part of the demands of my love for Jesus.

Lord, all this I struggle with is part of my great love affair with you. Thank you.

1. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.

2. You can listen here.

3. Robert Marsh SJ, ‘ID QUOD VOLO, The Erotic Grace of the Second Week', The Way, 54/4, October 2006, 12.

4. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, #316. Puhl, Louis J.; Ignatius of Loyola, St. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph, 93.

5. Robert Marsh SJ, ‘ID QUOD VOLO', 14.

6. https://jason.so/TrueFriend