God Loveth

Psalms 33:4-5

For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.

He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.

 

[In true randomness, I’ve received this passage before.  In order to keep with the spirit of this blog, I will keep these verses as my challenge – and try to write something new.]

 

How does God love?  Does God love “freely, as men strive for right… purely, as they turn from praise”?  The poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writes of this free and pure love as the truest human love, loving “to the depth and breadth and height” that the human soul can reach “when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.”  Divine love, however… Divine love does not need to reach out, does not feel beyond sight.  There are no ends of being and ideal grace for divine love and all measurements are meaningless.  For, divine love is grace itself and being itself.  Infinite, eternal, and ever present is the love of God, as infinite, eternal, and ever present as is God – for God and God’s love are one.

 

So… how does God love?  By being… and through being.  For God is love.  And who are we?  How do we love?  We are images of God, created by God in divine likeness.  What does that mean?  To be like the divine is to be like love – divine love is in us and through us, as God dwells in us and through us.  Not dwelling in the ubiquitous sense that God is infinite, but, rather, dwelling as in being at home.  God homes in us… and through us.  God exists in intimate relationship with our human hearts, and “our hearts are restless, until they rest”, until they home, in God.  Why do I say this is so?  It is thus, as St. Augustine says, because God made us for Himself.  And, yes, that means that God made us for love, but we must not separate love from God in our human thinking, or in our human feeling and doing.  When we home in God, we are the very expression of love.  And when we truly love, we are doing nothing other than being who we are: God’s image.

 

God made us for Himself, God loves us and knows that we will only know the fullness of being who we are and the fullness of love if we love God – if we desire to give ourselves fully to the other.  The divine other dwells in our hearts, and to Him we selflessly give our hearts as home, we give our minds and our bodies, our very souls.  And, in our human thoughts, words, and actions, we love “to the depth and breadth and height [our souls] can reach” in giving to God.  And with God, in God, we are opened up to infinity.

 

God created us for Himself and God created everything.  “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD”, the psalmist tells us, and this is because God created the earth to be good.  God gave of Himself freely so that something could exist purely, something that is other than Himself.  This is the great act of divine love, the generous pouring out of being for the sake of the other.  This is how the heavens and the earth are created: by and through God loving.  And though we, in our humanness, are but the dust and ashes of suns and soil, God sanctifies our humanity by becoming one of us.  God condescends, God stoops down in humility, to assume the limits of human nature and to fling them wide open through His love.  Through loving, God speaks to us in a language that we can understand and, so, mindfully and bodily, gives Himself to us.  In the frailty of His human strength, He pours forth the power of His divine love, blood and water, spirit and truth.  And He carves out a home for us in His Sacred Heart so that we, mindfully and bodily, can enter into redemptive love.  No longer do we center our identity in, and believe that we exist for, our limited selves.  Rather, we mindfully and bodily receive divine love, we mindfully and bodily receive God, and, so, what was once lost is restored as we are restored to the truly free and pure image in which we were created.