God is Love

     A friend said to me recently, "I don't think of God as a person. God is Love!" 

    Well, OK, yes. God is not "a person," as if God were just one among many. As if God were a discrete individual, distinguishable from all the other "persons" in the world. As if God had a beginning and an end, boundaries, limits. Yes, we believe that God took on the human condition in the life and death of one particular person, Jesus of Nazareth; but in God's divinity, God is infinite and eternal, the ground of all being. So no, not "a person."

    And yes, "God is Love," as John says in the prologue to his gospel. But what is "love," if it is not personal? What does "love" mean, without a subject and an object? Surely it's not just a warm and fuzzy feeling or a free-floating, undirected passionate desire? What is "love" in the abstract? 

    No, to say that God is Love must mean that God loves; and love must have an object. That God is love means that God must love, that love is inherent to God, intrinsic to God, and therefore unconditional. God always loves. God loves us -- our Creator loves his creatures. 

    That, of course, begs another question: what about before the creation? Whom did God love then, if God is love and love must have an object? If God was alone, if God is the only God, and there were no creatures to love? I leave aside the question of God's relationship to "time," the meaninglessness of "before" and "after" when talking about the Eternal. 

    The intrinsic nature of God as Love is something that is expressed in the Christian idea of the Trinity. If God is Love, then God must be inherently in relationship. Because love is a transient verb, it must have an object. So we say, God is one and indivisible ... but God is not alone. Even before the Creation, when there was only God, God was in relationship within God. We say that the one, indivisible God is at the same time three "persons," called by tradition "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit," distinguished (if not always clearly) within Scripture, and that these three live in eternal love with each other, within the one God. The world was created by and in love, and the love of the creating Trinity overflows in God's love for creation, and for each and every creature.

    God is one and indivisible; God is three in one; God is infinite. 

    God is eternal and unchangeable ... but not static, nor impassive. God is moving and active, and God is responsive. 

    God is utterly transcendant, and also, God is intimately present in our hearts, our minds, our bodies. 

    God's love is universal and impartial, but it's also personal; God loves each of us as deeply as if we were the only one, a darling only child who is the light of its parent's eyes. 

    Today's Mass readings are about our right relationship with God in prayer. It's a mistake to treat God as if Love were a remote abstraction, instead of something -- Someone -- present and personal. We are to presume to complain, to lament, to challenge as Abraham did. We are to approach God with all the confidence of children who trust in their parents to meet their every need. Our divine Mother-Father might not give us what we ask for, but God will "give the Holy Spirit to those who ask." And I say, what comes to us in the end, when we trust in and obey the promptings of the Spirit -- even when it leads us through trials -- is ultimately always, always better than what our own imaginations could have come up with to ask for. For "eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the human heart, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him."

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PEACE