Why on earth do I say God loves me?

Why on earth do I say God loves me?

(As this is rather a long article, I’m posting it in 5 chunks on successive days)

Part 1

I am sitting quietly alone in my room. If there was an observer, they would see nothing. Nothing outward happens, yet I say that, in my heart, I am experiencing the love of God – and that is why I say he loves me. I am experiencing it now; I am simply describing what is happening to me. Yet God is invisible, inaudible; he has no hands to touch. How can I uphold my claim? What do I mean?

Perhaps it is a delusion? Yet I never imagine anything else that cannot be corroborated. If my belief in God’s love is false, it never leads me to do anything harmful or strange – in fact, quite the contrary. I can talk perfectly rationally about my experience of God loving me – and accept the possibility that I am mistaken. I don’t seem to be missing any of my mental faculties.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking? I would really like it if there was a God, and if this God loved me, and so I have somehow conjured up a false experience of him loving me. It is something self-created. There is no-one outside of myself loving me; I have – somehow – created the experience. It’s a trick of the mind by which it is me promoting love to myself, but I have successfully fooled myself into thinking it is coming to me from a God-figure outside of myself. If it’s a trick, it’s a jolly good one, and I wish I had the ability to fool myself in other respects. I’m certainly not aware of fooling myself, and if you say, “Well of course you’re not aware of it, that’s how you’ve been fooled”, then I have to reply that I am a very self-reflective person, and it does not feel like I am doing this to myself. I’m well aware of what it is like to have a conversation with myself, and the key point of my experience of God is precisely that it does not feel like me; it feels like an experience coming from outside myself that I cannot control, but which is something that happens to me. I am the passive recipient, not the active agent.