Love is personal. Part 2: Love is received from God and passed on; it is not generated by me
When we encounter God, it is not enough to say we encounter the value or principle of love. What we encounter is a person who is loving us. This is totally different to simply believing in love. That puts all the onus on me to make a commitment: that I am going to put love as the governing principle in my life; I am taking charge and being the active agent in doing loving things; that it is up to me to use my inspiration by the principle of love to do some loving.
Instead, what I experience is that I am the recipient of love and I respond to the love I have received. I don’t generate love within myself through the power of my commitment to my principles; I am empowered by and filled with the love of God that then overflows in love towards others. We are channels of God’s love – and that’s supremely more than we can manage by “trying hard” to love others.
We thought about religious experiences, of what is happening when we encounter God, and, in seeking a common denominator for the experience that I think all the major world religions would accept, the term, “encountering the transcendent” is a valuable one. God is “other” in that he is not at all like me or anything else in all creation. He is beyond everything else. Many things might express something of his nature and point us towards him, but nothing, no matter how beautiful or lovely in itself encompasses the fullness of who God is; they always point beyond to “something more” – and that is who God is – the something extra that is always beyond our grasp – though still filling us.
For our thinking now, I want to stress that, for me, and for Christians generally through the ages, the experience of the transcendent is a personal experience. We do not experience love; we experience someone loving us. Now, when we experience “being loved” – that is a passive verb – though it may well be an exhilarating experience, so it requires someone to be the active partner, doing the loving. So, my experience of God is not something I do. I am not the creator of this love. I am not the active person responsible for generating this love. Love is something I receive from someone who is loving me.
I said earlier that ultimately I do not know who or what God is, but whatever is the cause of my experience of God is the core of life and is ultimately precious. In the same way, I cannot point with certainty and say, “Look there is the person loving me”, but what I can say is that the experience of “being loved” is a personal experience of “someone” loving me. I came across a lovely way to describe an encounter with God: “I met with a mysterious stranger, I know no whom, but he loves me”. I think that that is my definition of God, and for shorthand I just use the word “God”.
Many atheists are such because they cannot bring themselves to believe in God because they cannot be certain that he exists in the way they can be certain that their mother or child or their best friend exists. Well, surely what all of us have learnt is that God is just not like that. I cannot be certain that God exists, or what he is like, because God is not a person like you or me. But what I have discovered is that whoever God ultimately is in his inmost being, that only he fully understands, my experience of God is of a person, a person who loves me.
For me this is very important. It is not enough for me to believe in wonderful values like love and justice. I believe in a person who is love and justice, and in relationship with him, I receive, reflect back into the world, and an empowered to be a person of love and justice.
Spiritual Devotion 