This is the much longer addendum to my last post, which was hastily scrawled at half past midnight.
We throw around the term "In Love," like it is the secret ingredient of our happiness. I dare say that much of our society looks forward to this phenomenon to cure them of the hum drum of the everyday: to make them happy, rightly or not. Being in love is even something we strive for (though striving hardly befits it). I have often known people who are not in Love, have no interest in being in love, and don't look forward to it. These people are seen, by and large as some kind of neo-hethens, in as much as they are not interested in what everyone is supposed to be interested in. In the movie "The Tao of Steve," the hero states that the United States should just get down to it and declare romance our national religion. As far as I can tell, nothing could be truer.
But this quote from John makes me think again about this phrase: "In Love."
"God is Love, and whoever lives in Love, lives in God and God lives in them." What does it really mean to be "In Love?" Inside; within; enraptured by; encased in - Love. We speak of Love as though it is the whirlwind we are itching to be taken to Oz by. If God is Love, then can this kind of enrapturing love be any different, if it is true? Can you be, literally, In God with someone? Such that the connection to this other person makes you feel swept away by God, and that God lives within you? That's a phenom for ya. What would that mean for both Christianity, and for romance? John also states in a nearby passage that whoever says he Loves God and hates his neighbor is a liar. So if Love of God and Love of others are so completely intertwined that they can never really be distinguished as separate in practice, then it makes perfect sense to be In God with someone. What if our daily interactions with people, were, in some sense, interactions with God? Earlier on, Jesus said "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me." This changes things quite a bit. If this were, for one instant, taken seriously, by and large, what would change? It would be impossible to think of the paradigms of loving someone the same way. If in showing your love for someone, you are practically showing your love for God, and rather than building a church which which only worships God (a good thing to do, of course), or day by day fills the world a little more with the bland recitation of inert liturgies, rather we would show our Love for God by Loving each other. Not just romantically, but every kind of love. We would no longer approach our love relationships as ways to become happy, but happiness would be the obvious side effect of Loving someone for Love's own sake. If you can be in God with someone, can you be in God with God? For God's own sake?
1 comment:
Wow, a lot of people I know really need to read this post!
As long as our love for people is a method of getting what we want, we don't actually love people. We don't even love ourselves. We love our perceived needs(famously, the need to be worshipped by the opposite sex). Which is actually hatred of ourselves, of the other, and of God.
Lewis's Screwtape extols this quite emphatically as a method of winning souls to hell.
Being "in God with God" reminds me of something the mystics often talk about- which is the final union of the soul with God, in which the self of the individual becomes the self of God.
It seems lik we practically need to discard our use of the word "love" until God can give it back to us with its proper meaning restored.
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