When we do not know the deep love of God in an experiential, soul-changing way, religious practice and faithfulness will be nothing more than lifeless rule-keeping. Until we lose ourselves in the enveloping light of God’s love, that love can be nothing more than simply a topic of discussion and interest, forever a matter of the head rather than personally transformative. One may talk incessantly about God’s love but remain alien to it, and it, foreign to oneself.
However, when divine love, in the fullness of its constituent mercy, grace, and patience, becomes the life-changing experience of personal acceptance and dignity by the infinite, it is a resplendent mystery and constant source of wonder and joy. The profound sense that we are the beloved of God, no matter what, comes to us as a gift rather than being a subject we have to “get” and master.
Eternal love is what happens to us in spite of how we have been thinking in our heads, and consequently reveals that all previous knowledge of it was pure nonsense. What we tried so hard to comprehend needed to sweep us up in a divine embrace beyond description.
When we know that we have always been known, religious life is forever freed from rule-keeping. It becomes an irresistible lightness and groundedness in a self beyond our mere personality and individual traits, to say nothing of our history of actions both good and evil. Law-keeping is the life-blood of the ego, but an impediment to becoming alive. We must become who God knows us to be, through love, rather than according to what we think we know.
And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:19
Why am I saying this? Am I not writing about the very things that I am asserting cannot be taught but must be experienced instead? You might think I am engaged in a contradiction, but let me explain. It is not, in fact, a contradiction, but a sensible paradox.
First, what I am saying may validate the experiential “knowing” of those who have been taken by God’s love, lost themselves, and then discovered a newness as “the beloved”. These awestruck souls may struggle within a religious world more interested in talking about how God loves the world than actually doing likewise. These words may affirm what they sense as true, against the flow of general opinion.
Second, for those striving to understand God’s love as a matter of the mind, to be learned as if it is purely a doctrine of the church, what I say may open them to consider that love may be beyond such arid knowing. A law-keeping mentality is threatened by knowing through love.
We all have, in fact, experienced the transforming love of God which defies reduction into words, though we may have not been told how to recognize what we are experiencing, or have actually been told not to trust it. For these seekers, my words cannot teach the unteachable but rather may open them to the possibility that the love of God in Christ exceeds knowledge.
Though the divine love is not a matter of the mind to grasp but the reality that grasps us from a limitless beyond, our mind can be oriented to think on this embracing from the infinite. Our minds can humbly acknowledge they are not the purveyors of the ultimate, and so actually allow us to think on what exceeds their capacity.
Scripture is inviting us into the experience of the love of God. We can, by thinking on the mystery of God’s love, actually further experience its immensity. The renewing of our minds will place them in the service of love, and so fruitfully aid us in our being remade in the love of God.
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